Posted on: January 1st, 2010 by Famous Phil
At the time of beginning this post… it is 12:01am Eastern Time, January 1, 2010. My first words are: Happy New Year! and Happy new decade! Hopefully this decade will bring a lot more fortune than the last one 
I just want to quickly look back on the last 10 years of my life and the funniest videos of the year that I’ve found.
Ten years ago from today, I did not know much about a computer. I can assure you that I did not know how to turn one on, and I only had a slight clue about what the internet was. At the time, I had high hopes of becoming an electrical engineer and I loved playing around with circuits. I was also much younger and had a lot to learn (obviously). I also wasn’t entirely sure about what all the Y2K stuff was all about, so it didn’t really affect me. Finally, a last tiny tidbit… I have spent *every* new year of my life in my own bedroom here at home. I might be a few feet off from the same position each year, but I’ve basically in the same spot. This is only the third year of my life that I’ve been up to witness the new year come in.
So, how does it feel? I doesn’t feel any different… its just another day. For some people, its an iconic day I suppose, being a new year and all, but for me, nothing has really changed. I will continue to live and will continue to do what I do every day. The only difference is, I will have to get over the annoyance of not remembering to write 2010 on any documents I create for at least the next few weeks (probably about a month or two in reality).
2009 brought me 8 hard drive failures in various machines that I’ve worked on, 2 being my own. It also brought some bad fortune with the passing of my grandmother. On the brighter side, it brought Windows 7, Microsoft Exchange, XM Radio, 2 new Laptop computers, a new server, and the magic of Verizon wireless high speed internet here at home. It also brought me a wonderful job at my college and lots of new knowledge about computers. Overall, 2009 for me was a decent year, especially considering the killing I made on Ebay selling Michael Jackson dolls (I sold quite a few within the first day after his death). Of all the stuff that 2009 brought, perhaps the biggest was a new and improved FamousPhil.com. Within the next few weeks, FamousPhil.com will change slightly again to become more smooth in color transitions
In 2009, I watched a lot of amazing video. I think its time to share some of the more memorable youtube links of the best videos I saw in 2010! I’m also going to leave this blog post here. I hope that your 2009 was as enjoyable as mine and that your 2010 brings good tidings Enjoy!
Ancient Modem that still works (seen on Yahoo for several weeks back in June, 2009)
World’s Fastest Speed Reader reading the original Health Care Bill – Cavuto (Fox News)
Glen Beck – Turtles on TV (You may have to get half way through this partially edited clip)
Next up is from a movie that was hilarious (Monsters vs. Aliens). I also liked High School Musical 3.
I discovered something about geiko!
And finally, the video that combines it all together perfectly!
To another great year! Thanks for stopping in!
Tags: 2009, 2010, Happy New Year, New Year, video
Posted in My Site, Personal, Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: August 30th, 2009 by Famous Phil
It has been a while, but I’ve been moving back to college and such and haven’t really had the time to write new blogs about technical topics. I hope that after this next week is through, my normal college schedule will be finalized and any bugs in the FamousPhil calendar / countdown system will be fixed (yes, there are bugs 
). This is a blog that I drafted about 4 months ago, but haven’t really finished until now, so I feel that now is an appropriate time to open the topic then provide video / photos later. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: component, computer, engineering, fun, home automation, ir, php, serial, web development, x10
Posted in Personal, Technology
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Posted on: July 7th, 2009 by Famous Phil
First, I think I should put in a plug for exchange hosting. I got exchange 2007 up after deciding to get a bigger server and host a few more people. Exchange 2007 is a bit more bloated but has nicer spam fighting features and has a much nicer interface in browsers like firefox. I’m still looking for a few people to help me pay for the server. I put all the details on codecall in this thread: http://forum.codecall.net/hosting-registrars/18780-exchange-2007-email-hosting-offer-personal-server-looking-4-more-people.html. If you’re interested, feel free to drop me an email
Now onto the rest of my blog (and the main reason why I’m even blogging)
I really think its time I take the time to update other parts of my site. My blog gets a lot of my attention because it is fun to write when I get a chance to write about stuff I care about!
Lets start with why am I taking this sudden initiative to update the rest of my site. A few days ago, I was talking to John who has a low page rank (PR) on his blogging site at johnciacia.com. John wants to increase his PR. I currently have a much higher rank than he does but I’d like a higher rank too. Higher PR means more popularity and higher search rankings for common key words.
Why would I want a higher PR? Higher PR means my popularity will go up on search engines and I will get more traffic to my site. I really want to get 10,000 people reading my blog within a few years. I feel this is a very obtainable goal because I tend to write 2 to 3 very technical articles per month that aren’t easily obtainable elsewhere on the web. I constantly find the Microsoft knowledgebase is insufficient at helping me fix my own problems, so when I come up with a solution elsewhere, I tend to post it either here or on Adminreference.com. I have looked back on AR quite often to find my own solutions to recurring problems due to corruption, etc.
Now time to move onto my photo gallery
I finally got around to putting a few photos up from the same old photos forever. I have yet to filter out the spam comments, but they will go eventually. Within the next week or two, I plan on posting a few of my nature photo galleries that I’ve kept on my computer now for quite some time. These include a fox that comes to our house quite often and a rare shot of baby skunks.
Anyways, I would like to point your attention to my latest gallery: http://famousphil.com/gallery/?level=album&id=4 (You can get to this from the main page by clicking the photos navigation link). This is of a practice barn burning for the Humphrey Volunteer Fire Department (no website available). Our Fire Department is very small and right down the road from us. We had a barn on our property that was falling down and we felt it was time to burn it before someone got hurt in it from beams falling, etc. Anyways, I got a few really cool shots and thought I’d share them Look forward to more nature photos in a few days.
