automaticable

Hey loyal readers! I know it’s been a while (Holy crap, 3 months?!?!?) since our last post, but that does NOT mean that we Wegnerians have given up on you.  We’ve just all been swamped with school, work, social lives, or lack there of.  There are some changes that you will notice to the site as soon as the New Year, which includes a brand new Tab dedicated to me!  Why me? Because #1 I’m awesome, #2 I’m special, #3 I have a class project with my new internship that requires me to keep record of what I’m doing (I’ll post more on this later on).

So, I’m sitting here thinking, and I realize I only have about 32 more hours before I’m off on a flight, leaving the U.S.A. to go be in warm, 85 degree weather during some of the most brutal snow storms Chicago’s had in quite a while.  The family and I (yes, all automaticable bloggers) are taking a GLORIOUS trip down to Jamaica for my parent’s 25th wedding anniversary.  This is a trip that has been in the makings for about six months now, and I’m as gitty as a school girl.  With a brand new camera, and skin as white as the snow we’re leaving behind, I’m fully prepared for a 7 day, all expenses paid vacation in the Caribbean.  Our resort includes a poolside bar, sailboats at our leisure, a beach, and endless amount of sunshine.  I don’t want to brag or anything, but it’s supposed to be 85 degrees EVERY day that we’re there.

Now, being it the holiday season, we were torn at first, at what to do about “The Big C” (Christmas), but in the end, we decided…..we’re skipping Christmas.  Yes, I know, shocking, because every year we have Christmas Eve at our place, and 45 people will all be disappointed this year because Santa will be coming down the stairs this year, instead of the elevator.  The fact that we’re skipping Christmas this year, is kind of difficult.  All my friends are asking me what I want for Christmas, and the only good answer I have come up with is “A Tan.”  I’m saving a bunch of money for not having to buy any gifts this year, but I can’t seem to put a close to 2008, even with New Years on its way.  Without Christmas, my year just doesn’t seem to be complete.  Oh well, Jamaica will still be fun, and I’ll be tan for my arrival in Orlando.

So here’s the deal, starting January 7th, I’m leaving the cold once again to live in Orlando, Florida for 5 months.  I have been offered (and I graciously accepted) an internship at Walt Disney World.  I will be working in Quick Service Food and Beverage, but I won’t know which exact park or where IN the park until I arrive down there.  The new tab I was talking about is for the Coop-Internship side of things, where I have to keep in contact with a faculty member at my college so they know I’m actually doing something down there instead of just enjoying the warm weather.  I’ll try to post ATLEAST once a week, and there will also be pictures to support my posts.  This is an exciting thing for me, because it’s an opportunity of a life time, and will give me direction and motivation on what I really want my future to hold.  With that being said, it’s now close to midnight on Saturday and I only have 30 more hours, before my flight leaves for Jamaica.

A Bon Voyage to you all, as well as a Happy Chrismahanukwanzakah with a Jolly good New Year!

In this new age of social networking and being able to find just about ANYTHING on the internet (Thanks Al Gore!) it seems like your typical websites like Myspace and Facebook are where you can basically find anyone and their mom, literally.  I have experience with both websites and have watched both grow and deteriorate over time.  I’ve still noticed that I spend the majority of my time on websites like these, and it got me to thinking, “What is it about these websites that make me so attracted to them?”

Continue reading “Social Networking: Is it for you?”

As I sat there on a Friday night, the only logical thing that came to mind to do was to play stupid 2D games with a couple of my closest friends: my brothers.  The time was 9:26 and I was happily downloading a new game just so I could have fun and be sociable.  Granted this is nothing new to me, because I am an avid gamer.  I tend to like the more interactive games such as first person shooters and MMORPG’s .  My favorite first person shooter game(s) are anything in the Half-Life series, mainly Counter Strike, Counter Strike: Source, and Day of Defeat.  For the MMORPG side of gamer life, I have a new addiction to a game called Minions of Mirth (MoM) that my brother downloaded and bought.  For all you people out there that don’t know what MMORPG stands for, it is an acronym for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.  Games like this include Everquest, Asheron’s Call, Minions of Mirth, Final Fantasy (series), and World of Warcraft (Warcrap in my opinion).

My gaming career goes back quite far; I’m talking back into the first stages of apple computers, back with the computer with green screens, using “floppy disks” that were actually floppy and the size of your average sandwich you’re going to have for lunch.  Granted these games I started out with were all educational and not really for personal amusement, but trust me, it wouldn’t take many more years before I started to find games that I really enjoyed.

