All time blogging blunders

So I pulled off one of classic stupid moves. I wrote 99% of my blog entry, didn't save it, and turned off the computer. And boy, it was long and funny. Now I have to recreate it. I will do my best, but I've really lost my motivation at this point. If I have one suggestion for the creators of w.bloggar (the program I use to write these entries), it is: autosave.

I ran across this site last week. It's one of the funniest damn things I've seen a while. The "yearbook" pictures at the bottom of the page are hilarious. The reason I find it so funny is because there was a time in my life, probably about 5th grade, when everyone that was "cool" also thought that Iron Maiden was "cool". I can remember buying a copy of Somewhere in Time on vinyl. It had awesome artwork, as you can see here and here. Here is a list of "hidden messages" in the artwork. One of the neatest parts is that there are many references to Blade Runner, which is my favorite movie. At the time, I hadn't even seen it. Really, I just bought the album because it looked cool. If you want a good synopsis of the band's history, check out their wikipedia page. I never would have known that I was listening to "intelligent metal" at the time, but thinking back on it, that's exactly what it was. All they did was sing about historical events and weird shit. Not really your run of the mill metal band. I think I'm going to have to spend some time going back and listening to their albums.

I've been using RSS Bandit as my news aggregator. It works really well - it is a little buggy sometimes, but I like it for the most part. The fundamental flaw is that it can only keep track of what you've read on one computer. I have it loaded on my computer at work, since that's the computer I'm in front of most of the time. Unfortuantely, I only have a little time to go over news, so it all ends up piling up. I heard about feedster, but I could never get it to import all my feeds from RSS Bandit. I tried over and over, even emailed their support. No response. Piece-o-crap. Eventually I stumbled onto Bloglines, and it friggin rocks. It does exactly what I want it to. It even has a few advantages over RSS Bandit. So I recommend using it if you use a news aggregator. You can see all my feeds here, and can even export them if you'd like to use my list as a starting point for your own. Apparently there is another online news aggrigator, Rojo, but it's invite only. I've requested an invitation, so we'll see if that ever comes through.

I'm thoroughly intrigued by the technorati tags, although I can't really figure out a good way to use them. Blogger doesn't really "support" them, and I don't feel like classifying all my hyperlinks. I really like how they incorporate flickr, del.icio.us, and technorati - all 3 services that I use. If anyone knows an effective way to use tags, please let me know.

I want to take this opportunity to point out that I have a wonderful and beautiful wife. She says I don't write enough about her in my blog, so I'm doing something to rectify that. Really, I'm afraid to write much because I know I'm just going to get myself into trouble. I'll just end with: April, you are the light of my life ;).

Things at Apostles are really looking up. We had a good turn out this morning, and we're having our big organizational meeting this afternoon at 2:00. If anyone like to come, it's at 1321 Trend Blvd (map). It's an odd time for the diocese because it seems like everyone is pissed off about something. Hopefully we can take a step back and ignore some of the useless politics, and do what we're supposed to do as a church. I'm going to suggest that we start a congregational blog once things gets going. Apparently at lot of the criticism about Stacy and the diocese has come from blogs, so maybe we can counteract that a bit.