Category Archives: Learning

PAD April 25 2013 – Second Time Around

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Tell us about a book you can read again and again without getting bored — what is it that speaks to you?

I read both 1984 and “What Dreams May Come” regularly for different reasons. 1984 is worth reading because it speaks to the dangers of NewSpeak. When I was growing up I decided that expanding my vocabulary was the best single thing I could do for myself, to make me a better person. In 1984, that whole thing is a thread the book challenges and it terrifies me. The quality and the lessons it teaches I think are incredibly valuable. As for the latter book, I read that when I was at the lowest point in faith and it helped by inspiring me to seek out a new faith. I enjoy Richard Matheson for his other works as well, but that book really speaks to me.

Medium

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This is how social networking works. I was just wandering along, scrubbing through my Feedly list of syndicated items on websites when I ran across an article about headline hunting. As I read along, I noticed the presentation layer, the UI/UX was pleasant enough to be remarkable and catch my attention. It became, quite quickly in fact a trip down the rabbit hole.

The source of this fascination was Medium.com. One well-written, well-presented article was all I needed to see that this is something special. I found myself enraptured, roped in, and signing up. Now I don’t know if I’ll ever write material for that system, but there I was spiraling into it and enjoying it quite a lot.

And this is what startups and social networking enthusiasts are really hoping will happen. That their creations will catch people, like I was caught, and reel them in. It’s the definition of good UI/UX, if the content and presentation are good enough, they become an entirely new thing, something like intellectual Velcro.

I was just floating along. Then suddenly I was reading a lot, enjoying myself, signing up, and then the magic hit: I started sharing. Links from the site to Facebook, Twitter and yes, even LinkedIn.

I think everyone I know would enjoy this site and get caught up in it like I did. In many ways Medium.com wins because in less than fifteen minutes I’ve become an evangelist of it. Check it out at Medium.com. I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

RSVP – A Saving Grace

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There is a fantastic class of applications that are available for the iOS, Android, and Apple/IBM Computing platforms that really assist with speed reading. These applications are based on the same reading technique called RSVP, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation.

RSVP defeats subvocalization while reading. Many people subvocalize while they read and it becomes a habit. What most people don’t understand is that you do not need this subvocalization to actually comprehend what you read. The way to defeat this slow-reading habit is to fix the eyes in place and present the words too fast for you to vocalize them. Many of these applications start you off at around 300 words per minute, with sliders that let you adjust the speed up as you get used to the feeling of reading without subvocalization.

Recently I had a business need to consume a lot of written work, and I would have been hopelessly slow if I had continued my habit of subvocalization while I read. With RSVP I’ve been able to increase my reading speed to about 520 words per minute. Instead of taking half a year to polish off a 250 page paperback book I can now liesurely read it on-and-off over a weekend and be done with it. The nice part about RSVP is the faster you read the better your comprehension is, which seems to defy common sense. I’ve found that sometimes 520 words per minute is too annoyingly slow, and I’ve been known to push it to almost 600 words per minute, and it’s a pleasure to read at that speed.

Here are some applications that I’ve found that feature RSVP:

iOS –

  • Velocity – This free app on the Apple App Store can connect to Pocket, as well as act as an Open In… target for other applications that handle text. Velocity can also detect web addresses and present the text on the page as RSVP quite well. The interface to Velocity has a lot of polish and is quite a pleasure to use.
  • Fastr Pro – This is another free/low-cost application on the Apple App Store which features RSVP. This application has something special as far as I’m concerned and that is an open data locker where you can upload your ePub files and synchronize your library and last-read bookmarks across your iOS devices. I’ve run into some bugs with the software, but upon later analysis it was purely operator error, not the fault of the software. I was too impatient for Fastr Pro, and because I wasn’t willing to wait, I caused my own headaches. This app is written well and the developers have a fantastic sense of humor and are exceedingly friendly to work with.

Android –

  • Speed Reader – I’ve only been using this app for a little while. It’s free and the software is quite good. I ran into a little bug where the end of my ePub files were being missed in the conversion, as the app converts ePub files to TXT files before processing them in it’s RSVP engine. Something causes the last chunk of data on the ePub to not appear in the TXT file, as far as I can tell.

