Lee McKusick

When I watch a movie, it’s usually because I want to be entertained. I want to immerse myself in another world, another plotline, another story. And when I come back from that other place, I want to feel better, more positive, or at least more thoughtful for the experience. I want movies to leave me with a smile for some reason or another.

I just finished watching No Country For Old Men, and I can honestly say that I found no form of escapism. I’m no more thoughtful because of it, it’s certainly not a happy movie, and I feel no positive repercussions from it.

I’m certainly not smiling…

As the title implies, it’s week 3 here at RIT. It’s chaotic as ever, but ultimately, it’s turning into a lot of fun. A quick breakdown of classes:

So far, this quarter is going great. My classes are cool, I have free time (sometimes, hehe), and the weather is finally starting to get warmer.

More updates to follow.

Which tech industry superstar do you most resemble?

The Technosailor Self Importance Test

I myself am:

most like Chris Pirillo!

You are most like Chris Pirillo. You dominate your brand and do quite well in marketing it. However, you go out of the way to place the focus on other people as much as possible as a decision on power and authority. You may have many followers, readers or fans but you rarely let this distract you from your mission and focus.

Nice. I think it fits me. =)

Who is everyone else most like?

One more thing I forgot to mention:

If you use SMS (texting) on your cell phone, you can update Twitter from your phone. This is especially handy for those times when you see or overheard something that you want to let people know about, but aren’t near a computer.

Just go to Settings > Phone & IM and follow the instructions.

Just be sure your SMS plan is adequate. It’s nuts how addicting Twitter can be!

Here’s an email I sent to my brother, who just got a Twitter account, and I thought I’d share it cause it has some good info.

Hey, so you’ve been Twitter-ificated.

Couple pointers for you:

1. Personalize it. Add a profile picture, a background image (Something cool but unobtrusive) , and fill in the short “About Me” blurb. Twitter is all about extending your presence to the web, and personalizing your Twitter page will tell people that see it that you’re an actual interesting person and not just some faceless robot.

2. Check spelling. It’s paradoxical: for a forum where space is so limited, some space-saving shortcuts are not received well. For example, it’s generally a bad idea to use l33t speek on Twitter. I say generally, because if the situation allows it and you can do it with tact, that’s one thing, but most of the time, use reasonably correct spelling. (Grammar is just slightly less important, I’ve noticed, but people should still be able to read and understand what you’re saying.)

3. It’s been said in many places on the Internet, but never use Twitter as an IM client. It’s rude to broadcast your private conversations and keep the however-many other people who are following you out of the loop.

4. Find some people to follow. Twitter is all about interaction with people. One of the cool things is that it will import your Gmail contacts and look for people who are already there. It’s under find and follow. (Of course, that’s assuming you’ve added people as Gmail contacts.)

5. Some technical tricks in Twitter:

    a. @ - If you put an @ in front of a Twitter username, it references that name. For example, if     you put @leemckusick in you post, it creates a link to my page. If you put it at the beginning, that’s a reply.

    b. Favorites – Find a Tweet you love? Favorite it by clicking the star next to it.

6. Have fun! Twitter is meant to be fun and to facilitate social interaction. Enjoy yourself.

There’s much more advice that could be given about Twitter, and you can find it all over. This should be good to get started. Happy Tweeting!

Gateways to knowledge. Pathways to financial destruction.

If we’re paying so much in tuition, why add insult to injury with the added weight of textbooks. It’s like getting punched in the face, and then having a bee sting the bruise…

Thanks to Mom and Dad for covering that, along with the other expenses recently.

The next incarnation of Internet Explorer is here, available in beta form for public download.

While I haven’t gotten a chance to mess around with it much, I did install it and set it up initially. One thing that intrigued me was the ability to import settings from other browsers, namely Firefox. It even detected the extensions, and had a little button to find similar ones for IE. Which brought this reaction:

“IE8 has extensions?! Niiice. (Even if they are behind the curve.)”

The main bad thing I did notice is that conditional comments are now going to be a bit screwy. Because of IE8’s new standards-compliant status, a lot of the “IE fixes” are no longer necessary. So if a conditional comment targets IE in general, then you have some “fixes” applied that shouldn’t be now that IE8 works like it should. For example, the layout on my current homepage for IE, Netflix, is somewhat messed up.

More on this and other IE8 issues to come, when I play and poke around with it some more.