fail

About ten years ago, I bought a pair of used JBL J520m bookshelf speakers. They have nice, wood cabinets, a great-sounding woofer and tweeter, and a classic look (they don't really look dated, like 90% of 80s and 90s-era speakers).

Doesn't it look stately?

Whenever you buy used speakers, you should check the woofer cone and foam surround, as these are usually the first parts to deteriorate and cause terrible distortion in certain situations. In my case, the speakers had been stored in someone's garage for a few years, so I knew the foam wouldn't last long. When purchased, the foam flexed okay, but this year I noticed both speakers started making funny noises during explosions or low bass notes during movie and music playback.

I've maintained social pages and accounts for the more popular business ventures and websites I run on Facebook and Twitter for a few years now. These pages and accounts have driven a good amount of traffic to my sites (and they would drive more if I put more time into making them more relevant/personal).

When Google+ announced pages similar to Facebook's, I quickly set up a page for each of the same sites. But since I don't have time to manually post and manage each of these pages, they sat dormant since the day I set them up.

Plus, nobody 'circled' any of them.

Plus, nobody's really on Google+ anyways, besides the regular early-adopter crowd that, like me, jumps from new service to new service just to test it out and see what's neat and what's not.

Plus, Google+ doesn't have a real API that provides any value to me. Heck, I can't even have my site post an update to a Google+ page automatically... that's like feature #0 that should be in the API.

I worked from home one day. That day I accomplished about 3x as many tasks as a normal day at the office. Why is this? This post offers a pretty good summary: Why You Can't Work at Work.

After reading this comment thread about Facebook logins on ReadWriteWeb, I feel sad to call myself a Facebook user. The sheer number of clueless users who actually thought ReadWriteWeb was Facebook is a sad fact. The fact that they login to facebook by going to Google and typing in "Facebook Login" is also sad. Could they not simply type in facebook.com? I guess the idea of a URL is too outlandish for people.

What about a bookmark? My grandma, who only does a few things on the web, knows how to make a bookmark and go back to it. A lot of the Facebook users who posted comments looked quite a bit younger than my grandma, and, apparently, they cannot figure out things she could do in her sleep!

Have an exiting day! Or... should that be exciting?

I hope our nation gets a heck of a lot better at grammatical usage. Spell checkers are not the be-all-and-end-all of making sure your design is ready to go to press. But in the day of trimmed budgets and text messages, this kind of thing will happen more and more.