Monthly Archive for July, 2008
After four months and over 115 hours, the First Baptist Church of Jackson, MN website is now live.
It was definitely challenging for me personally. I got to do a lot of things that I love to do. Specifically:
- The design work — I love it. I obsess over it. I can’t stop thinking about logos and other design elements. I have nearly 70 design & media related RSS feeds that I read in Google Reader. I’m certainly not the most talented designer, but I know a few good ones who don’t mind me bouncing ideas off of them.
- Helping out — There’s something about helping out that really drives me.
- Learning some new things — Techniques and tools for doing websites change so fast, that I have to force myself to not redo every website I’ve ever done every couple of months. It’s really hard to stay on top of it all, but trying new tools and techniques is always helpful — even if I don’t end up using them.
Some of the cool stuff about this new site:
- Google Apps for your Domain — I helped them get Google Apps set up for their church. Doing so provided an iCal feed that can be parsed and displayed on the site in PHP. Google Apps is an absolutely amazing set of free tools for any kind of organization. I use it at work, home and church.
- Feedburner-based podcast — Feedburner allows tracking of iTunes subscriptions and offers many features to pump up visibility of a podcast.
- Yahoo Grids page framework — It made the table-less page layout and font sizing a snap. I’m also going to be using this on a project at work. Saved a lot of headaches for sure.
- SlideShowPro is one sweet flash slideshow and video component. It’s worth the money, believe me.
- Customized Suckerfish drop-down menu. I needed a good cross-browser compatible CSS and JavaScript drop-down menu and Suckerfish fit the bill. Turned out real nice, I think.
Welp, Saturday was a milestone in our family. Rachel agreed to let me migrate all of her e-mail from Juno to Gmail. It was supposed to be my Valentines present from her. I bugged her about it to the point that she threatened to retract her “gift.”
Anyway, I registered a new domain and set up a new Google Apps account. I converted her old e-mails to mbox format with juno5bdb. Couldn’t get the Google e-mail uploader to work with the e-mails in Thunderbird, so I converted them to eml format with IMAPSize. That worked good. I uploaded over 1500 emails from Outlook to Gmail in about an hour.
Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Juno -> Remove
Ahhh, progress, sweet progress.
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Not only is Obama is acting like he’s already president and, in essence, trotting the globe promising that the U.S. will give, what I feel is an unhealthy amount of “say” to foreign governments regarding U.S. foreign policy, but now he’s reneged on plans to visit to wounded troops in Germany
it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign
ORLY?
Tags: obama
If you are a Google Desktop and Launchy user like me, you’ll know that the Win+Space hotkey doesn’t work in Launchy if Google Desktop is installed — even if the GD hotkeys are “disabled”.
Well, here’s the answer. You’ll have to hack the registry, but it works good. Here’s the gist.
- Exit Google Desktop
- Add this a “hot_key_flags” DWORD in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Desktop\Preferences
- Set the value to “0″ to disable all hotkeys.
- I rebooted afterward, but restarting GD may enable it.
If you haven’t seen the Gizmodo series on Lego, you’ve got to check it out. They’ve broken it up into several pieces. I did one post about it a while back. I thought it was just a single post deal, but no, it’s a whole series.
Here are all of the parts:
Exclusive:Inside the Lego Factory
65-foot-high Lego Cathedrals Store 19 Billion Pieces a Year
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lego
750,000 Brick Kennedy Space Center is the Mother of All Lego Models
No tags for this post.Well now that the new Oklahoma City NBA team has a new name, makes me wonder what they’re going market it.
Some thoughts:
- They certainly can’t use a lightning bolt. Gatorade may have an issue with that.
- I can envision an overuse of P.O.D’s hit song “Boom.”
- Poor Squatch. Guess that dude (assuming that it’s a dude) is out of a job now, unless he assumes the new identity.
- It’s going make for an interesting logo. Lots of BIG LETTERS, I would imagine. Here’s a Google Image query to see what’s been done with thunder logos. Fascinating.
