SOPA is definitely a bad thing, and I don’t see it passing but I could be wrong.

I have done my part to contact legislators to make sure it’s stopped but I think what will really make them think is money. I heard that on reddit.com they had a campaign to donate money to an opponent of one of the legislators in favor of SOPA, he/she quickly changed their mind after a reddit campaign raised about $15,000 for this politicians opponent.

That’s all I have to say for now on this matter.

I’m writing this blog post on an iMac.

You’ve made millions of people happy with the products that you’ve created including me.

My first computer that I owned was an Apple Performa 400. The interesting thing about that computer, it was made while Steve Jobs was not part of Apple. At the time I just thought it was the best computer ever.

Today, I actually don’t own an Apple computer – gasp, yes, technically this is true, but I’m fortunate to use one or two everyday thanks to my work, that’s why I don’t own any myself. I will be buying one in the future I’m sure. I have always had an Apple computer as my main computer ever since that first computer. I do however own many ipods. I will soon also own the iPhone 4s, I need to wait until my phone contract allows me to buy it at a reasonable price.

The last time I was this sad about a person who has died, that I’ve never actually met was when Kurt Cobain died. I think I’m actually more upset about Steve Jobs. When Cobain died, I was just this rebellious teenager and thought the world of Cobain. Little did I know that the person who really affected my life more deeply was Steve Jobs.

I could add more to this but I’ll just say this.

Think  Different.

I did.

Ok, I understand that I have an HTC Droid Eris which is “rooted” meaning it is running an operating system modified other than the manufacturer intended. However, the phone actually works much better than when I had it running the “factory” version of Android.

I would prefer to have an iPhone however for the last four years, ever since the iPhone was released, there were several barriers for me owning one. 1. I live in North Dakota the land of no iPhones, until recently when Verizon released their version of the iPhone. 2. My wife wouldn’t let me get one even if I was able to get one. She finally let me get an Android phone. She didn’t want us paying $30 a month for a data plan. Makes sense, so I didn’t luckily I can get the data plan at a reduced rate thanks to being a state employee and getting a discount.

I do like my Android phone but I hate when it decides not to function as a phone. That’s just really not acceptable.

I had to give @nodakemic – her Twitter handle credit for this: http://www.nodakademic.com/30-by-30

So here is my 40 by 40 list. I’m sure I’ll be able to accomplish a few of these things, at least I hope so. Some of them may seem selfish, but keep in mind this is my personal list of goals, of course they will sound selfish.

These are the things that I would like to accomplish by my birthday in May of the year 2016. To do this I need 8 lists in five categories.

Life in General:
1. Still be alive at age 40, this could be a challenge for anyone, depending on eating habits, lifestyle in general, success of skydiving attempt, etc.
2. If I’ve accomplished that goal, I hope to be in better shape than I am now. I want weigh about 190 lbs, currently I’m around 230 or so, fluctuating at times like Holidays when I’m very tempted to eat unhealthy food and lots of it.
3. Run in some kind of race/marathon. Not a full marathon that would be stupid. Or take part in some kind of cross country ski race like I did when I was in my 20s. I participated in the Lumberjack Jaunt in Brainerd, Minn.
4. Have another child. Currently we have one wonderful kid, Madeline who is now seven years old. I think I would like to give it a shot having one more kid.
5. Continue to be married to my lovely wife, Jennifer. By the year 2016 I still want to be married to her, like any couple we have our ups and downs, but at the end of each day I’m happy to be with her. Also, see number 4 above, it would be hard to do that without her (yes I could do that with another person I don’t want to).

Finances:
6. Be debt free. Oh, don’t make me laugh. I’ll be lucky if I can pay off one of my credit cards by this year.
7. Have paid some of my student loans back. All of it, would also be a pipedream.
8. Pay off our current car loan, so we can buy another car or two and start that process all over again.
9. Have some kind of savings account with enough money in it to take a nice vacation, such as cruise that your wife has been begging for since she married you.
10. Have enough money in a college fund for Madeline to begin college and (have at least started one for this other kid if we have one).

