April 2008 Archives
One of the biggest issues that we ran into when we got an HDTV was that the signal coming in was weak. This was due to a frayed cable end outside at the box, but we never noticed on the SDTV since SDTV isn't as effected by poor signal and isn't as temperament.
However, for some, upgrading to HDTVs requires a boost in their signal to get all the content to the right place. It seems that lower channels are a good indication of if your signal is making it if you get snow on them or have some issues with it. This is obviously if you don't know how to pull up your maintenance screen on your cable box to look at the actual signal strength.
In any case, this product is worth your money if you're in dire need of a signal boost. I recommend getting one if you're HDTV buff and there's no other way to get around getting a better picture due to how it was wired or what not. The Motorola Cable Signal Booster is definitely worthwhile. Just remember, though. Amplifiers do raise your noise floor. So don't get them until you're sure that there's no other way to get around the issue including better wiring from wall to TV and so on.
Let's be honest now. Everyone one that writes in a blog, would love to make a little money on the side. But you won't be a Robert Scoble or a Jeff Jarvis unless you're special somehow just as most actors and actresses aren't Hollywood movie stars.
But having learned many things about the trends of blogging before I delved into actually making a little bit of fun money from one of my good friends, I can say that there are many things that are worthwhile to selling your blog.
One of the biggest sellers? A clean design.
You won't believe the amount of difference a readable and clean design makes in uniques and page views. In fact, when I shifted the design of LUX to the current, I saw the current stats shoot up almost twice the uniques. This is because the easier it is on the eyes, then the longer the user is staying, the more likely they might turnover into a regular reader.
Remember. Clean design will do you wonders.
Photo Credit: (melop)
Ahh. You think that it's just another Michael Jackson thing. King of Pop. Oh ho, but it's not. But just watch it, since you'll crack a huge smile when you get to the part.... where.... ahh... shucks. Just watch the bloody thing. This is one of the reasons I actually really like Britain's Got Talent over American Idol.
One of the missing things still is missing from the main source of WordPress is your typical caching system.
What's interesting is that this "problem" has been around for ages. Documented from way back in 1.0 somewhere. That's why plugins like wp-cache or in this case, XCache, exist. The problem with running a WordPress blog without caching is that you run the risk of running some extremely high CPU loads, even with hardly any traffic. That's not exactly what I call optimized. Don't believe me? Take it the word from a trusted source along with graphs and all.
Believe me. If you run a WP blog on a host somewhere, your host will thank you for not killing the cpus. Either that or your website will just run really really slow since there might be more than one WP blog on there without caching. Eww.
Have you ever noticed the poor design of portable escape ladders? This realization came to me while I was watching Women of Ninja Warrior where the last part of the First Stage was an escape ladder that they had to climb up.
Think about it. To compensate for space and storage, they make it with strong nylon rope down the side. Not a bad idea. But, the biggest flaw in the design is based on the fact that in an escape situation the goal is to get down as quickly as possible. But seeing how difficult it was to climb up, there's no doubt that climbing down in a stable fashion is just as bad.
The issue really lies in the center of gravity. We're all more likely to step to the sides of a ladder, than the middle. This is why they developed the triangular shaped escape ladders. But even those are not as quick and friendly as you'd think. Again, due to the movable joints. At each joint, since it sways, it makes it difficult move quickly down. In fact, you'd probably be better off rappelling if you knew how and could.
In any case, depending on the style of escape ladder, there definitely is some improvement areas that could be worked upon. The goal here is how to not sacrifice stability for storage. The rigid ladders are always the easiest and best for quick movement but they also seem to be an eyesore in suburban areas. It might not be soon, but one of these days we'll begin to see some fresh new designs.
Photo Credit: (jurek d.)
NeoSmart writes some pretty fancy pants stuff. One of them is the award winning EasyBCD.
Basically? EasyBCD is an easy way to configure your Windows Vista bootloader, so that you can set up partitions of other operating systems, without the knowledge of how to configure the Vista bootloader itself.
It's really easy to use, and no knowledge is really needed ot actually delve into the fiery pits of operating system love. Assuming that you'd like to dabble a bit.
What's neat about iReboot is the fact that you can set it up to reboot from your system tray in WIndows, into another operating system. Quietly it does so, allowing you the comforts of many types of OS love without having to deal with nastiness.
Well, apparently the previous version was limited by UAC (user access control). If your system administrator had this turned on, then regardless of if you installed this, it would not have worked (think network admins vs. local admins - you). Many corporate arenas are set up this way, especially for telecommuters. Well, that's not a big deal. You know why?
