Well I’ll lose an hour of sleep, but at least it won’t get dark at 3 o’ clock in the afternoon anymore, which gives me more time for geocaching!

Sunday also marks the last day I’ll be using this 8 year old computer too.  My spanking new desktop rig should be arriving Monday, when I will then begin the process of migrating all my content over.  Oddly enough despite 8 years of data, I haven’t accumulated much.  It only took me a few minutes to transfer everything I had over to my external hard drive, which I’ll then move again to my new PC.  Wheeeeeeee!

And soon I will have a new GPS addon for my iPod, and a new MacBook too!  Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!! 

Seriously, my thinking is I need to get all my out of control spending in now before the dollar completely loses its value.  Amazingly enough, that checks off everything I had on my Blogging Badass Wishlist too, except for a leather jacket and a motorbike, but really let’s not kid ourselves here.  A dweeb like me on a motorbike?  Pffft.  Maybe I’ll just rent one instead.  I could go out and grab a leather jacket though, but I want the girl of my dreams to pick that out for me, which means I won’t be getting that either.

Sorry if I’m being dull today, there’s really not much going on in my life now except for the new computer coming in.  I’m treating it as an investment that will help me get my creative juices going and market my blog, but also finally have fun playing the latest games too.  Mostly I’ll be gaming though. 

Since my money is tied up in getting these new toys, I won’t be able to travel anywhere for a while until May, when I’ll need to take my car in for the 60,000 mile service, and I sure as flipping floopwhocks am NOT gonna get it done here.  The local service centers would probably put the engine in backwards (on purpose) and that would pretty much be the end of my beautiful ride.  So instead, I’m going upstate  to Kingston to get my car serviced there.  Kingston has a service center with an excellent reputation, so if there’s a chance to avoid any headaches and get my baby nicely cleaned up, they’re my best bet.  Afterwards I may head off to attend a major geocaching bash, but it’s a 6 hour drive from there, so I may opt to head to Lake George instead for the weekend.  We’ll see!

Is my life exciting or WHAT? 

Tags: blogging, car, computer, Daylight Savings, geocaching, investment, iPod, leather jacket, MacBook, money, motorbike, serviced, travel, wishlist
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
(  Print This Post | | 26 views )

Warning: techie geeky nerd-like dweebie content ahead.

One of the things I’ve been needing to complete my mobile blogging arsenal is a way to extend the life of my cell phone while I was out in the field. I use my iPod Touch for all things Internet via wifi tethering on my Verizon phone, but enabling wifi sucks the battery juice like a vampire on a hot babe. Usually I get only 2-3 hours usage before the battery dies completely. What I’ve wanted to do to address this issue was get a battery operated charger that I could attach to the cell, enable wifi and then toss the whole thing in my backpack while I’m out scouting the city or geocaching. That could extend the life of my cell phone’s wifi for as long as I’d need it, giving both my iPod and my laptop Internet access anywhere in the country, even out in the wilderness. Who’s awesome? I’m awesome.

So I did some researching, and researching, and researching. As it turns out, there’s only ONE battery charger suitable for my cell phone with the right connector (because these cell phone makers, they just wubs to make their own nonstandard ports to set their cell phones apart from the rest and make it speeeciaaal, doncha know?) The charger is made by Energizer and is powered by two AA batteries. Awesome.

But wait, they recommend lithium batteries, their own brand of course. The idea of swapping expensive lithium batteries on a daily basis to keep my charger going seems well, weapons grade STOOOPID. So I researched some more to see if there were rechargeable batteries out there that would have enough juice to power this thing. Turns out one does, Rayovac Hybrid batteries. Awesome.

But wait, their charger to put it bluntly, sucks the crap stick. It’s a dumb charger that simply charges for x amount of hours and turns off, regardless of whether it properly charged the batteries or not. I needed a smart charger that would turn on and off according to how much charge a battery needed and not wreck the cells in the process. So I did some more research, and as it turns out, the best charger for it is made by Duracell. As an added bonus, the Duracell charger also doubles as a battery operated USB charger, so it can also charge my iPod too. Awesome!

