Because I Require Stimulation

Tired of popping slotting a disc into your PS3 every time you want to watch a streaming Netflix movie or TV show? Soon you won't have to, as the online video rental service has plans to make Netflix Instant Streaming a native PS3 application by the end of October.

In delivering his company's Q2 2010 financial results, CEO Reed Hastings stated, "Before our next [earnings] call in October, we expect to be launching a major new version of our Sony PS3 user interface which doesn't require a disc, and is dynamically updated continuously with the latest Netflix UI improvements."

So, there you have it. When contacted for comment, PS3's Hulu Plus app said that it "welcomes the competition for media streaming on PS3 ... and prime placement on the XMB."

[Thanks, Vallanthaz]

Netflix on PS3 going disc-less by October originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 20:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We, the people of this blog, would like to remind you that the possession of a single digit size waistline is not necessary to be considered beautiful.

Also we have a note here from the American Institute of Sexy and it says “Fuck Redbook.”

Thank you.

All shapes, sizes, races, and faces. 20 images below the break.

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All shapes and sizes because one’s waist size doesn’t not equate with one’s beauty. (32 images, some high res.)

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I just want to make sure I understand what this game is supposed to be about. It seems to involve a virtual asshole, which is an attachment I’ve yet to see for the Wii.

What’s tbe number one thing that’s relatively easy to do (no climbing Mt. Everest) that you haven’t done?
First, let’s get one thing straight. The only way you’d ever find me on Everest or any other mountain summit is because someone shot me and drug my corpse up there. Climbing mountains and skiing down them just doesn’t trip my trigger.

But what haven’t I done that’s relatively easy? I’ve never learned to play the harp, and I really want to. I want to learn how to play one of those big, classical harps. I don’t think it’d be all that hard for me since, from what I’ve seen, they have much in common with a piano. I really think that, given a couple of months, I could become pretty decent on that thing. The reason I haven’t is quite simple, have you seen how much one of those friggin’ things cost?

Do you believe that eyes are the windows to the soul?
Sorry, this may sound a bit unromantic, but I think more than anything, one’s passions are the windows to the soul. What one does tells us far more about them than their eyes ever could. How often did we get to see the eyes of Ray Charles or Roy Orbison? Yet would you say these people lacked soul? Hell, Ray Charles is the very definition of soul.

If you look in my eyes, I really have no idea what you’ll see. They’re kind of greyish and probably just a tad bloodshot. Would they tell you about my music? Would they speak of my art and writing? Would they say anything about the two wonderful children I have which I absolutely do not deserve? I don’t think they would. So instead of looking deep into my eyes why don’t you instead come over, have a beer, I’ll play some music and we can watch my kids dance.

Why did you start working in a library?
Honestly? It was an accident. When I graduated high school I was a fully trained professional theatre technician. I specialized in stage carpentry, follow spot, and fly gallery. My aspirations were to do nothing but that and to eventually become a stage manager somewhere which would support me through college because, by then, I knew I wanted to be a historian.

But stage techs only work when there’s a show in town which might only be two or three times a month. It’s good money, but you can starve to death on it. So I needed to find steadier work. My dad worked as a facilities maintenance guy at the local library since I was three years old, so I practically grew up in a library. They needed someone to put books away and I needed a steadier paycheque, so I applied. The lady who interviewed me and became my boss had known me since I was a small child, but she hired me because I was the most qualified and gave the best interview.

I wasn’t supposed to like it. It was just supposed to be a job.

My inner geek was intrigued. Here was a use for these computers I loved so much. A good friend of mine was the IT manager for the library, and soon I was helping him with minor issues and network concerns. As the library upgraded their software, I got to see what a new world this library tech could be as things got connected to this growing thing called the Internet.

I was hooked. Specifically I got hooked on library circulation and technology. Fortunately, a lot of new technology is geared toward circulation. So as the years went on I did two things, I learned as much as I possibly could about library technology and I tried to figure out ways to make it work in the circulation department. I’m still doing that, and probably always will be.

How many blogs do you have?
I have four personal sites that I manage on my own. My personal blog where I write about anything that’s interesting to me at any given time is called Distant Early Warning. I named it after a song by a progressive rock band called Rush. When I was moving to Arizona, I drove the U-Haul while my wife and father in law drove our car. Since the U-Haul didn’t have anything in the way of a CD player, I put a small CD boombox in the front seat and listened to Rush albums all the way from Washington to Arizona. It was kind of an experience.

