Camperino.com goes online

Most of my friends and family like to camp, and back when I was in college I had a Geocities website called "The Camperino Website." I would post stories about camping trips that me and my pals would take and I used the site to semi-coordinate trips with people. Many new friends were made and many adventures were had. But that was
literally 10 years ago.

So, I was talking to one of my best buds about bringing the Camperino website back into existence. Maybe branching off my ericbolstridge.com page. Well, he would have none of that! (this friend does website junk for a living, btw) So, he reached out and grabbed his laptop off the kitchen counter and with a few deft strokes on his keyboard and a mouse click or two, Camperino.com was born!

I think we'll set it up much like the old Camperino website, with blog-type entries, trip announcements, etc. Maybe we'll let anyone post trips and invite folks to come along. Should be fun. I think we'll definitely have it up and running for the 2008 camping season. Yay, internets!

LinkedIn

Yup, I just got a LinkedIn account, too. So now I'm on there. Seems like a lot of stupid social networking crap to me, but what they heck, isn't that the point of this blog? I'm getting too bitter about technology and what folks are doing that I think it's crap? Yeesh, and on top of that, I'm using the word "folks."

Facebook.com

Okay, so I have a Facebook account, but never really put anything on it. It's nothing more then a basic replication of exactly what MySpace is, but I've heard that it is supposed to be more mature / professional / whatever. Anyway, a couple of my "real" friends sent me invites over the past couple weeks, so I went ahead and put some very basic content on my profile, a lil' photo and a link to my website.

I love Pandora.com!

My wife turned me on to this great online radio station / music website, Pandora.com . You tell it what music you like, and it then picks songs for you, playing them back to back without interruption. You help it learn what music you like by giving songs a thumbs up or thumbs down (or nothing to be neutral). I've been using it for a few weeks and it's fairly refined, almost always playing music that I really like (across multiple genres even!).

It'll play bouncy fun music like They Might Be Giants, then go to some nice J-pop, then to something like Primus or Soul Coughing or even Prodigy... but always something good! The feedback system is simple and fun and you can query it to find out "why" it is playing certain songs.

Web Cam software expiration

So, my Web Cam software, Biromsoft Webcam, was downloaded on a trial basis. It works awesome, automatically linking to my web server at GoDaddy.com and uploading an image every few seconds via FTP. Works great! So, of course, when the trial period ended, I clicked "Buy It!"

I paid my $29.99 via paypal to a company called ShareIt!, which I now know is a middle-man company that accepts payments on behalf of independent developers. So, they got my $29.99 and allegedly notified the Biromsoft folks that I had made the purchase. According to ShareIt! I was to receive my verification code by email within 24 hours.

Well, much more then that went by. So I emailed ShareIt! and I emailed Biromsoft. No response for over a week. So, I clicked through PayPal's "Resolution Center" thingy that sends another email... The next day I called American Express and had them retrieve the money.

Thankfully, AMEX is awesome about this stuff, so I got my money back with limited hassle, but I'm pretty grumpy about the whole experience. Here's this great software that I was fully willing to purchase, but because of some glitchy something or maybe just bad customer service, I don't get to have a web cam and they don't get my money. Such a lose-lose. Ah, well.

Web Cam on EricBolstridge.com

Hahahaha! Yeah, it's been a while since my last post, but it was worth it. I downloaded a couple software applications to see if I could get one to solve my webcam question, and I got this one from Biromsoft to work! It's set to my cheap Labtec cam and is uploading straight to my server that I have through GoDaddy! After getting the image uploading (the frequency of the upload is variable), I then had to get the HTML in there to refresh the page. That kinda sucks, because it's not a true streaming feed - it's just refreshing the webpage automatically ever few seconds.

Also, I have a slight concern that I might exceed my "upload" capacity or something like that, but since I'm not actually adding tons of images and only overwriting the same one, I don't think it will be an issue with my account limitations...

Anyway, what fun!

MySpace.com is stupid

So, I killed my MySpace page. I was getting spam and invites from random pron people. Plus, their services are redundant considering I have a blog and website elsewhere...

Maybe this is an admission of how much I actually don't get it, but I'm not into the whole online social networking thing, either, which would be the only other reason to have a page....