Windows/Mac Computers –

  • Spreeder – This is a website that works well on browsers on these two platforms. The site, www.spreeder.com has links to the Java applet as well as a Bookmarklet that enables one-click access to their RSVP engine. The nice thing with Spreeder which I appreciate is there are more adjustable settings with its RSVP engine. You can elect to chunk words, so it speeds up around small words and slows down around large words, keeping your average reading speed set to your preferred speed as well as a host of other thoughtful adjustments. I encourage everyone to visit the site and investigate for a full view of this product.

Generally these programs can help you increase your reading speed, allowing you to chew through written works much faster, and with much less eye-strain than with other speed-reading techniques that I have tried. I find it works better than skimming, which sometimes leads you to miss small salient details, and after a while using my fingers to release eye-strain just pushes the strain into my hands. I encourage everyone to look into this technique. RSVP revolutionized my professional career and quickly enabled me to consume a lot of written text much faster than I ever thought possible. I’m sure if I really invested serious concentration I could increase my rate to ever higher numbers as RSVP becomes easier as you get used to it, almost like exercising a muscle.

If you liked this column, please comment. Now that I am an independent IT specialist I thrive on feedback!

Many Thanks!

OwnCloud

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At work I’ve been thinking about cloud sync services, something like Dropbox without actually using Dropbox, because it’s non-kosher around these parts. I thought about OwnCloud so I went investigating.

OwnCloud is neat, it’s a PHP script that will set itself up on a web host, and then provide you with a web interface like Dropbox and access to clients like Dropbox which mirror the function of Dropbox completely. This was a possible route to satisfy our legal people and maybe leverage cloud sync at work. As it turns out, it didn’t work. OwnCloud is a lost cause. I installed it on my iPage host and got it to work all up until I tried to connect the Mac desktop client to it. It got files perfectly well, but when I put a file in the owncloud folder to be synced back up to my host it all fell apart. The error was “errno 22” and ended up being shown to me as “Bad Request” – so that was a no-go. Then I thought maybe I could install OwnCloud on my Mac Pro server at work, keep it in house maybe. That also was a failure, the web side was fine, but the client just couldn’t connect no matter what I tried.

So I’m going to abandon the pursuit of OwnCloud. I’ve tried it and found that it just won’t work on what I’ve got. It was something that could have possibly worked and been great, but it’s got too many moving parts and it was a total failure when you tried to get all the parts to spin up and run. Oh well, at least now I know I can abandon OwnCloud and move forward.

iOS 7 and iMessage

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After I upgraded to iOS 7 on my iPhone 5 I ran into a really annoying problem. Whenever I would send iMessage messages to friends and family the message would look like it’s sending and then the progress bar along the top would stop about 1/4 inch from the end and just stay there for hours. Never sending the message. I tried the Kung-Fu Grip to only partial avail. The solution is to reset the network settings on the iPhone:

Tap Settings
Tap General
Tap Reset
Tap Reset Network Settings

Once the phone resets, and you reset your Wifi and turn on all the cellular bits, like voice and data roaming (at least for me) then after that, everything works as it should.

If this helps you, please let me know. 🙂

Did You Get That Thing I Sent Ya?

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Museum of Communications

This video, adapted from a character on Cartoon Network’s Harvey Birdman animated series. Asks the most fundamental question that exists and is at the center of my issues with workplace communications.

“Did you get that thing, that thing, THAT THING, … that… I sent ya?”

It happens a lot, I do it, and a lot of other people do it too and it’s so annoying, irritating, and upsetting. You send a message to someone else and if it’s email, it can be like it flew into a black hole. You don’t know if they got it, if they read it, if they don’t care. Did they file it? Did they laugh when they got it? Dunno. When will whatever it is get attention? Dunno.