My music hobby:
11. Be able to play your guitars still at this age.
12. Learn at least 10 new songs, hopefully by then you will have learned to play a few Pearl Jam songs.
13. Start a band (okay this might be dumb idea, but I need 40 things to list for this blog post). OR attend one more Pearl Jam concert or some cool concert. I used to go to them all of the time but lately I haven’t been to any for a long time (well last year I saw Bon Jovi in Fargo again, but hey that’s just Bon Jovi).
14. Record a top selling hit with your new band and sell it on iTunes (okay, this is just crazy talk).
15. If nothing else, make sure you teach Madeline how to play a song on the guitar.

Work:
16. Continue working at the job you love.
17. Learn how to be better at that job.
18. Make more connections with people.
19. Help others be better at their job.
20. Really get a start on that home business. If you want to know more about it (shameless plug, visit this website): http://smalltowntechguy.com

Education:
21. You’ve got your Masters Degree, how about maybe thinking of getting your Ph.D. again.
22. Take at least one college course just for fun.
23. Teach a class or two a local community college or community education program.
24. Read a book on how to do something you don’t know how to do (this should be easy, there’s a lot of things that I don’t know how to do).
25. Learn the meaning of life, the universe and everything (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy reference, just had to throw that in of course).

Personal selfish goals:
26. Continue writing a blog or whatever this called by the year 2016.
27. Buy an iPad or an Macbook Air (I still can’t decide which is better, this is actually probably fodder for another blog post).
28. Buy an iPhone that works on Verizon (this is probably a pipedream for many reasons, but I won’t get into that now).
29. Buy a sporty car, see this is even a lower priority on my list than an iPad. Actually this list isn’t necessarily in an priority but it kind of is a little bit, especially the first 10 or so items.
30. Write a novel, about what, I don’t know. I started doing this last year but I ran out of steam and gave up. It was something about Rugby North Dakota and I was posting daily updates to it on twitter, lame idea now, but at the time it seemed really cool.
31. Get your novel printed.
32. Actually, I should get my dad’s book printed. He wrote a short book about his life describing his early days growing up during the Great Depression. I typed it for him while in high school (albeit with many typos etc) and recently I tried to work on it and get it printed from a site like blurb.com but haven’t succeed yet. My wife wants to proof it before I print, I might just have to do it and not listen to her or it will never get done.
33. Inspire someone else to write a blog post just like this or similar to it with their own “bucket list” well that’s really what this is, now that I think about it. It’s things I want to accomplish before I “kick the bucket” aka die or get too old to do them.
34. Here’s one that’s actually hard for me to do coming from German family (my heritage is German so we’re like this, or at least I’m blaming this on that) tell my parents I love them before they die. Yes this should be number 1 on my list, and heck I might even edit this and change it to be that but like I said I come from a family where expressing emotional feelings is something we suppress. I need to find more proof about this German theory thing. I’ll update this later if I find more proof, I’ve heard it from people before and I swear I’ve seen it too.
34.  A. Okay I’m kind of cheating, this actually might make my list a 41 item list, but this is my list so I can do whatever I want. Heck I might do more edits like this, add things as sub items. Alright I want to reconnect with my old friend Luke Fiedler, he’s kind of been ignoring me the past few years. Part of this is both of our faults, but mostly I’ll blame him. He’s got this aversion to technology or at least e-mail, cellphones, facebook, etc, so it makes it really fricken hard to contact him. So Luke, buddy old pal, I hope I can make this happen.
35. Get at least more than my wife and two other people to read this. I’m sure by just posting a link to this on twitter or reddit, I’ll get a few suckers to read through this, if you actually do that, thank you it means a lot to me.
36. Get someone to comment on this God damn blog entry. That never happens for me.  Proving my theory that no one reads the stuff I write or cares to say anything about it.
37. Become better at writing blog posts, heck just better at writing in general. I used to somewhat make a living from doing this when I was younger working for newspapers, and yes I admit I was not the best writer in the world but I think I can string together complete thoughts.
38. Watch Ishtar. Okay, this one is a weird one, but I have a friend who claims this is the worst movie ever. I’ve never seen it and from what I’ve read about it, it’s probably true but I want to see for myself.
39. Read Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy series of books again. These are my favorite books by my favorite author and it’s been awhile since I’ve done that.
40.

