propstm.net » Odds & Ends

Too Early, No Meteors, I’m still awake!

Matt — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 09:28:05 +0000

With the Perseid meteor shower going on right now i’m rather agitated. Considering I don’t usually get up this early but I thought i’d get up a little early and hopefully see a meteor or two, to find out the Grand Valley area has too much light pollution to notice anything bums me out. I had fully intended to try to photograph it with my new digital camera, but the greater disappointment is that I couldn’t even get my camera to focus on even the brightest of stars.

So back to bed with me I suppose. This is in fact a Saturday.

Patriot Act Strikes Again!

Matt — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 16:02:34 +0000

Be wary of the content in your MySpace and Facebook accounts (I’ll be going back through and censoring some of mine). Apparently the Patriot Act can allow potential employers access to material you thought only people which you had allowed access could see.

…the interviewer explained that as a state agency, recruiters accessed his Facebook account under the auspices of the Patriot Act.

I stumbled across an article from the Louisiana State University Career Center on the Patriot Act’s snooping skills.

World Cup Discomfort

Matt — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 13:25:27 +0000

Watching the world cup made me think of many things, mainly since when do Americans get to refer to the sport of football as soccer? European football was around much longer than American Football and well the originator of the name!

here’s a bit of information i found at About.com

In England, King Edward III passed laws in 1331 to try and suppress football. In Scotland, King James 1, in 1424, proclaimed in Parliament, “That na man play at the Fute-ball” (No man shall play football/soccer).

That predates the United States, therefore must predate American football.However, here lies my question: Who does an US citizen root for during the World Cup? Ben Hammersley mentioned being a non-native in the Italy at the time that the Italian team won the World Cup. “It wasn’t my moment.” He wrote. That makes me wonder who should the US citizens root for? I’ve always been a fan of the heritage. Or this year I admit I was gunning for France to win (one of my best friends’ family is from France).

So when the US got knocked out after match play who is the kid from Metro-Detroit supposed to root for?

Selling our wares like street vendors…

Matt — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 15:59:37 +0000

Scoble is asking if anyone has skills. Hugh wants to know where and when the next big idea will hit. I’m not in tune with the MMORPG crowd, but we might as well be vending our tech savvy skills on a virtual main street. Know CSS, can you make a wordpress template….? “Yeah. I can, but it’s easier for me to download one and modify it.”

I can’t help but wonder are our (collective our) blogging skills becoming something which are marketable and desired? The blogosphere is a shared space between intellectuals, politicians, technologists, billionaires, and the unemployed. We can rapidly share information spread ideas, and gain notoriety. It’s not like i’m the college kid sitting outside of some high rise in New York City wondering who is up in the top floor. The person up there could very well be interested in what I’m writing, and there is no social, or economic boundary separating us. I’m still of the mindset that many bloggers are just tech enthusiasts who like to document what they dabble in. Some do this professionally I know, but I would like to believe that many of us do it simply because we enjoy being creative, from the content to the design, it’s DIY.

Now I’ll chip away at my CSS files making them more to my liking, customizing my content. I could do it for someone else that is if they’d want to pay me. For now I’ll just keep doing it for me.

Google Finally Passes $400.

Matt — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:39:32 +0000

After about a month of solid gains, Google finally hit a few days where they hovered around $390. Finally this morning Google has surpassed the $400 marker. Go Google!

More news is available here:
TheStreet

In other news, My ASP.NET independant study which i will be working on next semester was OK’d by the department head. I am now the owner of the domain “propstm.net”. So hopefully i will be migrating over to that domain sometime. I will be using it for an ASP.NET site which i will be working on next semester. Finally, I should be getting my new Averatec 4100 this weekend. There will defeinity be a post made about that machine.

-MP