I, like many other people am a pretty visually oriented person. I like to look at pretty pictures and enjoy a spectacular view. I mean seriously, who isn’t awed by a great looking picture or a city skyline on a crystal clear night?

Most of the time newsreaders (RSS readers to be exact) are clunky and boxed into a window, and let’s be honest, most people are looking at the content rather than the UI of whatever application/web application they’re using. I normally use NetNewswire. It’s the staple of putting all your feeds in a nice and friendly way. You can easily view hundreds of RSS feeds and their articles all

I always wanted something lightweight but at the same time visually pleasing. I’ve tried Newsfire which has a gorgeous UI, but I still find myself going back to NetNewswire. I’ve used Vienna and I just didn’t really get used to it for long enough to keep it as my newsreader.

So today I found out about an app called Headline and it’s pretty much everything I’ve wanted in a newsreader. Small, compact and visually pleasing. Since it’s a very new app it’s obviously got some bugs and usage quirks that will hopefully be ironed out in the very near future. It also lacks quite a few features that I use NetNewswire for, namely flagging and clipping of articles for future viewing, ability to easily insert selected text into a blogging software (ecto to be exact), and syncing with a web based service (Newsgator, Bloglines, etc). If these things get resolved soon, this may be my new newsreader.

Hi folks. I’m back.

Welp it’s been quite some time since I’ve posted anything. A span of 6 month’s to be exact and then the site was down for near the whole month of February. But now I’m back and so is the site. Might be some y’know major updates to the site and what not. Might finally do something good with the place.

Anyhoo I’m back. I’ll blog. You’ll read. Merriment will be had by all.

I didn’t know it had been so long since I’ve made a post. A lot of nothing has happened. But it seems I’ve missed a lot of the more eventful and blogged about moments. Here’s the list in no particular order…

1. Britney Spears’ flop(ing) at the VMA’s
2. 50 vs. Kanye (mostly I just didn’t write reviews for either albums)
3. Martians landing on Jay Leno’s chin (made up? maybe. maybe not.)
4. General What’s-his-name saying we should pull out of Iraq (y’think?)

And various other crap that really isn’t worth mentioning. Now you’re probably asking yourself “Well gee, why haven’t you posted on all of those things that have been invading my home for the last 2 month’s?”, well mostly it’s because I couldn’t care less. Also add to it that my internet has been up and down more times then a fat girl at a Twinky bob.

I’ve missed a lot, but haven’t missed much. Footballs here and that’s always a good time, so I’ll get to postin’ about things you don’t care about ASAP.

Pizza is as much the US’s past time as baseball supposedly is. But why are we apparently getting beat in the awesome pizza department by Japan!? They gave us the Wii and Playstation, and now the Double Roll. How come the pizza hut in Japan caters more to fatties then the ones here? So not cool.

via digg on Plastic Bamboo

So I kind of wanted to get back into the swing of posting at least a few times a week (hats off to bloggers who manage to write something every day, sometimes about important or cool things, or what their cat just spit out — to each his own), and I was working on getting back into and was ready to go in that direction.

And then the computer came into play (of course it could be argued that I came along to the computer and touched it, thus causing the problem). So as of this writing, though I’m able to post (obviously), I’m not able to do it in my preferred way. I usually boot into OS X and fire up NetNewsWire and ecto and off I go. Unfortunately for me I keep getting random kernel hangs and I’m not even sure why. I think a part of me as effectively given up on getting things working again, at least for now.

Anyhoo, can’t post neat asides really cause I don’t have access to my feeds that I frequent (can’t remember my password to Newsgator). So no posts for a bit.

Also if you know of any contests or quick/cheap ways to get a Macbook/Macbook Pro/iMac let me know. Kind of sick of the hackintosh route and I’d like to go genuine, plus Vista isn’t so bad when the computer can run it. On another note, for you OS X users, is there any other filesystems OS X can read/write that’s not FAT32 or HFS+ or HFS?

