Kevin Littleton Blog

Hug a bag

2010-02-05T20:30:59Z

I starve for new experiences.

I love being able to explore new avenues of thought. I love trying new foods and talking to new people.

I love to explore nature. And I love listening to new music.

Put that into a big bag and hug it. I do.

Rainy Day

2010-01-21T20:25:55Z

It's a lovely rainy day. I've got my music up way too loud and my computer faces the window and the rain drops are barely audible over How the West Was Won. This pleases me.

Not that I don't like the rain. I love it and look forward to it. Soon I will be out in the thick of it.

I need to consume my music much more visually. I would like to buy more concerts and have them running during the day and night instead of the bullshit that is television.

Television sucks your brain dry. But I do like the rain. Happy, happy.

lala.com failed me

2009-12-17T07:15:07Z

I was in love once with a music streaming service until it fell into the hands of Apple Corporation and sold out for not even that much.

Perhaps you have not heard of lala.com but that is OK because it does not even matter anymore. I wonder why I must tell this tale of sadness but maybe due to the fact that I'm finishing up finals week and floating around in a perpetual state of bliss that I want to get this one thing off my chest.

lala.com (not capitalized because of their awesomeness) was a service that I fell in love with. There were many reasons as to why I fell so hard but the biggest was probably the fact I had a netbook. lala.com is a music service that lets you buy music for dirt cheap but you can only listen to it when on their website. At 10 cents a song who wouldn't take advantage? We're all connected to the internet 99% of the time anyway so what could be the downfall? The other neat thing was the fact that you could let lala scan a folder on your hardrive and upload all your music to their site so you could listen to it anywhere, on any computer with speakers.

Doesn't this sound good? For someone that uses a netbook most of the and likes to move around a lot it's genius. They even had an iPhone app on the way.

Apple bought the company simply for the engineers and for a ridiculous price. I couldn't have been more upset. What was to become of my beloved lala.com? Of course I'm sure the iPhone app is now no more. The reason for this being that Apple wants to dig their big toe into the cloud music arena with iTunes.

I do not want to go to iTunes.com and stream my music. Why? Because I much rather type in lala.com and not be bogged down with iTunes and Quicktime ads. I love the underdog but when the underdog is no more and now a major corporation I get sad, very sad.

Is Jolicloud a Solid Choice for Netbooks?

2009-12-12T19:23:22Z

I stayed up very late last night installing and configuring Jolicloud on my netbook. Actually the bulk of the time spent was not on the install, that only took about 10 minutes. The majority of the time was spent on learning and just having fun with it.

What is Jolicloud?

Jolicloud is a lightweight netbook operating system. It's totally free and installs in minutes. Once installed you are able to boot up your computer with a choice of either Windows (or whatever you have on your netbook before) or Jolicloud.

Jolicloud is sort of in the same vein as the Google Chrome OS but rather than only having web apps to power your system, Jolicloud is able to run native clients or programs.

Strong enough for full time?

I am on my netbook full time with a backup laptop of ancient qualities (I think it was built by the Mayans). So, I'm considering making Jolicloud my default or main operating system. I don't miss much from Windows XP. Most of my time spent on the computer is on the internet anyway. I already used a lot of online applications to do my day to day work and I don't use Photoshop or anything heavy.

Jolicloud is simple, lightweight and fast. I had some strange bugs going on with Google Chrome under Windows XP but they disappear under Jolicloud. Apps are a breeze to install and the library is pretty solid. Of course not everything is there but some substitutes are actually pretty nice and fun to play around with.

Jolicloud makes my netbook feel young again. I'm going to give it a few days and see if I can make the switch.

If you have a netbook you should definitely play around with Jolicloud.

Torn Between Firefox and Chrome

2009-12-10T03:32:07Z

There are a lot of reasons why I love Google's Chrome browser. I like anything Google so it already earns bonus points but other than that fact it's blazing fast and light. It's a perfect for my netbook which I'm using full time.

Firefox on the other hand has a special place in my life. I love it too. It was my first browser after IE and when I discovered it I also discovered that I was a geek. I never looked back and have enjoyed my life as a geek ever since.

There are only two reasons why I am on uneven about what browser I should double click on when I start my computer in the morning. Firefox does three things that Chrome will not:

load up my school's student portal
play Quake Live
run Scribefire

I have a feeling that now that Chrome Extensions are out two of those will be cleared up at some point. Until then I guess I will have to teeter todder on the fence and open up Firefox when the need arises. My god, life is just so difficult.

Testing out Scribefire

2009-12-09T07:36:38Z

I'm taking my blog in a new direction and Scribefire is just one of the new things I'll be using/doing to make my experience as a blogging more fun.

So this is a test of how the font looks, the text size and how fast it is.

To be honest, you should probably just ignore this post.

Radio Today

2009-11-25T06:28:05Z

I was listening to my favorite classic rock radio station today and discovered something that made me want to give up on radio for the final time. Of course I love the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana but do they belong on a classic rock radio station?

Today, I was blessed with "Californication" and "All Apologies" on the classic rock station. I was deeply disappointed in hearing them after listening to Jimi Hendrix. Granted these songs are awesome and will continue to grow in awesomeness as time goes on but at this point I would not call them classics. In another 10 years? Yes.