NeoSmart found a way around the UAC limitations. It's actually kind of a pain, since it runs as a service and a client, but it gets around it and works regardless of if UAC is running. Works for both Windows XP and Vista.
Sometimes, you have a gaggle of computers that you have to update. Yes, you read that right. Gaggle.
And we all know that updating Windows updates just makes you want to "gack". Oh yeah. I said "gack". But that's okay. Project Dakota is here to help you out with that hair ball of trouble. Not only is it an update iso with all of the latest updates (from when you downloaded that iso image) but it also includes freeware or open source software that could stand to be useful. For example, Spybot Search & Destroy, and Firefox are just two of the pre-packaged goodies for you to install on these workstations.
On top of that, besides the first few questions you have to set up, it's pretty much a no hassle installation and does everything in the background. That makes updating for the typical system administrator a lot less stressful. So rejoice. Someone is actually looking out for your well-being, and it's not coming from Redmond.
This movie in itself was spectacular. Based on Richard Matheson's 1954 classic, I am Legend, it speaks of a lethal virus that was genetically engineered to become the cure for cancer that instead, mutates and wipes out humanity. Colonel Robert Neville was based at ground zero and spends three years trying to find a cure. What didn't wipe out humanity turned the remainder of the population into primitive creatures that were superbly aggressive, but confined to the darkness due to their reaction to ultraviolet light.
This movie was spectacular, although I'm not sure why the original ending was changed. It was supposedly controversial, but it didn't really dawn on me where and why. Overall, this movie was definitely one of those really great films that you would have wanted to see in a nice theater, or if you have a great home entertainment system. Very dramatic, but the performance is amazing and worth every penny if you purchase this.
If you're renting a lot of movies, I would suggest you try out Netflix. They do get the movies pretty much day of the release, and the turn around is pretty quick. For those that are into anime, or asian flicks, Netflix gets those too and is one of the few places you can even get a hold of these types of films with a large library to choose from.
It really beats the On-Demand stuff, especially when DVDs are now releasing about a week or two behind the On-Demand. Is it truly that important for you to see it when you didn't at the theater anyways?
In any case, there really isn't any reason you shouldn't be doing this if you do watch a lot of shows and movies. Never had an issue with them, and hopefully will continue to have that wonderful customer service. So remember...Rent movies from Netflix! It'll save you money in the long run.
Haven't had time to talk about this, but it is something that really annoys me.
It seems that the House Republicans are now going to Speaker of the House and Majority Leader, and asking for an increase in H1B Visas. H1B's are the visas pertaining to well-educated immigrants in letting them work within the United States under a corporation's wing. In fact, you really can't get an H1B without an employer's sponsorship and it costs the employer a chunk of change to actually fulfill the paperwork.
So all in all, that's a good thing, right? Definitely. But the spin is what I have an issue with. Let's not forget that the decrease of H1Bs before was pushed by the administration and like parties while they were pushing for the migrant worker license. The limit for 2007 was set before Congress swung its slim majority to the Democrat Party.
Seriously. Of all the things in the world, H1Bs can only help so why would you decrease these visas in the first place? Well educated individuals from other countries legally want to come work in US soil, pay taxes, and help drive economics. Corporations want to pay for them to come here. Sounds pretty good to me.
Photo Credit: (kaneda99)
One of things that will definitely help out during a recession is the fact that you still want to spend on your usual luxuries but you also need to cut back.
On certain items, you can always cut it completely from the budget, but what about when there are items that you have to shop for? Suggestion is to make use of your credit card, but make use specifically of all of the bonuses that come with it.
What does this mean? For example, Discover has partnerships with numerous vendors and you actually get cash back bonuses from 5% to 20% depending on the vendor. This means that for items that you would normally buy anyways, you would get another little bit of extra just by using their service. It's just more efficient use of your money.
I got to take a look at ZoomProspector's closed beta, and I have to say that I'm thoroughly impressed if it's going where I think it's going.
Here's the thing. In the world of information brokering, demographic data is extremely important since not only does it allow historical trending to predict where the economics of an area is going, but it also allows you to determine population densities, shopping patterns, and all sorts of interesting data. Just based on what people make in a city can really be helpful in changing the environment itself, especially for "economic developers".
For those that have been involved in economic development, they'll know that shooting blindly into the dark is one way to throw money into a river when there's no planning involved. Locally, we'd know this information as the McKinsey Report of 2000. This mashup with the GIS data alongside demographic data with Google Maps shows not only what and where, but it also gives a vantage point from what locales are in direct competition with you for jobs, communities, housing, and so forth.
