Technology | The Habitation of Justice

Lessons learned from vacationing with an iPod

Lincoln Adams | October 17, 2009 @ 6:06 pm

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. :blink:

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. :wub:

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. :shades:

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

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

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The Six Thousand Dollar Man

Lincoln Adams | September 19, 2007 @ 8:00 am

Today I get fitted with my new $6000 hearing aids, the Destiny 1600 by Starkey. I’m not expecting miracles, or the ability to hear conversations from 100 yards away, but it would be nice to have a normal conversation in noisy settings for once without finding myself trapped in a puffy shirt situation.

I grew up hoping with each new generation of hearing aids that passed, that the technology would finally advance enough to give me the level of hearing I so desperately needed and wanted. I wanted to be able to hear someone whispering in my ear at the movie theater, or the sound of crickets chirping in the early hours of the morning, or the sound of my car jingling its merry little tune whenever the keys were left in the ignition. I wanted to be able to carry on a decent conversation in places like the subway, or at ballparks, or anywhere I happened to be.

But most of all, I no longer wanted to be afraid. Afraid that if someone asked me for help, I wouldn’t be able to tell them because I’d have no idea what they were saying. Afraid to approach beautiful women I saw in everyday life, not so much because I was shy and ugly, but also because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to hear a single thing they said to me.

But after 27 years of wearing all different kinds of hearing aids from all different kinds of manufacturers, I still have yet to realize those dreams.

Will today be the day? After so many years of disappointments and heartaches, has the moment finally arrived where I can at long get my life back?

We shall see.

Tags: aids, audiology, ballparks, beautiful women, conversations, crickets, destiny, everyday life, hearing, hearing aids, hearing loss, life, movie theater, new generation, puffy shirt, social, social life, starkey, subway, technology
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log

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The Ultimate Blogger’s Toolbox – More than 80 links to tools and resources to help improve your blogging experience

Lincoln Adams | July 7, 2007 @ 3:00 pm

Inspired by Mashable’s latest streak of publishing insane link lists for their readers (covering images, audio, video, analytics and podcasting), I decided to publish my own personal toolbox for bloggers in general. Enjoy!

Analytics This

Add This! – Make it easy for your visitors to bookmark your blog and subscribe to your feeds. Saves you the real estate of using tons of bookmarking icons, and also provides tracking stats.
BlogStorm – A free service allowing you to track the number of websites linking to your blog posts.
Clicky Web Analytics – One of the best stats services I’ve seen out there next to Google Analytics. They have a premium version you can try out free for 3 weeks, and it only costs less than $2 a month to use (if you sign up annually). Worth every penny, and offers even more features than Google does. Check here and scroll down for a comparison between Clicky and other analytic services.
Google Analytics – Arguably the most comprehensive analytics service out there, now with a much improved interface and look.
HitTail – Reveals in real time which keywords people use to find your website, while offering optimal keyword suggestions you can use for marketing and SEO purposes. They have a basic free service.
Sitemeter – One of the oldest and most popular tracking service of choice for bloggers.
Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem – Get a rough idea of where your blog ranks in the blogosphere. Determined largely by link popularity and Sitemeter stats.

Buzz Buzz Buzz

Google Trends – You can view the latest Google search trends here. VERY useful for getting a sense of what the most popular keywords searches currently are, so you can possibly utilize them for your next blog post.
Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ BlogPulse – Find out what the blogosphere is currently abuzz about. Also contains helpful tools to track stories and conversations between bloggers.
Sphere – Excellent service that can help you find blog posts and media articles related to your content. They provide a widget you can install on your blog as well. Very helpful if you want to find other bloggers who are posting content similar to yours.
Spotplex – Provides real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count. Similar to Digg, but without the voting.

Everyone’s Got An Opinion

Co.mments – I use this over coComment as it runs faster and it’s easier to use. Comment organization is rather simplistic though and can be hard to read through sometimes.
coComment – This is more community oriented than Co.mments but it can get VERY buggy (and at the time of this writing there has been a lot of issues and complaints regarding its integration with Technorati.) Still, when it works it does prove useful.

Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money!

AdBrite – A versatile ad marketplace that offers you a variety of ways to publish ads and advertise your own site.
AuctionAds – Display live eBay auctions on your blog for profit.
CafePress – Merchandising, merchandising! Where da REAL money from da blogging is made!
ChipIn – A cool widget that provides an easy way to do fund raising.
Chitika – A contextual advertising company that offers the popular eMiniMalls ads you can place on your blog for profit. Best for blogs that are more product oriented.
Google Adsense – Google’s ad publishing network, one of the foremost and most widely used networks by bloggers.
Kontera – A service where you can change some of your text into link ads for profit.
Openads – A huge ad-space community that offers powerful software to help you rotate and control ad space on your site. The ability to rotate ads will also make it far easier for you to use multiple ad services to help monetize your blog.
PayPerPost – Write about web sites, products, services, and companies and earn cash for providing your opinion. As with most monetizing efforts, your blog should get a considerable amount of traffic in order to truly benefit from the service.
Text Link Ads – One of the most popular context advertising services on the Internet, where you retain full editorial control over the advertisers that appear on your blog.

