Earlier this week my hard drive began to make a very unsettling noise. Seeing this as the beginning of the end I immediately backed up all of my files. I would have replaced the hard drive, and in fact I’ve done just that on several occasions, but with this particular laptop I think it would be too risky for me to do so.

So it’s at a repair center and will be returned next week with a new (and larger) drive. I’m getting by thanks to school computers (even if most of them are running Windows…) and my spare home computer, which just happens to be an old Compaq running Linux. I really like this Linux install, too – I don’t think this thing was this fast when it was new!

It’s also quite fortunate that I transfered my blog over to Blogger and my rss feeds over to Bloglines before the fateful day, even if I still have no way to put podcasts onto my iPod until I get my laptop back.

Unfortunately this means I won’t have my laptop when I head up to the PETE&C preconference sponsored by DEN. I’ve got to find another way to blog about it.

Feh.

Still playing with things. Explanation will come soon.

Humor me here – I’m trying something new.

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People in the following countries have visited my blog between January 24th and today:

Australia
Cambodia
Canada
Finland
France
India
Japan
Luxembourg
Portugal
Singapore
Spain
Thailand
Turkey
United Kingdom
United States

I don’t need any more proof that the world is becoming more flat every day, do you?

Hey, who wants to turn this into a meme? If you have a website and a way of tracking the countries your visitors are from (via a web counter, etc.) make a list of all of them from the past week or so and post it on your blog.

I just caught up on all of my blog feeds yesterday and today I’m trying to catch up on all the podcasts I’ve got on my hard drive. (This will not be finished today, as I’ve now only gotten it down to just over 23 hours of podcasts and I will be taking a 3 hour break when Leo Laporte’s radio show comes on.)

Listening to the likes of David Warlick and Bob Sprankle has gotten me itching to record another podcast, but I won’t be doing that just yet. You see, I’m temporarily out of ideas.

Oh, I’ve got plenty of ideas, but I’ve already mentioned them in writing and in my podcasts. I don’t want to just rehash the same old concepts over again for the sake of building up the number of podcasts I’ve recorded.

So for now you won’t be getting any podcasts from me. I need to be inspired to ramble on about something first.

Maybe tomorrow, as I still have a ton of EdTechTalk podcasts to work through.

My goodness! I was taking a look at my blogroll and was surprised to see how different it was from what I actually have in my Bloglines account. I immediately fixed it, adding a lot of links in the process.

I’m also creating an EduBlogging 101 wiki that I’ll be able to use at a teacher inservice in the near future. If you’ve got some ideas, please feel free to edit it.

… oh yeah, and if you haven’t put your digital pin in my Frappr map … well, why not? Do it already!

After reading Steve Dembo’s thoughts about FeedBlitz, I’ve decided to add FeedBlitz and MyYahoo! to my site. MyYahoo is kind enough to aggrigate blog feeds, and FeedBlitz allows people to subscribe via email.

Personally I’d rather just use an aggrigator like Bloglines to subscribe to RSS feeds, but for those of you just getting your feet wet all you have to do is plug your email addy into the box below and you’ll never have to come to academicaesthetic.com again.

Put a pin in my Frappr map!

…c’mon, you know you want to…

After a scare with my hard drive that may or may not have been resolved I decided to move my blog to a more off-site publication method. I love Thingamablog‘s features, but push comes to shove I have to keep the dynamic files on my own computer and upload static pages.

So … if you can read this, the move of all my posts to a Blogger account has been successful.

Ad supported service providers like Bravenet are often ok, because the ads are often not too intrusive while the services (like showing me who visits my site here) are great.

Unfortunately, Bravenet took a turn for the worse. At first I thought it was a fluke. After a restart I visited the same Bravenet page a 2nd time and got the same problem – 94 .exe files downloading themselves onto my desktop (It would have been more, but I eventually geve up trying to hit “cancel” or “quit” and just used the “force-quit” command). How they managed to do this while I was using a Mac and running a Firefox based browser (Camino) is beyond me, but needless to say I was very annoyed. I’m just happy that .exe files won’t run on a Mac so I don’t have to worry about any spyware infections or the like.

Free is good, but it’s not worth that. I filed a complaint with Bravenet but since they allowed this to happen I’ve decided to remove all the Bravenet.com code from my webpages.

UPDATE: One thing in Bravenet’s favor is the fact that their tech support responded to my complaint faster than any online company I’ve seen in a long, long time. I don’t mean a computer generated something, I mean a living human being asked me to clarify some things and then responded again once I did so.

Bravenet might yet redeem themselves. We’ll see.