Probably my best known blog is Dioecism Squared. Dioecism as a word refers to a species where compatible sexual organs are found on different members of the same species, usually what we’d call male and female. While this may seem like it’d be true of most organisms, it’s not always the case. There are types of snails who can change their gender and be male or female. Some creatures reproduce asexually, so there’s no need for a sexual organ. Anyway, as you might be able to figure out from the all the talking about sex and sexual organs, the blog itself is about sex, the adult entertainment industry, and pornography in general.

Since I’m a librarian and completely into how technology and libraries can work together, I’ve got a library and information culture blog called Not All Bits. The name comes from a quote by one of my biggest heroes, Carl Sagan. He once said “All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.” With the huge amount of information on the Internet, televisions (some of which are now connected to the Internet), DVD players (some of which are also connected to the Net), video games (ditto), and beyond, it’s interesting to see what people give value to in terms of where they get their information from and how it shapes them. More than anything else, that’s what that blog is about.

My fourth site really isn’t so much a blog, even though it runs on WordPress. It’s called Hyperlinked History and it’s really the site where I put up my history shows. See, I’m working on two shows right now. The first, Hyperlinked History is a show about the surprising connections between historical events and their effects on the present and the future. The other show is still in process and I hope to debut it very soon. It’s called Historionics and it’s about the history in our entertainment, like the true history behind a story in a video game. Or what really happened with the Inglorious Basterds. So like I said, that’s not so much a blog as it is just a website you can go to to watch my shows.

I’m also a fairly regular contributor to LISNews, the Librarian and Information Science website.

How do you find all your NSFW links?
I get a lot of stuff from a lot of different places actually. I’m a huge fan of places like 4chan and 7chan. These websites are truly a sort of Internet underground where people unafraid of images and language might go to see what other people are doing. Both of these sites are examples of image boards, something started by another hero of mind, Nishimura Hiroyuki. He created something wonderful in Japan called 2channel. It was something different, a site where people could post images and comments and they could do so with complete anonymity. No need to create an account, just upload a picture and make your comment. Websites in America started doing the same and 4chan and 7chan are only two of many.

Beyond that, my RSS reader contains somewhere around 50 different feeds from various sites who post some rather fine pornography. Thanks to the wonders of RSS, I typically read through a couple hundred sites per day (not all of them pornographic) all from the comfort of Google Reader. Other things come to me through serendipity and still others come from friends. (Yes I have friends who send me porn.)

Usenet is also a major source of good things for my NSFW blog. For all the nerds old enough to remember, there’s this part of the Internet called Usenet where you can read “news” like an old school bulletin board system. Usenet has lots of specialty groups for images and multimedia. There’s tonnes of content and good things there, you just have to know where to look.

What’s a belief that you once held when you were younger that you have since reversed, if any?
At one point, I believed in God, and that’s God with a capital G. I went to Sunday schools and youth groups and all of that stuff. I want to make it clear that I wasn’t going because I was forced, indeed I can’t remember my parents ever going to church except for the occasional wedding or something. No, this was of my own volition and mostly related to a social need. Some of my good friends were Christians, so I decided to try hanging out with them in their own environment.

It was when I started to witness and experience the basic ignorance inherent in most, if not all, religions that I started really examining my beliefs. One preacher or pastor disagreed with another. One pastor actively discouraged people from reading the Bible, ostensibly because of “issues arising from interpretation.” In other words, you might learn something that contradicted what he said. They spoke against evolution, which made no sense to me since, being a naive kid, I saw no conflict with a creator and taking time to create something. I wrote music, but it took time. I could draw something, but time passed while I did. The act of creation took time, didn’t it?

“No, God just flipped a switch.”

“But what of all the evidence that says…”

“Now you’re speaking like an unbeliever, you shouldn’t talk like that.”

“But if He just flipped a switch, then why did it take seven days? Why didn’t he just do it all at once?”

“Shhhh…”

So I read the Bible, cover to cover, and I learned a lot. Indeed, I learned far more than any of the church authorities seemed to know.