It’s the not knowing that irks me. We used to use GroupWise which made this particular issue somewhat of a non-event because it would record the fate of the message and you could get read receipts automatically sent back to you. Generally, this isn’t a problem either with SupportPress as we get emailed when a ticket comes in and the system enforces a receipt structure whenever we get tickets and manipulate them. It’s just, well, everything else. And it’s not something you want to include with every email because it should be a matter of common courtesy to acknowledge that you got a message and that you are working on it, or whatever is really going on with it.

Then again, my experience is that much like verbal arguments, nobody is really listening. In email, nobody is really reading. Time and time again I notice people who only pick out keywords from a cursory scan of what I send and reply to the things they feel they want to reply with, ignoring the actual message itself.

When asked, “What is the biggest stumbling block for you professionally?” The answer can be only this: Basic human communication and the lack of it. How can anyone get anything accomplished if we aren’t listening or reading or even paying attention to each other? Thank god for cognitive dissonance. It’s an absurd life if it is this way and obviously it isn’t because things get done, somehow, so it can’t be that bad, not really. But I think it is bad and I fear that it’s just getting worse.

If you get an email, maybe it’s a good idea to form a new habit and immediately reply telling the other party that you got it. At least when everyone knows, it’s one less little chunk of mystery floating out there.

photo by: Cargo Cult

Grayed Folders in Macintosh OSX

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While copying files to an external hard drive with a bum cable using my Mac’s Finder to move the files I ended up with an accidentally half-copied folder that was grayed out and I couldn’t open it at all. I could go into Terminal and access it that way, but Finder was a dead duck. Even after I properly unmounted and remounted the drive it didn’t work. I putzed about for a while searching for a solution and the general answer most people have is to use the ‘cat’ command to copy the files elsewhere and just be done with it. This didn’t sit well with me, there should be a way to correct the situation without having to duplicate the folder or copy the files or do anything laborious like that – and it turns out there is just that.

The folder had a creation time of some date in 1984. Probably the first possible date for OSX knowing Apple. They initiated the folder but since the move was interrupted the later adjustment never got made. This is a bug, Apple. Anyways, how to correct it? Some people seemed to think that the ‘touch’ command could possibly do the trick, but touch can’t really get to all the dates that come with files in the HFS file system. This folder, for examples sake I’ll just call it “folder” had displayed this 1984 date as it’s creation date. The touch command was successful in mangling all the other dates, except for the specific one I was after. I used the ‘stat’ command on the folder and discovered that the st_birthtime of the folder was 1984. How in the hell do you change that date?

I found out that you need another utility to do it properly. You need to download the Command Line Tools for XCode, which is the development platform for the OSX Operating System. It’s free and easy to install. Once you do that, you will get a new command to use in the terminal called SetFile. So here’s how to fix this problem if you run into it: SetFile -d [todays date][file or folder] and press enter. So for my file, it would be SetFile -d 08/17/2013 folder/ and press Enter. Voila! Folder is real and not-grayed and Finder thinks it’s just peachy keen.

So for anyone with grayed out folders, check your dates. Use the stat command, download the XCode CLI tools and use SetFile to rescue your folder or file from inaccessible hell.

Bell’s Eccentric Cafe, or Nooooope.

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Ever since I arrived in Kalamazoo all those years ago I’ve always noticed this blight on East Kalamazoo Ave as you approach the downtown region. Oh God No, what the hell is that?!? Turns out it’s Bell’s Brewery. It looks like an abandoned industrial ruin, fences, the hint of brewing tanks behind filthy windows, serviced by a incredibly tiny parking lot which is marked for company use only. It’s strange because there is a big yellow sign advertising things that sound like musical acts. So there has to be an inside, obviously. It’s the dead last place I ever wanted to go mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to approach it. The outside looks awful, it’s filthy, barbed wire fences, no parking at all, and East Kalamazoo is a one way, so if you miss it, well, screw you, you’re shit out of luck.

Years went by, I assumed that there was something there, but seeing Bell’s from the outside I always figured it was a dive. A nasty wretched filthy dive. Then I started hearing about how Bell’s is supposed to be this incredible world-renowned microbrewery. Family members ask about it, where I am in relationship to Comstock, MI. It’s, uh, I suppose a town, it’s just down the street. I assume it’s a town at least. I’ve been there a few times, it strikes me as being sparser than Cortland, New York and that’s embarrassingly sparse. Oh look, they have an intersection, yay.