So after much hair tearing, the solution turned out to be an Energizer charger, powered by Rayovac batteries, which are recharged with a Duracell charger.

As a friend of mine commented, the solution I came up with here seemed to suit me: difficult and full of irony.

Ah well. I should have a chance to give this a trial run later this week to see how long I can keep my cell phone’s wifi going, just in time before I take my trip to Boston. The prospect of being able to walk everywhere in the city with my iPod fully powered for blogging and geocaching gives me ooovas!

Tags: batteries, battery, battery charger, blogging, cell phone, city, Duracell, Energizer, geocaching, internet access, ipod touch, laptop, mobile, Rayovac, verizon, wifi
Categories: Gone Mobile
 
(  Print This Post | | 28 views )

While I’ve been thinking about ways to get more traffic and links to my site here, something occurred to me: there was one particular way that I could have easily gotten a huge spike in traffic and finally put my blog on the map.

I could have gone to Massachusetts and volunteered for Scott Brown’s campaign. Seriously. A mad dash to Worcester just for the weekend would have put me in the middle of all the action and given me so much blogging fodder that people would have been hard pressed to ignore me then. Think of the possibilities: me blogging live while I meet and greet Brown supporters at rallies. Or posting photos of me shaking Scott Brown’s hand. And then photos of me flirting with his daughter Ayla Brown, begging for her phone number. And then photos and vids of Scott Brown punching my lights out after flirting with said daughter.

Oh, the possibilities…

I could have done it too, except ironically enough my money was already tied up in launching a marketing campaign. Um, whoops?

It was a missed opportunity, but I’m sure others will come along, especially as we get closer to the 2010 elections. I’m glad I had this revelation now though. In order to breathe life into my blog, I really do have to put myself out there, instead of waiting for the action to come to me. I even thought about going down to Haiti too, hitching a ride with Red Cross and just going down there to help out wherever I could. And then of course, I’d blog about the experience. And blog, and blog, and blog…

That’s been my objective for a while, to somehow bridge the desire to help others with my love for writing, but I had been so narrowly focused on trying to bring more traffic to my site that I had failed to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the traffic would take care of itself if I instead focused on writing and living life the way I’ve always wanted to. So I’m not self-employed just yet, but I can certainly ACT like I am.

Maybe instead of chasing the dream, I should be LIVING the dream, and the rest will fall into place. The battle is already won, the race already done, the future made, the foundation laid, and I need only claim the victory.

Tags: blog, blogging, campaign, election, epiphany, future, Haiti, life, living, marketing, marketing campaign, Massachusetts, revelation, Scott Brown, traffic, writing
Categories: Blog Fog, Politics and Poker
 
(  Print This Post | | 44 views )

What do we even call 2000-2009 anyway? The Zeros? The Single Digits? “The decade that just piled on with so much crap that not even the smelliest crap could have crapped as much crap as this crappy decade crapped on me?”

Well, whatever. Good riddance to 2009 and that whole era of loveless crapiness. I am sorely hoping that 2010 will accumulate in the fulfillment of all hopes and desires, or seriously, I’m just gonna start hitting people. Hard. With like, baseball bats and stuff.

I refuse to make any resolutions though, because I had already done that once on this blog for 2008, and well, let’s take a lookie-loo to see which ones I actually managed to accomplish:

1. Clear up my health problems and get strong again (vith ripplin’ mosscles to impress de vooomen.)

… … … BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!

2. Generate a stable income of at least $1250 a month via my blog.

BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!

3. Get out of my dead end job and find a new career, whether it’s with another agency or by becoming self employed.

BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!

4. Move somewhere else, either out of state, or to nowhere in particular, depending on how successful I am in earning a living off the Internet.

BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!

5. Meet the girl of my dreams.

BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

Yeah. How ’bout we try that again?

Nah, forget that. Instead, I’ll simply convey what I would like to happen in 2010 that might actually fall within the realm of scientific possibility.

For starters, as for working out, well ok, maybe looking to become the next Mr. Universe was a tad extreme. Not that I was aiming that high really, I just got tired and bored of the gym. There was like, people there, and worse yet, slut-like bimbos who either bounced around the gym with their boyfriends or claimed to be lesbians whenever I tried to talk to them. Ah well. This time I think I’ll invest in some free weights instead so I can do some light workouts by myself, anywhere I please.

As for getting toys: new upgrades on everything I have! That means a spanky new desktop PC, multifunction printer, MacBook Pro and a GPS addon for my iPod that I can use for both geocaching and geo-blogging. My income from the Internet has finally reached the point where investing in a home office makes sense now. Despite falling well short of my goal to make $1250 a month online for 2008, it’s now feasible that I could be making $1000 a month by this time next year. With that in mind, I’m planning to reinvest some of my earnings back into promoting my blog and establishing a permanent marketing budget. I’m lucky here, not everyone can say they can afford to spend a few hundred a month just to market their blog, so I do have an advantage. Let’s not kid ourselves though. I’ve crunched the numbers, and while $1000 a month is entirely feasible, maybe even up to $2500 a month, I would have to get around 50,000 to 60,000 visitors a DAY just to rake in enough income to justify quitting my job. It’s just not going to happen. Well… it COULD happen, if I somehow attracted corporate sponsors or got accepted into an elite advertising agency, but not bloody likely.

Still, $1000 a month would make me a happy dappy camper for the time being.

As for traveling, I have several trips planned, including a few more New England trips spanning New Hampshire and Maine, a trip into Boston, and maybe a few cities in Canada from Ottawa to Montreal. During the summer I might plan a getaway to Alaska or British Columbia, and originally I had wanted it to be an Alaskan cruise, but after reading up on cruises I decided the idea of being trapped on a ship with a few hundred drunken weenies didn’t really appeal to me, so I’m exploring alternative options.

Oh and of course, I’ll be making reservations later on in 2010 to go tornado chasing from Colorado to Montana. Don’t tell Mommy though, she’ll get very upset.

Finally, I have a major roadtrip planned for the midwest in October, from New York to Missouri/Arkansas and back. It will give me a chance to meet up with an old friend of mine for the first time, enjoy the gorgeous fall foliage from the Smoky mountains in Tennessee to the Ozarks in Missouri, and also, to find me a sweet country babe that I can take back home with me.

I’m kidding… well actually no, not really. It seems my best chance to find anyone decent is going to require me to travel many a mile far away from feminazi land to the heartland, and I’ll be honest, I’ve reached the end of my rope here. 2010 HAS to be the year this hellish drought finally ends, and I meet THE ONE, because I am crawling the walls and going out of my #$%^ing mind here. I swear on all my Yankee candles, if I do not meet a girl by this time next year, I am declaring war on mankind. You think I’m punking you? Wait.

So that’s pretty much what I have on the menu for 2010. This is all assuming of course that nobody drops a nuclear bomb somewhere, although if that did happen, more than likely I’ll probably be close to the blast zone, which in turn would give me PLENTY of things to blog about, at least until the radiation finished me off. See? There’s a silver lining in everything.

Happy New Year!

Tags: blog, blogging, country, decade, geocaching, getaway, girl of my dreams, health, new year, resolutions, travel, upgrade
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
(  Print This Post | | 50 views )

So aside from the poison ivy rashes (which reared its ugly head once I came home), I had a nice time in Pennsylvania for a few days.

I stayed at the Fulton Steamboat Inn, probably THE place to stay at if you’re ever visiting this area (and I don’t merely say that because of the sweet hotel girl I met here.) As soon as you come near you can hear folksy music playing in the background, and the hotel is especially a treat to the eyes at night:

Look at all the purdy lights!

