How to Keep a Good Blog

I blog. I know I am not the only one. I have developed some tips on keeping a good blog after a few years of blogging, all at different places. Blogging is not something new to me, but it is something I am good at.

So, I talk about how to keep a good blog. Here are MY tips:

• Updating Constantly
• Not Repeating Yourself
• Do Tutorials
• Have a good theme
• Have at least 50 pages. (It keeps a user busy for a while)

These are just tips I have picked up of the years of blogging. Other than that, happy blogging at geekintosh.net .

Are You a Geek at Heart?

I once read that a geek doesn’t care how his hair looks or if he is getting a date to the prom or whatever. In your mind, does this reflect a geek? It doesn’t give them a very good image. On the internet, the term geek is used interchangeably. Most people think of a geek and think of a guy with glasses and short nerdy hair. Yes, some geeks look  like this, but being a geek does NOT mean you can’t have a social life. I was on urbandictionary, as always and looked up the term geek. Here’s what I found:

geek

565 up, 127 down

One of four titles used to classify someone based on their technical and social skills. The other three titles are nerd, dork, and normie. The difference between the four titles can be easily shown in table form: ……………. Technical …… Social Title ………… Skills ……… Skills ———- —————- ———— Normie ……… No …………. Yes Geek ……….. Yes …………. Yes Nerd ………… Yes …………. No Dork ………… No ………….. No Normie: A normal person. Blah. Geek: An outwardly normal person who has taken the time to learn technical skills. Geeks have as normal a social life as anyone, and usually the only way to tell if someone is a geek is if they inform you of their skills. Nerd: A socially awkward person who has learned technical skills due to the spare time they enjoy from being generally neglected. Their technical knowledge then leads normies to neglect them even further, leading to more development of their technical skills, more neglection, etc. This vicious cycle drives them even more into social oblivion. Dork: A person who, although also socially awkward, doesn’t have the intelligence to fill the void with technical pursuits, like a nerd, and is forced to do mindless activities. Almost always alone. Usually with an XBox. Like playing Halo. All day. Every day. Not even understanding how the Xbox is making the pretty pictures on the screen. Very sad. If you met me at a party, you would have no idea that I enjoy finite element analysis-based inviscid flow modelling using computational fluid dynamics. That’s because I’m a geek.

What are the Dangers of Meeting People Online?

I have about 30 online contacts who I can come to when I need help. I know that all of these people are real, and are children. In school today, I said how I knew all of these people online and that I have a .com website (they don’t know anything about tech, they would take a week to learn what a domain is). One of them explained how dangerous it is to meet people online-Which brings me to my topic. What are the Dangers of Meeting People Online?

First off, I have to say that I agree with what one of my classmates stated. It is dangerous. I am not speaking with these people in bad chatrooms (as in sex related chatrooms). These chatrooms are tech related and if you go off topic and talk about sex or give away too much personal information, the ops will help. I also have to say that I do not make my friends in a text chat. Usually, I ask for their skype info so I can verify their age and etc. I don’t want an adult/predator as my “friend”. If I meet someone strange, I block them.

But, what if you are not able to block these people? What if they really are predators? You have no defense against them. You can only leave hoping they ban the person. Meeting people online is dangerous. By the way, child predators do not hang out in TCSL Chatrooms, or tech chatrooms. They stay on places like MySpace and FaceBook. They don’t understand how people are always told, “Don’t go on MySpace”.

These are just my thoughts. I don’t plan to meet up with anyone in real life that I haven’t met on skype yet or ventrilo. I may host a tech conference, in a few years, but I am not sure.

My Flight Simulator Game: ISSUES

My Condensed Story/Intro:

I recently bought Microsoft Flight Simulator X for PC. I was expecting it to be a lot of fun, as anyone would. I had a ton of issues with the game. I couldn’t fix them, so like anyone else would, I returned it. They wouldn’t accept it. It was against copyright. I could only get the same game but new. It sucked. Here is my lengthened version (and more interesting in my mind) of the story.

Though, with my install, I had issues after issues after issues with it. I tried installing it and it worked. When I tried to takeoff, though, I would see a black screen then an alpha (alpha, for those of you who are not developers is the perimeter of the image in black and white) of the image, then I would see full color for about 1/4 for a second. It would do this again and again and it was about a 3 second cycle. It would be black for 1-2 seconds, alpha for about 3/4 of a second then full color for a quick period of time.

Like any other normal person would, I called the worst company in the world, Mircosoft. The only thing that call did was allow me to pay $1 per minute for the toll on the call. I talked to this guy for about fifty minutes and was no help at all as always. He wanted to update my drivers and all that crap, but it ultimately failed.

Then, I gave up. Like anyone else would, I went to my local Best Buy (now known as Best B*#$%@!) and I tried to return it. As you would expect, they will accept anything opened but software. (by the way, I did get a new copy of the game in case it was the DVD it came on) I tried to think of what I can do with it. I considered burning it, smashing it, and shredding it.

Aaron (AaronG94, or Aaron from chat) finally convinced me to reinstall it. I uninstalled it in five minutes, and I am installing it as I write. I doubt it will work (no offense aaron), but I think it is the game. By the way, I have a top-of-the-line PC (as of September 20, 2008) with 2 GB RAM, nVdia 8600 Graphics Card, and Intel VIIV CPU with a 300 GB Hard Drive. It meets and exceeds the game’s requirements. I really hope this reinstall works.

What Drives Your Website?

