Tech Review

I bought my wife a Vostro 1320, which reproduces audio worse than my son's old crib mobile. Turned all the way up, Youtube is barely audible. DVDs? Forget it. If my wife wanted to maintain her routine of watching El Gordo y la Flaca while cooking for her devoted husband, she needed external speakers. The Logitech USB V-20s I have didn't seem the right solution considering that she uses her laptop all over the house and on different furniture- kitchen, sofa, bed, as well as the desk.

Logitech V20 Notebook Speakers (Black)

Husband to the rescue! (Technology is a plot by men to stay relevant to women)

Criteria: The speakers had to be of one piece and USB or battery powered. Mini-plug (3.5mm), USB, and Bluetooth were all acceptable connections: The miniplug allows one to use the speakers with cell phones and iPods. I didn't want the miniplug and USB combo- too many wires. Bluetooth was cool as it would have allowed my wife to take a call and use the device as a speakerphone. She could also have placed the speakers anywhere and listened to music with the computer in another room.

Fire up Amazon.

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Yikerz

Many civilians aren't aware of the crucial role bloggers play in our national security. Living in near-total social isolation allows us to monitor current trends, anticipate threats, and develop counter-measures. I've taken this task seriously, but the V miniseries has really injected a sense of urgency into the project. Friends, followers, buddies, fans: It's time to build the Asymmetric underground network. .

If something does go down on December 9, 2012 or there's an EMP/Red Dawn/V scenario, free people are going to want to get together; for comfort at first, then to survive, form some kind of makeshift governing authority, and strike back, if necessary. Totalitarian despots and brutal warlords would never expect their fatal enemy to organize on Facebook.

We'd slipstream into whatever nightmare society awaits us, ready to mobilize at a single tweet ("the birdie has landed").

What say you? Will you join me?

No? Don't see the need? Shiny magnets.

OK, great!

How will it work?

My friend Adam invented the very fun game Yikerz! (reviewed here), and he's generously agreed to donate three Yikerz! games to give away to people who sign up on my blog. I also have bunches of books, bumper stickers, and Cds (don't expect my Michael Bolton SACD- there's a limit to my generosity) that I can give away.

All you have to do to be eligible is connect with me on one of my social thingies. Each one is a chance to win, so if you sign up on Twitter and Facebook, you have two entries.

Then, let me know by commenting on this post. That's it! The stuff is below.

You can sign up on my blog software, here.

Google Friend Connect, Twitter, my personal Facebook, and the Asymmetric Facebook Page are right below. These are the ones I'm kind of trying to grow, as they're related to the blog. Below that is a bunch of social stuff that I've joined in the past three years. You're more than welcome to join those as well.

I'm running this until the end of January. Thanks, and good luck.

Oh, and if you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer, the Google Friend Connect link might not work. Just use the one at the bottom of the right sidebar.

Nelson Guirado

Create Your Badge

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When Pajamas Media decided to shed its blog network model- of which I was a part- I wrote why I thought it hadn't achieved the success of a Daily Kos or Huffington Post and why I was skeptical of its prospects. Their hiring of Joe the Plumber as a foreign correspondent seemed to confirm the latter, in my eyes.

After hearing Roger Simon on Prager and Medved today, I decided to check out the site.

It looked good. The organization was more functional and its Pajamas X-press blogs were easily accessed and from quality writers. I still couldn't recognize the contributors from TV or radio, and I didn't feel compelled to click on the the TV clips.

I checked Alexa (I know, dubious, but it's something). Wow! It's grown from mid tens of thousands in popularity to 8000-something, which means it's doubled or tripled its traffic. If you compare it to the con big-boys, it's a little behind Townhall, Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, and National Review Online, but way ahead of Weekly Standard and Spectator.

So, DO NOT hire me a web consultant.

I love Google and use many of its products including the Android OS in my Motorola Droid, Reader, Docs, Analytics, Adsense, and Sites. Not that a slight tilt would make me leave Google, but I thought it'd be interesting to see how the company leans, politically.

Their homepage cartoons are mostly innocuous middle-of-the-road fare, and some of the demands- a 9/11 pic, Christ on Christmas- go against its policy against religion and politics, I think. They did feature an image of that new monkey-like fossil, which some people take as anti-religious as evidenced by those Darwin car stickers (religion gives avowed atheists' lives meaning). Still, no big deal.

