It’s been too long since I posted because I’ve been preoccupied. I am moving to yet another apartment and preparations are tedious and time consuming, however the topic of moving always makes for good blog fodder. I have lived in 6 apartments since I stopped living (regularly)with my family. I can honestly say that I’ve been disappointed by each one of them in one way or another, regardless of roommate issues (when I had roommates).

The older I get I think the more see the value of community amenities. When I was in college I couldn’t afford the fancy schmancy apartment communities that had pools, workout rooms, and game rooms. I always went for the best (cleanest, safest, newest) apartment I could afford and didn’t stop to worry about extras not knowing how they could’ve changed my experience for just a few dollars a month. Recently I’ve come to realize the value of community amenities and discounts.

The average gym membership is about $30-50 a month regardless of the length of the contract. The vast majority of gym contracts are impossible to break and usually end up costing people a lot more money than they intended to spend. I discovered that if you find a community with a workout room and a pool, hot tub, or sauna, you might pay 5-10 dollars more on rent per month but it is worth it for the convenience and the lack of an unbreakable never expiring contract.

I don’t have to get up get dressed in street clothes and drive to the gym to change into workout clothes and vice versa to come home. I also don’t have to use a public restroom populated by stinky and sweaty women of all ages when my apartment is a two minute walk away. I’ll be more inclined to get up and go to the gym at 5 or 6 in the morning because it won’t be a big production and require me to be awake enough to drive. This particular gym does not have free weights, so the chances that there will be a lot of men there is slim. The competition for the equipment will mostly be with other ladies which I’m used to at the gym anyway. I’m not seeing the downside to this yet. I guess I’ll have to report back on what it’s really like when I move in early next week.

Other amenities which I think should be in every rental community (if possible) are a dog park, a playground for kids, and picnic areas. My current rental community has no amenities. That means that parents let their kids run in the parking lot to play, there are doggie doodles at random places, and there is no sense of community because there is no hangout area (not that I am social or would socialize with some of the folk around here). It just makes for a very boring and depressing rental experience. There are other reasons that I am leaving, but I think that if the community had more to offer I would be more reluctant to leave.

I’ve visited friends who have spent exorbitant amounts of money to live in apartments the size of a closet to be closer to a city or a university campus. I never understood why anyone would do that to themselves, but everyone has different ideas about convenience. I am interested in finding out what you look for in an apartment community. What makes you love your apartment and what makes you hesitant to sign a lease?

Eenie, meenie, miney, mo.

RIM is releasing about three hundred BlackBerries this year and Boy Genius was nice enough to break them down and let us know which device is which and which ones will have the features that we are looking for. He also differentiates between the prosumer devices and the devices intended for business.

According to his research I should be waiting for the 83xx which will include a Camera, WiFi, and GPS. Which BlackBerry are you getting?

[Link to RIM's BlackBerry 8300 Lineup : The Boy Genius Report]

Recently I realized that I barely spend any time on MySpace. I still respond to emails I get from friends there and friend requests, but I don’t just hang out to see what’s going on. I definitely don’t play with the instant messenger features anymore because they’re just sub par and I find that most MySpace users that I socialize with don’t use them. The shine has well worn off for me.

I guess that the MySpace folk are starting to realize this as well. They’re planning on launching a social news site, much like Digg, so that users can submit and vote for news articles. Personally, I don’t see this encouraging me to spend more time on the site. Using MySpace for your up to date news coverage is no better than listening to High School bathroom gossip. I also hope that the level of commentary from MySpace users will be more mature than that of the vast majority of Digg users. The thought of another avenue for a bunch of teenaged guys to tear each other to shreds for no reason does not strike me as entertaining. Unfortunately I think it will go the way of most MySpace pages — littered with grainy video and audio tracks that automatically play pasted over swirly animated backgrounds with unreadable text.

At any rate, check out this Wired article and let me know what you think.

