It’s been so very long since I’ve devoted my attentions to my writing.  Whether it was because of having a job, general laze, or even boredom, my stories have really suffered.

I just started school again, and while that would be another source of constant distraction in regard to my writing, I’ve used it in a completely opposite fashion.  A little background first.

I am a Computer Science major, and have been going to school off and on again for 6 years (holy crap, has it really been that long?).  I’ve been taking high-level programming courses, as well as the general requirement courses.  I’ve finished all of the general requirements, and am working on getting through the courses needed for my Associates Degree.  I switched focuses from Programming to Web Development, and with it has brought a few more credits needed in other areas, and has pushed some of the courses I took before to electives.

During this whole time, I somehow failed to take the Computer Science 101 course, which is required of all incoming Freshmen in any curriculum.  Well, as I’m getting back to school now, I am having to take this course.  While I could easily test out of it, I decided that because I’ve been out of practice for so long, it would be good to sit through a class, do the assignments, take the tests, and get an easy A.

I had no idea how bored I would be in this class, and with that boredom has come the opportunity to sit in one place for 1.25 hours with a pad of paper sitting in front of me.  Now, the old me would be tooling around on the PC while the professor talked, but I’ve decided against that approach.  Not only is it disrespectful to the instructor, it can be distracting to other students, and ultimately, it would be a waste of time on my part.

I’ve been mulling around the ideas for Dimenxia for longer than I can remember, and I’ve done very little to get things going in that respect.  Now I have the opportunity and means to sit and actually put some ink on paper and get these ideas out to the world.

I’ve written 6 college ruled pages front and back (I write pretty small), and have layed down a pretty solid foundation for the completion of this tale.  I’ve not digitized it yet (see, I pay a little attention in CS 101), but I plan on typing things up once I have this section of the story pegged down.

It’s amazing to get back on the horse.  I feel like I can really start to do the story justice, and I’m very excited about finally being able to have someone sit down and get through the narrative that is living solely in my brain at the moment.

A quote that I’m sure I’m going to butcher that has stuck with me, but I haven’t really fulfilled:

“Half of writing well is just sitting down and writing something.”

Like I said, I’ve probably butchered it in my mind to the point where it’s not recognizable anymore, and it must be so, as I haven’t been able to find a reference to it through Google.  That’s OK because it holds all the same with me, whether the words are exact or not.

Tags: Rants by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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If you know me personally, you certainly know that I have some trouble managing my time. The way my brain works makes my attentions turn to certain pursuits over others, sometimes without a conscious thought on my behalf.

With this type of ‘disability’ comes a lot of loose ends, as well as issues involving relationships with customers, family and friends. Though I’m actively attempting to change my habits, things never seem to stick.

The way my passion works is a burst of sudden energy toward one topic, and my attentions can seem infinite and without speed bumps. Without fail, once the passion fades, I’m left with an empty husk where productivity should be, and things get left to rot in the background of my ever-changing mind. Truthfully, my mind is a scary place to live, with thousands upon thousands of connections running from one topic to a seemingly disparate topic of an entirely separate persuasion.

That being said, truly there are projects out there which I have started (quite a few come to mind, *cough* ZTTC *cough*) and are truly just relics of the spaghetti that is my thought process.
[A quick word about the irony of this post.  I started writing this on Thursday, August 28th, and only made it to this point.]

So, I’d like to list a few of my projects here, with some brief descriptions so that I can get things in order, and make small strides forward in each of their processes.

