I do not plan to make a frequent habit of this, but I had to try out the WordPress application for Android. The last time I remember using the mobile version was posting via an email sent to a special address that was set up for the blog. That particular medium for blogging wasn’t half bad, but I found that formatting was less than stellar.

You can often tell that I do not go back and edit ny posts unless there is some kind of obvious oversight. Previously, I had cats like Daniel Boston and Kenny Katzgrau for that jazz, it wasn’t my job in those days, and I don’t really care for it now. Kudos to those two for taking my midnight ramblings and making them legible for newspaper print.

Lately I have been trying to get back to my roots as a writer, and entrepreneur, because I feel connected much more to those industries than where I see myself now. Ideally they would both intersect, with some code and software involved, but sometimes that’s not what is in the cards for you.

I would love to be able to provide wisdom to today’s youth with the coined phrase of “take the road less travelled,” but I prefer to tell them to make money, get drunk, and party like a fucking rockstar. If anyone complains, screw them, you only live once, and be sure to write their asses off when you make your fortune.

Just remember that your fortune and legacy doesn’t always need to be valued by your monetary worth.

Sent from my Android.

Earlier in the year I installed a developer preview of Lion which did not seem to include too many features. In fact, I did not even remember that I installed this, and when it came to the Mac App Store at first it believed that I already had Lion installed. After some searching through Google and forum posts I was able to figure out how to reset the Mac App Store and get Lion downloaded. The installer kicked off without any problems. This is when the proverbial shit hit the fan.

I was greeted with a failure message that basically told me jack squat. My disk was corrupt and unable to be repaired by the Lion installation image (or the bundled Disk Utility program). This was a real problem. After some quick searching some fellow patrons suggested trying a repair installation with the original Snow Leopard installation disk. I tried this and was met with a little success – I was now greeted with a seemingly updated installer that included Safari and an updated version of Disk Utility. But to no avail was I able to actually get Lion installed on the disk. My laptop was effectively a brick.

Since I was actually busy this weekend (riding the Monster around New Jersey) I decided that I would make an appointment to see the “Genius” bar at the heralded 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York City. This was a big mistake. Despite making the appointment an hour and a half ahead, arriving fifteen minutes before my appointment, it took them a full hour to actually see me. Not the best service thus far. The “Genius” that I met with was baffled at the problem claiming to never have seen the installation do this to a laptop. Great.

What really complicated the matter was that I was using FileVault to encrypt my home directory just in case my laptop got stolen. If it wasn’t for this fact I would have merely copied all of my music, photos, and documents over from the directory to an intermediate storage device. After completing the re-installation of Lion I could copy it over and all is good. But, rightfully so, this was not the way to actually complete the measure.

Now I am writing this without actually attempting to open up the encrypted sparsebundle that my data is stored in. I have a copy on an external drive that I mounted in the Lion installer, and copied over the files from the Terminal application. The actual Lion installation (after using Disk Utility to erase my main disk) went smoothly without a hitch. All of my applications were installed and ready to go after about an hour and a half.

The only thing that remains right now is getting the sparsebundle mounted unencrypted so I can extract the data, and figuring out why my instructions for using a third party device to backup with Time Machine don’t work. It is looking like that Apple is requiring the use of AFP protocol for Time Machine backups. This won’t be too much of a problem as the open source netatalk solves this for all of you Linux users, but for people using an integrated device that runs a stripped down version of Linux it may be a little bit of a pain to get this on the device. Nevertheless, I am on the problem.

Type Aloud has been a dream of mine for at least four years now. I envisioned a writing and reading community where people will not only be able to share their stories (and poems) but also get collaborative feedback for both editing, and hopefully, print publishing. Some of the most intriguing writing I have read came from people that were not published professionally. I look forward to being able to read (and write!) much more than I have in the past with this service. My primary goal is not to be profitable: Type Aloud is a service that I want to use myself. I am a lucky man if I am able to break even.

For those of you that consider yourselves an amateur writer, or anyone who has the itch to tell a good story, please head on over to Type Aloud where you can sign up and begin writing! Over the next couple of weeks I am going to start posting some of my own work, and I will be (trying) to get some local writers to do the same. The more, the merrier.

Now its time for me to go to bed.

One thing that I have not (ever, really) been afraid of is to state my opinion. I don’t pride myself in being an idiot; I know when to keep my mouth shut even when I shouldn’t, but I also know when people need to hear what I have to say. Just more lately the person on the other end of my verbal sparring tended to push back without realizing that I was merely giving advice and not trying to start World War III. There are just times in life that you need to hear the bitter, brutal, honest truth and sometimes you really only listen to it from people that you trust. There are other times that you are too stubborn to listen at all, and then you tend to get bitten in the ass.

I have been called several names by people that do not really know me. Some people call me a nerd, a geek, very few people call me a genius, but I tend to hear the utterance of asshole more than all of them. I know that I can be an asshole if I want to be, but I believe that it boils down to people not quite understanding where I am coming from. My view on the world is quite abysmal; I am not what I would describe as religious person, and I generally do not really have any faith in the human race as a whole. Really, how could I? The world is full of death, famine, war and generally a bunch of unhappy people that are content with being exactly that: unhappy.

If I am bothered by something I am damn well going to voice my opinion. Now, I am lucky enough to live in a part of the world where I am not going to be castrated for doing so, but even those around me tend to complain and bitch more often than not. My commute home from work I hear (and see) people that have given up on life. They are tired, hopeless, shell of human beings who go through the motions because they feel as-if there is nothing left for them to live for. This is the kind of shit that makes me sick. I think one of the only things I enjoyed about not being in the city landscape is that there are generally less people, and a smaller sample of people meant that you saw a less amount of unhappy souls.

This is partially the reason why I started Type Aloud; some of the best memories I have are those where my nose was stuffed in some book. I can also admit that I did what most kids do and leafed through the pages until the end because I did not want to read the whole book if it bored me. Shit, I still do that with novels that I purchase because I realize three-quarters of the way through that it is a piece of crap. There is just a part of me that needs to know the ending of a story in order to sleep at night.

For me, Type Aloud represents a place that all of these sad souls can come home and lose themselves for a few hours in reading. Despite the people in my life that are causing problems, think that I am an asshole, or otherwise have ill feelings towards me and mine: I always have the people who spend their time and effort writing their pains, wonders and dreams onto digital parchment. That’s the kind of life that I hope for.

It is a widely known fact that Apple has been purchasing some real estate in North Carolina to house a massive data center to what they’ve told investors is for their expanding cloud services division. For the past couple of years Apple has been trying to get people to pay $100 per year for MobileMe when you can get the same services, with nearly the same Mac integration, for absolutely free from Google. Apple told its investors that this new data center is going to be strictly for MobileMe and iTunes; pray tell what exactly does iTunes need a billion dollar data center for on the east coast? MobileMe sure as hell doesn’t need it; the service is crap, and most people only pay for it because they forget to take it off their credit card after the first three months they’ve owned a new Mac.

Another point of interest is that Apple purchased Lala, a music streaming startup, and has done absolutely nothing with the service to date. Steve Jobs sure as hell does not buy companies unless he plans on using their technologies, because otherwise they would just roll their own. You can bet your dollars that tomorrow we’re going to see three things: a brand new iPad, without a Retina display, with two cameras, a bumped up processor and memory; a new take on the MobileMe offering, most likely free and including some kind of premium services ala Dropbox storage; and a cloud streaming service powered buy the Lala purchase.

If we’re lucky iTunes catalog streaming from the cloud. That would absolutely make my year. And I am about to launch a a website myself!