Then along came other doctrines like homophobia, racism, misogyny, and an overarching sense of vileness that if you weren’t a Christian, then fuck you. Actually it went beyond that because most churches believe not only that non-believers were scum, but if you believed but weren’t part of my church, then fuck you too. The misogyny was the biggest surprise because I saw it coming from women too.

The last straw was the youth pastor who said that new age music was the music of Satan. Keep in mind, I’m a musician and a new age composer and I have been since I was in my teens. New age music is evil? So Yanni, Shadowfax, Suzanne Ciani, Vangelis, Deep Forest, and Enigma are evil? And since I play, compose, and enjoy this kind of music too, I am also, therefore, evil?

Fuck you. Fuck you, you ignorant son of a bitch. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. I can’t find a single goddamn passage in the entire Bible that said new age music is evil. Indeed, the Bible really doesn’t categorize any music in any meaningful way. So, in the end, you stupid fuckers are just making this shit up, aren’t you? And if you’re making that shit up, who knows what else you’re making up? Gays are bad? Who says so? The same book in the Bible that gives instructions for the selling of slaves? Sex is dirty? But what of the Song of Solomon and all those begats? There are shitloads of begats in your Book, so someone was doing some heavy fucking.

So I left. I tried other religions before finally deciding that there is one thing I can count on, and have counted on, to direct me and help me in my times of need: Science. When I had a bleeding episode as a kid, the very episode I was diagnosed as a hemophiliac – God didn’t save me, science did. When a friend of mine in high school got cancer and went through radiation treatments and chemotherapy and is now cancer free it wasn’t God who killed the cancer. No it was chemotherapy and radiation treatments, two practical things wrestled by humans from the laws of nature through experiment, skeptical observation, and years of testing.

What belief did I once hold that I’ve since reversed? Well, I used to be a Christian but now I’m a human. You know, you grow.

If you weren’t doing what you are doing, what would you be doing?
You know, I’ve thought about that and I can only come to one conclusion: If I wasn’t working directly in library circulation, I’d be working for some kind of company that made technology solutions for library circulation. For instance, we’ve got this spectacular machine made by FKI Logistex that takes items, checks them in, and sorts them into bins. In the 16 years I’ve worked in library circulation, it’s the first labour saving machine I’ve ever seen that actually saves labour.

The company that makes it is based in Aarhus, Denmark. Their techs, salespeople, project managers, and consultants go all over the world talking to libraries and librarians to see what they can do to help them. Of course they’re also looking to make a boatload of cash because this machine may be a lot of things but cheap isn’t one of them. They’re well paid, certainly better than I am. They’re also handling another aspect of what I love, which is library technology. It’d be an interesting job.

Is there anyone you would kill in a heartbeat if you were guaranteed to get away with it?
Not really. I know that’s not a very interesting answer but I abhor real life violence. I have no issues with fantasy violence. When it comes to video games, I’ve killed more people than any historical criminal. I’ve shot civilians, military people, and yes I’ve even killed women and scientists. All of them were the creations of a computer and the mind of a video game designer. I’ve got nothing against fantasy violence like you see in horror movies or action flicks. That stuff doesn’t bother me at all because I know that after Jason Vorhees hacked that woman apart, the director called CUT! and she got up and got ready for her next scene. I know I didn’t kill that scientist in Half Life 2 because, when I loaded the game from a checkpoint, the scientist came back and I chose not to shoot him that time. I know that I didn’t kill any innocent people in Modern Warfare 2 because after I was done hosing down an airport with an automatic weapon, they came back when I reset the game. Indeed, they were wearing the same outfits.

None of that stuff matters to me because it’s not real.

Have you ever seen the real effects of a .45 caliber bullet on a human torso? Have you ever seen the damage done by a .50 caliber round on a person’s head? Have you seen the victim of a stabbing? Have you ever really looked at a crime scene?

I have. At one point I was thinking about becoming a CSI and this was long before CSI made it a cool occupation to have. So in college I looked at crime scene photos, real people who died real deaths and usually they spent their last moments experiencing real fear and real agony. These people, regardless of who they were, were someone’s sons or daughters. They were someone’s best friend. At one point, they were just a cute, cuddly little baby toddling around a room and playing with a toy. And there they laid, on the floor, throat opened by the razor of a serial rapist and murder.