The last one was left blank, see number one, so if I’m alive at age 40 I can finally complete this list.

Why did I pull the plug on my account?

I have my reasons, but mainly to make a statement, just like tech superstar (one of my idols, just like Kevin Rose – even if I occasionally refer to both of them as douches) Leo Laporte did when he abandoned facebook, only to rejoin a few months later. I probably see myself doing the same thing. I found digg to be a cool website that brought me daily news links. Recently, they changed the user interface or “UI” as we geeks like to call it. But, they did a lot more than just that. I’m going to get into all of the techy details (about Casandra[the database, not a woman], mysql and all that), but one major issue was they got rid of the “bury” feature which was part of the pun for digg.com, you were “digging” stories or links, and you could also “bury” them. Now, you can just “hide” the ones you don’t want to see, only for them to pop back up again next time you login. For me, the whole entire site just isn’t what it used to be.

Another major reason I am no longer using digg.com is the lack of user submitted content that I liked. Currently, it seemed to be more of a corporate news fed stream of the same crap I saw everywhere else. I didn’t need that.

I used to enjoy watching diggnation, a video/podcast of digg founder Kevin Rose and his actor friend, Alex Albrecht discussed the weekly top stories on digg.com. I still might watch diggnation but it’s just not the same.

I may waffle and go back and sign up again but for now, my account is deleted. That’s another issue, I had to actually google how to delete my account. There was no setting in the account preferences to do so myself. I found that I had to e-mail support@digg.com with a specific subject in order to get rid of my account.

I understand that it’s a business and things change, but so do people, so for now digg.com will not be part of my life. However, I don’t feel like there is a giant hole that can’t be filled, because I began using digg.com‘s competing website. I know Kevin Rose doesn’t even consider it to be competition, because he’s buddies with the Reddit guys but, it is very much a competing website. I’m  also not suggesting that other people do the same thing. I just wanted to share my opinion about why I will no longer be using digg.com anymore.

I’m a nerd and I have quirks too (we’ll discuss them at a later date). Although, I must point out a few major short comings of a few of tech elite.

First, I’ll pick on my first hero. Steve Jobs. Okay, Steve why on earth do you wear the same fricking clothes from day-to-day? We get it, you “Think Different” but really the last guy I knew that wore the same clothes was my high school friend and he did it based on a bet. He wore the same Freddy Kruger t-shirt to school for a month or so for a $5 bet. Mostly just to get attention. That’s the least odd thing about Mr. Job’s, his short but to the point e-mail responses are even weirder. “Yep,” “Nope,” etc. What the hell? You’re a CEO of a major corporation and you send out replies that my first grade daughter gives me when I ask her a question sometimes.

Steve Wozniak is another guy who’s an odd duck but more normal when compared to his buddy Steve. Actually, when you look at Woz, he’s actually really cool. He wears a really neat watch. He’s a prankster and he’s been on Dancing with the Stars. Plus, whenever a new Apple product is launched he stands in line with the rest of us waiting to buy one.

Now, another hero of mine, Leo Laporte. I used to think Leo was the greatest guy ever. Until recently, he’s been annoying me. I’m sure he’s a great guy personally, he seems to be. But, Leo started to annoy me when he was complaining about facebook’s privacy issues. Fine, he had legitimate points. But then, he rejoined it. Ha, ha. Okay, we all make mistakes. The facebook waffling wasn’t the only thing that annoyed me, he’s starting to sound like his former co-host John C. Dvorak, (who he still has on his Twit network as a guest occasionally). Leo complains about twitter, and how it’s not good for conversations, fine maybe not for you Leo. Leo complains about Apple, and he complains about tons of other companies. Okay, we get it Leo, you’re a cranky old geek. Now stop being so annoying, it’s getting harder for me to listen to you.

