Dujodu Blog

Can anyone tell what the hell he is mumbling about after he says “defeat that” ? (~1:55)

OK, it’s been longer than I expected. Now that even my most dedicated readers have probably stopped checking for updates I finally have some stuff worth talking about. First of all I’ve been really busy with my work with MATC/Discovery World. Things have really been picking up so I’ve been working a lot on that. In most of my spare time I’ve been playing a lot of guitar (and wasting a lot of time.. of course). Me and my pals from Secret Iris have changed our name to “Paper House” and have been working on some new material. We have a lot of stuff in the works, plenty of song fragments to spend plenty of hours developing, and that doesn’t stop us from making new ones to add to the pile. We’ve been recording some stuff as we feel the songs are ready, and as time permits, and we have a myspage page up — because Rupert Murdoch doesn’t have enough money already and we thought the advertisements might help him make fox news a better place…. oh wait, that’s not right… erggh.

Anyway, the myspage page is up and you can view it here:

http://www.myspace.com/paperhousesongs

Digg 3.0 (If you are familiar with digg skip this section!)
There was a new version of Digg.com (v3.0) launched a few weeks ago and I’ve been throughly enjoying it. It has broadend it’s topics from science & technology to pretty much everything including: health, enviornmental, political, video, and even gaming news. There is a category for everyone, or if you’re like me you want to read (at least) the headlines for everything. For anyone who doesn’t know what digg is, I highly suggest checking it out - it’s a “social bookmarking / news” site that is ruled by the users. Every item you see on the front page is user submitted and approved (via votes, or “diggs”) to the front page. I’m not 100% sure how the algorithm works but it is based on number of diggs and the frequency of diggs. I’ve seen stories get “promoted” from the queue to the front page with as little as 12 diggs, which if you ask me is pretty whack but it might just be growing pains. Anyway, enough with all that. This post is supposed to be about how to take advantage of this huge system of information.

The Digg Spy

I mentioned the “Queue” earlier. The Queue is basically a list of all the stories being submitted to digg by all the diggers (digg users). It is a pretty active list and you can view it realtime by clicking on the “Spy” link under “Digg Tools” at the bottom of the left menu. Here you can see what people are digging, commenting on, voting down (kind of like a “negative digg” for stories that are inaccurate or spam), and it’s all in real time!!! By default the Digg Spy will show activity for all submissions, including ones that are already on the front page. I find it to be MUCH more effective for catching stories by clicking on the “Only Upcoming” tab toward the top right of the page. This will only show activity for stories that aren’t already on the front page - because chances are I’ve already seen those! I also like to filter out activity for things that I don’t need real time updates on - like comments on ALL the upcoming stories and diggs on ALL the upcoming stories. When I’m in the digg spy, what I really want to see are new story submissions, so I uncheck every box at the top except for the little blue one. Now I will have a real time view of all new story submissions and promotions and nothing else - perfect. I find this to be the best way to view the most recent content. You can immediately choose to digg or “bury” the articles as they are submitted this way and really help to make digg work by actively participating in the promotion process. If you are only looking at the front page you are getting a lot of cool information - but you are missing out on one of the best aspects of digg if you don’t go into the queue from time to time to digg the things you find interesting!

Digg & RSS

You’ll notice there is an RSS feed for just about every imaginable page on Digg. I haven’t really used this yet, but I think I’m going to hook up my digg.com user profile to a diggstream on the right near the linkstream (which I’ve been neglecting recently). This will allow anyone visiting my blog to see what I’ve been digging! The RSS could also be used to get a REALLY specific virtual “topic” that you can monitor without actually trying to search for anything. There is so much news submitted to digg that if you want to monitor a certain person, event, or anything else you can possibly tie to a key word you can simply subscribe to diggs RSS feed of a search for that keyword, say for Milwaukee. This way you can have all the users of digg (a ridiculously large amount… err..) doing all the search work for you and you can just sit back and let the info come to you. Definitely a neat feature.
Coming Soon on Digg

There are some even more amazing information filters that are slated for a mid July release on digg. A new version of the digg spy (”digg spy on crack” as Kevin Rose, founder of digg.com, described it) which will be an even easier way to filter content, and some really interesting graphical views of the content and diggs will be included. If you want to check out a video highlighting some of these features and more, take a look here.

I don’t drink much soda these days since I’ve been mainly drinking water and tea and fruit (in smoothie form). When I DO drink soda, I at least try to make it worth my while. We picked up a case of Sprecher products while I was getting my replacement pair of Koss headphones for free* so I had a lot more soda than usual over the past few weeks. After that ran out, my soda addiction was on the verge of kicking back in, so I actually went to go seek out a soda to buy in the store. I went over to the freezer section and saw Sprecher so I instantly looked for my favorite product of theirs, puma cola. Unfortunately they had no puma cola, I wasn’t feeling like a root beer so I tried their ginger ale. I was surprised that I actually liked it since I haven’t had ginger ale in a really really long time and when I did I remember it being not that great. But anyway, a few days after drinking that I was craving some more ginger ale, and I happened to be in outpost when I spied a 4 bottle pack of some over priced ginger beer. It’s like root beer, but ginger (errr… I think). Whatever the hell it was, I liked it.

