Terribly behind

At least that's how I feel at the moment. The internet has been buzzing for a couple of days about the Lost finale and I've yet to see it. What can you do when you live in such a terribly backwards country as I do. Well, not terribly backwards actually. At the same time as we get these kind of things long after the internet has deemed it ancient history we still get things like mobile broadband without traffic limitations.

Which is something that kind of brings me to the topic of this post. I currently work in tech support for an ISP and so I spend my time together with a bunch of other geeks trying my very best to answer questions from regular people. What strikes me as a bit odd is that people set up these fancy network solutions at home but they still have no idea how to configure their router ... and I mean none at all. This is however something that makes me wonder why I myself doesn't have some fancy network solutions at home.

I do have a 100/10 Mbps connection so I could very well run a web server at home, after all I know how to configure it and set it up. I could also have a NAS running to provide me access to what ever I might want when I'm out running around. After all I have an Android phone fully capable of utilizing such a thing.

I recently came to the conclusion that I might very well be a class A geek but at the same time my other interests prohibit me from spending the time and money it would take to set all these things up for the odd chance that I might wonder around and feel a terrible need to update my music library on my phone without using Spotify ... which probably would never happen anyway. Of course I could rip my DVDs and stick them on a NAS so I could stream them to my phone but then again I could just bring the ones I want with me when I go on holiday. Or I could even just experience the place and the people were I go.

So the bottom line is that while I feel terribly behind when I talk to people about these things daily I at the same time don't feel a bit behind on those points but rather extremely behind in taking the next step towards the next new experience in my own life.

Twitterfeed part 2

A while back, or if we should be really honest I should probably say a few years ago, I fiddled around with a service called Twitterfeed. Which essentially is a service that 'automagically' link your blog feed (as an example) to Twitter, among other things. I even wrote a quick note about it on this blog. I came to talk to a mate of mine about this the other day as he's a politician and it's an election year over here. We spoke about web presence and the lack of it that his party has according to a study that was published in a Swedish tech paper (NyTeknik). This lead to some activity from his part in his party on a local level which I guess is a good thing but it also lead me to look into it again too ... which is far more important, or possibly not depending from which point you view the world I guess.

Either way, it would seem that Twitterfeed has come a long way from where it was a few years ago. For one thing the interface is much better and for an other they have made the service a bit more dynamic so you can link it to more social networking tools then just Twitter and it also seems to accept a few different type of feeds now which, from what I can remember, it didn't do earlier. So it would seem that it is time to start using it again ... now if I only updated my blog a bit more often.

To make this post completely incomprehensible lets move back to the subject of benefit or not with linking feeds to Twitter and using Twitter. I know people speak against using Twitter as a sort of megaphone or billboard and instead believe that Twitter should be used as a way to start or keep a dialog going. I have to say that I totally agree with those people, so people that only use their Twitter accounts to link blog feeds will eventually end up with absolutely nobody following them on Twitter. Thus completely killing the purpose of linking the feed to Twitter to begin with. However I also do believe that a feed linked to Twitter can generate debate if used correctly. Which is why I do believe Twitterfeed has an essential purpose to fill for us that can't be bothered to code the whole thing ourselves.

A tiny update

I must admit that I blushed a little when I noticed a link to this blog on a mate's site. Especially considering that I haven't updated this site in about 6 months. Somebody less stubborn than me would probably come to the conclusion that if I haven't updated this site in 6 months time I really should just abandon it all together but I'm afraid I'm way to stubborn for that. So instead I'll bore you with yet an other update.

To the surprise of some people I've actually been employed for the past 10 months. I've been spending my time trying to help customers of an ISP understand why they don't have any internet at the moment amongst other things. Of course most of that time is spent tearing my hair out trying to get people to understand some basic things about how computers and adsl connections actually work and that 90% of the time it's because their equipment at home is broken and not because the ISP is an evil money grubbing devil that tries to make their lives miserable.

But while I'm not doing that I've tried to get a better grip on computer networks. That is also what led me to my mate's site since I was looking into easy and secure ways to communicate with my home computer while I'm out and about. My main objective was to get a somewhat dynamic solution so I wasn't bound to one single program since I then would be limited to waiting for that program to support the system I'm currently on. So I checked out his article on 'VNC over SSH' which is exactly what I was looking for. Even if I'd have preferred a solution where I only needed one program to achieve what I was looking for. This solution however means I can connect a Linux/Windows/Mac or what ever system to my home box in a secure manner without making any changes to the setup on my home system. An other good thing is that it even allows me to connect my Android phone to my home system.

Well, that's what I've been doing lately. Well that and being horribly bad at keeping in touch with my friends and family as usual, sorry about that everybody. I'll try my best to get my head out of the sand soon actually go visit people.