Awesome rooms too:

LOVE

After catching a bluegrass show the first night, it was off to go geocaching for the remainder of my trip there. One of the things that I should have realized about this pastime is that when you go outdoors, you expose yourself to unpleasant, outdoorsy things. Like say, poison ivy.

And course, only me, would catch a BAD case of poison ivy by looking around for a geocache at a Walmart parking lot. Yes, seriously. A week later the rashes have left me weeping in a corner for several days now, while wishing death and destruction on the idiot douche monkey cache owner for hiding this thing in a jungle of this VILE, EVIL WEED. Seriously, who expects to run into poison ivy at WALMART? Oy.

I did fare better on future cache hunts though, the most rewarding of which was hidden at a covered bridge here:

Wow... it really covers!

You would thinking finding a cache here would be easy right? Well, aside from almost getting mowed down by passing cars who liked to drive 300 miles an hour over the bridge, when I realized where I had to look…

Errmm...

Are you kidding me?

Oh boy. There was a tiny ledge underneath the bridge, but the only way to get to it was to swing under by holding one of the wooden beams. I’m telling you, I came THISCLOSE to falling into the water. I was sure the wood was going to give way and I would wind up spending the night at a hospital with splinters and pneumonia. Somehow though I pulled it off, grabbed the cache while holding on to one of the beams, and swung out. Behold:

Who does your Daddy work for now, punk?

Inside were several items known as swag (trade items geocachers leave behind) and a geocoin that came from British Columbia, which I took as my reward. Due to their nature though I can’t hold on to it, so I’ll need to drop the coin off at another cache soon, where it will continue its worldwide journey.

After that near brush with death and swimming with the fishes, I decided to avoid the more riskier caches and opt for those that took me to various areas around Lancaster, preferably those places that didn’t require bushwhacking my way through the forests where evil, dangerous things like groundhogs lurked. Filtering those out, I ended up finding one near a game farm:

What are YOU lookin' at?

And one near an Amish store, where I bought a homemade sausage pretzel from a pretty Amish babe. Mmmmmm, mmmmmm, MMMM! She can do Rumspringa with me anytime.

But anyhoo, *ahem*, I have to say, geocaching is definitely providing some helpful fodder for my blogging, primarily because it leads me to places I normally wouldn’t go on my own. Usually I’m just driving around aimlessly when I’m unsure of what to do, (which is pretty much the case for me 90 percent of the time,) so it’s nice to finally come across a hobby that can provide some much needed focus to my otherwise meandering and boring life.

I have more pictures from the trip by the way, so if you’d like to see them you can check them out at my gallery or on Flickr. Enjoy!

Tags: Amish, blogging, bluegrass, country, covered bridge, geocache, geocaching, hobby, hotel, Pennsylvania, photo, Photos, poison ivy, walmart
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
(  Print This Post | | 45 views )

I’m on the last leg of my vacation trip, and finally have some time to sit down and reflect on my experiences so far, especially when it comes to blogging about it all.

Rather than use an iPhone (which are not hearing aid compatible and relies on the crappy AT&T network), I went with the next best thing, an iPod Touch that I tether to my PDA Phone using Verizon’s Broadband Connect. This way I have the advantage of using a faux iPhone on the Verizon network, as well as access to the Internet wherever I had a signal. I didn’t have to worry about motels or restaurants not offering wifi for my laptop either, since I could tether my laptop to my phone instead.

As far as connections go, Verizon gets an A here. There were times when I completely lost the signal, but I was so far high up in the mountains that it was to be expected. If I had to guess, I’d say I had a signal and access to the Internet virtually 99 percent of the time. Total WIN there. It makes liveblogging or livetweeting my experiences as they happen as easy as pie. Mmmmmm, pie…

Many of the apps on my iPod relies on geolocation to work ideally, especially Google Maps, and as long as I was in New York this wasn’t a problem. It was amazingly accurate in pegging my location, despite the fact that the iPod had no GPS chip.