Kill someone? To be honest, I doubt I could.

I know I’ve been a little scarce around here, but that doesn’t mean that Hyperlinked History is gone. Indeed, I’m working on a new episode as we speak, but hey, I’ve been working on other things too! Among them is the look and feel for this blog. I found a theme I really like and I’ve switched most of my blogs to it. I love how the background image is easily changed so just by clicking a couple of buttons, I can give any of my blogs a fresher look from time to time.

But that’s not all. I’ve also been working on a new show!

The name of the show is Historionics. It’s going to be a shorter form than Hyperlinked History and that means I can have something for people to see while I’m working on the larger show. Historionics deals with the real history behind some of our biggest entertainment mediums: video games and movies. There are tonnes of video games and movies with plots and stories based in history and Historionics will be taking a look at what that history is.

Here’s just a quick slice of what’s up, namely the opening credits to the show. But I think you’ll get an idea what’s coming soon!

You know what’s weird? Thanks to the internet and my profession as a librarian, I’ve developed some kind of following. It’s not a large following by any means. I don’t have an entourage nor would I ever want one. Yet I communicate with people on a daily basis who know absolutely nothing about me, who I am, and why I am the way I am. So while I was browsing the web looking at ideas for writing and boring things like that, I came across an exercise. Basically it said to write something about yourself on a personal level like someone was interviewing you. Who are you and why are you the way you are and that kind of thing. It sounded like fun, or at least something different than what I normally write, so I figured out a few things to write about.

Then I had a brainstorm. All of these folks I communicate with on Twitter might have some interesting questions for me. Surely they’d have ideas for questions far better than anything I could think up. I sent out a quick tweet and, sure enough, I received a flurry of questions and ideas for this little project. All of them were good, some of them were funny, and a few really made me think.

So here are answers about me. All of these answers are truthful, though I suspect they will have the standard sideways approach to them that I normally use. I’ve tried to write seriously, or at least as seriously as I can and, frankly, I just can’t do it. By my very nature I’m not a serious person for reasons which may become clear to you over the next few sentences here.

Name, age, and standard physical description are boring. I’m a guy and I look like a lot of other guys out there. I’m not particularly handsome nor am I horrendously ugly. I’m not a great athlete, but I’m not a sloth. In short, I am about as average as you can get in the physical stature department. If I have anything that stands out, it might be the fact that at only five foot five inches (165 cm), I don’t stand out as being very tall. That said, let’s see if there’s something more interesting here.

Attire
Normally, I wear cargo pants and loud Hawai’ian style shirts. Footwear usually consists of the same shoes I go running in, or occasionally a pair of SWAT boots which zip up the side and are just as comfortable as my running shoes. If I’m wearing name brand anything, it’s an accident of that name brand being on sale and I bought it because it was a good price. The only exception to that are my Nike shoes because they’re the best running shoes I’ve had. Comfort is the name of my fashion game. The pants are baggy and comfortable. They also have lots of pockets to hold the load of junk I normally have on me at any given time. Right now, I’m toting an iPod, cellular, keys, wallet, headphones, notepad, change, paperback book, and a receipt to Chipotle. I should probably toss that receipt.

If you get this reference to grooving, then you're probably a nerd too.

Spontaneous Grooving
I think life should have some kind of soundtrack. I’ve been a musician all my life and music just comes to me whenever it wants to and it seems to arrive often. I’m a keyboardist, but I also play drums. This means that, when someone approaches me at the front desk of the library, there’s a good chance I’m bopping along to something in my head or I’m literally drumming out a rhythm on the desk. I will do this at any time and it’s not uncommon for me to start bobbing my head in a staff meeting as I’m silently keeping time to a song that only I can hear.

Geek
When I was ten years old, my parents got me a Commodore 64 home computer and it changed my life. See, to get a Commodore 64 to do what you wanted, you had to learn a little BASIC programming because the front end on the computer was a BASIC interpreter. It was really a revolution in my way of thinking and living, but not for the reasons you may think.