Now ZoomProspector allows you to do all of this data online at the touch of your fingertips. I'm unsure if there will be a price involved at some point but it definitely is probably worthwhile from a city's economic development perspective if the sources of data are reliable and there is a lot of it in the database.
From a business growth perspective, there is many things that can be achieved through this information resource and depending on how they sell it to the governments (my suspicion is through a subscription based model) on more pertinent data, it can really get into the nitty gritty of graphs and charts to show all sorts of fun stuff. I'm definitely hoping that this sticks around since I can think of a number of things I can use this for to help out my local community.
It seems that Google Finance has gone and changed their main portal for the users. At least this morning, my portfolios were all on the left side and tonight it's on the right side. Now there is more of a market summary section at the top of the page. The middle section is now tabbed out so that it has news from the market, portfolio related, and video. The video section is interesting since it's basically clips from Google Video.
The bottom runs Sector analysis and Trends.
It's actually a lot more informational now, and definitely more worthwhile. Not sure when they were going to announce this, or if they even were going to, but it's kinda neat. At least it's been around to help me keep on top of my portfolios.
With WordPress 2.5's widgetized Dashboard, you can basically do all sorts of things and set it up to show all sorts of stats.
So if you're looking to see your scheduled posts, then just install this plugin and ... bam! Scheduled Posts will be shown on the Dashboard. There's not too much to it, and not anything less either. Pretty much, that's it.
Draft Posts is a WordPress plugin that allows you to see drafts directly on the dashboard.
This is convenient since it's part of WordPress 2.5's widgetized Dashboard. Not really too much else to say about this, since that's pretty much all it does.
The Skype Pro subscription plans have taken a turn for the better.
Now, not only can you call 34 countries at a flat rate with no hidden fees, the fair use calling per month is now at 10,000 minutes. 10,000 minutes?!?! That's insanity. In a good way.
That's five hours a day, every day for four weeks straight. And believe me, when I say that even people that I've known to talk a whole lot on the phone, have never been close to that limit. I suppose if you run sales calls all day long, you MIGHT... but that's a pretty big "if".
In any case, it's still costing $2.95 a month for US/Canada. And you get a number cheaper coming in. All in all, it's looking even better as a business alternative as long as you don't need dial-tones for whatever reason. For me? They've sold it for me. I might be getting some more numbers for my other businesses.
If you don't know who Paul Potts is, this was the storybook win of Britain's Got Talent where a mobile phone salesman comes out nervous and looks like he's about to cry, but sings absolutely astonishing opera.
So far, I've seen both the audition piece and the final umpteenth times and every time, I can feel tears welling up from the brilliant tenor sound that's coming out of that guy. It's absolutely astonishing, as well as moving. He has a contract now with Sony BMG and you can get his album One Chance from 
.
If you haven't seen the auditions though, here's the audition piece, and below it is the final performance. And if you like opera, be prepared to have some kleenex around.
These days, it's too easy to get a credit card. In fact, not many people pay with checks anymore. Why bother when you can carry plastic and have the benefit of some backup in financial security?
But the one thing that people fail to realize is that there really isn't a need to carry a credit card for just "sake of credit" any more. In fact, you should switch all your cards to reward cards if you haven't already. Why?
Well, let's just say that they pay off better. If you keep on top of your personal finances, then the only bad thing about reward cards is.... there isn't one. You get free stuff, or money back. How can that be bad? So if you still have one one lone card that is sitting in your wallet not gaining anything but dust, get rid of it or replace it. There's no reason for you to have it if you can't gain more than just the benefits of having a credit card.
If you need to go to your System window but you want to minimize the number of clicks, here's a great way of doing it instead of going to Start button, Control panel, and then selecting "System".
Hold down Control, and push the Pause|Break key.
That key combination will allow you to access the System window immediately without all the fuss of point and click type interfacing. Don't you love keyboard shortcuts?
This is from personal travel experience so YMMV. But in general, I have never had a connecting flight after 2PM that didn't get delayed that went through Atlanta.
In fact, every single time I had checked in baggage through there when the connection was after 2PM? The baggage didn't make the flight.
There is a good reason for this. Many airlines that hold East coast operations use Atlanta as one of their Southeast hubs. It also is THE busiest airport in the world due to the many domestic flights that it processes each day. But for a traveler, this also means that you're going to go through a lot more hassle if you transfer through there.
Thus, I usually make sure that if I'm not connecting via an early flight, that I don't fly through Atlanta. Is it their fault? Probably not. Sure wish PTI had just a fraction of the traffic to keep the rates down. But on the flip side, it is a afternoon/evening connection nightmare.