- Guess they have some flexibility on the mascot. I was surprised by how many of them don’t have anything to do with the team, e.g. Moondog, Stuff the Magic Dragon. Just in case you wanted to know, here’s the complete rundown of NBA mascots. Note the teams that don’t have an official one, specifically the Clippers and the Lakers:
Atlanta Hawks - Harry and Sky Hawk
Boston Celtics - Lucky the Leprechaun
Charlotte Bobcats - Rufus Lynx
Chicago Bulls - Benny
Cleveland Cavaliers - Moondog
Dallas Mavericks - Mavs Man and Champ the Horse
Denver Nuggets - Rocky the Cougar
Detroit Pistons - Hooper the Horse
Golden State Warriors - Thunder
Houston Rocket s - Clutch the Bear , Turbo
Indiana Pacers - Boomer the Panther and Bowser the Dog
Los Angeles Clippers - ?
Los Angeles Lakers - Jack Nicholson, et al (hehe)
Memphis Grizzlies - Griz
Miami Heat- Burnie
Milwaukee Bucks - Bango
Minnesota Timberwolves - Crunch
New Jersey Nets - Sly the Fox
New Orleans Hornets - Hugo
Oklahoma City - ?
Orlando Magic - Stuff the Magic Dragon
Philadelphia 76ers - Hip Hop the Rabbit
Phoenix Suns - Go-Rilla
Sacramento Kings - Slamson The Lion
San Antonio Spurs - The Coyote
Toronto Raptors - The Raptor
Utah Jazz - Bear
Washington Wizards - G.Wiz and G.Man - I know they had a big vote in Oklahoma about the new team name. It’s hard for me to imagine that something like Barons or Drillers or something oil related didn’t make the cut.
Wonder boy Irfan Skiljan has just released Irfanview v4.2. Complete with a new fresh interface update.
You can download it here. Don’t forget to download the updated plugins, too.
Here’s a summary of the sweetness:
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Basic Unicode support added (Properties->Misc 1, thanks to Christophe Paris!)
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New zoom options; improved relative zoom (Properties->Viewing)
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Thumbnails can be sorted manually using drag/drop
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GIF animations can be played in fullscreen/slideshow mode
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New Advanced batch options: Fine rotation, Blur, Median …
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Option to show TIF Annotations created by Kodak Imaging (Properties->Viewing)
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New JPG save option: Set file size (PlugIn: thanks to Lucian Sabo)
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New save menu: Save for Web (PlugIn: thanks to Lucian Sabo)
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New thumbnails options to disable or configure info text on mouse over
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New edit menu: Auto crop borders (remove outside lines/rows of same color)
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New feature in Canvas dialog: negative border sizes are allowed (border crop)
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New option in Capture dialog: Capture desktop on current monitor only
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New options in Custom selection dialog: Set custom ratio; Save values
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New slideshow option (window mode): Set window position
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New Fullscreen display options: Fit to screen width/height (Hotkeys: 5/6)
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IPTC data in TIF files can be showed (no editing yet)
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Fixed Thumbnails crash on multi core CPUs
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New command line option for EXE Slideshow: /window=(x,y,width,height)
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Option to set Status bar text using placeholders (Properties->Misc 3)
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Option for proportional paste into selection (Properties->Misc 3)
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Support for EXR format (PlugIn)
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Support for MAG format (MAKI, Formats PlugIn)
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Default display option is now: Fit only big images to desktop
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Expanded Copy/Move dialog (4 more folders)
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New Edit menu: Maximize and center selection (hold CTRL to center only)
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New option in Edit Palette dialog: Click on image to find color index
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New Thumbnails menu: Remove selected thumbs from list, Hotkey: Ctrl+Del
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New Thumbnails menu: Save selected files names as TXT
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New Thumbnails menu: Start Panorama dialog with selected files
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The Enhance/Correct colors dialog can be resized/maximized
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Enhanced TIF-LZW saving with 24 BPP images (smaller files are created)
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New command line option: /jpg_rotate=(…values…)
JPG lossless rotation, see i_options.txt for examples
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New command line option: /transpcolor=(r,g,b)
Set transparent color: can be used for GIF/PNG/ICO saving
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New Hotkey: SHIFT + F = Fit only big images to desktop
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New Hotkey: SHIFT + W = Fit images to window
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New Hotkey: NUM-PAD 5 = Scroll to image center
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New Hotkey/Menu: CTRL + N = Open current file in another IrfanView window
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New Thumbnails option: Auto scroll during creation
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New option in JPG IPTC/Comment dialog: Append text to old text
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Scan dialog: ‘Skip existing files’ works also for multipage TIF files
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Several PlugIns are changed/updated, please install the newest versions
http://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm
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Some minor bugs/features fixed/added (scrolling)
Since Brett Favre has shown everyone that he’s not mature enough to have a life outside of football, I’ve decided that he needs a hobby. Here’s my top 10.