I’m a hemophiliac, which means my blood doesn’t clot as quickly as normal people. What this meant is that I couldn’t take part in activities normally enjoyed by boys my age. Contact sports were out, so I couldn’t play baseball, basketball, soccer, or football. Parts of physical education class were off limits to me due to concerns about generic injury, joint related injury, or any other injury. So I was sidelined for those classes that the other boys thought to be the best part of the day. Because of that, I was teased, bullied, and picked on because I was the worst of all things you can be in a public school; I was different.

I felt powerless. Some of the teachers thought I was slacking off for no good reason. Others thought I was just wimpy, and the kids readily agreed. It was during elementary school that I learned the hard lesson that no one gives a good goddamn about your grades and reading level if you’re not going to play sports.

But with that computer I could do things. Type a few commands and POW! it did what I told it to do! Do you know what that feels like? To have that kind power over something when you never had any before? No drug in the world comes close to that euphoria I felt when I, the different kid, could make a computer do what I wanted not because I was bigger or stronger, but because I learned something.

Later on I got my first PC. Thanks to geeky friends, I learned how it worked and how it could be harnessed. I discovered I liked making computers talk to each other and I learned how to set up, manage, and operate a computer bulletin board system. Then along came the internet and the entrancement stepped up a notch because I wanted to know how this stunning new thing could be used to share information and ideas. So while I rarely programme anymore, I still get a kick of logging into my system and learning something new every time I hop online.

*****

So that’s a little bit of what I came up with for this. I had other ideas, but they got folded into the things people asked on Twitter. Like I said above, the Internet amazes me on a daily basis, and the fact that I could ask people all over the world “Hey, if you wanted to know something about me, what would it be?” blows me away. So here are the answers to the questions I received online.

A/S/L (Age/Sex/Location)
I was born on 31 August, 1976 which makes me 33 years old at this writing. However, I’m pretty sure that I stopped maturing around the age of 16 and I’ve been faking it ever since. I’m male, and I live in Gilbert, Arizona and work in the nearby town of Queen Creek.

What is your name?
Daniel Loran Messer. There’s a tradition in my family centred on the name Daniel. The name goes back through my heritage so my mom, whose middle name is Daniele, continued the line. Strangely enough, my mom’s obstetrician thought I was going to be a girl so my name was supposed to be Daniele Lorraine Messer. Things didn’t work out so well for that when I was born with a penis, so my parents made a slight change to the genders normally affiliated with those names.

What is your quest?
You know, I’m not really in search of anything more than decent coffee in a small cafe in Munich. I’ve already had coffee at a place right across the street from the Library of Congress and, for someone who digs on coffee and libraries as much as I do, that was an experience bordering on the orgasmic.

What is your favourite colour?
Purple. No I’m not making that up.

How do you get your head so shiny?
It’s not unusual for me to shave my head. There’s no big reason behind this so much as that I am a lazy bastard when it comes to how I look. I don’t want to comb my hair everyday and try and manage it throughout the day so I go the short route by removing it all together. When I shave my head, I really go all the way. A set of electric clippers does most of the good work and then it’s shower time to wash off the hair and take a four bladed razor to my scalp to finish the job. The reason my head is so shiny is quite simple, when my head is totally devoid of hair, it’s naturally shiny.

Now if I can only get that Yul Brenner look going, I’d be set. I think I’m getting close because when I put on a big ass set of headphones, I look like Lobot from The Empire Strikes Back.

What is your favourite body part on someone else?
Among the other things I do, I’m an artist. I’m not a particularly good one, but when I draw something it’s usually readily identifiable as the object I wanted to draw. As a result, I tend to look at everything on a person. No, this is not a cop out. If I’m trying to regard someone as a subject of inquiry or as a model for a picture (even if they will probably never model for me), I look at everything. The difference is that I gauge the balance between parts and features. Everything contributes to the whole and while some aspects of a person may detract from my limited ideas of beauty, others may add so much that things cancel out.

What I notice most readily is when things are out of balance on a figure. This happens a lot in the adult entertainment industry. You’ll see a female performer who stands around five feet tall, yet she’s got D cup breasts. Obviously she’s had breast enhancements, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But for me, the physical aspect of her figure is completely unbalanced and I know that I’d have a hard time drawing a convincing portrait of her because people would think I drew her breasts too big.

