Year: 2010

done with delicious

Well, I decided not to mess around, and just jumped straight into a different bookmarking service. I set up a new account with Pinboard. They charge a small fee to set up an account, and they have a weird way of calculating that fee — it rises as more people sign up for accounts. I think a lot of other people were jumping over from Delicious today too: I saw the fee rise from $7.50 to $7.57 over the course of about an hour.
My bookmarks are currently being imported. They have a note up at their import page, saying that it may take a while, due to all the new people signing up today. Imagine that.
I have a separate Delicious account set up on my work computer, since I like keeping work bookmarks at least somewhat separate from home bookmarks. (I use to Delicious “for:” tags to share between the work and home accounts.) I’m not sure if I’ll just use the same Pinboard account for everything, set up a new Pinboard account at work, or try a completely different service at work. I might try importing my work account into Google Bookmarks or XMarks and see how that goes.

Yahoo is shutting down delicious

…and a few other things. Darn it, I have 3500 bookmarks in delicious. I’ve been using it since 2003. Warren Ellis covers this eloquently: “Hey, Yahoo? Running del.icio.us cost you pennies, and bought you so much goodwill. Now you’re just another of those scumfucks who acquires great services just to bury them.”
Here are links to a couple of articles about possible alternatives:
5 Solid Alternatives to Del.icio.us
10 Alternatives To Delicious.com Bookmarking

GPS

I just ordered a new GPS from Amazon. I’ve been using an older TomTom that I bought back in 2007. It still works, but it’s been a little flaky, and my map update service has expired. I decided to take advantage of a Black Friday special, and pick up a new TomTom with lifetime maps & traffic, and a few other features that the old GPS didn’t have.

I like the TomTom interface, so I decided to stick with them, rather than switch to another brand. I’ve never been any good at driving anywhere unfamiliar — I’m always getting lost — so the advent of GPS technology was a godsend for me. I don’t have to use it that often, but when I do need it, I really appreciate it.

Ernie Preuss


Ernie
Originally uploaded by andyhuey

I just found out that my Dad’s best friend Ernie passed away back in September. I have a few good photos of Ernie in my Flickr stream. This is a nice one from Christmas at some point in the late eighties, I think. Dad and Ernie gave each other a lot of odd gifts over the years.

I have a lot of fond memories of time spent with Ernie, including the time he took us for a ride in a small airplane when I was a kid. (He was an amateur pilot.) He was a great guy, and I’m going to miss him.

Libraries

Mark Evanier on libraries — I too was issued an adult library card before I was old enough to have one, mainly because I’d outgrown the stuff in the childrens library. One of the first things I remember checking out was a science fiction anthology that contained Harlan Ellison’s story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”. It was the scariest thing I’d ever read, by far. (Up until that point, I’d mostly been reading Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown books.)

Motorola DROID Pro

Motorola DROID Pro first impressions | BGR | Boy Genius Report: “Something we can’t move past, though? The ear speaker. Talking on the phone with the DROID Pro is probably the worst of any handset we can remember.” — I was thinking about picking up a Droid Pro as a replacement for my BlackBerry Storm. But one thing I consider critical is being able to use the phone… as a phone. So maybe not.