Quake? All over the news? Are you serious?
I was actually up this morning at 4:30ish during the quake that hit the Illinois/Indiana border. Yes, I was in the Chicagoland area. And I thought... "big deal, a quake."
But apparently it was. At least, a whole bunch of people were emailing Robin Mead this morning on CNN and she kept talking about how people felt it far and wide. They were still talking about it when I got to O'Hare between 5 and 7. Must have been a slow news day to at that time.
Maybe it's just growing up on the west coast, but quakes really aren't a big deal. It shakes, and usually sounds like a train is rolling past. If you're in a tall building, then you'll actually feel it a lot more since top floors sway some. Otherwise, it's like someone jumping up and down really hard in a room and you want to yell at them to stop.
In any case? Seriously. It's just an earthquake.
Photo Credit: (Sean Claudio Mancillas)
There is some nudity and sexual (and other mature) content so be wary if you're looking to rent or buy this and watch it with your child even though I know that the game itself was mature rated to begin with. Hey, have to disclaimer since some people do actually take their children to these movies.
Agent 47 (Olyphant) was amazing in the role and the only thing that I probably would have changed would have been having had a bit more tall and lanky body build since the assassins in the games were very much so. Also, the games themselves were very much more about stealth kills whereas the movie was more about total gun play action.
Critics didn't like this movie, but for an action fan, I thought it moved quickly and never paused until the end. That in itself, made it very much worthwhile.
Been on a business trip the past week, and often people are amazed ath what a small bag I carry. I actually bring a week's worth of clothing in a small duffel that can slide in length wise into the overhead compartment in a 737. That and a laptop and that's it.
Secret? Carry-on is only worthwhile if you can fit it in any sort of plane. Including those super small jets. And believe me. When you travel a lot, it's worthwhile not to stand around waiting for thirty minutes waiting for that suitcase when there are better things to do.
So pack clothes that are wrinkle-resistant and those that you can roll up. Usually I can run at least a week's worth in these small duffels. Slacks that have the stain resistance (teflon, so thus wrinkle-free), jeans, and pullovers. Believe me. That Atlanta connection flight where your luggage didn't make it? You won't be checking in the baggage after that after it happens a few times.
Photo Credit: (wehardy)
Sometimes, I find a tool that's definitely not for the weak-hearted.
Regalyzer is one of those tools.
Basically... you don't ever want to mess with your registry unless you truly know what you're doing. Windows wise that is. Is it dangerous? Well, you could seriously mess some things up since the registry basically takes care of telling the computer where your applications are located and libraries, and other system type stuff. Regalyzer allows you to look at your registry, and edit it. Right then and there.
You can search for terms, use wildcards, regular expressions, the works. Pretty nifty stuff.
Seeing how I didn't own any of their albums, I went on and bought Love Songs
The below is the song that really got me going when I heard it on television and decided that I needed to get some Carpenter loving:
For those that do interviews or do anything dealing with audio (podcasting), then this is the plugin for you.
podPress automatically creates feeds, provides statistics, allows mp3 tags, automatic media player, and previewing for iTunes.
So cool. So cool.
cforms II is ajax based contact form that has many many features.
It has Dashboard features (showing last five entries), backup, restore, and all of it is in a database so you can track it.
Even more fun? You can drag and drop form management and duplicate forms. All in all, this is one plugin that you probably don't want to miss out on for WordPress.
Because WordPress is so neato... and version 2.5 now supports widgets on the Dashboard, we now have a lot of plugins that are technically widgets for the Dashboard.
Well, here's another one of those widgets for you. Recent Comments Extended. It basically shows you the most recent comments, but it's been blown out in more details so you can actually read those comments in excerpt form, dates posted, and even the trackback pings, if you wish.
Pretty nifty depending on how you have your Dashboard set up.
The Dashboard for WordPress 2.5 has been using widgets now, so you can set it up for this widget or that widget.
Nice thing about this is that now you can set it up to read Recent Posts, but have it extended out!
Nothing too crazy, it just makes it extended posts on the Dashboard. But it's neat and somewhat useful.
If you're providing downloads of whatever type of files and you're trying to track them, then WordPress Download Monitor is probably for you.
It does exactly what it sounds like. It basically allows you to provide downloads and tracks how many people have used the link, and so on so forth. You can even designate the download image.
Overall, it provides those that are using a blog for software packages, a way to track things without having to go filter out apache logs, or find out from Google Analytics. It just makes things a lot easier in the long run.
