I brokeddeddit :)

As Jessie used to say when she was little, “I brokededdit!” (pronounced ‘broked-dead-dit’ LOL)

I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.2 but unfortunately it seems to have fubar’d a few of my plugins, including my beloved WP-CaTT and the javascript slide/hide thingy on my sidebar, so guess what I’ll be doing tonight, tomorrow, or however long it takes me?

In the meantime, things are going well with the new job. I endured “Diversity Training” yesterday which is (I hope) the last of my “newbie” training sessions. For now, anyways.

Now if only I could find where all the good gel pens are stashed!

Today I was lucky enough to catch up with Glas, a friend of mine who also works for UAB. Had a yummy BLT and some faboo hummus dip ‘n pita slices at the always entertaining Mellow Mushroom on Southside. (YUM!)

I hopped on over to Zooomr’s site earlier this afternoon and saw that they are still experiencing technical difficulties in getting Release Mark III launched. :cry:

Poor guys. Keep your chin up! I still lub y’all! :grin:

In case you Firefox users hadn’t already been notified, the latest updates were quietly released in the early hours yesterday. So far I haven’t experienced any issues with existing plugins … I think most everything was either already compatible or already updated.

YAY!

At least tomorrow’s Friday. The annual Bluegrass Festival is going on at the Civic Center in Gardendale Saturday night, so I might go slink over that way and catch the show. Last year’s was a blast, and I’m hoping to get more pictures this time.

I’ve been Wii’d on

Last night Jim and I were playing around with the Wii online and browsing our sites to see how well the Wii browser handled them. His did much better than mine, LOL! I found it hard to navigate to/around small hyperlinked objects and apparently the Wii browser didn’t like my Lightbox’d images, so those are something to think about when designing my next theme. (Because you know me, I can’t just pick a theme and actually STICK with it! LOL)

When I left to go to bed, Jim was still playing around with stuff. When I checked my messages this morning, this was in my Inbox:

From: jim
Subject: wii……

you’ve been Wii’d on.

—————————————————————————-
Sender info:
IP: ((snip))
Browser/OS: Opera/9.10 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1621; en)
—————————————————————————-

LOL, what a goober.

Resistance to RSS?

A friend of mine recently sent me a very heated email, chastising me for not visiting his forums more often. It’s not that I don’t want to, I just never have the time to sit and navigate from one set of forums to the next. In all honesty, if he would only enable his RSS (atom) feeds, I could easily subscribe via Google Reader and pick and choose which threads I’d like to read and/or respond to. His argument against this was that if he did that, I wouldn’t go visit his site to access the forums.

:shock: Uh … helloooooooooo???? That’s why I don’t come around as often, you numbnuts …

He furthers this argument by saying that enabling feeds would open him up to “exploits” and “serious security risks” but I have yet to see anything published for his forum software packages. :roll:

What seems painfully obvious still escapes him. He sees RSS as damaging to his traffic. Of course he hasn’t at all studied his logs, he just watches the freebie counter at the bottom of his forum’s index page. I’ve tried sending him several “pro RSS” articles and varied plumes of market research touting the positive effects of using feeds, but he refuses to budge.

I say if your content is good, visitors will both subscribe to read AND visit to respond/engage, but he disagrees … and so the argument continues.

The thing is, I am a member of dozens of forums that I would *love* to sit and peruse at my leisure; but sadly I do not have the time any more to do this. With the availability of subscription feeds, I could subscribe via my reader and interact more – essentially making both me AND the forum owner happy. I want to email each of them and scream, “For the love of God, PLEASE give me an RSS or Atom feed, a plain XML file or an RDF … ANYTHING!”

LOL

So what do y’all think? Am I wrong? Are feeds too much trouble?

Me want!

*gasp* I *MUST* have some of these! (courtesy of LifeHacker … have I mentioned that I love that site? :mrgreen: )

USB rechargeable batteries

USBCELL rechargeable batteries are NiMH (non-alkaline) batteries that plug right into your computer’s USB port to juice up.

USBCELLs recharge from your tower, monitor, game console or keyboard’s free USB port; or you could turn a USB hub into a battery recharging station. These suckers reduce waste, keep batteries on hand, fully recharge in about 5 hours, and cost £10 (approx. $20) for a pack of two.

URI: http://usbcell.com/

The website says that right now all they have available is AA, but coming soon is:

• C/D size
• AAA format with a mini-USB connector and also with a folding full-size USB, and with convertors.
• 9-volt cell format and other prismatic forms
• Major phones, Smart PDA and portable devices

They also have a form where you can request to be contacted when a battery size/type is available for your phone.

Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeat-OH!

Now, if only I could find some USB-powered cookware, I’d be all set!

You too can get no respect

Growing up, Rodney Dangerfield was one of my favorite comedians. A friend of mine, knowing this, sent me an article about his Las Vegas condo that has recently gone up for sale. There were no pictures, but I’m pretty sure that it was swank as hell. (As I recall, “The Rod” had good taste!) Part of the article reads:

“Located in the exclusive Las Vegas Country Club and offering everything from 24 hour guard gated security and concierge services, a PGA golf course and valet parking, Regency Towers represents the new world of luxury Las Vegas real estate. Privacy, luxury and security within minutes of the world famous Las Vegas is something which has transformed life in the valley region of the Sonoran desert.”

Sounds peachy to me! :lol:

Ok, so I’ll never be rich and famous, and I’ll probably never own anything that was ever owned by anyone rich and famous, but it’s still pretty interesting to read about that stuff and wonder about the people who actually BUY these things!