[Link to Wired News: Exclusive: MySpace News Pics]

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Darren Rowse at ProBlogger asked his readers about their feed reading habits. In particular he wanted to know what makes people unsubscribe from a Blog feed. I have been cleaning out my Google Reader lately and I have found myself unsubscribing to feeds for the following reasons:

1. Partial Feeds: I still click through to the originating site even if I’ve read a full feed. Partial feeds seem like a cheap way to force me to do something I already do so I just unsubscribe to pages that use them out of spite.
2. Poor Grammar: Mine is not perfect, nor is my spelling, but seeing bad grammar and poorly constructed sentences on a regular basis makes me lose respect for the author. A lot of the errors I see could be corrected with a quick run through the spell and grammar check on Microsoft Word so there is very little excuse to post before checking.
3. Repetitive Posts: I know that sometimes the media gets carried away with certain topics (Anna Nicole, Oscar Coverage, etc.), but I expect more from a blogger. Unless your blog focuses on a specific topic, I don’t want to see 10 posts on a specific topic over the course of a week.
4. Off The Topic: When topic focused blogs go off topic and stay off topic for a while I just lose interest. If it is a topic focused blog I signed up to read posts on a specific topic and related items.
5. Furry Friends and Cute Babies: I don’t want to see pictures of your kids or your pets unless they are doing something that is really special. I set the bar very high when I use the term special — that video of a cat sitting at a piano and attempting to play was on the low end of what I consider special. Truth be told no one really wants to hear about your munchkins or pets unless it is a blog that regularly features appearances by them. If I am subscribed to a blog with this kind of material, I most likely know the blogger quite well.
6. Regurge: Please try not to regurgitate stories you found on the last ten sites you visited when you were reading through your own feeds. Chances are I’ve read half of them or I subscribe to similar feeds and will get to that news from an official news source as well. Not every tech site has to report on the newest USB gadget as soon as it drops. Go for a weekly roundup of new gadgets if that is not the primary focus of your blog.
7. Miscategorization: Don’t try to pass your blog off as a tech or gadget blog if you only make one post about a gadget every week or so. If it’s a personal blog, don’t be embarrassed to let it be a blog about you and your experiences. Don’t try to pass your opinions off as fact or try to spin them as real news either. If you think your readers are fooled, you’re wrong and Fox News already does a better job of it.
8. Video Clips: If you are going to post links to video clips in your blog, at least put some text in the blog post. Spending an extra second to tell the viewer what the video is about should be common sense.
9. Excessive Updates About the Blog: You don’t need to tell me about every update you do to your theme, how you’re changing your blog, and constantly apologize for being offline or for not posting constantly. We are human and most bloggers work alone. We understand that your posting frequency will change depending on what is going on in your life. If you want to put some ads on your blog to pay the web hosting bills, more power to you. If you made a change that may have caused down time or screwed something up for the readers, by all means explain yourself. Just don’t do it every day.
10. Blogging about Blogging: Don’t do it. I’m guilty of it as well and I’ve made an effort to stop it. Blogging about blogging is the snake eating its tale (ha ha).

[Link to What makes you unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed?]

When I first started blogging regularly I purchased a license for Ecto which is an amazing application. I started using it on OS X, so I was a bit disappointed in the Windows translation. Most applications that start on the Mac platform don’t quite translate to Windows just because of the limitations of the operating system. At any rate, since I moved back to Windows (temporarily) I have struggled to find a good desktop blog editor.

A while ago I went through almost every free and low cost blogging software package that I could find for Windows. I found a software package with a good interface, it ran slowly. If I found one that was good all around, the price was too high. For kicks and giggles I figured I would try Windows Live Writer because other people seem to like it, and I also found a quick and dirty article on getting it to work with the Wordpress Ultimate Tag Warrior plug-in. It causes me physical pain to say it but I like the software and it works well for my purposes. Furthermore it’s free. It also has a growing library of plugins which will encourage versatility. I just hope it doesn’t become bloated like Microsoft applications tend to get after they have been around for a while. I also hope it remains free.

Do you use Windows Live Writer? If so what do you think of it? Do you use another application I may be unfamiliar with? Let me know about it.

I was driving home yesterday after running some errands around Raleigh and I saw my first redneck limousine. It was a stretch limo with a 4×4 pickup bed at the rear. To top off the hideousness of this beast there was a cap on the bed. It was so ghastly it actually knocked the wind out of me for a second and I had to slow down to gawk. I guess I learned that hideousness knows no bounds. I would love to know how much gas this monster consumes and what kind of people would pay to ride around in such an inefficient eyesore.

I’ve been playing the iLike Challenge (much like Name That Tune) for the past two days and I’ve realized a few things. I can tell Panic! at the Disco and Fall Out Boy apart with amazing regularity. I am proud of myself for that. I also get every Pink Floyd and most Syd Barrett questions right which is an achievement as I never purchased any of Syd’s albums.