1. DiggNitty - This was a project that never made it anywhere, as using the name of Digg in any new service is against the copyright holder’s rights.  DiggNitty was to be started as the “nitty gritty” version of Digg, with more adult-themed sections and stories.  I was told very amiably that I could not use the name “Digg” in my site, and I’ve come to terms with the idea that they are just trying to protect their rights.  Diggnitty.com expires today, and I am going to let my hold on the domain lapse.  If someone out there wants to try their hand with this, be my guest.
2. Nostrus - Nostrus was to be a blog and content management system for websites.  I started this project in 2005, but after seeing how much spam can build up on a homebrew system, and running into enough other issues, it was abandoned.  I just use WordPress now, and stop worrying about the underlying code of the site.  Nostr.us expires on September 16th, and I’m unsure whether I want to keep it around for a future project, or just release it back to the wild, saving a few dollars a year in the process.
3. The Third Realm - The Third Realm was to be the home of Jaycen Poole’s artwork and rants.  For a while, it ran the Nostrus software.  After switching a few different servers, it was sidetracked, and no new content was being produced.  Jaycen has expressed the desire for a new blog under a different domain name.  Most likely, I will set it up using WordPress, thereby making things a lot easier for everyone.
4. Radioactive Computers - I guess you could say that this is the granddaddy of all of my failed projects.  Radioactive Computers was a company that I started with a coworker in 2004.  We did desktop support for individual and business customers, as well as running a hosting business with a dedicated server.  We also began running a Half Life 2: Deathmatch server, and created a fully-functional stats system with an online profile and forums.  This effort created the Radioactive Clan (rAc) which is still active today.

   After operating for about 2 years, the losses we were taking with the dedicated server were starting to hit home.  Both of us had fulltime jobs and growing families to take care of, so things became stagnate, and the business was lost.  The forums on the original site are still available in a read-only format.

5. Benjam.us - This was simply to be a place to post pictures of my son, for our families to see.  A set of about 20 pictures were posted, and nothing ever came of it. I still plan on doing something with this domain, but it’s unclear what at this point.
6. Amjebin - This domain never had a clear project associated with it, but I still own it nonetheless.  At one point, it was a wiki for me to keep track of things I was working on, but it became way too cumbersome for its own good.
7. I’m A Big Fat Loser - Before I joined Weight Watchers, I was trying to figure out a great way to lose weight, and create some sort of fun project along with that goal.  Originally, I was going to try to make a wager with the world, and bet that I could lose 50 pounds in some crazy short amount of time, and thereby win some sort of reward.  Alright, that’s kind of a weird idea, right?

   Although I have lost 25 pounds with Weight Watchers, I’m still 33 pounds away from my realistic goal weight.  I think if I can grab some more time, I might do this blog again, and try to at least chronicle my normal weight loss and keep track of my points and exercise and weight loss-oriented thoughts.

8. Western Maryland Think Tank - The Western Maryland Think Tank was going to be an invite-only forum for contemplating the large ideas for life, as well as the small things affecting life in this area.  It existed for a small time, but eventually faded into dust.  I would love to get this started up again, as I’ve recently resumed contact with a few of my intellectual friends.
9. Cranial Constructs - This is a new recruit to my army of incomplete ideas.  Cranial Constructs was to be a repository of some of my best ideas, so that I could put the ideas out into the world.  The thought was that because I’ve been getting less and less time to complete things, if I put the ideas out there in an open source type fashion, someone can pick them up and get them done, paying great justice to the concepts, without need for copyright, trademark and patent disputes on my end.It became painfully obvious, while I was trying to put the concepts into words and simple artwork, that each idea needed much more love than I was able to give it at the time.  I’m not going to include these projects in this roundup, but maybe I’ll go over them at a later date.

This is pretty much all of the ones that I feel comfortable sharing at this point.  But just from memory, I can think of at least 6 or 7 others that have been partially done with great enthusiasm, only to meet the wrong side of a backup folder.

I think I might do a spotlight series of posts, focusing on a new idea in each, and including bits of already completed work in order to try to work through things a bit better.  But, as I’ve said earlier in the post, most of the time I can’t be arsed to complete much of anything.

Tags: Rants, Travel, Uncategorized, daily review by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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Posting has been very sparse lately, as I’ve been working on signing up for classes for the Fall semester at Allegany College of Maryland. While I only have classes on Tuesday and Thursday, I’m hoping to find a full or part time “normal” job in order to try to round out our income for the rest of the month. We’re still a good bit away from being able to stay completely afloat while avoiding credit disasters, but everything seems to be moving in a better direction.