Then out of curiosity I bought a six pack of Two Hearted Ale thinking it was rated very highly, so why not give it a shot? Oh my god. It was the first time I hate-drank a six pack. I couldn’t endure the notion that I had wasted money on that swill (oh, and god, was it awful, unpleasant is a huge understatement) and so I put Bell’s, and all it’s delightful whatever in the list of “Maybe someday, if I find the Wardrobe to Narnia…” and it became just another blighted eyesore that contributes to the general dilapidation that is downtown Kalamazoo. It needs a good solid tornado to improve.

So, years go by and I don’t think of Bell’s at all. Every once in a while people mention meeting people at Bell’s and I always ask “Does it have an inside? I mean, something you can go into?” and they look at me funny and assume that I’m being intentionally odd. No people! I don’t think it HAS an inside! Not for people at least! And I let it lapse. Wondering whats beyond the Wardrobe to Narnia occurs to me every time I pass it heading to work on East Kalamazoo.

Anyways, between a lot of not-thinking-about-Bells and now I joined a cycling group that heads out all over the northeast part of Kalamazoo every Tuesday. A nice bunch of people, I don’t know any of them at all, but nice enough. I get my exercise in, I get a path to follow, and I get people to bike with, at least in general. After the biking they customarily go to Bell’s for beer. Cue the double-take. People who have… wait for it… **been inside**. It’s like spotting Mr. Tumnas for the first time and expecting to hear a bleat and the clickety-clack of little hooves. So today we were headed up to Gull Lake, sort of, and then back. I got home, fed my cats and then got my license and my bank card and headed out. I asked Google Maps to get me to Bell’s, thinking that it might lead me to the Wardrobe (baaah), no, not really. I ended up standing in a lot too tiny for my big SUV, festooned with industrial debris, you know, the “No way this is habitable for human beings” itty-bitty parking lot. Not for customers. I seriously doubted, even at this point, that there were customers at all. I mean, Narnia folks, Baaaah. So I turned down the next street and figured that the Wardrobe might be on the other side. But there is nothing on the other side but ugly train tracks, mostly a nasty railyard which serves the most annoying feature of Kalamazoo. A train runs through it. Annoyingly so, and poorly too. Amtrak. Yay for sitting in piss, but I digress. There is nothing back there but rotten out abandoned warehouses, potholes, the saddest field of brickwork that used to be the street, it pokes through sadly every once in a while, when the rotten out asphalt just can’t hack the punishment. That’s it! It’s just rail controls, street crossing barricades, brownfield, debris, urban decay… oh my fucking god, it’s the god damn Wardrobe to Narnia! There it is. It’s a parking lot, bigger than you think, but not marked, so maybe you’re going to be towed, maybe you aren’t. Is it for employees? Are there employees? This whole time I seriously doubted this was a real place. I honestly figured Bell’s had grown softheaded and thought that maybe the train-that-doesn’t-run-through-here-anymore may pick up kegs of their beer. Sort of like a really depressing alcoholic Polar Express. If you look very carefully, and you walk around the building you see the entrance and, well, there I stood. 15 years of living in this wretched place and I finally found the fucking entrance to a place I thought was a local urban legend. Bell’s Eccentric Cafe. Oh, hello Mr. Tumnas. Nice seeing you! Baaaah!

I wasn’t dressed for this place. I was hot and sweaty and I looked kind of disheveled. I had talked myself into going even though I don’t really have the money to spend and the gasoline I burned up getting there was a very tiny black cloud hanging over my head. The people pouring out were brightly dressed, tourists, hipster trash, and downtown people. Even walking up I felt awkward. Then I entered. There was a gentleman sitting by the entrance and he looked at me and I glanced at him. I thought it was strange that he was just sitting there, and since I didn’t think anything about it, I just walked right past him. Turns out, maybe, he was a door something or other checking patrons licenses, at least that’s the gist I got when I turned around on my way out. He didn’t seem to be important, just kind of “this guy by the door”. Honestly the thought was that maybe he was using his phone, or something else, but that I should have approached him wasn’t even anywhere in my head.