Multimedia Frenzy

Radio.Blog.Club – One of the first stand-alone players that lets you stream sound on your blog.
BlogTalkRadio – Host your own live talk show for free. A great alternative to podcasting, and allows call-ins to your show as well.
BlogTV – Broadcast live and recorded video shows for your blog.
finetune – A visually appealing widget that allows you to build your own custom playlist and embed it on your blog. Not as versatile as Radio.Blog.Club though.
Flixn – Fast and easy way to upload a webcam video to the web and your blog. Very easy to use and perfect for those times you want to make a quick webcam vid on the fly.
Gabbly – Chat service including code you can use to embed a chatroom on your own blog.
Hipcast – A service that can take a lot of the guesswork out of podcasting for you. Offers audio and video blogging capabilities.
Meebo – Meebo now offers you the ability to embed any chatroom you want on your own blog.
myBlogTunes – Create your own radio station and embed it on your site.
Odeo – Podcasting portal that recently assimilated Audioblogger into its service.
Project Readon – If you’re a hearing impaired blogger, this site offers closed captioning for many popular Internet videos.
Quizilla! – Got blogger’s block? Here’s a site with tons of quizzes you can take, the results of which you can post on your blog. There’s also a directory of lyrics, poems, stories, games and more.
YouTube – Again, if you don’t know what this is by now, there is no hope for you.

Newsworthy

Bloglines – One of the oldest and most popular free online readers for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content.
FeedBlitz – Gives you the ability to offer email subscriptions to your readers, though it’s not without its problems. There’s a newsletter edition as well.
FeedBurner – It’s FeedBurner. Nuff said.
Feedster – A new service that gives you the ability to jazz up your favorite feeds and include them as widgets on your blog.
Google Reader – Despite still being an experimental service, it’s already become one of the most popular feed readers out there. Neat and simple, though some features remain severely limited.
Popurls – Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, NewsVine and more, get it all in one neatly organized page here.
Topix – This might prove useful if you want to blog about local news rather than national or international (which is what every other blogger does.)

Picture Worth 1000 Blogs

123Flickr.com – Takes the guess work out of creating Flickr galleries for novices. The galleries are basic looking, but they can spare you a lot of coding grief.
Flickr – You really, REALLY should know this one by now.
PhotoBucket – Along with ImageShack, both sites provide one key service that will serve you well: the ability to offload your images elsewhere, thus relieving the stress on your own server during peak traffic times.
SlideFlickr.com – Instantly turn your Flickr photos into a slideshow, which you can then embed on your site.

Promotion Commotion

Blog Carnival – A directory of carnivals you can join to help promote your best blog posts.
Digg – Want to try bringing in a horde of obnoxious, drunken, one time visitors to your site? Then Digg is the perfect place to go!
Meshly – Not as popular as the major user driven news site like Digg, but it offers an interesting way to submit news articles (via instant messaging).
Netscape.com – one of the largest user driven news sites, but it’s a bit slow and hard to navigate. However, it contains far more topics you can choose from to submit posts to, so your content is more likely to hit the popular front pages here than at places like Digg.
Reddit – Another user driven news site, but one which can be more effective in bringing traffic to your blog. The quality of visitors also seem to be far better than the Digg community as well.
StumbleUpon – Randomly surf the Internet with a toolbar to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. Also proven to be a great for bringing traffic to your site. (For more info on stumble promotion, read this article.)
Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone – READ THIS THREAD from Webmaster World. It provides the best advice I have ever seen for optimizing your blog for search engine traffic, and truly reads like a “condensed SEO Bible.” Even though it was written in 2002, it’s just as true now as it was back then.
Technorati – Where’s the Fire? – You probably already know
about Technorati, but you may not know about their new WTF feature. It’s not as active as the more popular aggregators out there, but that fact means it also makes it easier to get your content voted into the front pages for more exposure.
Truemors – This might be a good site to submit postings of a gossipy/rumor related nature.
Twitterfeed – A free service where you can feed your latest blog posts directly to your Twitter account.

