Category Archives: Magnetic Oreo Awards

Announcing the 2012 Golden Magnetic Oreo Awards

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It’s been quite some time since I bothered to post anything on the ol’ blog, although I’ve recently set it up to show my recent Instagram photos so this doesn’t look like such a ghost town. Between grad school, world travel, moving cross-country, starting a job, freelancing, finding out I’m becoming a father and not really caring that much about this blog, I haven’t had much time to write. But I’m changing all that now that my life has some semblance of normalcy. And I’m kicking off my return to the world of writing in the absolute shallowest way I could think of: End of Year Awards.

I used to give out Magnetic Oreos to things I liked “for not sucking very much or at all”. I’m going to continue that as a weekly/sometimes feature on the blog, because I still like the idea. And I’m going to give out Golden Magnetic Oreos to things that I think were the best things of the year. Some of these categories are pretty dumb, but it’s my blog and I’m the only one who really reads it or gets a say. I’ve narrowed down the categories to the following:

  • Nouns: The best person, place and thing of this year.
  • Music: The best song, artist and album of this year.
  • Moving pictures: Best of TV, Movies and web video.
  • Food: Awards will go to Restaurant, Entree and

    • And maybe some others, we’ll see.

    There will also be three special awards:

  • The Bucketlist Award – Best personal achievement
  • White Trash/Treasure Award – Best thing that shouldn’t be good but is.
  • Best Ever Award – For the thing that was the best ever.

That’s what’s coming up on the blog. Hopefully after those posts, I’ll be in a posting mood and can finally keep the dream of being a semi-professional writer alive.

Plinky – My New True Love

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I’m in love with a site and that site is Plinky.

I came across Plinky accidentally, like one comes about a good story or a true love. In fact, in the pursuit of ruining the Internet (which I do daily to place food on my table), I found the one thing that might convince me that the web is worth saving. It’s a strange amalgamation of democracy and communism: everyone answers their own opinions to a daily question. Then they build on each other’s works. It’s the most beautiful of all the Internet microcosms: one that could convince me that there is yet a reason to spare this bright blue ball we call earth.

Picture 2 Plinky My New True Love
Here are the top three things I love about Plinky:

1) It Is The Swift Hammer Of Thor To Writer’s Block.

The thing that I think I have the hardest time with as a blogger is coming up with the will to write. WordPress is a damn commitment when you really get down to it. I have to write the whole post, edit it, rewrite it, find photos, edit them, upload them and schedule it. That’s not including the time I spend cursing God or hating myself. It honestly takes a few days to fashion a good post (and you’ve seen what I consider a good post around here). In fact, I have a dozen “drafts” that are pretty much done minus photos, formating and the occasional affiliate link (a boy has to eat, right?)

Where Plinky succeeds is that they make everything easy. The idea is to be brief, but they don’t limit you to a certain word count. They give you a daily prompt and you answer it in as few or as many characters as you’d like. My post today was quite lengthy, but I’ve had others that were only one sentence. It’s just free form fast pace prose creation.

I started a Tumblr blog almost 2 years ago to help me do that very same thing. However, in the 20 some-odd months I’ve been part of Tumblr, I’ve only posted 8 times. In a month of being on Plinky, I’ve made seven answers and made friends. Prompts, I’ve found, help me to fire up my creativity. Plinky is like a light jog before a tremendous workout. It get’s the ideas moving and the blood flowing to the fingertips.

2) It’s A Great SEO Tool

Google’s recent Farmer algorithm change vastly affected the way a lot of people are doing their link building. I’m personally not a huge link building fan (though there is obvious value in it) I prefer to build links organically by having my readers link to it. What readers you ask? I’ve got some- I think.

Picture 1 Plinky My New True Love

However, adding links to a Plinky post is easy enough and every post I’ve put up has been indexed by google within a day of the post. My most recent answer was indexed in less than an hour. That means that not only do you get the anchor text you want, but it will also be indexed very quickly. Now it’s not a great link, but it is still a link. And if that’s what you need to feel better about your site at the end of the day, then it’s a perfect way to do it.

I’m not a huge believe in this, and I imagine that by saying it’s an “SEO tool,” people will take that to mean it’s a place that they can vandalize with useless text and get anchor text out of. I’m going to ask you to be gentle with Plinky, for the next reason I’m going to list.

3) It’s An Unadulterated Realm Of The Internet

Here’s what I mean by that. Facebook used to be this place where only college students could hang out, post photos and stalk cute girls. Now my 85 year old grandfather has a profile. Twitter used to be a free forum for conversation. Now you’ll get spammed any time you mention apple. LinkedIn always sucked.

There are very few places left on the internet that are free of the spam and wasted space of most modern social networks. Remember when everyone had a MySpace page? Then what happened- The only people who wanted add you were amateur porn stars and people with terrible bands. But that place exists again, and it’s called Plinky.