For me, I like it when one thing just barely stands out from the rest. There should be something that catches the eye, but doesn’t throw itself in your face. As an example, look at actress Kiera Knightly. She’s hot, but she’s got a smallish chest along with a rather unpronounced butt connected to some lovely, but fairly standard legs. But damn, have you had a good look at her eyes? They don’t steal the show from the rest of her sexy figure rather than become the centerpiece for it.

Pet peeves?
George Carlin once said that he didn’t have pet peeves he had major, psychotic, fucking hatreds. That’s how most of my so called pet peeves go. I have a very low tolerance for willful ignorance, which is why I don’t get along with creationist type people who think the Earth is only 6,000 years old or something stupid like that. For the most part, the commonly displayed traits of those people make up for most of my peeves. They’re homophobic, something I cannot tolerate since a good many of my friends are gay, bi, or lesbian. They’re racist, a trait that is so outdated it should die out like the Australopithecus.

While I openly profess my laziness, I confess that it’s mostly a facade and that I just don’t understand true laziness. How can I be lazy when I’m writing and shooting an online show, playing in a library band, volunteering at a school library in addition to working at public library, writing for no less than four blogs, working on a book, raising two kids, running four or five miles per day, composing my own music, and more? The reason I say I’m lazy is that I enjoy doing all of those things, so I don’t really see them as being work. Seriously, I enjoy working at the library almost as much as I enjoy playing a game on the PlayStation 3.

So when I see someone sitting around doing fuck all, I don’t understand. Get up,  get going, and develop a passion about something, dammit!

Sniffing around online I’ve seen some of the most mixed reviews to a new Apple product that I believe I’ve ever seen. Some people are calling the iPad a stripped down netbook while others are joking that it’d have been better if it were smaller and could make phone calls. Others think it’s so cool they’ll buy two of them and a few others are writing about how it’s a decent product if it’s what you’re after.

I think the truth is somewhere in between all of this. I don’t see it as a stripped down netbook because it doesn’t even conjure up the word netbook in my mind. I have a netbook and it doesn’t do what the iPad does and the iPad reciprocates on this. I see it as a smart tablet, a paper notebook that doesn’t use paper and happens to have an internet connection. I’m most assuredly going to get one, but that’s because I fit that demographic of geek where the thing will actually be useful to me.

How?

Well, as a guy who blogs a lot and about a lot of different subjects from information to science to entertainment to tits and ass, you will find that I have a hobby that is secondary to my blogging passion: I collect a vast amount of content for my blogs.

One of the reasons I bought my netbook was to be able to blog anywhere with a WiFi connection and it does a very decent job of that. However it’s got some drawbacks. It’s kinda slow, not really slow, but sometimes Firefox just sort of stops working while I’m typing and I have to wait for everything to sort of “catch up” to what I’m doing. Multitasking, while available, is a bit of a pain for the same reason. I’ll open Firefox (I write almost exclusively in Google Docs.) then I need to look at a picture on the hard drive, so I minimize Firefox, wait for it to “catch up,” open an image viewer, wait for that, look at the image, switch back to Firefox, wait for the operating system to realize that I’ve done that, wait for Firefox to…

You get the idea.

Then I got an iPod Touch. Now, I only write on the netbook, that’s all it’s for. I’m going to eventually put Chromium OS on it so I can do nothing else but connect to the net and Google Docs and that’s it. For content collection and pre-blogging management, I do almost all of it on my iPod Touch. When I have some downtime, or I’m on a break, I’ll pull out the Touch and do some fiddling around. I open up Safari and surf to a few websites. I’ll find stuff I want to write about or post on a blog. I’ll collect it, route it, and eventually I’ll write a blog post or something. I don’t need to multitask six or seven different things. I don’t need a keyboard. I don’t need a huge screen. All I really need is a couple of free apps and a workflow.

Everything happens because of my workflow.

So here’s how a blogging nerd can collect, generate, and publish content using an iPod Touch; or at least how this blogging nerd does it.

First, before I start, let me say one thing. The ability to manipulate data and information with my fingertips is something so elegant and so natural for me. It’s a huge benefit for me per my own personal tastes. If you’re not into touch screens and what they can do, then this isn’t going to work for you. For me, the ability to guide and control my device without the aid of an external keyboard or mouse is so wonderfully useful, I feel hampered by a traditional desktop with its mouse, keyboard, separate monitor/tower setup. That said, here’s a typical way I find and save information for blogging.

