david giesberg dot com

And they said it couldn’t be done… Here is your “weekly” Friday Link Post, there are some really interesting reads in here this week - check out my Google Reader Shared Items for for previews and more cool links from yours truly. Also, don’t worry, I am still working on that shameless bribery that I promised - that’ll probably be this weekend.

Onwards to the linkage!

• Strategy Was Based On Winning Delegates, Not Battlegrounds Washington Post
  Now that the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination is over, the Post has a fascinating article about the strategy that the Obama campaign used to beat the Clinton campaign machine.

  The insurgent strategy the group devised instead was to virtually cede the most important battlegrounds of the Democratic nomination fight to Clinton, using precision targeting to minimize her delegate hauls, while going all out to crush her in states where Democratic candidates rarely ventured.

• Twitter, social media, and unmashing the mashable Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist
  Penelope has a good post talking about the intersection between all of the different aspects of your collective online profile and how in a lot of cases, the different faces of that profile (i.e. your twitter, your blog, your LinkedIn profile, and your facebook profile) don’t all have to be in sync - use the different media in ways that feel natural to you. She offers an alternative take on the embarassing-pictures-on-myspace issue that I wrote about last week.

  So give yourself permission to use social media to explore all the aspects of your personality, rather than just the one you picked for your “official personal brand”. It makes sense that you should give yourself some leeway to be inconsistent in who you are—and thereby consistent with who are completely are—in social media. Explore your full identity as you explore the media.

• June is National Iced Tea Month Slashfood
  Are you an iced tea drinker? I make it from time to time - a lot of times I won’t even sweeten it - or maybe just a little bit for day to day drinking. Every now and then though, a real glass of sweet tea just hits the spot. I’m not going to lie though, the original poster has got it all wrong - look at this quote:

  And no matter how much sugar and/or lemon I add, it just doesn’t have the same taste as the packaged Lipton or Nestea.

• How to Use Parkinson’s Law to Your Advantage Lifehack
  Ever heard the saying that a task will expand to fill the time you have left? That’s Parkinson’s Law, and Lifehack is talking about how if you can exercise some discipline by forcing yourself to have to have a task completed in less than the available time you can avoid the procrastination mess.

  Instead of doing the leisurely 20-30 minute morning email check, give yourself five minutes. If you’re up for a challenge, go one better and give yourself two minutes.

Have a great weekend folks!

Megan and I (and the dog) made it out to the the Sunset Valley Farmer’s Market this weekend and had a great time while getting some fantastic (and photogenic) food. I’m not going to harp on you about how going to a farmer’s market is the “green” thing to do, or about the organic products, etc; instead, I want to tell you that food you buy at the market tastes way better than grocery store food and that by buying local, you are supporting local farmers and keeping money in your local economy, rather than sending it away to some faceless corporate entity.

Remember to bring cash with you when you go the Farmer’s Market - in our experience, almost no plastic is accepted there (except for the some of the higher dollar stuff - like jewelry, trinkets, etc).

When you are making your grocery list, look to see if you can incorporate seasonal produce (use this interactive map from Epicurious to figure out what is in season where you live). Even if nothing is obvious, go down there and you’ll find something tasty.

Here is some food porn for you (pictures courtesy of my in-house photographer/girlfriend):

The haul: Carrots, blackberries, tomatoes, peaches, and green onions, yellow onions, and locally-baked hamburger buns

Blackberry Popsicles: Blend blackberries, agave nectar, and a bit of sugar and freeze for deliciousness

Peach Cobbler a la Mode: This was made with locally grown fruit and entirely from scratch (except for the ice cream). Also, it is vegetarian/vegan except for the ice cream, I believe.

You can see more pictures after the jump
[Read the rest of this entry...]

What kind of reader are you?

Do you read a lot of blogs or just a few? Do you subscribe to RSS feeds or do you visit each site individually? Do you leave comments or tweet with your favorite bloggers? Do you just visit and read blogs from A-listers or do you check out the little guys?

Interact with the bloggers that you read, don’t forget that this is a two-way communication medium - bloggers have soapboxes, not ivory towers - you can talk back at them, whether that is on your blog, their blog in the comments section, Twitter, or e-mail. Nothing warms (most) bloggers’ cold dead hearts like interaction with their readers.

Have a local friend that wrote something cool? Link to it - talk about it…it’s good for their ego (and your karma).

Example: My friend Dusty just wrote a post about how “coworking” is a verb and not a noun - something that has been bugging me for a while.

Later on this week I am going to do a promotion to (shamelessly) bribe my three readers to tell their friends to read my blog - so stay tuned for that!

I know, I know, its not Friday again, but I am working on getting back in sync - I am working on a great post about going to the farmer’s market this weekend (with pretty pictures). In the meantime, here’s a collection of some cool techie/geek reads I’ve come across recently:

• Google spotlights data center inner workings Cnet NewsBlog
  A view behind the curtain at Google’s data centers, interesting that they go the approach of having many many cheap custom servers as opposed to having fewer more reliable servers. I suppose if anyone knows how to run a big data center, Google would be it.

  In each cluster’s first year, it’s typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will “go wonky,” with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there’s about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover.

• Baking Soda: My Favorite Frugal Substance The Simple Dollar
  Trent has a great set of hacks for stuff you can do with baking soda around the home. I use it at home for cleaning cast iron because of its mild abrasive properties, since soap on cast iron will clear off all of the seasoning.

  Whenever something needs to be cleaned around the house, I just mix about four tablespoons of baking soda into a container of very hot water and mix it until it’s dissolved. The solution just cleans up almost everything quite nicely, from spots on the hardwood floor or linoleum to spots on the windows.

• Workers shifting to 4-day week to save gasoline Reuters
  My summer internship has me driving 30+ miles every day - moving to ten hours a day sounds like a good idea - that’s at least an extra gallon and half a week minimum, plus a faster commute.

  Some 44 percent of respondents said they have changed the way they commute — doing things such as sharing a ride or driving a more fuel-efficient car — or are working from home or looking for a closer job in order to reduce gasoline costs, according to staffing services company Robert Half International. That’s up from 34 percent two years ago.

• This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix Link by Link (NY Times)
  The creator of xkcd is interviewed in the New York Times… weird? Very cool story about how he makes a living with a narrowly-focused niche comic.

  FOR a certain subset of Internet users, “Sudo make me a sandwich” may as well be “Take my wife … please.”

Have a great weekend!

Our friendly neighborhood electrical utility, Austin Energy, offers free programmable thermostats for your air conditioning, and I have been meaning to investigate getting one. Unfortunately, it continues to fall by the wayside, so by making this blog post, I am publically making a committment, to you, my faithful (and terribly bored) davidgiesberg dot com readers, to try to get one.

This thermostat sounds pretty slick and it seems that it would be a fairly “green” thing to use - the electric company has them networked up, so they can balance air conditioning units around the city in order to make sure that they are all not on at the same time. The programmable aspect of it is nice in and of itself, just because then we can “set it and forget it” rather than going around and tweaking the AC several times a day. Plus Austin Energy is preparing to roll out a feature that will let you control your air conditioner from over the internet (how cool is that?).

(This is all aside from the fact that a decent programmable thermostat runs anywhere from $40 to $100!)

The only catch for me is whether or not my apartment complex will be cool with having this thing installed….

Investigate whether or not your local electrical utility offers similar cost-saving tools, services or benefits!