I decided to see their feed recommendations for Reader.

News:

BBC News - World Edition
Google News
L.A. Times - California | Local News
Breaking News
LAist
New York Times
The Orange County Register: Homepage
LA Observed
Guardian.co.uk

The OC Register is there. Fox is a notable omission. They picked the liberal UK paper.

Politics:

Daily Kos
Talking Points Memo
The Politico
Wonkette
Think Progress
washingtonpost.com - Politics
Eschaton

Foul! No Corner, AmSpec, Powerline? Weirdly, the politics section has less entries than the knitting feeds.

The Catholic blogs are all faithful to Rome. Good. The philosophy and "Thinkers" feed groups don't have too much of a bias except for Salon (they don't come to mind first when I hear "thinkers;" the last article I saw there was a woman struggling with an impotent husband). There's a Theology group. I learned that smart people don't talk about movies, but "film."

Google blocks conservative sites concerned about homosexual curriculum in school, like Massresistance.

So, just a slight bias. Could be much worse, and to that, I'm grateful. Why isn't it worse? Well, there's this reality slap, experienced during Google's infancy:

Both Brin and Page [Google's founders] had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students. However, they soon changed their minds and early on allowed simple text ads.

I must have done something to get on Yovia's mailing list because I get an email from them every couple of weeks. I decided to follow a link from one of those messages the other day, just to see who the heck they were. It turns out that Yovia's a "blog network," a collection of blogs centered around one master blog that aggregates the posts from all of the member blogs. This is different from Google's Blogger or Wordpress where blogs are completely separate from each other.

Joining a network seems like a good way to get people to see your blog immediately. A blog completely separate from all other blogs, like Asymmetric, has to wait to show up on search engines and acquire links while weblogs on a network get instant eyeballs.

The downside to a network is that you can't build your own domain name and don't have complete control over design and content (Yovia requires you to pick one of its avatars). This must be attractive to those who just want to write and prefer to avoid all of the hustling involved in standing up a new blog.

These networks also help out with Twitter, Facebook, and other hip social media stuff.

I'm glad I went the independent route, but there are times I wish I didn't have to worry about hosting issues, software updates, or any other things that've caused me grief, the three worst examples that I can think of being when Google de-listed me because somebody injected spam code into my files, the time my site couldn't handle the traffic from my most popular post ever (it would have reached over a thousand on Digg), and when Bluehost kicked me off because of CPU usage.

Anyways, Yovia came up with a blogger's calendar to help its members blog about things sure to receive a lot of search inquiries. They call it their "Social Media Calendar." It's a good idea, as it lets you can prepare blog posts a couple of days in advance. You can have them send it to you from here.

I gotta go. I only have a few weeks before "Women Rock Day."

I've criticized Little Green Footballs a couple of times (here and here), but I've mostly ignored Charles Johnson's blog because 1. Johnson used to be my boss at Pajamas Media and 2. I would glance at it about once a year.

I didn't read LGF because it always seemed the shallowest of popular blogs. Compare LGF to a blog like Powerline, and you'll notice that while the smart folks at Powerline offer smart commentary; LGF, at least from the posts I've read, gives us little more than "Look at this!" extended tweets, with zero original thought or analysis; self-promoting nothings; and bad music. That he would only allow people to register on certain weekends and the rich-mistress-hand-me-down "open threads," was obnoxiously self-aggrandizing to me ("self" is the operative word here).

Johnson's thoughtless stream of anti-Muslim news offended even this Christian conservative.

The only reason people read him, I concluded, was because he was one of the first blogs, and he helped make known the fakery involved in the Army letter promoted by Dan Rather and the faux photograph used against Israel by Palestinians.

LGF is now a liberal or, more accurately, an anti-conservative blog now.

I'd like to forward the idea that LGF really hasn't changed at all: Instead of dumb posts against Muslims, Johnson now posts dumber posts against conservatives. All he did was change hatreds.

I went there today and read this today:

I’m kind of obsessive when I get interested in a subject. (OK, not “kind of” — “definitely.”)

Uhh, yeah.

Then, he offers this intellectual trifle explaining why he left conservatism (my commentary inserted):

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