I use two free apps readily available from the App Store on iTunes. The first is the Evernote app from the company of the same name. I use Evernote as a method to transfer links, notes, images, and whatever else from my iPod to any computer I care to write on. The second programme I use is the WordPress app. Naturally I have that app set up to publish content to my various and sundry blogs all of which, except one, are based. The odd blog out uses Tumblr, and I intend to install the Tumblr app, I just haven’t done that yet.

Okay, software set up is done, let’s go. I sit down, because it’s a bad idea to do this stuff as you walk around, and I pull out the iPod. I’ll bring up Safari and start browsing a few sites to see what’s up in the online world. For this narrative, let’s say I start at Reddit. I find a story that looks interesting and, after reading it, I know I want to blog about it. From here I can do two things. I can copy the link to the story, switch to the Evernote app, and paste the link into a note that I set up specifically for links like this. When I get home, I can pull up that note, hit the link(s), and start writing. Or I can tell Safari to e-mail the link to me. Obviously, I have my own information in my contact list and this is a quick and easy process. I’ve been saving more to Evernote recently just so I don’t fill up my mailbox with stuff from me.

Now, there are times when I have a simple post to make. This happens a lot when I find an image I like and want to throw it on a blog. So let’s go back to Reddit and, oh look! Here’s a cool image, and here’s another. I’ll put one on the adult blog, but I want to write something about the other one when I get home. Going with the one I’ll post right away, I simply save it and now it’s stored in the Saved Images folder on my iPod. Dropping out of Safari I’ll open up the WordPress app and select the proper blog. Using the app I can compose a post, attach the image, and publish it. The image I want to write about later will also get saved, but then I’ll hop into Evernote and upload it as a Camera Roll note. I suppose I could e-mail the saved image to Evernote, but I figure that’s using one programme to interface with another programme when I don’t really need to.

I’ve actually used the WordPress app to compose full on posts with images and text and the like. I don’t mind doing that at all really, it’s just that when I’m using the iPod for these things it’s because I’ve got a few minutes to do something and don’t really have the time to write a whole lot anyway.

To me, the issue of multitasking doesn’t even enter into it. What would I be doing on a desktop computer? I’d be flipping in between programmes. I’d have a browser open, my blogging client (I love Windows Live Writer.), perhaps an image viewer, and probably some kind of music playing in the background. Except for the music, which is a continuous thing, I’m still only going to be using one programme at a time on the computer. I’m not simultaneously doing something with the blogging client and the browser. I’m using one or the other and flipping between them. To me, I’m doing precisely the same thing on the iPod Touch. I’m flipping between programmes which I’m using one at a time. I will grant you that while I’m flipping between multiple running programmes on the desktop instead of closing and opening different apps on the iPod, it’s also not like the Touch apps take a long time to open. Flipping between them literally takes only a couple of seconds. (I know because I timed it.) While I may be busy, I’m not in that big of a hurry.

So for me, and my workflow, doing all of this on a similar device with a much larger screen is damned near irresistible. So while some people are grousing about the iPad, the truth is that I’m getting more done on an MP3 player than I normally do on my netbook. So while Apple’s new toy isn’t for everyone, it’s definitely for me.

Luscious and lascivious leather loving librarians lend lexicons at the local library.

I still play with Legos and I’m 33 years old. Sure, sure, I say that I’m playing with them because my son plays with them and we’re playing with them together. The thing is that Legos are so cool, I’d probably play with them anyway. I’m thinking about using Legos to build a dock for my iPod Touch. I’d sure as hell be a lot cheaper than buying one.

Anyway, when I build stuff out of Legos, you can usually tell what it is. This is a helicopter, that’s a truck, and so on. But it’s a multi-coloured helicopter and the truck looks like it was painted by colour blind hippies. In other words, I just use bricks to build things and the colour isn’t all that important. For some people, it is, because they’re building something really special and cool.

Like this guy, who built a rebel Nebulon-B Frigate from Star Wars. Not only is it massive, but it’s incredibly well detailed too. Amazing work and far better than anything I could do.

She is obviously going to take after her father in this respect.

She loves the blue guy from Yo Gabba Gabba.

Faceless woman print I found at Target.