As you could probably tell, I was never really one to play games on a game system all day because that just didn’t appeal to me.  I really liked the way a PC felt and played games.  I want to say my gaming really started to emerge once Windows ’95 came out.  I started out with the cheesy solitaire, minesweeper, and a few games of free cell (even though I still to this day can’t figure out how to play that game).  From there I was introduced to games such as Need For Speed and Doom, and that’s when my career really took off.  I progressed into more strategy based games like Age of Empires, Myst, and Tribes.  From there I moved onto the MMORPG’s and the first person shooters.

After that stage my love for gaming focused more on the first person shooters and the MMORPG’s because I loved the fact that you can interact with people from all around the world who had the same passion as you; to grab a dessert eagle, semi-automatic P-90, 2 flash grenades, an HE grenade, and just storm up the middle to surprise the terrorists and keep them from planting the bomb at bomb site A.  (For those of you who didn’t figure it out, the game described above is Half-Life: Counter Strike).

I don’t really know where my gaming career will lead me next, all I know is right now I feel as if I have a second set of friends that I meet up with every day, all around the world.

Well, two weeks and three days away until I leave on the trip of a lifetime with some of the closest people to me in my life.  Most of them you have heard from if you’ve read automaticable for a while.  Kyle Wegner, Scott Wegner, Joe Wegner, Stacy Friel, Lindsay Gerke, and I will all be road tripping down to the Smoky Mountains in Bryson City, North Carolina. This trip should be a lot of fun because it’s our first real big vacation where our parents haven’t been watching over our shoulders and there to guide us in what we should and shouldn’t do. My brothers and I have been camping and being outdoorsy for as long as I could remember, but we’ve never done anything of this caliber without our parents planning and them being there. But we’re finally making it our own and going down a path that has yet to be ventured by all of us. Granted we’re using a lot of the techniques that we’ve learned by observation through the years, like cooking teams, cleaning teams, planning out our expenses to a T and how much each meal SHOULD cost and what not. It’s kind of exciting to see how it will all come together in the end. So far we don’t really have many adventures or excursions planned for our trip, all we know is we have a cabin next to a lily pond, six people, two cars, and a weeks worth of time to have fun and enjoy everything that the Smoky Mountains and North Carolina has to offer us. If any of you Automaticabalites have been there and have suggestions for us to do or see, please, leave a comment and let us know! I’m sure when we return, there will be plenty for us to tell about our adventures and photos to go along with our delightful adventure.

As of yesterday, I am now being syndicated by Ubuntu Weblogs. This is pretty exciting for me because I’ve been reading others’ blogs there for quite a while, and now I’m finally able to become a part of it.

For those of you reading from Ubuntu Weblogs– hello! A little about myself– my name is Scott Wegner, and I’m a student at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, studying Computer Science. I’ve been using Ubuntu for about 2 years, and have already started converting my family members. I enjoy posting about Ubuntu news, tutorials, and projects that I’m working on (more on that later). You’ll also see an occasional post on music, politics, and life in general. My blog, automaticable, is actually a culmination of thoughts and posts from my brothers and I. I’ve only syndicated my own content, so check out the blog to read the rest.

For those reading from automaticable, you shouldn’t really notice a change. If you’ve never read it, I suggest you check out Ubuntu Weblogs– there’s a lot of really great content there.

We just added a new WordPress plugin here on automaticable so you can use OpenID login IDs. If you’re not familiar with OpenID, it’s a framework that allows you to use the same login information on a variety of webpages.  From the OpenID site:

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.

You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.

So what does this mean for you?  Well, if you like to leave comments here, you can claim them with your OpenID login, rather than actually registering for automaticable.  This is convenient if you’re a casual visitor and like to leave comments on a variety of blogs– you can use the same login on any blog that supports OpenID.

If you already have a login on automaticable, you could associate your OpenID login ID with it, and enjoy all the same benefits.  Check out your profile page for details.

Staying true to my promise for this week, here is another daily post!

Although much of what I enjoy throughout the internet eventually makes its way to the readers of automaticable, a very large chunk of what I find useful or entertaining hasn’t found a home here.  That doesn’t mean, however, that these gems are lost.  Much of what I find across the net is through the many blogs I read daily.  My RSS reader of choice is Google Reader for its flexibility, portability, and speed.  If you aren’t up to speed on RSS readers, you can find out what all the hubbub is about here.  Anyway, Google Reader recently added a new feature to the “Share” function: comments.  Instead of blindly “sharing” a story, I can now add a small comment about what I found useful in the post.  This adds a huge amount of functionality and usefulness, especially when sharing with a large community.

