Thanks For The MacBook Pro, SourceForge!

When I first signed up for Twitter back in February, I had no idea that it would be helping me win free stuff.  Even now, I still can’t believe it.  Except, of course, for the fact that I’ve actually received the free stuff.

I also would never have expected SourceForge to ever give me something for free, either. Yet, they have. And for that, SourceForge, I definitely thank you! I am My family is glad to have a new MacBook, too.

It all goes back to one month ago… I had heard about SourceForge’s 2009 Community Choice Awards and some live feeds they were going to do for the event. But wait! There’s more?  They were giving away four MacBook Pros during the live coverage. Wow!  Of course, what are the chances of me winning one, right?

Well, winning one required tweeting answers to trivia questions.  I was shocked when the first question was one that I actually had an idea about.  ”What movie did Apple use to hype its new QuickTime4 format?”  I won’t give the answer, so have fun figuring it out!  But, being the first to tweet @SourceForge with the correct answer, I soon learned I was right.

And so that started the journey of the new MacBook!  It took some verification of personal data, some FedEx transit, but in the end, it made it here one month after that fateful night.  Tuesday, I received an email with the FedEx tracking number and, thankfully, within two days, it was here.

Here are some photos from the grand opening! (Sorry for the lack of thumbnails… Wordpress is giving me some issues with uploading photos.)

While it’s such a sweet looking piece of technology, I decided that I would not keep this.  Nope, this MacBook is now my dad’s newest toy. I still have plans for a MacBook, but it wasn’t going to be this one.  So, there you go, dad!

Again, a big thank you to SourceForge!  I come to your site often for open source needs.  And now I can we can thank you for this shiny new MacBook Pro, as well!

Blog Updated, And I Need Your Help!

I recently upgraded this blog to the latest Wordpress version.  I had such a pain with it as I tracked down some issues I was having.  I’ll write more about that later.  But, for now, I’ll just say that, with that upgrade and troubleshooting, I had to change some things around.  Many plugins were reinstalled from scratch. So, to ensure that all is working right, I’m calling on all of you!

If you could, take a look through my blog and test things out.  If you find something broken, let me know!

Thank you!

Gmail and Google Apps Come Out of Beta

Fresh, breaking news from @Google’s blog: Google Apps, Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, Talk, they’re all coming out of beta.  After being in beta for over five years, Gmail now will be without those four little letters that we’ve all come to know and love.

What does this mean for those apps?  Is Google changing how they’re working on them?  Not really.  Here’s a quote from their blog:

“Beta” will be removed from the product logos today, but we’ll continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not there’s a small “beta” beneath the logo.

So, all that is changing is the removal of ‘Beta’ from the logos, it seems.

What kind of impact might this have?  Honestly, I already think of Google as providing wonderfully useful apps and services.  The fact that they now no longer list it as beta doesn’t change much in my mind.  But it may make things look more professional to people, especially those that may not know how well Google makes things.

Either way, Gmail and Google Apps are still very useful, and I’m glad they’re sticking around!

Why Do You Tweet?

I’ve been on Twitter for almost four months.  It seems like longer, but it really hasn’t been.  Time just has flown by way too fast lately!

When I first signed up with Twitter, I saw it as something that people used from their phones.  Honestly, I have no need to update people from my phone about everything I’m doing.  I enjoy my privacy!

That said, I have found Twitter to be a useful tool.  For one, it lets me follow certain people and organizations and get 140 characters (or less) of information from them.  For example, I’ve been following @Nasa and, if not for their tweets, I wouldn’t have known about the ability to watch the Atlantis shuttle launch live recently (via NasaTV).  Or I can get notification quickly of new Stargate news from @GateWorld.

With Twitter expanding as rapidly as it seems to be, there are so many useful apps and widgets that seem to keep popping up.  I can post a blog, like this one, which TwitterFeed will send to my Twitter account.  That, then, is fed to my Facebook profile.  There are enough apps out there to have Twitter do so many things.  I’m not even sure I want to guess at what will be coming in the future!

I also have found that Twitter can be a relatively useful marketing tool, with various degrees of ’success’.  I’ve not tried to use it too much on that level yet, but it definitely has potential.  I, personally, still need to look into that, as I know I’ll be using it to try and market a few sites I work with.

So, for me, personally, when it comes to what I say with my personal account, my replies, or anything that I put up, why do I tweet?  I like how easy it is to get updates from those that I follow, how easily I can update ones that need to be updated on something, and how simply it is all done.  It can let me get information from a target group and project information to a target audience.

Why do you tweet?

WolframAlpha: Oh, Where Were You…?

Friday, something new was unveiled.  I don’t think it’ll be competition for the major search engines, but it definitely is cool.  It’s called Wolfram|Alpha.

It’s not really a search engine.  There are definitely quite a few neat things that you can do with it, though.  I did a few quick examples.  First, I did a search of a date.  I chose September 11th, 2001, as it is a date known by almost everyone worldwide.  Now, I’m shown data about how long ago that was, notable events, sunrise and sunset times, and how long there was daylight on that day.

Let’s try a different search.  One of the examples shown was to do a search for the International Space Station.  You can get sky position and orbital data about the ISS.  So far, this is looking really cool!

It seems that Wolfram|Alpha is great when it comes to data that has statistics, numbers, or other kinds of numeric measurements.  But this isn’t what I’ve been playing with the most.

One thing that I had to try was some mathematical computation.  I initially tried it with a simple quadratic equation.  I then moved on to something a bit more complex.  Being the geek that I am, I thought back to my Calculus days and had to try a little integration and differentiation, too.  Oh, and limits.  You can’t forget limits.

I must say… I am impressed.  I just wish I had had this to play with when I was still in my various Calculus courses.  Actually, I would’ve enjoyed using this with my engineering courses, as well.  There is so much to play with!

If you would like to try Wolfram|Alpha, why not check their list of examples?  There will definitely be something there that you can play with.

Have fun!