Gnomedex

I'm spending this weekend absorbing Gnomedex #9. For those not familiar with Gnomedex, it's an annual conference held in Seattle every year that is dedicated to the social interaction side of the internet.
Chris Pirillo has set up this conference for the past 9 years. It keeps getting better and better.
I find much of the information presented at the conference makes me rethink how to better interact on the web.
I urge readers to tune in and enjoy the conference at http://chris.pirillo.com/live/

Thoughts on Social Networking

Time to share a few thoughts on social networking. Please realize these are thoughts and one thought is not necessarily related to another
Facebook I've been on Facebook for a couple years. It's a fine service for staying in touch with friends and family. However I don't find it useful for finding and communicating with people that have a similar interest in technology as I have. I also find Facebook to be a "closed" environment. It doesn't have the ability to migrate well with other networks. Mark Zuckerberg and associates have come a long way with Facebook's 15 billion dollar empire, but I think it's time they rethink their business model and their integration into the rest of the social web.
Twitter I find a number of good qualities in the Twitter world. The main fault with Twitter is anyone that follows more than a few people will miss many tweets due to the sheer volume of traffic generated. I find it useful to let followers know what is going on with my blog as well as our streaming radio station. The biggest down side of Twitter is their inadequate infrastructure. Far too often the system gets overloaded or goes totally down. Often at critical times.
FriendFeed I've recently started using FriendFeed and like many aspects of it. Friendfeed was recently acquired by Facebook so I'm not going to get too involved in it until I see how it is going to be integrated into the Facebook environment.
A TinyThread This is a new player on the block having only been launched a few days ago. I like the simplistic approach the creators have taken. It should be fun to watch how they advance. Click here to check out A TinyThread.

My latest computer build

After I had a major computer failure, I set out to build a replacement for it. The computer is used for general browsing, web site maintenance etc. I'm not into gaming or other processor intensive things so I set out to build a budget computer. Being impressed with the Asus pc900ha netbook that I've had for about six months I began investigating the Intel Atom processor that most of the netbooks share. I discovered that Intel's latest Atom processor is a dual core running at 1.6 ghz. Unlike most other processors, the Atom's have to be purchased mounted on a mother board. There are a number of mother board manufacturers offering boards with the Atom N330 processor. I went with the Intel D945GCLF2 Atom motherboard.

To say I'm impressed with this board would be an understatement. The typical computer builders concerns about cooling are almost of no concern as this is a low power consumption board that runs extremely cool. The best part of choosing this board is it's $89.95 price from Tiger Direct.
I added 2gb of DDR2 ram also from Tiger Direct.
For a hard drive I recycled the 80 gb Sata drive from my dead computer.
The Atom board can be mounted in just about any case as it is a 6.5"X6.5" ITX board. I decided it would look dwarfed in a traditional tower case so I opted to build it in a new case. I used the 12.75"X8"X7" Ark PI-01 case available from Newegg for $44.99. It is a good choice for something different from the "typical" computer case. Performance is far better than I expected. It runs much faster than the 2.8 ghz P4 with 2 gb ram that it replaced. I will post a further evaluation of this mini-machine once I've had a chance to run it a few weeks.I'm already convinced that it's a good computer for the minimal money I have invested in it.

New computer

I built a new computer today. No, it's not the latest and greatest power pc. It is a basic web browsing type computer.
The best feature of it is the cost to build it. I will be doing a post describing it here on the blog real soon. It's a mini pc yet very flexible machine.
Stay tuned for more. Geez I love technology.