How does this help you?  Well, for one, if you use Google Reader already, you can become my “friend” through your gmail address.  My name is simply kyle.wegner[at]gmail.  Add me and you will automatically be subscribed to my shared posts.

For those of you who do not use Google Reader (or any RSS reader, for that matter), you can also check out my shared posts at this URL.  Bookmark that page if you enjoy it, as I tend to share stories quite often.

You may notice that many of my shared stories have comments on them directed at a specific person (Scott, I’m looking at you!).  I have taken the functionality of comments and integrated them into a Twitter-like conversation.  If I respond to someone else’s shared feed, you will see their original comment as a blockquote at the top of the post, directly under my comment.  If this sort of functionality is popular throughout gReader, I am hoping they start integrating a reply function so I do not manually have to quote other people’s comments.

Some other quick notes for those of you who want to experiment with the “share with note” function on Google Reader.  First, you have the ability to change the original post in any way you see fit.  This may be a blessing and a curse, as changes are not marked, meaning people could change the original text and the readers would never know it was not the original post.  What is nice about this, though, is you are able to use most HTML tags, so if you want to add a link, bold or emphasize text, or blockquote a response like I do, the functionality is there.

So check me out.  If you frequent Google Reader and share posts often, leave your gmail address in the comments (or email it to me) and I’ll subscribe to your shared posts as well.

Hey faithful automaticable readers. I wanted to apologize for the lack of posts for the last week or so. Things have been crazy in my neck of the woods between work & social events. I wanted to make this up to you (and publicly motivate myself to do so at the same time).

I am publicly committing to post a minimum of 1 story per day for the next week. That might not sound like much, since most blogs are updated fairly often, but with my schedule it will be quite the task.

So all of you awesome fans, stay tuned for a flurry of rants, raves, opinions, and maybe even a few useful posts. This next week should be a good one for automaticable.

If you usually read automaticable through an RSS reader and have wondered why we’ve been so quiet lately…well, we haven’t really! WordPress recently upgraded their software which broke our RSS feed. To be specific, the WordPress 2.5.1 update broke all of the links pointing to our RSS feed don’t work, except /feed. Unfortunately, we’d been forwarding this to FeedBurner and Pheedo for all sorts of RSS magic. For now we’ve just disabled the FeedSmith plugin, which seems to fix it.

In layman’s terms– we’re back! If you are wondering what you missed, the list is below.

• Kyle wrote an article listing the Top 12 SOE Firefox Extensions. Check it out, it’s not just for SEO.
• He followed that up with a post regarding letters written to a journalist posing as a little boy from convicted serial killers.
• Kyle also joined Twitter. Let us know if you are on Twitter too!
• Following that was a review of the Iron Man movie that just came out.
• Brian opened the blinds right before finals began.
• Kyle announced his new SEO project revolving around Gibson guitars.
• Scott finished finals and is happier than a clam.
• And finally, Kyle reviewed the new Death Cab for Cutie album, Narrow Stairs.

So spend some time catching up. You know we missed you as much as you missed us!

A few weeks ago I posted about how I had a couple of exciting announcements to make. Since then, 1 of the deals has fallen through the cracks. I was sad at first, but it has actually turned out to be a good thing for me in the end. The second announcement, though, is still going strong and I am ready to talk about it more publicly.

When I made the announcement I had just learned of a new SEO technique that sounded very promising. It is something that has very little risk, but presents a huge reward if implemented correctly. I am being vague here for a reason; if I gave away too many specifics on top of a link to the new site I am running, someone could come in and take away my competitive advantage. I’m sure any of you SEO gurus could probably figure out the gist of what I am doing by studying the site for a while, but the technique is fairly intricate and focused, so it wont be immediately apparent.

So what is this site? Well, it is a blog (well, not really…) called Review: Gibson Guitars. It fuses my interest in music and guitars with my experience with SEO, and is starting to look promising. I only have a handful of posts up there right now and I am working on getting a few more up soon. My goal is to make the site a great destination for people interested in Gibson guitars and guitar buying in general. So if you are interested in what I’ve been working on lately, or want to learn about guitars in general, go check out my new site about Gibson guitars!