Tags: barn, burn, burning, department, email, Exchange 2007, fire, Google, humphrey, page rank, pr, search, seo
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Personal, Technology
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Posted on: June 26th, 2009 by Famous Phil
I got a comment about if I was going to touch on this at all, so I might as well.
Thriller, and a few other of his songs that I can’t name were really good songs. I guess I do like the pop genre the best out of all the genres out there. Other than what I’ve heard from his court trial a few years ago, I didn’t really pay much attention to him.
Last night I learned of his death while watching the Fox news Glenn Beck program.
Shortly after hearing about his confirmed death, my father suggested we list some of our dolls on ebay of Michael Jackson. About 5 minutes after listing a set of the Superstar of the 80′s series dolls (4 of them) in the original unopened boxes, someone hit the buy it now for $650. Its quite amazing to me how people will pay this, but now we are that much richer I think my father said he paid 10 bucks for the set in the 80s is a really great turnaround compared to the bank. Anyways, since I have listed several other memorabilia, and it was going hot for the first 3 hours and now the excitement is gone and the market is flooded, so I guess I won’t be getting outrageous profits anymore from his stuff, but I’m still quite happy. Looking back on this, I have learned that most buyers buy collectables on adrenline caused by death of the doll’s character.
Anyways, thats all I have to say on this topic I’m trying to decide on what my next blog topic will be. I’m guessing it is going to be something on ubuntu xen administration since that is my next major project
Tags: adrenline, collect, collection, doll, ebay, glenn beck, michael jackson, superstar of the 80's
Posted in Personal
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Posted on: May 25th, 2009 by Famous Phil
The title pretty much says it all but I thought I would take a few moments of my day to remember all of those who have died fighting for our country. Hope your day is as relaxing as mine will be
Tags: memorial day
Posted in Personal
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Posted on: April 25th, 2009 by Famous Phil
The other night, I was working on installing a new RSS feed reader that is similar to Google Reader. I first found out about Google Reader from a friend (Chris) here at my University over a lunch. I then looked at it and discovered that it is much better than going to each and every blog site and reading the posts on each blog directly. This reader basically gathers all of the full text blogs and puts them in an email interface format, making it extremely easy and painless to read a bunch of RSS feeds while on the go (for me, on my windows mobile smart phone on the bus going to class or during dinner when I’m too lazy to get up and return to my room).
Anyways, I am not a real fan of using everything Google when I have an alternative that runs in ssh and doesn’t require an additional login (or saved password). I found 2 alternatives that run in ssh, one is snownews and the other is newsbeuter. Both of these programs are extremely simple and do exactly what google reader does, but they run in the SSH window like Pine or Pico does (Pine is an ssh email client, and pico is an ssh text editor). Snownews is not really good at reading rss feeds because it looks at the description tag of RSS 2.0 feeds which only puts a brief outline of the feed on the screen. Newsbeuter is much better and places the full content of a post on your screen like Google Reader does.
So, what does newsbeuter look like?
Here is the Main Screen, a main listing from a single rss feed, and a single blog post from an rss feed:
Newsbeuter is a great program, I’m willing to put up with no images, videos, and sometimes some gargled text to save time. As you probably know, I use public keys for ssh and and to get to this reader from my pine email takes a matter of seconds and no mouse movement. I’m slowly working on getting my instant mesengers to ssh, however we will see if that ever materializes.
So now onto my rant about partial vs full text feeds.
When I was configuring newsbeuter, my main concern was, “would it read a full feed that is in the rss file, or would it just show the description cropped by [...] like snownews did”. Because I compiled this on my server from source, I didn’t want to waste effort installing dependancies (a compiling problem) if it wouldn’t work in the end.
Luckily, it did read full rss feeds, except for John’s blog. I asked John what was different about his blog, and he told me he turned off full text rss feeds. His reasoning is, rss feeds make it very easy for someone else to post dynamic changing content on their own websites. While I totally understand this concern, I really wonder if it will kill off readership to his site, which I know he might eventually want to make money off from some day. I know for sure that I want famousphil.com to eventually make money for itself although I’m still debating how to put ads on it without hurting the design (which will be changing in a month or two again to make it easier to read).
I have looked at several blogs debating rull text vs partial text feeds (they aren’t hard to find), including the following:
- http://econsultancy.com/blog/018-rss-strategy-full-text-vs-partial-text-round-2
- http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004717.html. Although this site says the problem was fixed, I think it grabs my true feelings about partial feeds
- http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cartoon_partial_text_rss_feeds.php “So nowadays those sites only get my attention when the teaser looks absolutely irresistible — and that’s a bar that’s high and rising.” Thats how I feel (although I have yet to move many of my favorite feeds into newsbeuter.
For me, I will probably keep his blog on my feed list and look at his teasers. I will probably not actually read any more than his teasers though (mostly because I don’t have time to go look at these other sites that feel too smart to post a full feed). I don’t use other people’s content for my blogs normally without citing then adding significant material onto their blogs, therefore, I don’t consider myself a blog theif either. I do however visit other sites if I feel like leaving a comment
Finally, with wordpress, if you use a “more” tag, this material will not show up on your blog feed. I will likely begin using this a bit (only after my site becomes eye friendly) because I do have long blogs and sometimes that material is an aid, but not necessary to know everything about my blog. If people want to read the aiding material, then they can then visit my site.
As for this blog, always expect a full feed, if there isn’t one, I will do everything I can to help. Comments are appreciated as always If you host with me, feel free to use these programs I mentioned as they are installed on the main server 
Tags: blog, content, description, feed, full, newsbeuter, partial, pico, pine, rss, snownews, ssh
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site, Personal, Technology
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