But truthfully, that was the entire movie. It was all about how great the CG was and there were parts of the film where I sat there wondering if they were just showing off how great the CG team was instead of working on the script. It was slightly cheesy with the main character since he was wearing this enormous necklace that supposedly gave him protection but it just looked sort of dorky.
On top of all of this, the movie promoted underaged drinking. The girl in the movie is supposed to be turning twenty, but yet she's in a bar in one scene, having a beer. Nice job for not catching a plain error in age and promotion of underaged drinking. Go figure that pretty girls do get into bars, eh?
Overall, I wasn't that disappointed mainly because I thought the trailers were cheesy to begin with but it was worth a shot, just like when I gave Dragonlance a shot. Just because it was somewhat of a Korean legend made it a big hit in Korea but I'm not sold on this. Dragon Wars - D-War
Obviously, Google Docs is still in beta.
And obviously, while it works extremely well, there are a few caveats to know about. I was editing a document in Google Docs under Google Apps for my nonprofit, when I ran across this issue. And boy can it be recreated easily.
Basically, there are instances where regardless of how you save your document, if you have a predetermined font already being used, then the formatting automatically uses that font style. This only is shown on the pdf, so the actual document would show the correct changes, but not show you why it was printing funny (for instance in the default size, no matter what you set the size to in the settings).
Unfortunately, there's actually no possible way to actually see this error, unless you save the document as an odf (OpenOffice) and use OO to look at it. When this happened, I realized that there were a number of tabs that the web-based document editor didn't show, and they were all Sans Serif instead of Courier New, as I had told it do so.
This bug in itself, will cause some major headaches for printing even if you export to pdf. Definitely something to look out for. Otherwise? I love the fact that Google Docs is there and that it's helped myself and my nonprofit out in a number of times as a free total package. Definitely useful, but that particular bug makes it sort of annoying.
Ever change your blog from html to php? Or just plain files from one to another? Annoyed that Google has you down for one but it doesn't go anywhere? No problem.
If you didn't know already, you can actually set your .htaccess to redirect 301 access fails from one file extension to another.
Be forewarned though. This is tough thing to deal with since it redirects exactly "everything" that it's told to redirect. There are no exceptions. So if you're redirecting all html files, then they will all be shot towards whatever destination file you tell the .htaccess to use.
TinyMCE Advanced is basically a plugin for WordPress that allows you to add fourteen different plugins to TinyMCE, the editor that is used for the visual editing.
This enables toolbars and css for posts which is pretty interesting. Makes things a lot more powerful in the editing fields. You can even use the WP smilies if you wish. While it's neat in sort of a weird way, I personally just rather use an all text editor. Just not a very visual editor type of guy.
Another Silver Ash album that I picked up was Uncompleted Album off of .
Below, Silver Ash is playing 海的女儿 in one of their latest music videos. Obviously you can see that like many visual kei bands, they have since moved on from the actual dress-up and shifted to a more standard look. The outfits actually remind me of how many emo bands in the US dress. The music is still the same love songs that pretty much run through all of their albums.
Usually for Windows, I usually would use Putty. It seems that pretty much everyone else does too. But once upon a time, I did use Teraterm.
Well it seems that someone actually went and added ssh functionality to it and cleaned it up a little bit. And that's pretty dang cool. TTSSH2 is the ssh part of TeraTerm Pro and is open sourced. Gotta love new things to look at. So if you're not fond of Putty for whatever reason, or you just have some nostalgic tie to TeraTerm Pro, you might want to try this out.
Cyberduck is one of my favorite ftp clients. Runs on MacOSX, and it's open source. There's actually nothing bad to say about this ftp client at all..... except for the fact that it doesn't support fxp.
Truthfully, there aren't many ftp clients that even do support fxp. What is fxp? Fxp is another look at how ftp actually works. Basically, there are two connections that happen on ftp. A control connection and a data connection. Usually when you set up a ftp, the control and data comes from your client to the server. But if you're trying to transfer from one server to another, then you're basically hosed for speed because you're bottlenecked at your tiny bandwidth. But FXP allows you to connect the control points to you, but data points from server-to-server. This makes it extremely more efficient and really useful.
The great thing is that Cyberduck does have this in the pipeline. The bad thing is that fxp has been assigned since 2005 and shifted from version 2.6 all the way to 3.1 (currently we're on 3.0 beta).
When Cyberduck does finally get fxp in though? This will definitely complete pretty much all functionality that a macosx ftp client should have.
If you're running WordPress and you happen to be