Scientific Ink

Tag: Web

  • Beeping mac – why I love time machine and the genius bar (gratitude #35)

    So my macbook was beeping, constantly for a day and a half, like this. Besides my sanity, I was afraid, after hearing the same sound from YouTube videos of pre-hard-drive crash Macs, it was going to take out my hard drive.

    So, i moseyed on down to the Genius Bar at Briarwood Mall, with an appointment. And although the diagnostics the technician ran said my hard drive was fine, he did say that hard drives can “chirp” before going out. So, he replaced my hard drive, and -aaaaaaaahhhhhhh- no more infernal beeping.

    I came to work the next morning and I started to download my backup from time machine and was amazed that everything except the things I’d excluded at the urging of our IT guy (applications and my music) came back after a few hours of pulling down the backup from the server.

    This is the second hard drive to go on my MacBook. I got it last June (2007). Last July, I did drop it from a few feet above the ground (long story), so I’m directly responsible for the first hard drive crash (about six months after the drop), but I don’t know what I would have done to cause the second….

    Last time, I said it was the best ever hard drive crash. Now I think it was another level easier.

    I am thrilled to be able to recover so quickly through time machine and grateful to be up and running again. Now if only my iPhone would allow me to sync my music from the iPhone to my laptop. Looks like I’m going to have to re-rip the CDs I’m interested in having there…

  • How social networking sites gave me a very happy birthday (gratitude #30)

    I have to hand it to the constellation of social sites to which I belong. All combined to give me a very happy birthday today! I turned 38 today, and I didn’t get the iPhone I was seriously hinting for because of local shortages, and my husband has a summer cold, so has been prone on the couch for two days, barely audible on the cell phone. I was thinking I might just have a lonesome birthday, but no!

    Good wishes streamed in from across the globe, from close and from not-so-close friends via email, twitter, Plaxo, and Facebook. The email friends already knew my birthday, or maybe saw my shame-free birthday-promoting gchat status line. And, at least some of the twitter wishes came in response to my own birthday oriented tweets, but not all. Some came before my own tweets. The other birthday wishers are either uncanny calendar-keepers or may have been reminded of the event by the various methods those sites use to keep friends aware of each other. Facebook and Plaxo did all the hard work for me. I’ve been kind of withdrawing from Facebook, but I got re-engaged with it today, catching up with well-wishers, surfing their profiles. Previous to today, I would have said I wasn’t completely sold on Plaxo. I mean, who needs another place to update your status and befriend the same 30-60-90-howevermany people I’m already friends with elsewhere. But Plaxo seems to really emphasize the birthday thing, and that was amazingly touching to me on this day. Nice to get several well-wishing messages and feel friendship coming through my email all day today.

    I also benefitted greatly from the ArborWiki birthday deals page, which helped me score some great (and free!) Zingerman’s bagels and a yummy free Birthday cupcake from Cake Nouveau (key lime, mmmm). Thanks to the larger ArborWiki community for maintaining the list!

  • Word clouds from my last 10 blog posts and my del.icio.us links

    I’d love it to go the whole way back, but this one shows what I’ve written recently (via Wordle).
    Scientific Ink word cloud

    Here’s one from my del.icio.us account. Seems a bit more representative because it has accumulated over a longer time.
    My del.icio.us word cloud

  • My Tweetcloud by tweetclouds and tweetstats

    I had some fun playing around with word clouds from my own twitter streams. Here’s a kind of random comparison of my tweet cloud from two applications – tweetclouds.com and tweetstats.com.

    Tweetcloud
    My tweetcloud seems pretty biased towards recent tweets – see “staycation”? I only said it once, just recently. looks like I retweet a fair bit, and that I talk a lot about gardening, soup, and yoga.
    Make your own tweetcloud.

    OK onto tweetstats. My tweetstats tweetcloud seems less centered on my last few tweets. “Ann Arbor” and “yoga” are less prominent, and “work” is more prominent. “client” “day” “home” “new” “time” “today” “work” and “www” seem prominent. I’m also noticing “tired” in there, and “tea”.
    Dunrie tweetcloud via tweetstats

  • Internet User Experience 2008 (gratitude #14)

    This week is the Internet User Experience conference, a conference spotlighting methods for dramatically improving today’s web site user experience. I attended the conference last year and gained a lot from listening to my colleagues in other usability, web design, and human factors companies locally and globally. I was grateful for the things I learned that were new, the things I learned I wasn’t wrong about, and for the people I met and got to know better.

    This year, I’m excited to return for a day and a half of presentations, inspiration, networking, and learning.

  • Considering removing the del.icio.us links autoposts to this blog

    I’m thinking I’m going to not delete any past posts, but also disable the autoposting from my del.icio.us to this blog. I’m also considering deleting past posts, but that seems so much more drastic.