Reach Out And Blog Someone

Blogathon – A blogging community that does an annual marathon (where bloggers post every 30 minutes in a period of 24 hours for the charity of their choice). Creates good exposure for your blog, as well as offering a chance to give something back to the community.
BlogCatalog – A directory and community for bloggers. Contains a discussion forum and a well designed directory to help you find like minded bloggers and readers. In my view it’s far superior to MyBlogLog, which lately has become more stagnant and prone to spam.
BloggerTalk – An up and coming blogging portal which includes a forum. Looks promising and may become the go-to spot for bloggers once they get enough members.
Blog Mad – Traffic exchange network, where you earn credits while surfing other blogs. Great way to find new bloggers and expand your community, but the interface is HORRIBLE.
BumpZee! – Similar to BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog but tedious to navigate, plus the community seems to be more narrowly focused on niche marketing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
del.icio.us – You ought to know this one by now. Excellent and popular social bookmarking service, not blog oriented but it can be used that way. It’s a bit on the geeky side though, along with an interface about as attractive as Britney Spears without hair. If it doesn’t suit you, Ma.gnolia is a viable alternative that sports a much better looking interface.
Feedslice – Currently in private beta, but keep checking back for its official launch.. It’s designed to be a niche social network themed around syndication feeds. Sounds very promising!
LouderVoice – Review network that allows you to publish reviews both to their network and your blog. You can also use Twitter as well.
MyBlogLog – Blog community that emphasizes connecting with readers of some of your favorite blogs. It’s more stats oriented than BlogCatalog, but it’s become stagnant lately and more prone to spam abuse.
TheGoodBlogs – Clunky but interesting blog network. They still need to work out some of the kinks though.
Twitter – A microblogging service where you can tell the entire world (who could care less) what you’re doing in 140 characters or less. Can also send tweets via IM and SMS as well (that is, when it works.)
Webmaster World – Though some forums require premium membership and the site is tailored for web designers, there are still many free forums you can participate in to get help for maintaining and designing your blog.

Tools For Fools Bloggers

.HTACCESS Banning Generator – Provides an easy way to modify your htaccess file for banning purposes.
Browsershots – Want to make sure your blog still looks spiffy for Bulgarian readers using the Konqueror browser on their Linux box? Then this is the site for you.
Copyscape – A Google like search engine that can help you find sites that might be plagiarizing your content.
CSS Compressor – An online tool you can use to compress your stylesheets. Compressed CSS files can sometimes boost the response time and speed of your blog.
Google Adsense Sandbox – Helpful tool to get an idea of what kind of ads might display on your blog from Google’s Adsense network.
List of User-Agents – If you’re the sort of blogger who loves to check his logs regularly, here’s a directory of user agents you can look up to determine who owns or runs some of the spiders and bots that are crawling all over your blog.
Market Leap Search Engine Marketing Tools – Several free tools you can find here, from checking link popularity to keyword discovery.
SEO Toolset from Webconfs – A lot of cool tools you can use here, from checking backlinks to Kontera ad previews to making sure your URL redirects work.
ServerMojo – Free monitoring service that can check your blog every 15 minutes to ensure it’s up and running. Includes various settings and notification options you can choose from.
Test Everything – More online tools than you will ever need to test your blog.
ZapTXT – Use this service to receive notification and alerts when sites are updated. The site relies on feeds to determine whether a site has been updated or not.

But I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

Not to worry, here’s a list of sites I subscribe to via feeds, providing some of the best resources, tips and advice for blogging.

Andy Beard – Offers lively blogging posts that focus on niche and affiliate marketing, social media and blog search engine performance.
Blog Herald – A stylish group blog offering commentary and valuable articles from some of the Internet’s most prominent bloggers.
Blogging Tips – Just recently added this to my feed, but so far he writes good stuff (though the Superman logo hurts my eyes.)
Blogging Pro – News, plugins and themes for blogging applications, though most of it is geared towards Wordpress.
Copyblogger – Emphasizes copywriting skills to help promote and build a successful blog. Note, that’s copyWRITE, not copyRIGHT.
Daily Blog Tips – Shockingly, this site provides blog tips on a daily basis.
DoshDosh – An always informative blog with articles focused on helping you promote and monetize your blog. Really wish he would drop the anime images though and replace them with Jessica Alba photos instead.
eMoms at Home – Don’t let the name fool you. There’s some valuable content to be found here for blogging whether you’re a Mommy or not. Personally I’ve always considered myself to be my beloved car’s Mommy, so I fit in just fine.

Lorelle on Wordpress – She’s been around since before blogs became blogs, and provides some of the most insightful advice for successful blogging I’ve found to date. She also recently published a short book to aid beginners in successfully launching their blogs.

North x East – An offshoot of FreelanceSwitch offering weekly but informative articles for bloggers.
Problogger – Darren Rowse is a machine. Nonstop advice for professionally minded bloggers.

Addendum

For some reason I seem to have a hard time finding popular message boards and forums specifically dedicated to blogging. If you know of any that might be worth checking out, let me know! :shades:

Updates

As it turns out, Mashable also published a Blogging Toolbox a few weeks before I published this one, and I completely missed it (though this was before I started subscribing to their feed. And here I thought I was being so original too, *sniff*. The good news though is that there’s not much crossover between the two lists, so I’m glad to see I still managed to list a ton of goodies that went unnoticed by the Mashers. :banana:

Still, you should find their “toolbox” highly useful as well, so go check it out.

