Extreme geekiness
There are 700 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 58 of 70).
About 24 hours from now, we should be treated to a glorious lunar eclipse, provided the weather behaves. As of now clouds are expected tomorrow night, so it might not be ideal viewing weather. Either way it promises to be very windy, so if you do brave the night be sure to bundle up.
I remember taking Hallie to watch a lunar eclipse at Jordan Lake when she was little. I don’t remember if Travis was with us then or not. With a little luck, we’ll all get a view of a wonderous celestial event.
Remember when I said our Craigslist ad was popular? Well, was I wrong … its really popular! Its not yet 6PM and already we’ve racked up an astounding 309 views of the ad! Of that, a huge audience of 41 visitors went to our Great Raleigh Home website wanting to find out more.
Today, we showed the house to three different groups. We’ll probably have at least two showings tomorrow. Maybe even an offer!
Wow, am I ever glad I decided to track the Craigslist ad for our house! In 12 hours of tracking, Craigslist viewers have clicked the ad 101 times!
On a related note, the clickthrough percentage to GreatRaleighHome.Com has fallen considerably from the 40% I reported earlier but that doesn’t worry me. When I reported the 40% rate, the ad had rolled off the front page and thus was typically found only through a specific search. Being on the front page attracts more viewers who are just window shopping. Or, they’re just lazy and clicked it mindlessly, there is that.
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Last night I got smart and put an html IMG tag in my Craigslist ad for the house. Now anytime anyone views the ad, they pull a 35-byte GIF image from my webserver. I can then track how effective the ad is.
After setting up my tracking at 9:30 last night, five people clicked on the Craigslist ad. Out of those, two of them went on to view the home at the GreatRaleighHome.Com website. A forty-percent clickthrough rate is awesome!
The Beeb tells me Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo. I think this is kinda sad in a way. Microsoft now relies mainly on its formidable bank account to compete, rather than the “innovation, innovation!” Bill Gates used to love mouthing off about.
Its also a tacit acknowledgment that Microsoft no longer leads the way: Google does. I don’t think Microsoft will ever be the same.
Why is it that even though I’ve told my Mac’s iTunes I don’t want to be alerted to every little update to it, Software Update insists on downloading 50+ MB of updates every week? How do I get that to stop?
I’m about to cancel the $10 DSL I’ve had after having tested it and deciding we don’t need it anymore. The plan now is to drop Bellsouth service entirely and go to VoIP over our cable service. I’m still mulling that change over, though.
As I perused Bellsouth’s FastaccessDSL page, I note that the FastAccess DSL Direct service – the DSL service without phone service I mentioned earlier – is now listed on the DSL page. Its near the bottom of the page, mind you, but at least it’s there.
And to think you heard it here first on MT.Net!
The City of Raleigh now makes the meetings of the city council and other boards available as streaming media hosted by the company called Granicus. These streams are helpful for getting citizens (particularly geek citizens locked in a cubicle) a look at government happenings but they are offered in a proprietary Windows Media 9 format and not an open format like Xvid, MPEG4 and the like. Linux media players like Totem and Mplayer can play the existing streams but the streams’ lack of an index makes it impossible to skip through the sessions.
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Hours before last night’s Zenoss presentation at TriLUG, a friend offered me a ticket to the Canes game happening at the same time.
I should’ve taken the ticket. My demo was anything but impressive as my laptop’s VMWare session blew chunks in the middle of demonstrating Zenoss. I hope folks got something from the talk but it was certainly not my best presentation. Luckily, the Zenoss project succeeds wildly in spite of my meager attempts to show it off.
I’ll be presenting Zenoss Core at tonight’s TriLUG meeting at Red Hat’s Raleigh offices. The meeting begins at 7PM and features free pizza (which Zenoss is sponsoring) followed by an hour-long talk about the Zenoss network management software.
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