mattgriffin.net

I just got my 10 free sample mini-cards from Moo.  They are absolutely awesome.  So awesome, in fact, that I just placed an order for 100.  They’re just what I wanted, which is just a cool card with my contact info on it to give out to people instead of writing it down every time.

Library Thing is a cool new site (or new to me, at least) that’s sort of like social networking but with books.  You can see what other people who have read books you’ve read are reading.  It sort of reminds me of Delicious Library, but free and networked.

Check out my (partial) library here. 

I don’t know, but thanks to this web site, I now know what two groundhogs fighting sounds like.

Ever since my friend Steve recommended Chuck Klosterman’s book Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, I’ve become a big fan of the author. Right now I’m reading his third book, Killing Yourself to Live (85% of a True Story), and it’s great. His latest is Chuck Klosterman IV, which I almost bought the other day, but I thought I should finish the one I’m on before I go buying another. It was tough to resist, partly because the book just looked and felt so good. The dust jacket is clear plalstic with the title and text, and the book itself has a cool photo of a city (probably NYC) street. I’m a sucker for good graphic design, and witty incisive prose.

Anyway, the impetus for writing this post was this CNN.com article on Klosterman.  Enjoy.

One of my favorite parts of my old site was the admittedly stolen from Dan random quote block. Well, a new random quote thinger is back, this time all the way at the bottom of the pages on this site, thanks to Zombie Robot. ZR wrote a plug in for Wordpress that makes the random delivery of one of a list of quote I’ve chosen so simple it’s silly. Have I mentioned I love Wordpress?

So I’m on a wildlife kick with blog posts, I guess. So here’s a recording I made of some crazy frogs in my parents’ back yard earlier this year:
[audio:backyard_frogs.mp3]

Hello! And welcome, to the new mattgriffin.net. I’m very excited to have this site on a real server, thanks to my friend Adam Weiss. We worked out a little deal where I pay him what it called “money” to provice “hosting” on the “server” he “rents.” I should stop using so many “quotes.”

Anyway, it’s very cool to be on a real host and off wordpress’ servers. Don’t get me wrong, Wordpress rules, but I really like being able to play with the web toys that unfortunately they cannot allow one to mess around with. Something about not wanting their servers hacked due to mistakes on the part of their users. And for a free service, I cannot blame them one little bit.

It took me a little while to find a theme I liked for this version of the site, but I found this one. I like it. What do you think?

Sometimes I’m late to the game on some stuff.  Ok, I’m late plenty of the time.  Better late than never…

Anyway, I’m psyched to finally realize how cool Odeo is.  For a long time, I thought it was merely a web-based podcast (or netcast, maybe) client, but it’s cooler than that.  It’s like a blip.tv for audio (or perhaps blip is an odeo for video…  I’m not sure which one came first.)  Anyway, you can post audio/podcasts/netcasts whatever, and you can subscribe to channels, but my absolute favorite feature is this:  I can subscribe to all the audio shows that I enjoy listening to, and then I can subscribe to a sort of “meta channel” of my odeo inbox in iTunes and have it sync to my iPod.  That way whenever new shows I like are released, I have only one directory on my ipod to check.  If it’s new, it’s there, an I can listen to it on my commute to work.

Sure, it may seem simple yet uber-geeky, but it seriously fills a technology gap I’ve been thinking about lately.

An interview I recorded is part of the Museum of Science’s Current Science and Technology Podcast this week, which is pretty cool. I can’t take much credit for amazing editing or anything like that, because the interviewer, David Sittenfeld, and the interviewee, Dr. Kopans, were both very well spoken. Still, it’s fun to hear my “work” in a podcast (and the #1 science and technology podcast, at that…)

We’ve been recording different researchers for a couple weeks now, and I know there’s something planned for all of these interviews, so keep an eye on the MoS CS&T site for further details.