Unfortunately I have run across a problem. I cannot tell the difference between Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, Blink 182, and Sum 41 musically. I recognize the really really popular Blink 182 songs that played back in the days when Carson hosted TRL. I can pick out one of the members, Mark Hoppus, because he’s a looker. I also remember that they parodied the Backstreet Boys’ I Want it That Way video in one of their own. Other than that I am completely lost every time I hear one of the songs from any of these bands. If you could eliminate those four bands from the rotation in the game my accuracy would go up at least 5 percent.

It makes me stop to think about what was going on in the music industry when all of these bands were super popular on MTV and on the radio. I would probably conveniently assume they were all Blink 182 because Mark is cute and it’d be an excuse to buy CDs with his picture on them. Is that any way to buy music? Is this how the world felt when Backstreet Boys and were super popular? I never had any problems distinguishing bands by vocals, but with bands where everyone screams and hops around on stage how do you discriminate the vocals? I don’t get it.

I just came to the realization that I’m a closet Emo and I didn’t even know it. I was listening to Panic! At the Disco while downloading the most recent Dashboard Confessional album from eMusic and I got frustrated when I couldn’t find any My Chemical Romance albums on the site. I decided to search for more songs by The Starting Line while my iTunes playlist moved from Panic! to Fall Out Boy without skipping a beat.

My appreciation for Emo rock wasn’t really intentional. I guess I heard a few Fall Out Boy songs on some of the WB/CW shows, namely One Tree Hill, and decided to get the albums. One Tree Hill may be a lot of things but it’s not lacking for decent music. My Fall Out Boy purchases and interest led to my Panic! at the Disco fever because they’re like Fall Out part II but amusing in a completely different kind of way. After all of that Emo goodness, I caught Dan talking about My Chemical Romance. I started listening to some of their stuff and I found it to be even more melodramatic than the Fall Out Boy and Panic! stuff, but it was still amusing. My Chemical Romance led to Dashboard confessional.

I guess it was a natural progression for me since I was always a Cure fan and I liked Depeche Mode. Somewhere Robert Smith is laughing to himself when he watches these tortured Emo kids on stage. They’re trying to steal his schtick and they just don’t understand that no one will ever rock the fatalistic melancholy like The Cure. These young pups just want an excuse to wear black eyeliner and whine about failed relationships. The Cure owns them.

I have been using Google Docs and Spreadsheets since it was available to Gmail users. I actually wanted to try Writely, but signups had already been shut down by the time I got to it due to the Google takeover. I waited a while and when Writely had been Googlized I jumped at the chance to play with it. When Google Spreadsheets became available I made sure I took the time out to play with that as well. I think the idea of having a portable office suite has always been appealing to me for several reasons:

• I’ve had a few catastrophic data losses over time.
• I like to be able to access some documents no matter where I am.
• Constantly synchronizing documents between my laptop, desktop, and my file server is tedious.
• The ability to work on group projects without emailing files back and forth saves time and reduces the risk of virus transmission.

Since the beginning Google Docs was always slow to me. I thought it was just normal because the applications were somewhat complex and script heavy. I also had quite a difficult time downloading my files and deleting files from the site. It took so many clicks to move files around that it’s always been a point of mild frustration for me. I never thought anything of it until I tried ThinkFree Office. After only an hour or so of playing around with their applications, I cleaned out my Google Docs archive and moved everything to their site.

There are a lot of things I like about ThinkFree, but these are the most important to me:

• The site responds quickly and the applications are snappy.
• The aesthetics of the site are very good and the layout is well thought out.
• There is a PowerPoint compatible web application along with a Word Processor and a Spreadsheet application.
• It takes very few clicks to upload or download single or multiple files.
• There are AFFORDABLE desktop applications which you can purchase that coincide with the web applications for working offline.

So far I am very impressed with the suite. I am going to try to spend more time editing documents within ThinkFree Office on the web so that I can see how it reacts to heavy use and more complex functions than I have used before. I hope that the applications continue to be this usable as the suite grows and I hope that the desktop based versions of the applications stay affordable as well. I would also like to see a Mac version of the desktop suite. Once that is available I would have to say that ThinkFree Office would be a very hard competitor to beat in this particular software market.