Then it hit me as I looked around. It was several things all at once, actually. There was this overwhelming social anxiety – I knew absolutely nobody at all. I didn’t know the shape of the interior, and I walked past what appeared to be a beer hall and then further down to a door that didn’t appear to be for customers, and on my way back, I happened to notice a beer garden patio on the other side. I peered through the window and saw elderly people and strangers. Giant swaths of strangers, strange faces… then I felt an overwhelming urge to escape. I had to go. I didn’t have the money, I didn’t know if the biking group that I was supposedly going to join were actually there, and even if I did, I only know the owner of the establishment and only just first names. I was weighing everything and I felt like I really didn’t belong there. I was woefully under-dressed, I was running a risk of drinking beer on a empty stomach which would have really complicated my trip back home, plus the notion that I wasn’t going to really get out of there without spending $30 to $50 for beer I don’t really care for and people I don’t know in a building that really might have been Narnia. Baaaah!

I’m not a bar person. I really don’t like big group things surrounded by strangers, and I only put up with those situations because I don’t want to be that guy that clogs up the works for everyone else when they want to have fun – but it’s never really fun for me. It’s expensive. It’s nasty. It’s dirty. It’s smelly. Oh god, I’d rather just flee. And so I did. I fled from Bell’s. I didn’t have the heart to even make eye contact with the guy at the front door. Maybe he was a bouncer, maybe he wasn’t, maybe he was just sitting there – who the hell knows? Exit was the only thing I wanted and I walked back to my car, cursing the burnt fuel to get me to this boondoggle of an experience and thankful that I decided against “making the best of it” and staying. It would have been really awkward. Throw alcohol on top of awkward and I might as well be an albatross. Squawk!

So, I’ve been to Bell’s, er, Narnia. Yes, it’s probably a nice place. I’m sure it’s wonderful and I’m sure I am missing out on something, but in the end, I’m okay with that. People who like beer seem to regard it highly, and also in that, good for them. I don’t think it’s for me. 15 years and finding it finally has scratched off an item on my “Whatevs” list, so for that, a tepid yeh.

I can’t really afford the place. I can’t afford their beer. I can’t afford the gasoline it takes to get there and back and I don’t know a soul in the place. So, we’ve learned where the Wardrobe is and at least now I know it’s not for me. At least I can go back to my comfortable notions of before, that it’s just a run-down industrial pit and there is nothing on the other side but filthy blighted railroad.

Baaah.

Automatic Tag Generator for DayOne Journals synced with Dropbox

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Here’s how I created a system to automatically sync up keywords to tags in DayOne Journal. The journal is stored on my Dropbox, so if you have it in iCloud, I don’t know what you’re going to do.

First Step: Get text list of tags in a text file: (do this in the entries folder of your DayOne Journal, cd to it, if you can’t, google-fu.)

find . -type f |xargs sed -n “/<array>/,/<\/array>/p”|grep “<string>”|sed ‘s/<[^>]*>//g’|sed “s/^[ \t]*//”|tr -d ‘\011’|sort -f|uniq > tags.txt

Then copy this tags.txt folder to your home directory. Edit the file, be careful of phrases in XML that would confuse the system, Weather, Apple, DTD, String – that sort of thing, also be very careful around TLA’s as they can have unintended side effects. The later scripts that do the keyword searches don’t give a damn about cases, so your keywords or your KeYwOrDs will be equivalent.

