For the last couple of years, I've had a Toshiba U205-S5034 laptop, and in general, I've been really happy with it. This is one small laptop. If memory serves, it has a 12.1" screen, and is in fact pretty tiny. That can be annoying from time to time, but frankly I don't often use a laptop - only when I'm away from home - and that's a good thing when carrying it. I decided that I didn't really want to lug a massive machine with me any more, and it works great.

I did have to upgrade the memory (to 2GB), which gave me a little more breathing room, but other than that, it does the job well. The hard drive is sometimes slow when you try and do things like sync up with another computer (typically involving deleting a bunch of files or copying a ton of other files), but that doesn't happen too often, so it's not a huge deal. The problem is that every once in a while, it keeps locking up on me in the midst of, well, something.

The problems with Twitter are almost legendary. But a funny thing happened last week during their latest bout. As the popular Adobe AIR application Twhirl advised users to reduce requests to somewhere around a third of the normal rate so that users wouldn't experience errors on Twitter, another social application started to be mentioned. A lot.

Suddenly, users everywhere were talking about Plurk. Some people say that it came from Leo Laporte. Some say it was Scoble (evidence such as this tweet seem to indicate it was Leo). I think that I heard it first from Mack Collier, but I'll be honest - it could have been any number of people. Mack was likely just the most vocal that I heard (and he could have heard it from Leo, Scoble or any number of others himself. The fact is, Plurk started to emerge at just the right time, and now I'm convinced. It was just a day or so earlier that Plurk actually started to ramp things up.

Intrepid readers of RSS feeds may have noticed an odd happening in the Movable Type Community Blog the other day - unfortunately you can't actually read it if you check the site now, you would have had to catch it in your feed-reader (or your feed-reader would have had to catch it for you, or you'll have to catch it later on in this entry). Product Manager Byrne Reese remarked Since the day we released Movable Type Open Source more than a year ago.

Everyone catch that? Apparently according to Byrne, MTOS came out sometime before June 3rd, 2007. Yet, the official announcement of a stable release was on January 28, 2008, and Anil Dash made the GPL licensing announcement on December 12, 2007 (my birthday, but that doesn't matter). How the heck did Byrne lose more than six months? I'm all for being on "Internet Time", but this is a little bit much, isn't it?

The latest news online is the emergence of Plurk in the realm of social sites. Heck, I don't even know if that's the right term. But it allows you to find and connect to others, so that makes it social enough for me, and you'll just have to pardon my ignorance if I happened to classify it incorrectly.

The about page at Plurk is simple - it's less than a half-page (depending on the size of your monitor) and simply defines the site as A really snazzy site that allows you to showcase the events that make up your life in deliciously digestible chunks. Straightforward enough for you? In practice, it's like a competitor to Pownce and Twitter (yes, jaiku too, but since they are still in closed beta, and no one takes them seriously, I can't really say).

So the big question is: Which one is for you? That's the tough question to answer. Luckily, you don't have to pick just one, but chances are you'll use one more than the others.

Sometimes you just have to find something to do on a Saturday night. And sometimes there isn't much to do, even in the big city. Or in Charlotte. So we had to look a little deeper. We didn't really want to go out to eat, or go to a movie, or whatever. Then we figured we'd look to the country. Or at least as country as it gets around these parts. We'd go out to Big Lick. Yes, there really is a place called Big Lick. Check it out for yourself at that link.

Anyway, every month or so during the middle months of the year, they hold ATV Drag Races at the Big Lick Festival Park. Yes, there is also a place called Big Lick Festival Park. It's actually a big field out behind Hinson's Auction. If you're going from Charlotte, take Albemarle Road and keep on going. Once you hit Highway 205 (which is way out there), turn right. It's at a little town called Red Cross. Just a couple minutes on your right, you'll see a large brick building. A small gravel road takes you behind the building and into the park. It's not labeled very well, so keep your eyes open.

If you read the post where Andy talks about releasing the Automattic stats plugin for self-hosted WordPress, he mentions a few things that make it interesting - notably that the system "only supports WordPress". Then he also mentions that anyone with a thorough understanding of WordPress and XMLRPC could clone the plugin to make it work with other platforms.

I don't claim to have such knowledge (of either WordPress or XMLRPC), but I think I've managed to do just that. Make it work with another platform, I mean. Some time ago, I managed to get the blog registration piece working, which really wasn't that hard - you simply pass some data to the system along with your API key and in return you get your blog registered. Not too bad. Then I ran into a speed bump of rather monumental proportions. Actually it wasn't that the bump was particularly large, it's that I hit it and then had about a million other things to do. So I put everything on the back burner.