(For instance, I wonder who owns the cute little gopher props from Caddy Shack 1 & 2? I wouldn’t mind having one of those! )

Yikes! And I thought I had a lot of feeds!

I was reading my daily dose of LifeHacker and ran across a post talking about uber-blogger Robert Scoble and how he reads 622 feeds per day! :shock:

And here I felt good about trimming down my 200+ to 134. :lol: Perhaps I should go back to reading those “destination” feeds. (Disney vacation home, anyone? LOL)

There’s a good bit of helpful info on how to become a super-feed-reader-type-humanoid, and here’s a few of them:

• Use Google Reader and its keyboard commands to allow for faster browsing
• Use the “all items view” to see the full enchilada of news in glorious chronological order
• Do your filtering on the first pass. “Take a top level filter for topic, information density, author, and quality of post. Only articles that make the cut are looked at in more detail.” — I’m guilty here, on most days I read everything.
• Have superhuman abilities. :cool:

For more tips on how to become a Scoble-like feed ninja/junkie, LifeHacker has an article on how you can get good with Google Reader that might also have a few handy tipsters.

You find people in the funniest places

As much as I avoided most of the social networking type sites when they began gaining in popularity (i.e. MySpace, Facebook, etc.), I found myself eventually dragged into them in order to keep up with loved ones. For instance, I originally joined MySpace so I could keep up with my brother and help out with his campaign last year. Since then, I have been discovered by more people from high school and college than those I had previously connected with via Classmates.com and Reunion.com. (Funny how that is!) I’ve since in started getting back in touch with old acquaintances via MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook (a LOT of my former co-workers are on the latter two!), MeetUp, Virb, Jaiku, … heck, even one of my Twitter friends recognized me in a restaurant a week or so ago!

Cool how that is.

In fact, a friend of mine from college now surfs — well, he surfed during college, but now he does it for a living. Funniest looking thing he was back then: tall, skinny, long blond curly hair that he usually teased up into a ‘fro. Sweet guy though, I heard he married a girl from Vestavia. He now goes all over the world. He had emailed me a schedule of places he’s going: Southern CA, Outer Banks NC, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Japan! (I never knew surfing was big there?)

Another friend I ran across on MySpace — he was one of my best friends in high school. He graduated 2 years ahead of me and went into the Navy. He now lives in Nevada and bounces between there and Japan and works for the gaming industry.

(Color me green with envy on that one! )

Anyways, it’s just neat how people you know are everywhere and can be found literally anywhere.

Don’tcha think? :cool:

I’m a goober, lol

For whatever reason, my WordPress Day post didn’t go through and I was so out of it Saturday morning that I never noticed. LOL! I had a horrible headache that day and that afternoon, had laid down to take a quick nap before my Ladies Night Out meetup and damned if I didn’t sleep right through the alarm and on through the night! :shock:

So yeah, I’m a big ole goob. :oops:

Had a pretty decent weekend otherwise. Jim and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. It was pretty good, but I didn’t care for the ending. It left an opening for another sequel, and I think that if Disney is smart, they’d better do it and make the ending “happier” than this last one. ??:

We also watched Pan’s Labyrinth and while I am a huge fan of Guillermo del Toro’s works, I did not care for this movie as much as I thought I would. But then again, considering I had felt kind of crappy and moody Sunday anyways (it’s a full moon, what can I say?), my mood also affects how much I like or dislike a movie the first time I watch it.

Imagine that!

So anyways, yesterday was pretty quiet. We laid around the house and I piddled with a few things on my website. Last night we met Jim’s mother at Jim ‘n Nick’s (”our restaurant”, LOL!) for a quick bite of dinner. Jessie is fully enjoying her summer now that school is out, but is a bit disappointed because her mother did not want to continue her karate lessons over the summer. Poor kid, I promised to make it up to her and Jim has already supplied her with several very large activity books/kits so she’ll have new things to do every day.

I think I might swing down to Hoover during lunch. I want to look for a new address plaque to go on our mailbox (the little sticker things we have now are horrid, lol).

How was your weekend?

Happy WordPress Day!

Today is the anniversary of the first official version of WordPress released — version 0.70, on May 27th, 2003. My favorite little blog software that could is now 4 years old.

*sigh* They grow up so fast.

.

Happy Birthday, WordPress!

Happy Memorial Day

I hope everyone has a great holiday weekend. Please take a moment to reflect while you’re out there boating, fishing, grilling or barbecuing, or whatever it is you folks do. Memorial Day is more than the start of summer. It is a chance to pause and remember the sacrifices — remember the gallantry and bravery — remember the fallen. From the War of Independence to the War on Terror, from the open field to battles away from publicity’s light — remember this day all who have made the ultimate sacrifice, for freedom is never free.

Ordinary men and women just like you and me, leaving homes and families and all they know to risk their lives for an ideal of honor, or duty, or just to protect the soldier next to them. People of patriotism and goodwill may debate the merits of any given war, police action, or humanitarian mission; but there should be no debate about our debt to the hundreds of thousands of our citizens — our brethren — who have given the ultimate sacrifice of their lives heeding the nation’s call to service.

Please take a moment away from the cookouts, gatherings and other celebrations, put your hand over your heart, and whisper a prayer of thanks for the men and women who fought and gave their lives so that we can remain free today.

Freedom’s Colors

Red is for Bravery;
blood shed in sacrifice.
Freedom came with lives the price.

White is for Liberty;
freedom’s purity.
Life be free from God’s decree.

Blue is for Justice;
as vast as the sky.
Over freedom’s land to occupy.

Poem: © 2002, Roger W. Hancock (www.PoetPatriot.com)

Next Page »