You’ll need two more scripts. This one adds tags based on keywords passed to it as parameters: (be VERY careful, little L and capital I look very much the same, read man pages, yo)

tag.sh:

#!/bin/bash

cd /Users/username/Dropbox/Apps/Day\ One/Journal.dayone/entries

find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep -L “<string>”$1″</string>”| xargs grep -li “”$1″” |xargs grep -l “<key>Tags</key>”|xargs -I file /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “add Tags:Key string “$1″” file

find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep -L “<string>”$1″</string>”| xargs grep -li “”$1″” |xargs grep -L “<key>Tags</key>”|xargs -I file /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “add Tags array” file

find . -type f -print0 |xargs -0 grep -L “<string>”$1″</string>”| xargs grep -li “”$1″” |xargs grep -l “<key>Tags</key>”|xargs -I file /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “add Tags:Key string “$1″” file

Next, you’ll need another script called updatetags.sh, looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
cat /Users/andy/Dropbox/Apps/Day\ One/tags.txt|xargs -n 1 /Users/andy/tag.sh

The last bit will be a new LaunchAgent, so go to ~/Library/LaunchAgents and mock up a plist file by copying one from there, if you need an example, try this:

more ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.andymchugh.tag.plist
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN”
“http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0″>
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>org.andymchugh.tag</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/Users/andy/updatetags.sh</string>
</array>
<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
<dict>
<key>Minute</key>
<integer>00</integer>
<key>Hour</key>
<integer>06</integer>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

The name of the LaunchAgent has to be unique and the inside name (<string>org.andymchugh.tag</string>) should match the file name like you see here. Swap out the com bit for org, and forget the plist bit. This script will run every day at 6am. You can flavor it to your liking.

Then the final command to tie it all together:

launchctl load -w com.andymchugh.tag.plist

So now, when you write DayOne Journal entries you can mark up the tags.txt file that lives in your Dropbox. Value added, if you change this file anywhere, Dropbox will make sure it syncs up with all your other systems, so you can edit it and forget it pretty nicely as long as it’s not open-for-editing when your script fires off at 6am. That would be messy.

The first time you do it, you’ll notice your Dropbox churn for a long while and then all your other connected Dropboxes will churn as they sync up. Your iPhone and iPad will have huge downloads to do, but they’ll catch up well enough. As you create new DayOne Journal entries you can rest assured that your script will be doing keyword searching for you on your behalf and hooking up your tags to your DayOne Journal entries for you.

Just one more thing automated and out of the way. Hooray!

P.S. Backup your Journal, DIY. Be safe, be smart, learn how to use tar. man tar. Read it. Live it. tar is your delight and your savior. 🙂

EDIT: tags.sh needed a cd command first, otherwise it would just wander aimlessly. Sorry about that.

Slogger

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Memories.Slogger

Every once in a while I run across something I’ve seen before but ignored accidentally until I see it in great big headlines and neon and stop to pay attention to it and discover that it does something I really really want. This particular afternoon it was the product Slogger from Brett Terpstra. The software is a Ruby script, and Ruby is a delightful programming language that I’ve had the pleasure of dabbling in. Nowhere near the level of Brett and the people who help him, but here and there, little things.

The need came from a simple Google query, IFTTT and Day One. Looking for some way to bridge that divide between the automatic web service that I’ve fallen in love with, IFTTT and Day One, the journaling software that works quite well and renders DropBox a “Killer App”. Dropbox is the glue that keeps my Day One system together, on my laptop, my desktop, and all my mobile devices. When I found Slogger it was a definite Eureka moment, the answer all in one place. I downloaded the code as the author describes and tried to set it up.

Monumental fail. Pieces everywhere, error codes puking on the screen faster than I could read, pages and pages of interpreter and compiler errors, all surrounding one “Ruby Gem” module called hpricot. I knew why this was fail-town for me, it was because I had installed XCode CLI tools in order to get the mac_google_authenticator PAM module built. That CLI package rendered my system retarded when it came to processing gem requests. In the Ruby world there is a system established for distributing software written in Ruby, it’s called ‘gem’ and you run it much like apt-get in Ubuntu, it’s really quite straightforward and never has given me fits – until. Everything was complicated by the fact that I couldn’t really find where XCode was on my machine, all the likely targets to search didn’t have anything relevant and my find command returned pages of errors and I didn’t have the patience to pick through a thousand lines of “Permission Denied” to find the one spot where the file was hidden.

