Hipstamatic released a new Hipstapack today. Unlike the last couple, it doesn’t completely suck.  

 

My beloved wife Jennifer inspired me to figure out a way around the issues I was having with using a Macintosh to connect to my Windows 7 box at work. Thus allowing me to use a Mac when I telecommute. 
Success. Nerdvana, babie!  

 

Twitter got me thinking…

I’m not sure when I first started playing with the idea of blogging.  2005?  I know in 2006 I started using myspace, but there was one before then that is gone, gone, gone.  Yahoo 360.  I think there were like 10 users total and eight of them were porn spam.  A pretty pathetic service.  Myspace was the first place I wrote anything with any degree of regularity, but it wasn’t until I started toying with Blogger that I tried to post daily, or multiple times a day as it turned out.  That was Nobember 2008.  In December 2012 I moved everything here to wordpress.com.  It wasn’t spur of the moment, but it almost was.  I think I debated moving for a few days before I did it.  Maybe as long as a week.  I can’t remember.  Of course I could always actually look at my own blog to find out for sure, but that’s not the point of this.

Yesterday word got out that Twitter is planning a major shift in their service.  The 140 character limit is going to be replaced with a 10,000 character limit.  They say that your feed will stay at 140 characters, but if a post is longer than that users will need to click a button to see the rest.  When I read this I wrote a tweet with my first thoughts on the subject:

10,000 characters per tweet? But I already have a service that does that. It’s called @wordpressdotcom See? https://t.co/gfHMejsMlX

—  (@RobJ_) January 5, 2016

The reference to @wordpressdotcom wasn’t there to start with.  Originally it just said @wordpress.  But I changed it because I don’t really use wordpress, right?  I use wordpress.com.  There’s a difference.

But what about that difference?  I went with .com instead of .org because I didn’t want to pay for hosting.  I still don’t want to pay for hosting, or for a domain name, but what am I missing out on?  There are a lot of things I did with Blogger that I can’t do now.  Specifically embedding content from other sites.  I can do Flickr and Youtube and Vimeo and Soundcloud, and I found a work around for Alonetone, but wouldn’t it be nice to actually use HTML in my posts?  To be more precise, wouldn’t it be nice to use any HTML I want in my posts rather than the few tags .com lets me use?  Also, recently I found myself bitching here about how I can’t find “the right” theme for me.  Wouldn’t it be nice if I could actually edit the theme I chose myself?  I could do that in Blogger but I can’t do that here.

After pondering these deep questions for about 20 seconds I thought to myself, is it time to move over to wordpress.org?  If it weren’t for paying for hosting I’d already be there.  I recall saying when I moved to .com that I would probably eventually switch to .org.  That was three years ago.  Is it time?

It might be.

Quinoa for dinner… By choice.  They might have to kick me out of the picky eaters club for this. 

    
 

Sometimes my wife and I carpool to work.  Her work day starts a lot earlier than mine so that means I can sometimes have a little time to kill.  Today set the world record for time to kill.

I usually leave home at 7:30.  Today I left home at about 6:15.  We stopped at Dunks, then took a back road route to avoid some reported traffic.  I dropped Jen off and then got back on the highway to go to my office.  Traffic was pretty light and I parked my car in the parking lot at 7:13.  17 minutes before I normally leave home.

What was I to do?  Go in and start working?  It was 15 degrees out, so not sitting in the car would probably be a good thing.  No.  That’s not what I did.  Why?  Because I am a dedicated Netflix binge watcher, that’s why.  I had enough time to watch four (4) episodes of 30 Rock on my iPhone, and still get to my desk with 10 minutes to spare.

That, my friend(s) and loyal reader(s), is what you call dedication.

It’s bad enough we all had to go back to work and school this week, but did Mother Nature have to throw this on top of it?

  

Last week was Christmas vacation for school kids in Massachusetts.  My average morning commute was about 35-40 minutes for about 31 miles.

Today is the first day back to reality post-Christmas vacation.  My commute was one hour and 20 minutes for the same 31 miles.

Hate
Hate
Hate
Hate
Hate

Jen got an Amazon Echo for Christmas.  I keep saying, “Hey Alexa, what’s the weather like in San Diego?” and the response can be summarized as, “Better than here.”

Hey Alexa, can you and Siri work together to figure out a way for us to hit the lottery and then move to San Diego?  Pretty please?

  

I’m watching Ant-Man with my three favorite people.  Ms Patches is not interested at all. 

 

Paying our respect to the Apple.