AskLG

The Cause: Today is my last day of the semester (minus finals).  Yay!
The Effect: Me today’s are no more!

Early in January, I was a naive, young blogger who thought it would be a glorious idea to post updates about my life each day I spent at college.  True to form, I stayed the good path which led to a completed journey today.  68 days later, I have grown enough to realize how difficult these daily posts are.  There just isn’t enough to talk about, or at least not enough you would care about.

Yeah, but thats cool with you right?  You wanted posts that help your life out.  News thats makes sense.  Articles with more relevence.  Ying to your Yang?  Who cares if I had a great day or if my day was crap.  It’s OK, I blame society not you.  Seriously though, starting tomorrow I am all about tech, sports, humor, and other relevant articles.

If you do have some desire to follow my life online, aside from blog posts, be sure to hit up HoltkampW.com.  It has links to every social site I’m involved with.  If you’d like to figure out what I’m doing on a daily basis, then be sure to get a Twitter account and follow me.  I might even follow you.  maybe.. possibly.. probably..

Thank you for bearing with me these past few busy weeks.  Thank you for subscribing, reading, and googling for AskLG.  Thank you for being there.  Hopefully you’ll enjoy what’s next to come.  Besides, there are some ideas churning in this crazy little head of mine that you might like.  Maybe one day soon I’ll take off my hat and release them to the wild.  We’ll see soon enough.

Tonight I have done something I’ve been missing for three weeks now: social activity.  I went to dinner with David and Jennifer.  Then Khoa met us up for some bowling fun.  3 weeks man.  Its been a WHILE!  I guess thats what happens when you start grad school: no life.  The bowling pics are up at my Flickr, btw.

Assuming I steal some time (I have a ton to do), I’m going to be writing some interesting posts this weekend about things that are bugging me.  Hopefully.  You can hit me up on Twitter and ask for them, maybe that’ll motivate me to set aside time.

Now David dancing to Thriller:

Today I was going to talk about an inspirational story of humans evolving to become better people and a Yahoo, Google Anti-Trust suit but I simply don’t have the time my friends.  I have homework and a big presentation tomorrow.  I’ll make some posts this weekend to make up for it, promise.

FYI:
I now have a StumbleUpon account, and updated my del.icio.us account.  You can now find me everywhere (except MyBlogLog) by a username of “holtkampw”.

2!

Its true, the semester is coming to a close.  Lets re-hash my schedule just to prove a point.  Tomorrow I have 1 1/2 hours of class.  Then I move to study for a finals.  I must also finish homework.  The homework is the “starred” problems which apparently equates to “Really effin hard.”  Friday, I have to turn in an 8 page security primer and do a presentation over the topic.  Then I have to finish and turn that starred problem homework.  Monday, I have another 90 minute class where I get assigned a presentation topic.  Tuesday I have a final from 11-2p.  Directly following the final, I have another 90 minute lecture.  Probably Wednesday (or Tuesday morning) I have to do that presentation over the topic I get Monday.  Then it’s off for hardcore studying.  The 7th and 8th of May are my other finals.  Then my friends, I’m done for a month.  Hoorah!

In all honesty, I had nothing to talk about today.  Study days tend to be uneventful.  Instead I filled the space with babble about my schedule.  The question is, do you have something you’d like for me to talk about?  Seriously! Anything at all, just email me: will (at) asklg (dot) net  Let me know what you’re interested in

Yesterday I was complaining about this fog that took over my life, but today there was a completely different atmosphere.  Everything went well, really well.  It was unbelievable, but I digress.

I must finish some work and do some studying, so I’ll leave you with two odd videos.  These are actual videos for a Smirnoff campaign.  It all starts off with the East coast, but the West coast quickly retaliates.  Where’s the 3rd coast Smirnoff?  Hmm?

Oh, and Happy Earth Day!

2!

A day after 4/20 (I don’t smoke), I felt a strong fog coming in.  A San Francisco powered fog (yeah, hardcore!).  This morning was filled with the most mundane tasks possible.  Afterwards, I left for college.  Once I was at the parking lot, I realized I didn’t remember how I got there.  It was all a giant blur.  Now thats a cool feeling.  I hear many people talk about how it happens to them all the time, but I love driving.  Its the one time of the day where I’m in control, get to feel risk (from cops), and listen to music.  I love music.  During class, my fog continued.  Constant zoning in and out of consciousness.  Hopefully It’s a one day deal.