What drives your website? By this I mean, what is it powered by? HTML Coding? PHP? Or does it use a platform like mine? WordPress? Drupal? Elgg? Ning? PHPBB? There are hundreds of content management systems out there. I have used a lot of them in the time I worked on finding the right platform for the job. For my website, if you haven’t noticed, is WordPress. I use a combination of WordPress and PHPBB and loads of plugins to have the customization that the site has right now. I am working on even more, but I think I will always use WordPress for my site.

For my  other sites, I use WordPress or Drupal. WordPress and Drupal are almost the same thing but Drupal is better if you are trying to create a scocial network like YouTech.TV. Whenever I get a new site, the first thing I do with it is add WordPress to it.

To make it easy on you, I have created a table to show exactly what system is for what type of site you want to create:

Forums                                                                                          PHBB

Blog                                                                                               WordPress / Drupal

Social Networking                                                                         Drupal / Elgg

Knowledgebase                                                                             KBPublisher

Again, my favorite is Drupal for sites that are very user friendly, but WordPress is best for management. I really love WordPress. It has never failed me and I hope it never does. Damnit WordPress just crashed. (Sorry. I really, really couldn’t help myself)

How do You Work on Projects Collaboratively?

If you are in a corporate environment and you don’t have a lot of money to invest into a program like Microsoft Exchange but still need to work on a project and keep in your budget, what do you do? Well, if you are in this exact situation, quickly, head over to assembla. That is assembla.com.

I have been using this free service for about 6 months now. Not yet has it failed me. In addition to that, for a while I was obsessed with intranets. I wanted to create one. I found assembla and was a close second. I loved everything about it. It is easy to use, great GUI, and most importantly, it is clean, simple, and to the point. Everything there works great. I don’t see very many bugs on the site. Here are some reasons why you should use assembla:

• Free
• Easy-to-Use
• Clean
• Packed full of features
• and more!

I really love this site and I am sure you would too, so check it out today!
http://www.assembla.com

ISP Nightmares & Review

Comcast, unfortunatley is my ISP. They have had their issues and we have had great people come and terrible people come. Some of the better people we’ve had decided to rewire the entire lot (and it is a huge lot) and then after that, they gave us a spare remote and upgraded our connection. Some of the worse people we’ve had said “I don’t know” and left us with a bad signal and 5 minute ping timeouts. It was really annoying. If they can’t help, why can’t they get someone who knows what they are talking about. Also, I once said the word “router” and the man said “What the h%^ is a router?”. That shows what great training they have.

In addition to that, we can’t even get channels in the hundreds about 75 at some times. We are even subscribed to the 1000 channel pack (or something like that.) We can go above 75, but it is really strange. Sometimes I have to say, “Thank God we don’t have Animal Planet”. I don’t mean to be rude, but it is terrible. Also, once I called in I was on hold for about a half hour about email because their server was down and she thought it was my Outlook! I have to say, that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Outlook? Why the heck would I just stop getting messages when I was before? That makes absoluteley no sense.

I understand that the ISP competition is tough and most of them aren’t all that great, but I have to say, by far, and for four years before we moved here in Maryland, we used Time Warner Cable. Nothing was ever wrong. Our internet was always up and we never had any issues. The only times a repairman would come out from them was to upgrade our box. The GUI of the DVR box even made sense. I have gotten used to Comcast, but Time Warner was better. I think once we were having some issues with them and the man there actually showed us some secret channels and solved our problem. Who knew that was possible?!

In conclusion, if you can choose and ISP, please, use Time Warner Cable. You won’t regret it.I have only used 3 ISP’s ever and they were all terrible but Time Warner Cable.

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Special Characters

As some of you know, I take Spanish for my school. In addition to that, most people know that Spanish has some “interesting” characters required to use to type it correctly. Some of them are: á, é, and etc. You notice that they are normal letters, just accented. I have found various sites on this, but here is the best one for me. http://www.lingolex.com/spanishascii.htm

Also, with this you can not only do symbols in Spanish, you can do them for lots of things! Allow me to show you:

☺ ☻ ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ I ╫

Got those by holding down alt then going to the numeric keypad and then from there entering the code. To get the “code”, I just did ALT,1 or ALT,2. Please do not say this does not work because it does. If you are having trouble, be sure num lock is on and just keep trying. It can be loads of endless fun!

Cube Runner Review

I review my favorite [free] game on the iPod Touch, Cube Runner. It is a lot of fun, but can be a bit slow at times. I love it, though. It reminds me of Pac-Man except cubes and a bit harder. I love the game anyway.

By the way, I did not show the game only because the webcam (yes, the $150 one) couldn’t pick up the specific colors and it looked like one huge blob.

Want to embed this video on your blog?

1337 Speek (also known as leetspeek)

Yes, its a language. 1337, or leetspeek is the language of letters and numbers and is coming up everywhere. According to my favorite place to find online slangs (you guessed it, urbandictionary.com ), their example is:

.	leetspeek	2 up, 20 down
	(n) Online comic. did u see that site leetspeek? it 0wnz j00 f00!

It’s definition:

	leetspeak	99 up, 16 down
	A way of speaking that hackers used to conceal their sites from seach engines. Now, taken over by n00bs. Hacker: J00 kn0 h0w 1 PwN3d z3m M1cr0$0-ft? H4×0rn @ 1t5 b357. N00b: OMG OMG I r t3h r0xx0rz! I r s000 l33t!

Like I said, it is starting to take over the net. My friend, Dune had told me about it and I sort of forgot about it until I needed to do this blogpost. Anyway, what do you prefer, leetspeek, leetspeak, or nettalk?

NETTALK FTW!

*Leetspeek is commonly confused with nettalk (OMG, WTF, LOL) **The term leetspeek and leetspeak are used interchangeably

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