Didn’t need to complain, as I knew the solution. Download XCode for real. So off to Apple, download the monster and install it. That satisfied hpricot, and everything else installed quite nicely. I set Slogger up, pointed it at my Dropbox and configured the plugins that I wanted. The initial run crashed and burned but I figured out why, it was an errant space in the line that points to the Day One folder, a symbolic link fixed that and I was again off to the races. Of all the plugins that I configured these were successful:

  1. BlogLogger
  2. facebookifttt
  3. goodreadslogger
  4. lastfmlogger
  5. pocketlogger
  6. rsslogger

Then there were the plugins I tried to configure but couldn’t:

  1. fitbit
  2. flickrlogger
  3. getgluelogger

The primary problem with the fitbit plugin was that fitgem, the Ruby assistant program that you have to install is a phantom. You install it, it’s successful, and then it’s gone. No trace of it exists. You try again, poof, nowhere. Plus for the plugin setup there are API codes, User codes, and oAuth codes. I get the reasoning behind all of them and getting most of them was not an issue. I felt a little awkward creating an “Application” for just myself, it seems kind of a waste of effort to ferret all these bits and peices into a semiformal request procedure, but doing it wasn’t hard or cost anything, so what the hell. The part where it all falls apart for fitbit is where you have to get the oAuth token, since fitgem never worked and it’s invocation from slogger should have opened a web browser and asked for my approval, all of that never happened. I tried to be sporting and do the heavy lifting myself but all I did was irritate the API for fitbit and I figured, what the hell, I got most of what I was after and moved the fitbit plugin into the “unused” folder and forgot all about it. Abandon ship, y’arrrr!

Flickr is a pain in the ass. It’s Yahoo and as such, it’s kind of an Internet leper. You need your Flickr number, there’s a site that makes that easy, except it doesn’t work. Flickr username? Feh, either the one in Flickr or your linked Yahoo ID is meaningless. I half figured it was in the URL anyways, but then I thought about it and I don’t really use Flickr all that much beyond a solitary IFTTT rule and that’s precarious as it is. The only attractive part of Flickr is they gave out 1TB of storage. Still lepers tho. So, abandon ship! Y’arrrrr!

GetGlue was the last great effort. Much like Klout, it’s a site that makes sense sort of, but the name is utterly silly. GetGlue. What the hell? Why? Glue has nothing to do with TV or Movies. The only connection I could think of was celluloid and horses-processed-into-glue sort of connection. They give away stickers, what a wonderful bit of pollution that is, and as a gimmick seems dumb. The plugin needs an RSS feed for the GetGlue Activity Stream. It appears as though the GetGlue folks have moved away from RSS and towards “widgets” which seems stupid as in this application RSS is the answer and widgets are worthless. Alas, Google searching for the RSS feed method was fruitless. I was half hoping for something like http://getglue.com/user/bluedepth/feed.rss, where I could just craft it up and be on my merry way. No. You have to “View Source” to find it, which is stupid because that is so full of CSS flotsam and jetsam as to be utterly incomprehensible. Again, my ardor for that particular service was fog on a hot day. I don’t need it. I don’t use it. Whatever! Abandon ship! y’arrrrr!

So I tried the slogger script, it failed, tore out fitbit goop and then it worked. Then I went into my Day One app and mopped up all the mess that testing had made. The only oddity I noticed was the BlogLogger completely missed out on the text on my WordPress site that was between pre tags. Meh. Not really a reason to kick the entire thing to the curb, just something to honestly stop using. HTML is a right bastard, almost all of the time. CSS is a filthy abomination, but we won’t go there.

I would say that tonight everything will work as it should for Slogger, but I have to race to work tonight to turn everything off because work is going to exit-stage-left when it comes to the Internet. They are turning the entire thing off, at least for a few hours. I can’t wait for tomorrow, there will be lulz.

So, to Mr. Terpstra, thank you for slogger. I’m sorry the plugins didn’t work, that fitgem was a phantom, but at least most of what I wanted worked. So we sound a victory cheer, sort of. Yaaay!