A few days after I finished that off I stumbled across a webpage that claimed to have a recipe for home made ginger ale. I don’t remember what I was looking up I think it might have been yogurt or soy paneer cheese, but it struck my interest. It looked like I would need to find some yeast and some ginger extract which I didn’t have, so I looked around for some more recipes and came across one that looked like it was much easier to make. I got the ingredients (1 cup of chopped ginger, yikes) and made it. It was pretty good, it was not as good as the sprecher ginger ale or the ginger beer, but it was definitely not bad for home made soda beverage. I tried to cut out some of the sugar but you just can’t do it, without the right amount it just does not taste right. I think maybe I’ll pick up some yeast and ginger extract and try it the other way to see how the taste differs. Either way it was a nice little experiment.

As some of you know I recently returned from a short trip (Sunday - Wednesday) to Minocqua, WI. We stayed in a small cabin right off of some lake (yeah I know, this is shaping up to be the worst story ever). Here is an overview of what happened during that time:

Before the trip:

I was pretty convinced that this was going to be a boring trip. It was nice to step away from reality for a few days, but it also came at a very inconvenient (busy) time so I wasn’t exactly excited about going. I was trying to find somewhere to use my new gadget (the laptop) to connect to the internets, and I came across a website for a coffee shop (and more) called Life Spring that looked pretty promising. An excerpt from the official website:

A Northwoods rarity, LifeSpring offers more than just the highest quality coffee and espresso in the Minocqua area. Come experience the easy, open atmosphere and eclectic mix of healthy food, free high-speed Internet access, local fine art, antiques and practical/unusual resale items.

Ok, sounds pretty cool. Potentially lame, but sounds promising. They appear to only be open until 2:00 on Sunday, and closed on monday. We were going to leave early on Wednesday, so that only leaves two possible days to go there. We decide to go right when we get in town on Sunday and check it out.

Read the rest of this entry »

For some reason I’m really in the market for gadgets lately. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve acquired or will recently be acquiring all sorts of them. First of all I now have in my possession a laptop. It’s not MY laptop, it’s MATCs laptop, but I can use it for now at least. It’s a pretty insane laptop, it’s an Intel (eh) 2.0 GHz dual core processor(!), 1GB of RAM, 80 GB hard drive (err, I think), 17″ landscape display, built in Wi-Fi, fingerprint scanner (seriously, that is ridiculous), and probably all sorts of other crazy features.

Well, a laptop is nice and all, but who the hell wants a laptop without internet access? So I’ve been planning on getting a wireless router so I can split the roadrunner connection and get a wireless lan going, so you’ll probably be hearing about that a lot - especially if my $20 woot wireless D-Link router is a total piece of crap. That’s right, as usual woot comes to the rescue with a great deal on a product I’m actually in the market for (kind of like the zip disc that I received in my Bag’O'Crap, but this time on purpose). It’s gotten a LOT of shitty reviews, but I’ve also seen SOME good reviews, so maybe there is a lot of “user error” going on out there or the firmware sucked when it came out. Either way, it should be here in a week and I can test it out for myself. I didn’t really want to blow $70 on a router that I might only use for half a year or something, so hopefully this will at least be usable.

And crazy gadget #3, a PreSonus Firebox firewire audio interface. If you aren’t into computer audio, that would roughly translate to “a new sound card” which will hopefully provide better sound fidelity than my crappy motherboards soundcard. I’ve only had limited testing with it because I’ve been so damn busy lately, but I hope to record something ASAP with it just to see how far I can take the recordings. I still really want to finish the songs I’ve been working on too, before they get lost in riff wasteland.

I’ll get some pictures up soon of all the gadgetry. Something I want to blog about in the near future: RSS feeds. They are so damn cool and underrated, I think everyone should probably be using them. Instead of checking my blog every day you can sit back and do something useful and be alerted via RSS (which is much less obtrusive than e-mail IMHO) every time I update!! How is that not the coolest thing ever? Especially if you like to read multiple blogs or infrequently updated sites.

I’ve updated the blog to version 2.0.2 of wordpress. If everything went correctly you should probably notice no difference. I have however enabled being able to register. I’m not sure what the hell this feature will offer you (if anything) and I don’t intend to investigate it any further. If you register, lemme know what the hell it enables you to do (like make posts, delete my blog, blow up my computer, etc). I kind of want to update the design since I threw it together really fast when I created the blog and it barely works in IE. Maybe I’ll get around to doing that eventually.

Also, I’ve just enabled an anti-spam thing so if you post a comment and it doesn’t show up for a few days send me an e-mail (see business card below for the correct address) because it was probably marked as spam for some reason.