Turning 23

June 30, 2009 · 25 comments

Not much to say today other than I’m now 23 years of age! Posting around here has been a little slow and will continue to be for a while. I caught some virus and have had fever for the last week and according to the ER doctor at the hospital, it’ll be another week or two before I get my energy back. In the meantime, I’ll be playing Flight Control in bed with my shiny new iPhone 3GS. [click to continue…]

{ 25 comments }

I recently did the unthinkable. I changed the URL structure of my blog’s URLs. Long considered a scary territory, along with moving domains, due to the SEO implications and potential for losing traffic, I was convinced by Bruce Keener to give it a shot. Ever since my blog launched I have been using the domain/year/month/day/post-name URL structure. I thought it was quite handy to know when the post was written before even loading it, but I ended up dealing with very long URLs that got quite annoying. In addition, [click to continue…]

{ 32 comments }

If you live in Atlanta, you’ll be happy to hear that there’s a new ISP in town. And I’m not talking about just any type of Internet connection. I’m talking about WiMAX (read my Thoughts on WiMAX post). It’s called CLEAR by Clearwire and its launch makes Atlanta the “Fastest Unwired City in the South”. That’s a pretty hefty claim that I’ll have to put to the test later. CLEAR isn’t the first WiMAX provider in the United States – Sprint launched WiMAX under their XOHM brand name in Baltimore last October, and other providers have been helping businesses with WiMAX coverage in major cities as well. But for Atlantans, [click to continue…]

{ 41 comments }

Not too long ago I mentioned how I moved to a new apartment but was very disappointed to learn that I now live in an AT&T dead zone. A bit of testing has proved that I do not live in an AT&T dead zone (5 bars on the sidewalk outside), but the building’s stucco and concrete with rebar construction dampens reception considerably, to the point where I get no service closer to the middle of the building and just 1, maybe 2, bars next to the window. I did a bit of Google and Twitter querying and found a local Atlanta company called Wi-Ex that manufactures a set of cell phone signal boosters. [click to continue…]

{ 20 comments }

Those of you that have been following me online for the past few years might know that I maintain a healthy interest in cars in addiction addition to my tech obsession. It wasn’t too long ago that I was in Detroit attending the North American Intl Auto Show, and it was just a year ago that I was on a roadtrip through New York to Washington, D.C. following 17 college teams that re-engineered SUVs to be more sustainable (I even got to drive a fuel cell powered SUV). I could go on and mention how I was at the SCCA Nationals last weekend at Road Atlanta or talk about my involvement with the Fiesta Movement, but I think you get the point. I’m a car nut. So when [click to continue…]

{ 31 comments }

Photoshop Quickie: Perspective Crop

May 28, 2009

I take a lot of pictures for reviews on this blog, most with a Nikon D90 DSLR camera. A good chunk of my time on larger reviews is actually spent reviewing hundreds of images, then fine-tuning the best ones in Photoshop (case in point, my upcoming car review is taking forever). I’ve been using some [...]

13 comments Read the full article →

PSTAM Update: Moving, DirecPath ISP Still Rocks

May 19, 2009

Things will be a bit slow around here until I find my bearings again. I just moved to another apartment this past weekend. There were a few reasons for moving, from wanting to find cheaper rent with upcoming expenses (which is also why you’ll see me experimenting with different ads on this blog) like [...]

26 comments Read the full article →

Review: Roku Digital Video Player

May 10, 2009

From time to time, I have confessed my love for the Vudu set-top box that instantly streams up to 720p quality HD movies (or 1080p quality non-instant) over the Internet to your TV. The Vudu player is not subscription-based, so in addition to ponying up for the hardware, you have to pay an average [...]

24 comments Read the full article →

Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters Ads: When Will They Stop?

May 5, 2009

If you haven’t caught wind of Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters advertisements by now, well you’re lucky. They’re a series of (hopefully only) six ads meant to take a jab at Apple’s successful “Get A Mac” commercials. So far four of these ads are out and they are based on the premise that some person is looking [...]

74 comments Read the full article →

Site Redesign: Everything’s Bigger In Texas Edition

May 4, 2009

It has been almost 2 years since the last time I had a significant redesign of this blog. I figured it was time to start tinkering again. Instead of relying on the same blog theme and code base I have been working with for over 3 years now, I decided to use Chris Pearson’s Thesis [...]

64 comments Read the full article →

I Don’t Like URL Shorteners

April 28, 2009

The other day I was talking with local entrepreneur Sanjay Parekh about a domain I had recently purchased. He commented on how it was rather short and could be also be used as a URL shortening service. That triggered a few responses on my end: 1) I feel that URL shortening services are very much [...]

29 comments Read the full article →

How To: Optimize Your Apache Site with Mod Deflate

April 23, 2009

The title of this post might be a little cryptic to those not familiar with the Apache webserver, but this post is a sort of followup to Paul Buchheit’s recent post “Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step” as well as a response to a recent Skribit suggestion. The step [...]

44 comments Read the full article →

The Pirate Bay Founders Headed to Jail

April 17, 2009

The world’s largest and most popular BitTorrent tracker used for finding everything from music to movies and computer applications has always had its share of high-profile legal issues. Despite snags like their 2006 server raid to incessant cease and desists from media companies, The Pirate Bay has always come out fighting, recently hitting a 25 [...]

14 comments Read the full article →

Thoughts on Netbooks

April 13, 2009

With all the noise about netbooks over the last 2 years and a Skribit suggestion on the same matter, I think I’m overdue for a post divulging my thoughts on netbooks. First off, what are these so-called netbooks? You’ve no doubt heard the term countless times. It refers to a small, generally affordable (I’m [...]

33 comments Read the full article →

First Impressions: BackType Connect WP Plugin

April 9, 2009

BackType is aiming to solve a long-standing problem that reared its face when blogs met new forms social media and news sites. The problem I’m referring to is comment separation anxiety. Comments have feelings too. They don’t like being separated. BackType’s Connect WordPress plugin uses their Connect API to suck in all comments related to [...]

40 comments Read the full article →