I haven’t been bugged by anyone offering me a free iPad 2. People are actually just reading my answers and leaving responses. It’s like being heard again. It’s nice. I know that I just listed it as an untapped SEO resource, but hear me out on this. It shouldn’t be ransacked and brutalized by SEOs desperate to get a link. They only ask for a short answer to a prompt, and there’s no reason you can provide a quality answer to the question and get a link in the process.

The Bottom Line

Plinky is a new favorite site, and this week’s winner of the Magnetic Oreo Award. I encourage anyone who fancies themselves a writer to use it often to do some metaphorical stretching before writing.

magnetic oreo award1 288x300 Plinky My New True Love

Sponge – The Greatest App For Your Mac

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I’m a little disappointed with CreativeBe, who apparently became Incredible Bee and stopped providing the world with Sponge, the winner of this week’s Magnetic Oreo Award. The good news is that the award can still go to CNET, for their website versiontracker.com which essentially has preserved an app that Mac didn’t see fit to put in their newfangled app store. But still this little application can save you a ton of space on you hard drive, as well as making it impossibly easy to delete files that are critical to your OS functioning properly. Win-win.

Here’s the skinny on Sponge:

Sponge is an app that scans your hard drive and tells you what is taking up the most space, helping you find space wasters and reclaim your hard drive. It does this in three ways: Listing applications by size, scanning volumes for data hogs and pulling up duplicate files.

Remove Applications

remove applications Sponge The Greatest App For Your Mac

You might ask yourself, "Why does he have three different versions of Microsoft Office? Why doesn't he delete all but 2011?" The answer, my friends, is delirium.


This is the feature I have used the least, but I’ve still used it. At the very least it shows you which applications are not actually getting used that much. It made me ask the eternal question: “What happens if I delete the Chess game that came pre-installed on my Mac?” And I found out. Civil war in Libya.

Sweep Data Hogs

sweep disk hogs Sponge The Greatest App For Your Mac

When I said that this was the greatest app, what I meant was that this was a pretty good application with one great feature. And this is it: Sweep Data Hogs. By selecting one of the volumes on your computer, Sponge instantly starts calculating which ones take up the most space and ranks them in order of size. Obviously, if you’re like me and you have a lot of movies and music on your computer, these are going to be the data hogs. Sponge lets you track every folder in the entire hard drive, helping you find duplicates, undeleted podcasts and other non-essential space killers and put them to rest forever.

I found the movie Troy on my hard drive in an obscure section of my iTunes music folder as well as nearly 20GB of podcasts I thought I’d deleted. That freed up an incredible amount of space my drive.

BE CAREFUL THOUGH! Sponge lets you delete any file, big or small, essential or nonessential. Don’t go deleting random files in volumes like User or Library— you could FUBAR your OS. Only delete the files you know don’t belong, or else you’ll get to erase your entire hard drive.

Remove Duplicates

I used this once. It was worth it. It just looks for files with the same title, but I have never needed it. It’s worth trying on your iTunes folder and maybe docs. The only thing it found on my computer was a couple of ebooks I copied into my documents and never got rid of from the downloads folder. So it saved me a couple megabytes.

Overall, Sponge is this week’s winner of the Magnetic Oreo award. The application is free to download from version tracker and worth it. GET IT TODAY, PEASANT! I’m sorry, that was a little rude of me.
magnetic oreo award1 288x300 Sponge The Greatest App For Your Mac

Handmade Library

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My wife is awesome. She’s a very cute person, always supportive of any crazy scheme I come up with and is a an aspiring writer. And she’s started her very own website: Handmade Library.

Screen shot 2011 02 15 at 11.07.30 PM 300x274 Handmade Library

But really, what is paper grain?

My wife is a super crafty person (in that she’s artsy and creative, not shrewd and manipulative) and spent the last semester of her college career learning how to hand make books (like a 15th century monk) instead of letting a robot do it like a normal person. The result is amazing little cute books that now fill my living room. But the joy is that she teaches people how to make a book by hand on her new site. I’ve helped her set it up, taught her some CSS/HTML and I think she might even know what FTP is now.

I’m tremendously nerdy and always boring my wife to death with things like algorithm changes, endless details about computer components and yammering on about technical errors on TV shows (i.e. DNA tests on crime shows taking 2 minutes instead of 6 months). And then there’s sports. Let’s not even talk about sports. But she lets me go on insane tangents daily without even wincing. That’s love.

So I feel like I should give her some mad props about her progress in the nerd world. I just wanted to show off her new lovely site award her with a Magnetic Oreo award for entering into the nerdverse officially.
magnetic oreo award1 288x300 Handmade Library