“What should I do with myself this weekend? What’s something both fun and geeky that would provide value for someone?”

And it came to me: Finally wipe that horrible old paperweight of a desktop computer and turn it into a music server for the office!

So now the fun begins. Its a pretty limited machine — I have to look into it again, but I think I was able to UPGRADE it to 512MB RAM! Booya :P And I’m wondering if I should just re-install XP or go Win7? But I guess we’ll find out this weekend.

I have another hard drive for it somewhere, too. So I’ll see if I can find that and add it to the box.

What good is a music server with only 200GB of storage anyway?

I am at a point where I feel like I really need to step up my game outside of work.  That means getting better organized, getting more active in general (both on and offline), etc, etc.

Well, as a professional in an industry where sitting on my ass drinking coffee and tea is an all the time thing, I came to realize a few things:

• Changing so much of my daily life will not come quickly
• Its going to take sustained diligence
• I’ve come to this realization a few times already

And with 2011 being right around the corner, normally someone might wait until the new year to make this “resolution”.

But I say screw that.  I want to be well on my way towards kicking life’s ass by the time 2011 comes around.

So I’m here to say: Don’t wait for the new year. Make a change now to prepare for the new year and increase your likelihood of success.

Is 33 days enough time to prep?  I guess we’ll find out….  Day 1 starts today.

Just wanted to pop in and say that things have kicked up quite a bit here in the past couple weeks, and I just haven’t had that much time for blogging.

I have a few drafts in the works, however; but I just need to finish them up and publish.  But that might take a little longer than expected, as things are still quite busy.  I’m hoping that by this time next month, I’ll be able to get back to daily blogging.  In the meantime, however, I’ll just have to get to it when I can.

Tutorials and Help articles.

I suppose it really started with the Installing Rails on Ubuntu 9.10 post.  So as I’ve been spending a lot of time looking for conclusive and truly helpful tutorials on the wide variety of subjects/projects I’ve undertaken, it occurred to me that there really aren’t very many truly helpful tutorials out there.  At least not for newbies like myself.

So I am going to start making posts on ways I have found to be the best for new beginners.  The primary focus with this will be on people doing these tasks for the first time; as that was what I found my largest struggle to be when I was just starting out.  There are so many different ways to do things depending on your specific environment and there are just as many tutorials out there that will only end up spinning you around in circles.

I would like to be a pragmatic voice saying, “If you’ve never setup a LAMP environment on Ubuntu X.x (for example), here’s how to get going.”  And in that vein, I think I will dub these as a ‘series’ of sorts called “Tutorials for n00bs.”

Stay tuned! More to come…

After hearing all about this crazy new thing, and not being able to play with it until an entire day after some of my colleagues, I am here to say that it really isn’t crazy/cool at all.

Granted, I am VERY new to this whole thing, but my first experience gets me thinking that perhaps Google Buzz is a repackaged Google Wave Lite?

Sure, maybe Buzz is more focused on Social Media, but the collaboration piece completely and totally reminds me of how Wave works. And it doesn’t seem like it would be very hard to take pieces of Wave and plug it into Gmail for some limited functionality.

I really hope my opinion will change over time and with more usage. But as it stands right now, I am not impressed. I was expecting maybe a little more from you, Google.

Or as a colleague of mine so eloquently put it, “Do we REALLY need yet ANOTHER Social Media tool?”

Cheers, everyone. Control your buzz. ;-)

Kim, my lovely girlfriend, had to work pretty much the whole weekend.  That’s a pretty common occurrence, but this weekend was just a little bit different.

Normally I would spend pretty much the whole time geeking out on the laptop working, trying new things, installing new software, playing around with different web frameworks, etc….  On occasion I would get out and see a flick with a friend or maybe even go around town taking photos, but that’s about the extent of the exciting life that I live (sounds fun, eh?).

Anyone that works an office job knows what it feels like to go back Monday morning; and it just isn’t fun.  The brain almost never feels fresh for any amount of reasons and its just really hard to get to work on Monday and feel good about it.

I used to figure that spending time on the computer just hacking the weekend away would keep my brain active enough.  But it wasn’t until Kim and I got a simple 750 piece Jigsaw puzzle of Times Square, NYC that I realized my thoughts may have been flawed.

We spent much of Saturday evening (after going out to dinner) doing the puzzle, listening to music and had a great time.  It was a nice change of pace and had been an extremely long time since I had done a puzzle.  So Sunday evening I was bored and decided to just sit down with the puzzle myself.

I got in the office Monday morning and said to myself, “Hey, this Monday morning isn’t nearly as bad as they usually are…. I wonder what’s…” and then it just clicked. “The Jigsaw Puzzle!”

So I think I may be taking up another new hobby… They’re fun and they keep the brain active.  Let’s give this a shot and see what happens.  But right now, it feels like a great compliment to what I already do on my “spare” time.

And if you ever feel like you’re just constantly struggling with the Monday morning blues, try doing a puzzle over the weekend! It may make all the difference in the world….

• Upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 (Wonderful update, btw)
• Got RubyOnRails installed on my Ubuntu machine and… well…  almost running (have some server issues)
• Other side web projects
• Changed WordPress theme on DanReno.com and modified it to meet my needs
  • Gotta give my a shoutout to the Woothemes folks and their new theme Digitalfarm… It’s great!
  • Some tweaking was DEFINITELY needed, however (homepage features, etc.)
• All of this while simultaneously watching Ninja Warrior on G4 in the background :)

All of this was, of course, both very enjoyable and a headache at times.  I had the new theme/customizations working just fine on my Ubuntu machine at home yesterday, but had to make some adjustments just a few minutes ago when I checked it at work.  There were some weird IE issues I was seeing, but luckily was able to get them fixed.