Speaking of moves in the right direction, or at least the general direction of right, Mozilla Labs has released a video of the Ubiquity Firefox Extension. Ubiquity brings to Firefox and the web what Quicksilver and GNOME Do have brought to the desktop in terms of productivity and time-saving methods of computing.

Ubiquity makes sharing things on the web, and more generally, getting things done much easier. As shown in the video, let’s take an idea and run with it. Say I want to meet a friend at a restaurant in town, the easiest way to show him the location of said restaurant would be to email him a link to Google Maps. That takes things way out of the context we want to have, and ends up proving more work for not only me, the sender, but also for my friend, the receiver.

What Ubiquity allows us to do is take that change of context and throw it out the window. It provides an easy interface for you to include a Google Map right in your email, as well as many of the other open API sites that could be easily used to provide relevant information. This allows us to send a full-context email, in which the receiver gets a map, reviews, a shared calendar, basically anything the sender can think of right in the comfort of his email client, eliminating unnecessary legwork which would need to be done in order for all of that information to be at his hands on the standard web.

This is an amazing step in the right direction, allowing plain English into an application to accomplish tasks that only Mashup gurus were able to do in the past. If you are interested, view the video here:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Thanks to Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders for pointing this out.

Tags: GTD, Rants, Uncategorized by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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RFID Tags are all around us.  This got me thinking, why not use them around the house for cataloging and keeping track of various items that tend to get lost?  I’m sure someone has had the idea before me, but I’d like to give it a shot, and attempt at a practical application for this technology: The Library.

Now, like most adults of my demographic, I own a ton of media.  This media comes in all forms, digital, paperback, hardback, DVDs, CDs, CD-ROMs, etc.  Keeping the digital information in check is not that hard, mainly because I maintain strict standards on my home Linux-based content server.  But what about the other stuff?

Well, if one were to take a quick look around my “office”, one would notice that I’m not doing a very good job of keeping any of this other stuff in check.  In fact, if one didn’t know better, I bet one would think that a caveman lived here.

So what does this have to do with RFIDs?  Well, if you don’t see the connection here, then you need to be brained let me elaborate.

Past Systems
Let me start with past systems that I’ve attempted to use.

The first is disc notebooks and bookshelves.  While these are simple ways to get similar objects in one place, they lack a good bit of finesse, and the hassle it takes to add a new item to the set makes it all the more likely for a system of this sort to fail.  Also, when you take a DVD out to watch it, what are the chances that it will be put back into the proper place after use?

This leads us to our second system: the stack.  Now, as much as it pains me, I have to admit that I do fall into this strange pattern of stacking CDs and DVDs in unnecessarily disorganized fashions and locations.  This can lead to scratching, cracking and even altogether loss of the data that is on these disks.  The same goes for books.  What’s my problem that I can’t simply return the book to its proper place on the shelf?  Well, if you said laziness, you’re probably right.

The third system that I attempted to institute was a web-based application for keeping track of my various pieces of media.  While this worked admirably, and it bridged the gap between digital and physical media, it suffered from two main obstacles:

1. Physical Location Tracking
2. Time Consumption

How am I supposed to keep track of all these things and where I left them?  If they’re in a searchable database, it’s easy enough to discover if I own such an object, but who knows where it’s gone off to?  And who wants to sit down and copy ISBN numbers and other identifying characteristics in a system that is inherently flawed?

Solution?
Well, what’s the solution, and how do RFID tags come in handy?  Truthfully, there wouldn’t be a system that took care of the time-consuming cataloging efforts that are inherent to any system that isn’t set in motion before a library begins.  But at least we can make the first bullet point obsolete.

If we tagged each piece of media, every novel, DVD and CD, we could easily locate their whereabouts using a combination of the RFID technology and an intelligently designed database.

First, we would still have to go through all the trouble of tagging each piece of media and cataloging it in our database system. This could be made easier with programs such as Delicious Library.  Delicious Library can use a webcam to scan the barcode of your book, DVD or CD and locate it through online databases and catalog its information accordingly.  This would indeed speed up the process over hand-cataloging every piece.

