Recently, a friend contacted my wife and I asking about good places to start a blog. The request reminded me that while I had seen many articles talking about the success of Tumblr as a blogging platform and a community, I really hadn’t spent any time trying to figure out what the appeal is. So, in the interest of sating my curiosity about Tumblr, and to have a little bit of fun, I have started a Tumblr blog, Mikemac on Sports.

Obviously, the goal here is to just have something to play around with and to have it be something different from my WordPress sites. So I decided to just be a sports fan over there and have fun with it. If you want to follow it over there and talk sports a bit, c’mon over and check it out, and we can learn a bit more about Tumblr while we’re doing that.

The lovely, and talented, Annika Vitolo put out the word that she was looking for photos taken in Brooklyn for her latest music video, and who am I to say no to a fellow PS 207 alum? (Annika and I sat next to each other in 6th grade, a “few” years ago.)

Seeing all the video and photos does make me a bit homesick….

IT Elf: “Santa, you have 3 billion unread emails”

Santa: “Can you print them out for me?”

Who knew Santa was an attorney?

Never let it be said that I don’t share vital information with you. What could be more vital than this today?

Should we be overly concerned with the information people might be inadvertently sharing on social networks when many still haven’t learned about the dangers of using a cell phone in public?

That story reminds me of the time we were taking the train to Chicago and one of our fellow passengers spent part of the trip setting up a return of an item that had been delivered to her house. The conversation included her giving her name, address and credit card information, all within easy hearing range of a train-car full of people.

Dumb is dumb, no matter which communications medium you use.

The Friends in Tech group has released our Christmas special, A Geek Christmas Story today.

“Mattie Stevens, a young boy of the early 80’s, dreams of owning a Commodore 64. He sets out to convince everyone this is the perfect gift. But, along the way runs into opposition from his parents and everyone around him including old Santa Claus”

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to participate in this year’s Christmas special (A story for another time in itself…), but I know that a lot of hard work went into it, from FiT members and special guests, and that all that work really shows in the final production. Give it a listen and enjoy the geek humor, and if you enjoy this special, check the bottom of the post for links to previous FiT specials, some of which I did play a small part in.

Since I have mentioned here before that I love to watch CSI, but sometimes their “liberal” take on technology tools leaves me rolling my eyes with dismay, I have to share this link.

CSI Zoom Story

Yup, I know anyone out there who deals with audio/video/photographs runs into the “CSI effect”, where people actually expect that we can do things like this, so I had to laugh.

Occasionally, I will go through the spam folder in my gmail account, just to make sure there’s nothing in there that I actually want to see. It never fails that there’s some subject line that makes me giggle, just a little. A few weeks ago, I had 6th grade flashbacks when I saw an email with the subject line “Read this email, or you’re gay!”.

Then, as if they figured out that it’s 2009 and I’m not 11, the spammers upped the anty on me a week or so later, “Read this email, or catch a disease!”.

I’m not exactly sure that kind of disease you can get from not reading an email. Maybe the email had the secret cure to swine flu, or safe sex tips. Either way, I didn’t read it and thus far, no diseases!

So which is the worse email fail.

The other day, after replying back and forth with someone for part of the morning, over lunch I got 4 error messages from the remote email server that my messages hadn’t been delivered. The ones that had already been replied to.

That same night, the US Postal Service sent me an email to let me know that they had attempted to delivery my package, but couldn’t, and so I would need to contact them about picking it up. That would be the package that in fact, was delivered that afternoon. It was delivered to the office, just like I had ordered it.

So what kinds of email follies have you seen lately?

Ever since I created my Gmail account as my name, I’ve gotten occasional emails that are not meant for me at all, but are meant for people with the same name. Now, I have no idea how other people are getting the impression that my name @ Gmail is this other person’s email address, but it’s been frequent enough to make me wonder.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten flight confirmations from SFO, notes from an aunt, a copy of a HS kid’s resume, and lately group emails from a group of Sununu supports rallying for his election.

Usually, I do send a reply letting them know they’ve got the wrong address. Do you?

Wonder what Google’s advertising within Gmail thinks of all that?