I still feel like there is some work to do (naturally), but overall I’m pretty happy.  The header graphic definitely needs some re-touching.  But I was pretty limited trying to work with Gimp Editor; the default image editor on Ubuntu.  Definitely has a learning curve and I wasn’t quite getting past it as I was stumbling through.  So hopefully I’ll be able to get on my archaic windows machine with Adobe CS1 on it to do some actual/good image editing with it soon.  Not a top priority by any means, however.

Next up for DanReno.com is most likely going to be some reviews of my 2 recent favorite albums.  The first which has long been overdue is The Octahedron by The Mars Volta.  The second is The Great Misdirect by Between The Buried and Me.  Both are exceedingly awesome albums, but I will leave those details to their respective future posts.

And I’m not quite keeping up with my 1 new post/week goal just yet.  I imagine that will continue to slide throughout the holidays.  But I’ll do my best to keep active with it during the hectic times.

Cheers!

I think part of that stems from me not being terribly active on the web; despite the fact that I am literally on the web at least 50 hours/week.  Doesn’t make much sense for me to not be more active.

So as a result of me deciding to not take the blog down and turn it into a development project, I had to come up with something that will actually allow me to actively post and update the site on a regular basis.  That “something” is what I’m sure MANY if not all other serious bloggers do: make a list.

I now have a list of about 15 or so topics that I know I can write about.  I intend to use that list as my plan for posts.  Ideally, I’d like to keep the list at about 10-15 new topics at any given time so that when I actually sit down to blog, I can have a good selection of ideas to choose from rather than just drawing a blank.

Simply creating the list has taken quite the load off my shoulders.   So I’m excited to announce that I have made blogging more frequently a personal goal; and I just took my first step in the right direction.

As I stated in my last post, my concerns with doing that were basically around my recent inactivity and how I wasn’t sure taking down the site would be my best move since I couldn’t find the time to blog in the first place.  Well all of that has changed now.

I am attempting to turn over a new leaf and become more active in general.  I have spent the last year trying to get  acclimated with my new surroundings and not really doing much of anything.  Being a hermet. With my girlfriend. Staying in and doing the same thing over and over.

So getting more active with my site is my ultimate decision.  I can develop it as I go; contually adding new features and customizing the site to fit my needs as I get more familiar with PHP, SQL and programming in general.  Not to mention the front end side of things with HTML/CSS.  I’ll need to make an effort to learn more about the details around HTML 5 that’s supposed to be released soon enough, but let’s take one thing at a time.

I have a real issue with getting overwhelmed often because I like to think about everything as a whole.  And if there’s anything I’ve learned in recent months, its that taking things one step at a time is the only real way to get stuff done and take the neccessary actions to change things.  So that is what I’m doing.  Taking things one at a time. And this site is one of those things.

But there is much more to come in the next 6 months.  I have many plans in the works (mwah). Obviously its all a work in progress, but I assure you that the stagnant Dan is slowly going bye bye.  As things unfold, I will be keeping you all up to date.  That is, I’ll give updates in between all of my ramblings and unwanted opinions. :)

Some of the ramblings I plan to post going forward include, but are not limited to:

• Beer/wine reviews
• Photography “exhibitions”
• More music related posts
• Wonderful techie geek stuff
• And of course, good ‘ol SEO

Stay tuned, all (2 of you)!

So as I unintentionally made a false promise to be more active on my site, I have been contemplating taking down the current site you see here and redeveloping the site from concept to design.  I will still use WordPress as my platform most likely, but it just seems that I need to come up with a better idea for my site than what I currently use it for (which is almost nothing lately).

Originally I got the site so I could A) have my domain name registered to me and B) have a blog I could use to interact in the blogosphere and contribute to the web.  Well as I stated in my last post, there have been a LOT of changes in my life recently.  My interests in the oh-so-wonderfully tech/geeky world has just sky rocketed.  Especially when it comes to the web and programming.

I have recently enrolled in O’Reilly School of Technology’s PHP/SQL Programming Certification.  It has opened my eyes to a new world of possibility for me and I have been enjoying it quite a bit.  Especially when you combine that with my recent switch to the Ubuntu operating system.  Those two things combined have been the catalyst for my recent extreme interest in the tech world.  And the more I learn about it, the more I want to be a part of it.

With all of that being said, I also have other passions for which I would like to use my website.  The geeky stuff can be talked about, sure.  But I plan to use most of my knowledge gained from all of that to further enhance my website.  So apart from techie blurbs and rants, I would ultimately like to have a site where I can express all of my interests.  I just have to figure out how I’m going to do that.  I’ve thrown around the idea of having different websites for all of my respective interests, but I’m just not sure that’s realistic.  Especially considering the fact that I can’t even keep up with my own site at the moment.

At any rate, I am going to travel down one of two paths with this site:

1. Take the site down and put up a temporary splash page while making the site what I want it to be
2. Keep the site up and stay active with it while I continually enhance the site’s features

My only fear in traveling down the second path is that the same thing happens again.  I publish a post saying that I will become more active only to become stagnant once again.  But on the flipside, the first path will probably take longer to actually accomplish.

So I have to make a decision.  If I have ANY readers at ALL (and I highly doubt that I do just yet), feel free to post a comment with your opinion.  Either way, I would like to have a decision made sooner than later.  I plan to act on my choice this weekend, June 13-14 2009.

Cheers!