That is, until I wound up in Massachusetts. Then the iPod went from thinking I was in Martha’s Vineyard, to thinking I was in Seattle.

Despite being unable to track me, I could still use Google Maps manually instead of having to rely on paper maps, except that it incessantly flashed popups telling me it could not locate me, even though I was not using the geolocation feature, and I couldn’t find any way to disable it either. I already know you can’t locate me, there’s no need to tell me that a hundred times a minute. Yeesh.

The net result of all this was a ton of wrong turns, missed exits, and complete absurdity when I came across a street in Google maps that simply did not exist in real life. FAIL

So it looks like I will have to supplement my iPod with a bonafide GPS device now. The TomTom is working on an iPod dock for the future, though I don’t know how reliable it will be, and I hear Garmin is better for the USA. A speakerphone would also be a bonus, as it would negate the need to get a headset (I’ve been thinking about getting one, but the only time I would really need it is for when I’m driving.) Something to research for the future, for sure. In the meantime, if any of you use GPS devices, I could use some advice on what you think worked the best.

Other than that, the iPod was very useful for finding points of interest, though it tended to be a hit or miss thing. Some things worth checking out wouldn’t be listed, so I always had the feeling that I was missing something right under my nose. As far as locating highly rated hotels in the area, the Simultravel app I was using for that gets an F for EPIC FAIL. It only listed a fraction of the hotels within the area I was in, making the effort of locating a good place to stay for the night on the fly a monumentally hair tearing experience. I ended up going back and forth from using Google Local to surfing TripAdvisor all on my iPod’s Safari browser, and since TripAdvisor is a slow and bloated site to begin with, just trying to find a place to stay on the go proved to be more ridiculously frustrating than it should have been. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon Hotels.com’s tailored made site for the iPhone that finding a place to stay finally became more of a pleasure than a horror. It’s how I found Best Western in Ticonderoga, New York, easily the best hotel I’ve stayed at by far, and while chatting with a friend on Google Talk on lodging ideas and checking my email, I booked a reservation there while I was pulled off the road somewhere south of Burlington, Vermont, doing it all on my iPod. Technology can be truly beautiful sometimes.

As for finding points of interest and dining, I used a combination of Yelp!, Where to? and Google Local to find places worthy of checking out. It made such an impromptu vacation as mine all the more pleasurable and easier to manage.

Finally, I noticed when entering a dining establishment that the first thing I would check for was an electrical outlet to plug my laptop in. LOL My laptop’s battery gives out after only 40 minutes, so it certainly does create a handicap when I’m lugging it around. That MacBook with its 7 hour long battery life can’t come soon enough for me.

As far as the digital/internet side of my vacation goes, I certainly learned a few things that will better prepare me for next time. Another thing I need to get a handle on is how to manage my blogging/social media time. I noticed I spent far too much time responding to tweets and comments when I should have been driving and getting to wherever I was getting. And once the day was spent, I found myself too exhausted to blog about the day’s events while it was still fresh on my mind. Ironically, when I finally had time to recap my vacation experiences so far, I ended up blogging about my third day of vacation, rather than the first day, so my chronology was all out of sorts. I was also using BrightKite to tweet/blog my latest movements, but I only used it intermittently, and there were times when it didn’t go through at all. It made for a disjointed way of getting the crux of my vacation experiences out there for all to read, but since this is all new to me, I’m sure I’ll eventually find my mojo and liveblog my experiences in a more consistent manner.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go light my fireplace.

Tags: battery, blogging, browser, driving, experiences, geolocation, google, google maps, gps, hotels, internet, iphone, ipod touch, laptop, new york, PDA, phone, social media, technology, travel, tweet, vacation, verizon, wifi
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
(  Print This Post | | 36 views )