In tech news, SP3 for Windows XP is coming out on the 29th of April.  All you XPers lover and Vista loathers unite for this is good news.  As for me, I’ll be busy typing along on my Mac. [info from ZDNet]

Also, Apple is looking at some online store improvements by building a virtual store.  Now this isn’t a stereotypical online store, but a place where people virtually shop just like in the store.  You get to browse the virtual aisles, see other customers (avatar-ish), and go to the virtual cash register for checkout.  Places like Second Life have this already, but its still an interesting concept.  Have we become that dependent on machines that all personal contact must go through them as well?  Does chatting with “cute” customers become easier online?  You don’t fear public rejection because you’re just online?  I’m seriously curious about this phenomina.  This isn’t popular because its easier either.  Regular online stores are much easier and quicker.  Am I too extroverted to see the appeal?  Not homebody enough? I just don’t get it.  Someone shed some light. [based on TUAW]

2!

In the midst of a busy week, today was my first presentation on a Mac.  It went beautifully of course.  I apparently do an incredible job of BSing my way through questions I don’t really want to spend time to completely answer.  Whatever, the audience got the point.  My next presentation HAS to be on a Windows machine.  Oye!  Does anyone have experience porting Keynote over to Powerpoint?  I’m curious to see how the exporting process turns out.  I don’t my big presentation to look like crap.  They already took away my handy remote so I must hit enter the ol’ fashion way.  When I finally get done with my AJAX/XSS primer, I’ll probably put it up on here if you want it.  Let me know.

(more…)

In case you didn’t realize, Macs need some security as well. I’ve been using the built-in firewall and Clam antivirus, but ArsTechnica covered a few new things I didn’t know about. If you have OS X, then you should really check out Ars’ article.

Tomorrow marks my first public presentation in almost 6 months now.  I’m not used to this long of a drought between presentations.  Its making me anxious!  I am however switching things up a little.  Since I have a Mac now (yay!), I’ll be using Keynote.  So far I’m really impressed with some of the features.  There was a slight learning curve since some of my keyboard shortcuts from Powerpoint didn’t work, but it was worth the swap.  I plugged another monitor into my laptop to see how to setup dual displays.  This is where the Apple beauty shines through.  You can set which display to show the presentation.  Obviously in my case, I want the projector to display the presentation on the big screen.   With powerpoint, my computer screen would just show the same thing as the projector does.  Using Keynote though, my laptop screen shows: the current time, how long I’ve talked, my current slide, and my next slide.  Wow!  I typically have a good internal time clock, but now I’ll be able to tell exactly how good it is.  Also, this should help me transition from slide to slide better providing contextual cues.  If you have an Apple computer and don’t have Keynote then you’re just missing out.  I highly recommend it.

2!

Today class was canceled so I became a homebody. Instead of going to class, I decided to pretend like I was in school and still work my ass off. Actually I just have a ton of work to catch up on and more will be piled on soon so I had to get some done.

I did take a nice long break today. I noticed that the Flip Camera has already taken 13% of the market according to Gizmodo. In case you were keeping tabs on me, the Flip Camera is definitely on my “to buy” list and will soon be purchased. I keep trying to justify not needing it but its just so awesome I might not be able to resist. In the event I do eventually buy it, I will be giving you an AskLG YouTube link to catch all of our random vids with this thing. If you feel like you can persuade me one way or the other, hit me up in the comments or on Twitter.

I also spent some time checking out the Webby nominees today. The Webby awards is an annual celebration of all things online. It could be websites, video, audio, whatever. Even if you don’t feel like voting, you should check them out to see the really cool things people are doing. I found some great sites myself I plan on using now that I didn’t know about before. Go take a visit at the Webby’s.

My buddy Khoa uploaded this hilarious video on Flickr as well. Check it out:

Woah I’m really late today.  It seems like my days are lasting longer and longer into the night.  Tonight I was helping a friend work on some beautiful PHP code.  Anyways, something miraculous happened today that will probably never happen again: I actually understood the majority of what my professor said.  Its a huge breakthrough for me.  Maybe even a small battle won between me and myself.  Damn, I really should have put money or something on it.

Remember yesterday when I mentioned how Psystar is building OpenMac computers?  Well people naturally become a little more interested in these whole Psystar people and dug up some information.  Gizmodo coincidently noticed that during the writing of one of their blog articles, the Psystar corporate address had changed online.  Now if that doesn’t scream legit, I just don’t know what does.  [Via Gizmodo]

In other news, Facebook has released a few social features from 3rd party sites. Currently it doesn’t support much but it does include my beloved Flickr.  At this point its in its infancy but is a step in the right direction.  Score one for Facebook.  Now if only it supported all my other favorite services.  I just really hope these updates maintain tasty and throttleable.  I’d hate to stop liking Facebook because I’m being spammed and can’t weed out the news I actually care about.  You can set this up by going to your profile and hitting “Import” in your mini-feed.  [Via The Facebook Blog]