On the radio there is only one other option for coolness:

I support a little under powered radio station here near my house. It's a great little station with some great classic rock, even featuring some songs that I've never heard before within the classic rock format. A shock, right?

The station sounds like I'm listening to AM even though it's FM. It sounds like I hooked up an old transistor radio from the 50's in my car. But the music they play is mostly things that I have never heard of which, for a classic rock type station, is epic.

They even play live stuff, yes, win!

I hate mainstream radio and whenever possible I will try to pop a CD in or use my iPod. However, when I grow tired of those or when I forget to charge the iPod (yes, geeks forget trivial things) my little under powered, crappy sounding local radio station is king.

When it comes to radio I don't think it can get anymore geeky than listening to a local radio station that nobody knows about. Geekdom is great!

Pay no attention to this little string of characters - WXX5WSSX3FQ6 - it's a geek thing. #technoraticrap

A short rant on George Lucas

2009-11-20T07:16:32Z

I was going to do this on Twitter but decided it would take just a bit more room.

A conversation with my brother tonight spawned this, hell yeah real life to Internet!

The original trilogy is an epic piece of work right? I don't think many would disagree with me there. It had it all, the acting (minus Luke - bah-humbug Mark Hamhill), set design, story, lore, action, laughs and pew pewing spaceships.

If only we saw the patterns occurring starting with Return of the Jedi. If we saw this one pattern, maybe we could have stopped old Georgie boy but no - we were blinded by the "holy crap I love my Star Wars!!!!!! - mom, can I get this?" (insert picture of boy holding Darth action figure). What is the pattern?

Fucking, made up little creatures.

Yes from the beginning there was the wookie (who you should always let win), the sand people, the droid peddlers (don't trust those doods), the droids themselves and a trash monster. Well, actually shit - it was there from the start.

By the time Star Wars reached the third film in 1983 with Return of the Jedi the universe was filled with all kinds of crazy dumbass little monsters- er, creatures. I always hated the Ewoks by the way. Just annoying as hell and for such small creatures why the hell would they live so high up? It's like those guys who drive really big trucks - yeah.

Then the special edition of Star Wars came out and Lucas added a very small scene into the first movie when you see Mos Eisley. It's like 2 seconds long but shows a small droid like creature batting at some nuisance that was a little flying creature. What popped into his head that made him think, "hey more little funny creatures will be a nice touch here?".

You should have left Star Wars alone Lucas. It didn't need a touch up. Fuck CGI. The scenes of the Death Star in the first movie were perfect (made out of model battleship parts) and the black lines around the X-wings and AT-AT's in Empire were just fine (non-use of a green screen).

George Lucas has an obession with these things and I guess thats ok right? I mean, we looked past it for a lot of years before coming to a conclusion that Star Wars just may be taken a little less seriously. Obviously I don't take any of the new ones seriously. Maybe that one scene near the end of Episode III...

I wonder what he'll do with the 3-D versions. How will he squeeze more little creatures into them?

Just wanted to say that George Lucas is a very talented man and this aspect of his legacy is really no big deal but seriously if I see more little creatures - Kevin mad.

Today's Geeks are not Yesterday's Geeks...

2009-11-17T05:59:20Z

...and certainly are nothing compared to what is to come.

The current social norm for an average High School student is a Myspace account and for the college student a Facebook. Boom, done, a geek.

With an online profile, kids these days have an active social life on the Internet and what was once known as "out of the real world".

Growing up with a full menu of electronic devices readily available and easily digestible equals a new generation of super geeks.

If the young people of this generation are so "switched on" and "plugged in" what is going to happen to the kids of the next generation? Picard here>

Are we creating a machine (society) that teaches our young that it is ok to sit and consume behind a computer screen? When I say consume I mean to say, electronically "eat" information and learn through megaBITES. Is the information we are processing as a collective even the right information anymore or is it too bite sized and false?

What happens to the next generations when they are all learned from the last which staggers from the information that was brought to them from the Internet?

To me, honestly, this is a scary thought when the Internet is able to teach our kids instead of us (the parents, teachers, elders) teaching us what is right, wrong, morally ethical and socially prudent.

New generations are having to rely on information based around 140 character "tweets" that are shrunken, compressed and in the process changed and given new directions. These new microBITES are shared with millions and resubmitted in a new smaller form that totally contradicts what the first one stated.

Information being readily available in an extremely fast manner is not always the correct information but as the generations grow up and new ones take over they will want it faster and faster.

I get mad when my downloads take longer than they should. Drive to a store for a product? Hmm, what is that now?

Benefits of a Clean Workspace

2009-11-07T03:09:18Z

There are lots of reasons as to why you're workspace/room/house/living space/cave needs to be clean and organized. Here are my top three:

Elevate mood

Yes, the biggie: mood! When you're in your workspace or house and the place is clean and tidy there is no better feeling. Being able to actually find your crap is a plus too.

No lingering negative thoughts

This ties into the whole mood thing too but I felt it needed a section of it's own. When you are trying to get your work done, it really puts a damper on your mood when in the back of your mind you are constantly thinking about having to clean your crap up. That's not something I want to be worrying about, how about you? If you can clean it all up that is just one less thing to have to think or worry about. How about that in pipe...

Now you have more room to set down your crap!

Well, holy sardine Batman, your place is picked up, trash can is emptied and there is actually space to set your crap down when you get there...

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