Location was a big deal with the first system, and we would like to eliminate that by adding a “last known whereabouts” field to our database.  For the digital information, this would be very simple, as it wouldn’t move much within the already efficient storage solution.

Using the “last known whereabouts” field, we could start our search immediately with the location in this field, and coupled with the RFID locator, we could easily find the material we needed.  Beyond the original room, however, this could be an issue.  “Last known whereabouts” could be very useful in a lending library-type situation.  You could easily just enter the name of the person checking the material out, and you could set up notifications, or discover who has the material on a moment’s notice.

Ok, so this system isn’t perfect, but I just wanted to put it out there for future reference, or hilariously silly comments.  Think about it; this would be really awesome in your “house of tomorrow”.

Tags: Rants by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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I’ve updated the layout and design of the blog, trying to differentiate it from the original theme it was based on.  There is more work to be had, but it’s getting closer to my ideal.

Virtual Portability
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how our lives are tied to this technology that we use daily, and yet most of us don’t carry much with us that would prove useful.  At one point in my life, I was using only Windows machines, and I carried a 2 Gb USB thumb drive around with all of my important data on it.  This was enough to keep a portable Firefox installation on it, my fledgling writing career, and any of the various projects that I was working on at the time.

As with anything of the sort, it reached the end of its life, and all too soon.  I was a fool, in retrospect, for not backing things up to multiple sources.  I became a victim of modern technology, and lost with it months, even years worth of work.   I had just begun writing The Good Doctor, and already had the first three chapters completed.  This was probably the best work that I had ever done in a literary vein, and yet, it’s all gone.

I became (and still am, I admit) very discouraged about this, and kept myself from writing more out of baseless fear than anything.  Those few gems of creative flair are gone, and with it my trust in modern technology portability.

We’ve used a few iPods, one used, one refurbished, and one brand new, which was quickly broken (We are indeed on our fourth, which is still in pristine condition).  And we’ve owned three laptops since my precious data was lost.  I’ve not completely abandoned the idea of data portability, but I have certainly shied away from it at all costs.

Now
Now is a different animal in technology.  Things are increasingly easier to configure and use, at least to the technically-minded, and we are now in possession of technologies with ever-increasing power and storage.

I am using 3 different platforms on a daily basis (Ubuntu 8.04 x86_64, Windows XP, Mac OS X Leopard), and with that brings a whole lot of intricate curiosities in attempting to use my data each interchangeably.  Now, for the most part, the data is easily used between platforms, but there is hardly any uniformity between programs used.

I make due with a variety of nostra, including the wonderful Foxmarks Extension for Firefox.  This extension allows me to keep all of my bookmarks synced across platforms, but is far from the ideal in this situation.

The Future
I would like to explore in more detail the idea of platform-agnostic data and process portability.

My wife just recently purchased me an OCZ USB 2.0 32GB Dual Channel Rally2 Pen Drive thumb drive.  This affords me a lot of leeway in the realm of portable storage, without having to option for an online storage system.

Two reasons why an online storage system is not what I’m looking for:

1. I have two web servers (development and live) and have no need for an extra storage service.
2. What about the occasions when I do not have internet access to accomplish the tasks that I need?

I am going to be exploring these topics in greater detail over the coming weeks, and I hope to reach some interesting conclusions as to the pertinence of these ideas in our ever-expanding technological society.

Tags: Announcements, Rants by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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I’ve been working on getting caught up on all of the work that I have ahead of me for the next few weeks.  The anniversary vacation went exceedingly well.  The last two days were sunshine-filled, and we even got a late-night walk on the beach in.

I’ve been doing more computer support than I have for a long time over the past week.  It’s good to have that flow of cash coming in, regardless of the frustration it may cause.

I’m currently working on backing up and reformatting one PC, which will go to the owner’s house, replacing his virus-ridden PC, so that I can bring that one home to work out the kinks.

Other than that, that’s all that’s been going on.  I haven’t been able to get myself up to doing any kind of creative tasks lately, but I’m hoping that will change in the not-too-distant future.  More on this later.

Tags: Announcements, Rants by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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