I have come across some of these 10 things that you need, should see etc.  I started thinking and I came up with a small list of my own.  So with out further adieu I present to you the seven things I think you need to have in your home when having house guests or entertaining people. (I’m not smart enough to think of 10)

1. Q-Tip brand Q-Tips.  The off brand just suck and either come apart when using them or just don’t allow proper usage.

2. Martini Shaker - Even if you don’t make Martini’s they are still nice to have to chill shots and they make a nice counter decoration.
3.  Large music collection - If at all possible setup XMBC to stream all of your MP3’s to your Stereo/TV.  And don’t stick to one genre of music, unless all of your friends are carbon copies of you they might enjoy other types of music.  So just make it all available.

4. Movie Collection - This kind of goes along with #3.  I myself like a lot of horrible B movies, but I still have a decent collection of Comedy, Drama, Action etc.  You never know what people are going to want to watch, and if you have a variety on hand then chances are they will be pleased.

5. Spare computer - I don’t usually like people using my laptop, so I make sure to have a spare computer setup and locked down for guest to use if they feel the need to check their email or browse a few site.

6. Extra Towels - If you have ever stayed at someones house and end up taking a shower only to find out there have a lack of towels since they only have one for themselves and then one on the floor that they use for a bath mat, then you know it sucks when towels are not made available.

7. Games - While most of us have outgrown playing Operation or hungry hungry hippos its still nice to have some games on hand.  Also if at all possible just have a game system or two hooked up.

Thats really all I could come up with.  Am I leaving something out that you think is a must have item in the house hold for when you have company?

I have been a long time user of phpSysInfomebeli, but I must say the newest version that I installed takes the cake. I am digging the new layout, and yes mainly because of the fade effects put in place and the colors etc. It seems to display the information a bit better than prior versions, and the layout is much easier on the eyes than that of older versions. You should upgrade to this if you haven’t already.

Over the years I have had many different approaches to bringing in visitors to my sites, have it be spamming other sites(I don’t do this anymore thankfully), using adult content of some sort, or just having a good read here and there.  I am once again in the process of looking over the site and seeing how to attract traffic… But this time some more relevant traffic.  I was speaking with Ted and he has gone from zero visits a day when I helped him get his site setup to having about 70k a month unique (Correct me if I am wrong Ted).  Anyways I hope in the months to come to have some valid visitors coming this way reading some hopefully well written articles (I might need help on this if you know anything about my writing skills).  Well anyways this post was once again a little ramble off the top of my head and nothing of real importance, but if you have any suggestions about driving traffic I would be interested in hearing them.

I have been trying to figure out why there is such a lack of updates on blogs that I follow, including mine.  I am kind of noticing a trend that the people that used to blog a lot seem to have a pretty up2date twitter account.  I know I am guilty of not blogging due to my frequent yet unimportant updates on twitter.  Is anyone noticing this as well?  Do you think that twitter, pownce and systems like those might be somewhat of a downfall to full fledged blogs?  I have been dabbling with the idea of actually moving my blog into a sub folder and then just putting up a front page that gets the RSS feeds from my twitter, last.fm, flickr etc and displays those on the front of my site and then just offering a link to my blog.

After abruptly being woken up today nice and early I figured that I would put some work into my linux box. It was almost foreign to me, since I haven’t been doing anything linux since I moved. My Mediacenter has mainly just been sitting online running as a Transparent Squid proxy, Caching DNS server, Fileserver to my XBMC. The specs of the machine are as follows:

1.25ghz AMD XP
512 PC2700
784gb of Random SATA Drives.

As you can see its not anything that special, but houses a decent amount of drive space and handles everything just fine for my needs. That being said I wanted to squeeze a as much juice out of it as possible. I figured the best way to do this would be to remove any unused services that start, really no need in running cups when there is no printer connected to it. I also removed bluetooth, pcmcia, and a bunch of laptop services.
I really need to find my extra ram that I have laying around and spruce it up to 1gb of ram, as well as purchase another SATA card so I can add a few more drives that I have laying around. Adding the SATA card should boost me up to around 1tb of storage. More than enough space to start downloading the internets.

I came across this post, I gave it a try. Seems alright so far, though most of my friends dont update that often so its a little bare. Give it a try.