I decided to donate to become a micropatron of Jason Kottke’s blog yesterday. I didn’t give enough to be eligible for one of the prizes, though. I had put a lot of thought in to whether or not I should donate support kottke.org. In the end, I saw why I should donate. I am a regular visitor to his blog. kottke.org is the second site I visit, the first being my Kinja feed. I thought that since I am a regular reader, and Kottke’s quit his job for the sake of not only his blog but also to entertain his visitors, I should donate whatever I can in order to support him.
I think it’s great that Jason is actually quitting his job in order to blog. I’m pretty sure that more people will start. Jason is what they call an entrepreneur, as Megnut mentioned. I don’t think I’ll quit my job in the future, but I do know that I will probably blog, or do whatever people in the future do in order to express their thoughts.
My mom bought herself a domain and it’s being registered right now, so the site should be up by tomorrow. It’s at hirasboutique.com I registered it with DreamHost and I got it for free since I signed up for hosting. I get up to three domains (of which 1 is free) to host with them. I think I got a pretty good deal at $7.95 a month. Also, I donated to became a miropatron of kottke.org
My parents didn’t know that I share the same birthday with Rabindranath Tagore. I found out when I noticed that there individual pages for the days of the year and decided to look on the page for May 6. Tagore is like my mom’s all-time favorite poet. She didn’t know he was born on May 6, since she only knew the date from the Bengali calendar.
I am really hooked on tweaking my mom’s site layout. I’m so hooked, that I am scared that I might not be able to finish my homework! Anyways, I took some screencaps of the pages to show off.
Please tell me if there is anything that seems awkward or should be changed. (I fixed the contact page so the required fields would be bold.) Also, note that I don’t surf the web with a browser open at 800×1000 pixels. That was just to show some of the details.
I had some dummy text put in so I could see how I was going to set everything up. Those products aren’t the actual ones, although there will be similar ones sold. I don’t know whether to put the weblog as part of the homepage yet. Also, if you wanna get that cool background, or another background, go to squidfingers.com/patterns/ Mr. Beckham has really cool ones.
For the past few days, the mice in my room have been really bugging me. Yes, I have mice in my house. No, they’re not pets, but rather pests. I’m afraid of mice, so I had my mom get rid of a piece of cardboard that seemed to be what the mice were chewing on and scratching, which also made a lot of noise. We saw that the cardboard, which was behind my heater, (the mice like to hide in my closet and behind the heater in my room) had a hole chewed in it and had what seemed like remainders of pest control biscuits
on them. We threw it away. I heard lots of squeaks a few minutes later.
I was working on my mom’s site when I saw a mouse walking around the bottom of my closet door. Then, I saw that it was the size of a kiddie
mouse. I guess the mice were/are bugging me since a few mice might’ve been born a few days ago. Eww.
Right now, my eyes are dried up, my hands and arms hurt, and I am thinking how I am going to finish the buttload of homework that I put off in order to goof off. Also, I’m getting kinda hungry, since all I had for dinner was a huge bowl of Frosted Flakes. (Yes, I had cereal for dinner.)
Evan Williams is at it again! This time around, he’s joined forces with Noah Glass to start a podcasting tool, called Odeo. I’m gonna try and be an early adopter and hopefully, my iPod will be okay by then. There’s already a blog with news that lead me to a timeline showing how Odeo began. Ev blogged about Oreo and he’s also demoing it at TED.
I think it’s kinda cool that the New York Times has an article on Oreo Odeo, of course Ev’s a bit more famous for creating Blogger, so it’s no surprise. I already called my dad to bring me a copy of the article. Note that you can catch a glimpse of the Odeo homepage. Also, note that the article says, One recent example is Radio Shark, a small device that sells for $70 and enables users of Macintosh computers to automatically record over-the-air radio programs and convert them to MP3 files for later, on-the-go playback.
The Radio Shark isn’t just for Macs, you know!
As of now, there are no ads running on Cafenut. Why? Well, there’s a good reason. I used to have a BlogExchange banner ad up, until they deleted my account. They deleted my account because of my banner. First, I had a banner that kept blinking from black to white, and had the word “Cafenut” on it.
A few days ago, they sent me an email saying that they had asked me before, but I didn’t delete my banner, so they deleted for me. They also asked me to make a new banner which would result in me getting 100 credits or whatever they’re called.
So, I decided to make a new banner, which took me a pretty long time to make since I don’t have any programs to make animated GIFs installed on my computer. I was really happy when I finished it. It was just the word “Cafenut” that kept scrolling to the left. I thought this one would be okay, since there are a whole lot of other ads that are animated.
I think it was yesterday that I started seeing that my blog didn’t have the banner showing. I decided to try and log in. To my surprise, I couldn’t log in. I sent them an email asking that my account be restored and that I am sorry if my new banner caused a problem. They sent me an email saying, “I’m sorry your account has been deleted because of the inappropriate banners.”
I don’t know how my banners were considered inappropriate. They could’ve asked me to get rid of my banner again (or maybe the first time, since I never got the first request), but they just had to delete my account. I sense a boycott in the very near future.
I had forgotten about my old :CueCat. My cousin had given it to me a while back, and luckily, Digital Convergence went out of business by then. All they have up now, is a ghost site, which says:
DigitalConvergence had a colossal dream. [...]
The dream was to connect items in the physical world to the Internet, automatically. In January that dream hit a bump in the road and the servers were taken offline.
They will scan again…
Most people predict that even though Digital Convergence owns the patents to its products, they won’t get back into business.
I learned that Digital Convergence tracked the users of the :CueCat. I even found some instructions on hacking the :CueCat. There are several drivers for using the :CueCat as a regular barcode scanner. I tried a few, but none of them seemed to really make me feel like keeping the :CueCat. I think I might sell mine on eBay.
I remember, around when I was in fourth grade, I used to see a bunch of infomercials promoting the :CueCat and saying how it would be the technology of the future. The commercials talked showed stuff like kids doing their homework online and people ordering stuff catalogs with the wave of their Cat (no pun intended). They were being given out for free at places like Radio Shack and magazines were giving them to their subscribers. I asked my parents to take me to Radio Shack, but they’d say it would be a waste of time. Luckily, I never got a :CueCat back then.
Update: Joel on Software has a nice article about the flaws in the :CueCat.
Update #2: I think I’m gonna use the instructions on hacking the :CueCat’s “guts” to make it output just the barcode and not the special Digital Convergence encoded stuff.
I lied. I didn’t really plan anything significant out for my mom’s site. I am going to have to sketch out the pages and maybe use the Lorem Ipsum generator to set up the pages. I still need ideas. I designed a logo, but I don’t think it’ll go along with the stuff my mom’s gonna sell. The logo seems to much like it’s for some kind of futuristic video game, but my mom’s gonna sell clothes that she imported from Bangladesh.
I’m starting to get into the GTD way of life. There’s a new article on 43 Folders about remainders. They mention Napoleon Dynamite! Sweet!