Another tech nerd, who I’m a fan of is Kevin Rose, he’s about my age only difference is he’s younger, richer and better looking than me. But besides that, he’s a cool guy. What annoys me about Kevin is that he’s sort of emo. If you don’t know what emo is, it’s kind of like goth but even more wuss like.

Kevin likes to drinks tea, fine I drink tea too, but he’s really into his tea, almost past the point of being obsessed about it, or at least that’s what I understand from reading his blog and watching his show diggnation. What really annoys me about Kevin is that he acts like he’s not rich. In some ways this is a good trait, not flaunting his wealth, but he also seems to pretend like he can’t afford things. When in reality we all know he’s richer than shit. Unless he’s really in debt, which is highly doubtful.

I could react to his company’s latest debacle with Digg version 4.0 and the mass exodus to Reddit.com but I won’t. I think enough has been said about that.

I could go on and on about other geeks/nerds or tech rock stars but I won’t. These were the top three (yes I talk about four but Woz is perfect) on my lists with personality flaws. I’m sure as soon as I post this I’ll get people telling how mean I am or trying to explain why these guys are the way they are, or most likely I’ll get trolled or just ignored. I just had to express my opinion on this. It made me feel better.

I’m a former Minnesotan, and I will always be one, I guess. Despite the fact that I’ve lived in another state for about 12 years. That other state is North Dakota home of flat land, more Norwegians than you can count on your fingers and home to great hockey – yes the Fighting Sioux Men and Women’s teams, (no Fargo Force, you’re just a sad excuse for people in Fargo to wish they had real hockey).

Anyway, about Prince. He said the Internet is over.

This is what he said:
“The Internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it. All these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

What? Prince, just because you don’t like iTunes, why do you think that digitally recording CD’s and giving them away in an English newspaper that makes any sense at all?

This is why Minnesota should just say – “Prince is not from Minnesota, he’s really from California.” There are tons of batshit crazy people from California. People from Minnesota don’t need to blemished by such an idiot as Prince, we only have room for so many, famous Minnesotans, i.e., Jesse Ventura, Winona Ryder, Garrison Keillor, Judy Garland, etc.

I’m sure it won’t happen, but a guy can dream can’t he?

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More of this has to do with instant access to the internet for information. I can’t imagine myself running to look up information in an encylopedia when I was younger if I wanted to learn something, I would just shrug it off and say to myself, “Hmm, wonder what they hell they’re talking about,” but thanks to the Interents, now I must google or use wikipedia or IMDB for anything I don’t know, or at least most things. Sometimes I still find myself thinking, “Really, what the hell are they talking about?”

Anyway, this is supposed to be about my computer usage habits, but it’s all related so stick with me. I spend my entire work day at a computer, be it my computer or helping a co-worker with a problem. So, after a long day of doing that, one would think I wouldn’t want to spend anymore time on the computer, sadly that’s not the case. I would spend 24 hours a day on a computer if I could. Why? I have no idea, but it’s true.

That’s why it brings me to this conclusion, I need an iPad, because the iPod Touch screen is too tiny sometimes and to actually whip out a full blown laptop is just overkill sometimes. That’s why a light weight 10″ device such as the iPad is a necessity for me. However, fortunately at this time, it’s one of those discretionary spending items. I really don’t need it, but I think I do.

It’s actually a perfect device for anyone I think, well almost anyone. I was thinking of getting one with 3G access for my parents, because the real computer we bought them about five years ago became more of a device for the grand kids, or myself to use when visiting, since it was too complicated for my parents to use. I think an iPad would be easy for my parents to use and send e-mail, view photos from their grandkids, read books, etc. I don’t forsee them ever using something like facebook, but who knows.