UPDATE: Welp that’s over with — for now. Back and running on OS X and hoping it doesn’t magically go poof again. For all you Vista haters too, it’s not so bad.

Well it’s been a wild an interesting run for me with this domain, but from this day on, it no longer belongs to me.

But why!? If that’s what just shot out of your mouth, then you’ll be glad to know I have an answer for you.

I’ve sold the surtin.com domain name and all rights to Google. They said something about starting some new site for chicken ring farmers. Sounded plausible if all be it a little weird. But hey it’s Google, and they can do no wrong.

So welcome our search giant overlords!

So if you’re a regular visitor to the site you’ll notice some pretty blatant changes.

One of them being, I’m using the default WP theme. Why you ask?

Let me explain. I’m one of those weird neurotic people who has to have everything “just so”. I don’t even dare look back onto archived posts for the fear that I’ll end up going through each and every one, one by one, until I fix every mistake and flaw I’ve ever made.

Given the constant upkeep and looking after, a website (let alone a blog) takes, I find that I’m seriously lacking in the department for care. Not saying that I don’t enjoy blogging occasionally, but I like to play around far too much. The constant adding and removing of plug-ins and themes has taken a toll on me (and probably this WP install, but it’s going to chug ahead! especially since I just went through the database deleting every reference to plug-ins I remember). So I decided in the vein of spring cleaning, I’d do just that and spring clean.

I think I might also take this time to re-learn some things that I’ve been meaning to catch up on. Namely PHP and the like. I don’t think I’ve actually kept up on anything web code related since I first caught the personal/not-so-personal website bug. Back in the days when phpBB was king and Invision Power Board was the newcomer (and still free).

And with this blog themeless, and it being the only thing (for now hopefully) that you see when visiting here, it will give me reason and motivation to completely turn things around. By turn things around I mean, I think I’m going to try my hand at doing good things with this here hole in the wall.

Stay tuned. I’ll still be posting, but the pages won’t be chock full of widgets and plug-iny goodness, for now only of course…

I don’t rant nearly enough as I probably could. Mostly because I forget things after shaking my fist vigorously in the air after seeing or experiencing them. I’m sure a lot of you folks out there can relate. We see things every day that kind just make you go “Hmmm” or “What the fack!?” but soon as we get home we forget what they were and go on about our lives. But this comes to an end for me, as I manage to seemingly get my short term memory back, I’m going to remember and rant, ’cause it’s my patriotic duty or something.

Rant #1: Cities and their salt

Now if you live in a major city that is known to be hit by snow storms, you know every winter your car is going to be sand papered by the cities salt trucks. They’re out there all night just waiting by the side of the road, with eager anticipation of that first snow fall. That first snowflake even looks like it might hit the ground the call goes round the area for the trucks to dump salt with a quickness that’d make a person with high blood pressure head explode.

Here’s the thing though… what happens when that first snowflake falls and doesn’t bring along his snowflake pals? Your car gets powdered like a ho’s face from a pimp with baby powder in his hand. It’s an ugly, hideous time of year for pearly paint jobs and squeeky clean, garaged tires.

Everybody just rolls around because it’s the norm, we see it every year, and we expect but secretly loathe the winter when it happens. I think it’s time for the weather men/women to get their acts together and be able to tell these salt droppin’ scourges how much snow is going to fall with complete accuracy, so we don’t have to suffer thousands of powder white cars on the road every day.

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Well most people know by now that Tyra Bank’s isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to anything that doesn’t involve her staring into a camera like a deer in head lights. But I do believe her knack for making already or usually public knowledge into a big deal is kind of a annoying. I’m not going to start a rant about how silly Tyra seems a vast majority of… well since I first saw her boobs grace a television screen. So here’s one of her latest TV shows apparently.

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Fresh Prince perhaps? Possibly her ill fated first TV show? Not to mention all those “black barbie”-esque Disney TV movies.

Last video of Tyra yet again stating the obvious nationwide yet again below.

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