- Charity work - His wife is a cancer survivor and his home state was devastated by Katrina. Plenty of charity work there.
- His two daughters - I’m sure they could use some dad time. It’s probably too late for their 19 year-old.
- —- INTERRUPTED —-
Silly me, I’ve already got the rest of this list in my Top 10 Alternatives to Dogfighting post from 2007. Everyone knows there’s a correlation to football and dogfighting…
No tags for this post.OK, so now for the smells I dislike:
- Gas and diesel fuel — Normally they cause an instant headache.
- Any kind of soap, lotion or candle that’s not a fruit “flavor” — Blecccchh. In other words, I hate 98% of Bath and Body Works, Yankee Candle, White Barn Candle Company and Hallmark. BTW, I’ve long thought that Yankee Candle needed a Smoky Kansas City BBQ scented candle.
- Musty moldy smell — Mostly because I’m allergic.
- Hobby Lobby — You know what I’m talking about. Yes, eucalyptus.
- Cooked broccoli — I actually like broccoli a lot, but the smell of it cooking is pretty disgusting to me.
How about you?
No tags for this post.Are there certain scents that you just absolutely can’t get enough of? Here’s my list:
- Chlorine bleach — reminds me of the good ole days on the swim team in high school
- WD-40 — My childhood bicycles saw more than their fair share.
- Post-It Notes — Yeah, I know. Weird.
- The coffee isle at the grocery store — I love the smell of fresh coffee beans. Makes me want to pour a cup right now actually.
- Oatmeal raisin cookies — My wife’s of course.
How about you?
No tags for this post.In case you didn’t catch Agent Zero’s recent post:
HAHAHA! Oh man, now that is funny. When I heard that, I started laughing. Oh man, did I start laughing. You know why? Because every player hates Milwaukee. Nobody wants to live in Milwaukee. I’m sorry, Milwaukee, to come down hard on you, but no one in the NBA wants to play in Milwaukee. From him going from New Jersey, actually from New York (because he lives in New York), from New York to Milwaukee is like going … let’s just say it’s not going to sit well with you. That was a funny one when I heard that one. I know Yi is happy though.
Well isn’t that going to make for an interesting Bucks vs Wizards series next season?
Hope Redd lights him up, Jefferson forces him into bad shots and Bogut rejects all of ones he manages to get in the air.
I don’t think he can live up to his new $111M contract.
No tags for this post.College basketball commentator Billy Packer, who has announced 34 consecutive Final Fours on network television and created a few controversies along the way, will not be returning to CBS for a 28th season, The Miami Herald has learned.
More here.
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Well, I’ve decided, contrary to my last post on this topic, to not try Microsoft OneCare, Sophos or Panda antivirus solutions.
First, OneCare has too much to it. All I want is antivirus. Sophos doesn’t have a home edition at all. Seems like they’re focusing on the business market. I just don’t have a good feeling about Panda’s antivirus.
Out of all of them I’ve installed and tried, ESET’s NOD32 Antivirus 3.0 is the best.
It had all I was looking for — not intrusive, easy to use and configure and not too expensive.
There you have it.
No tags for this post.- my daughter had her first drum lesson last night. where’s that drum pad thing?? j/k. she’s a whiz already. #
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