Monthly Archives: January 2009

Thoughts while peoplewatching at The Haven

Jared multitasking: Peoplewatching at Haven and also using Photo Booth.

Jared multitasking: Peoplewatching at Haven and also using Photo Booth.

It’s Friday, which means The Haven on George Street is doing their weekly double cheeseburger special. For around $6 (before tip) you get a double cheeseburger, fries, and a drink. Damn good deal, especially considering it’s downtown. Food’s great, too, check it out.

Some randomness before I venture into a conference call:

  • The possibility of a snow event Monday night into Tuesday in Charleston is looking a bit better. The forecasted intensity is all over the place, but there is increasing agreement on at least the presence of snow. Brian Goode’s got the…erm…goods — most notably computer model readouts that are getting into better alignment on this thing. I’ll have more to say about this soon.
  • Great times last night at Sesame Burgers & Beer. Ian has a lot of pictures. Needless to say, during these meet/tweetups, we manage to bring with us a lot of technology.
  • Another day, another quake, and no, I didn’t feel that one either.
  • The idea of Five Guys coming to downtown has me extremely excited and my arteries quivering in fear all at the same time. Can’t wait.
  • I need to realign my car playlist. WAY too much stuff from Gary Cherone (whether it be Extreme, Tribe of Judah, Van Halen III, or his solo funk album) on the silver JPod (known as JPod Mach II). Maybe my ex had a point when I was burning the ToJ album into her eardrums back in 2003.

Off I go back to the workday. Enjoy the rest of your day!

A few days’ worth of observations

Into The Sunset

Random observations made on an approximately three-to-four day blogging hiatus that involved a great photowalk (the above photograph and two new images in the titlebar rotation being products of said photowalk; you can find the rest in my Flickr set), an epic lazy day spent with Windows 7, and other day-to-day snippets: Continue reading →

Identi.ca redesigns and ups the feature ante

It’s a happy Friday over at identi.ca as a new look and a refreshed Laconica version went live today. The refresh gives Identi.ca a major interface makeover, including the addition of a tag cloud on a member’s profile, further demonstrating Laconica’s integration of hashtagging as a core feature of the platform. My hashtags are very predictable.

The killer feature of this refresh, though, is integrated support for groups. People have been clamoring for groups on Twitter for a while now, and Laconica delivers. A group is indicated by an exclamation point (!) prepended to a string indicating the group name. Eugene started a Charleston group referenced as !chs. If one mentions !chs in an update and they are a member of the group, that update is automatically added to the timeline for that group. This strikes me, at first glance, as a more structured way to find updates for events (like conferences) than by using hashtagging. It will be interesting to see where people take it.

Once again, Laconica demonstrates the beauty of development in the open as opposed to Twitter’s closed system. While a lot of people like Twitter the way it is, Identi.ca is once again reasserting its technological dominance over an increasingly restrictive and closed Twitter system. If you haven’t been back to Identi.ca in a while, I urge you to take a look; if you’ve never used it, try it! You can send your Identi.ca updates to Twitter with no problem, so your Twitter followers won’t miss out on what you’re up to.

New guideposts to Serious Business

Serious Business is indeed live at 8:30 tonight on Ustream.tv — I’ve been busy reading a Tumblr-based show website and — finally! — a Twitter stream for the show as well. Brand identity, and all that — plus, this begins my strategy of pulling some of my multimedia productions out from under the jaredwsmith.com umbrella (the weather stuff is next).

I’ll explain everything on the show at 8:30. :) Join us!

OMG! Snow!

Today was remarkable in Charleston for another reason than a historic day in America; depending on where you were, it snowed! It will continue to do so, too, throughout the evening and into tonight. Here’s a radar still from 6:00 PM, showing where snow has been reported (lots of places!)

6:00 PM Radar Image, Snow Day in Charleston

NWS Charleston has noted accumulations of up to a quarter inch in Colleton County, with a trace of snow throughout the Charleston metro. I, personally, have seen a few flakes but nothing really out of the ordinary just yet. I’ll take video if/when I do. However, it seems as if the heaviest snow is remaining to the south and west; no telling if it will creep a bit more northeast. NWS keeps us in a 60% chance of snow and a Winter Weather Advisory until 11 PM, so it’s likely that we’ll see a bit more snow in the area before it’s over. Major accumulations aren’t expected; rather, the threat will be from puddles where it rained/sleeted earlier this morning refreezing overnight, as temperatures are expected to dip into the lower 20s inland (mid-20s near the coast). Wind chills will be somewhere in the low teens again. (It’s clear that Old Man Winter is reasserting himself after that absolutely balmy December.) Be very careful driving tomorrow morning in rush hour!

This morning I started the #omgsnow09 hashtag for Twitter users to make snow reports; there have been a lot of reports in North Charleston, and a couple in Summerville as well. Keep an eye on that one throughout the evening as more reports roll in. Also, watch @chswx on Twitter for updates as needed.

Serious Business Super Bowl Pre-Pre-Pregame Show Tonight!

After the conference championship games conclude tonight, I’ll be live from the JaredPlex on Serious Business with the first annual Serious Business Super Bowl Pre-Pre-Pregame Show, which I certainly hope will be reasonably self-explanatory. Keep an eye to my tweets or dents for an announcement of showtime. I’m estimating it’ll be around 9:30 ET, but that may be postponed depending on developments in today’s games.

NFL Championship Sunday

Despite the untimely elimination of both the Carolina Panthers and San Diego (Super) Chargers from the playoffs last weekend, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about today’s conference championship matchups. For the NFC, we’ve got the Philadelphia Eagles traveling to Arizona to play — yes — the Arizona Cardinals. In the AFC, the Baltimore Ravens visit the Pittsburgh Steelers at the Ketchup Tundra. I’m going to attempt to analyze the games, but I have to tell you: almost nothing has gone to plan this postseason. (Except, of course, the whole “Chargers-don’t-have-a-chance-against-the-Steelers” meme.) Call this a shot in the dark. Continue reading →

The Perils of Overthinking

I’m a chronic overthinker. I tend to really overthink a lot of things and drive myself insane in the process. This goes for matters of my personal life as well as my professional nerd life — especially as it pertains to websites, including this one.

A couple Marches ago when I was frantically reworking this site, I decided to split the homepage off from the blog in an effort to have a “full” website — somewhere to point people at projects, biographical stuff, and the ilk. I also wanted the opportunity to feature posts on the site’s homepage in an effort to be something of a gatekeeper over my material.

However, in this latest redesign, I noticed that the “homepage” concept was kind of a bummer. It was actually limiting what folks could see right off the bat (I’d write asides that would never see the light on the homepage, for instance). Beyond the filtered blog posts, it didn’t offer much besides a tag cloud for said blog, Twitter status, and what was playing via Last.fm (which was later axed in favor of a FriendFeed sidebar). Basically, I was trying far too hard to have a gigantic website when, ultimately, it should all center around the blog.

Thus, today, the full, unfettered blog makes a return to the root of jaredwsmith.com, because it just makes sense for it to be there. The old “weblog” link simply becomes “archives,” which must look better now that it’s a top-level page. The rest of the site (about, connect) stays the same. Good times.

Now, for hockey. $5 at the Stingrays tonight — sweet!