One activity that I can see a need for having a “real” computer for is writing a blog entry, even with a full keyboard on the iPad I suspect that it would be difficult to make a blog entry and do all the editing, etc. Or maybe I’m wrong, but I won’t know until I get myself an iPad.

I consider myself to be an advanced Linux user, but I’m sure to people who actually use Linux on a daily basis (why, I have no idea, the same can be said about me and my obsession with the Mac OS) I’m a beginner. *Disclaimer, I also use Windows too.

I’m going to torture, cough… I mean teach students how to use Ubuntu 9.10. I considered using Ubuntu 10 but for the following reasons I opted not to use that version: 1)I ordered a set of discs from Ubuntu, and that is the version they sent, so I assumed my students would do the same (order discs and get that version, yeah right like they will do that – and yes I know you can download it!). So, I am instructing them on how to use this version, so they are familiar with it; 2)I am familiar with this version; 3)I’m going to be using older laptops to install this on, and so far in my testing I’ve found that for the most part 9.10 actually still works pretty good. I don’t want to chance things and have 10.0 not work and provide a poor user experience for my students.

So, what am I going to teach these students? Well, I am going to teach them how to use Linux just like they use any other operating system (to access facebook and play games – let’s hope they do more than that). Actually, I’ve taught a few of them in the past, so they will be familiar with it, but I’m sure after last year, very few of them went home, installed Linux and continued using it. I’d actually be willing to bet a $1 none of them did that. I would have said I would have been willing to bet $100 or more but I’m sure just to prove me wrong one of them would read this and I’d be out $100 or more. I’m willing to cough up a $1 for having a student use Linux as a result of my teaching.

What exactly am I going to teach them about Linux? Okay, details, details… um… I don’t know. Actually, I do, I am working on making a cheat sheet or as I call it “Basic Linux commands” instructional aid to help them out. This is where I call upon my geek friends or anyone reading this who is a Linux enthusiast.

What are some of the basic Linux commands my students should know? – And no, “rmdir: ‘dir’: is not one… Well, actually, I will teach them that but I don’t want a bunch of jokesters telling me how I can teach my students to seriously cause problems.

The reasons I am teaching them Linux is simple. They don’t use it, and it’s something new for them. Most of them are familiar with Microsoft based operating systems and the Mac OS is really not that complicated. Plus, I don’t have enough Macs to teach them anyway. Also, running Windows XP on these old laptops I’m going to be using, is a frustrating experience for me and the students. Linux actually runs pretty fast on older machines.

Why have I chosen to use Ubuntu Gnome instead of KDE (yep, this is where it gets really geeky) again, I’m familiar with Gnome and I think KDE sucks. Ok, there you have my opinion. Why does KDE suck, because, I installed Kubuntu and saw that as a default it installed Konqueror as the default browser. WTF? Who uses that crap? Not me! Again, this is where some Linux nerd, would say, “Um, well actually…..” Yeah really, shut up I don’t care!

Ok, I think I’ve probably bored the crap out of most people by now and no is reading the rest of this…if you are, thank you, you’re a nice person. Anyway, I’m also going to teach the students how to do some basic programming. No, I’m not going to teach them Perl, Python or any other crazy stuff like that. I’m going have them experiment with Scratch. Last year, I had my students use Alice, but it relies too much on 3-D graphics and the machines I’m using can’t handle that. Scratch is just as fun and easy to use and it’s as far as I can tell just 3-D.

Well, that’s all I have to say for now about teaching with Linux, so wish me luck! I’ll need it. I’m teaching four hours of Linux each day!

This just proves one point, we still have a long way to go as far as voice to text transcription for average people. Nerds like me, will accept the occasional inaccuracies of google voice, especially considering the cost of the service. Yes, it’s FREE, so there is no cost.

This also taught me a lesson, don’t do any “techie” favors for my wife.