Tags: accessibility, ads, adsense, advertising, adwords, affiliate, aggregation, aggregator, album, alerts, analytics, audio, blog, blogging, blogs, bookmark, bookmarking, bookmarks, captioning, carnival, charity, chat, comments, communication, community, compressor, css, deaf, design, digg, directory, embed, feed, feeds, flash, forums, fun, gallery, generator, google, htaccess, IM, image, images, internet, journalism, Links, live, longtail, mail, management, marketing, merchandising, message boards, messaging, mobile, monitoring, mp3, music, network, news, nonprofit, notification, optimization, photo, photography, Photos, plagiarism, podcast, podcasting, preview, quiz, quizzes, radio, reader, recording, research, review, reviews, rss, rumors, search, seo, slideshow, sms, social, statistics, streaming, tagging, technology, testing, tests, tool, tools, tracking, trends, uptime, user agents, video, Videos, vlog, web 2.0, weblogs
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Finding My Niche

Lincoln Adams | April 26, 2007 @ 7:01 pm

It’s hard to decide what direction I’d like to take this blog in, which might have something to do with the fact that my life currently has no direction either. :unsure:

The best I can do now is simply blog my thoughts, and see where it goes from there. I enjoy blogging, but my writing can suck hairy monkey’s smelly butt if I don’t keep at it on a regular basis. In the meantime, I’ve been continuing to explore how I can use social networking sites to publicize my blog, so as an experiment, I submitted a few law school related posts of mine to a variety of sites. After watching my traffic for the past 24 hours, I noticed StumbleUpon and Reddit appeared to draw the biggest crowds. In fact I was floored by the amount of traffic I was getting from them. :egads: Getting my posts Digged though only resulted in a handful of visits, but then again, Digg only appears to be news, politics and technology oriented, and I simply don’t have much to contribute in those areas right now. My blog is more personally oriented, and my interests usually lie in topics relating to Society, Crime and Punishment, Offbeat News, Dating and Religion/Spirituality. It’s not likely then that I’ll be using Digg often, if at all.

Reddit was awesome though, with a continuous stream of links that I actually found myself interested in reading. One of the things I didn’t like about voting oriented sites like Digg was that the content you found was almost always something everybody on the planet already knew about. Big deal. Personally, I got my fix from reading newsworthy items that for some reason or other never seems to make the news (or even a mention on some of the more popular blogs out there). Maybe it’s just a vanity thing, but I feel better informed this way (not to mention that it provides a more unique depth to my site by blogging about news items not covered elsewhere).

It’s nice to know now that if I blog a particularly good post, there exists a few outlets from which I could legitimately promote the articles I write. Not that I’m going to submit every inane piece of writing I ever put up here mind you (up to and including my latest bathroom experience), but certainly on those occasions where I experience a random moment of clarity and blog something that might actually prove useful (or entertaining) to outside visitors. I can’t get people who game the system though. I heard of one guy using a script for automatically submitting his pages to StumbleUpon and I can only wonder, why? These shameless asshats completely ruin it for the rest of us.

Anyhow, now that I’ve gotten hooked on StumbleUpon and Reddit, I’ve been exploring other social networking sites as well (excluding of course MySpace and its copycat clones). Some seem to revolve around a specific theme that I found little use for (like researching networks tailored for members of academia), while others were merely less popular clones of some of the more prominent networks out there. There were a significant number of bookmarking sites as well, but for now I decided to limit my membership to Yahoo’s My Web and Del.icio.us. I’ve also known about blogging communities like Xanga before, but I’ve only recently discovered that the makers of MovableType had also created a similar community called Vox, which seems at first glance more tightly designed and aesthetically pleasing than Xanga. Xanga had been the place I would have gone to in the event that I could no longer stomach the anguish of maintaining the backend of my own blog, but who knows, Vox might actually prove to be a better choice if it comes to that.

Other sites were unfortunately so cryptic as to their purpose that I’ll have to give them a harder look before deciding whether they’re worth joining or not. And finally, I think it’s become obvious that I don’t much care for the more generally oriented sites like Facebook, Bebo (and that Space that shall not be named). They’re like online ghettos offering little more than juicy tidbits that prospective stalkers would just love to know. No thanks.

I’m kinda hoping that by jumping around all these social networking spots (and settling into the ones I like), it will all in some way help me find my niche, streamline my blogging style and give it some actual direction, so I can at least refrain from merely cluttering it up with the meandering thoughts of my completely useless and boring life.

But until then, I’ll just have to stumble along. :type: