Category Archives: Ramblings

Just me and my mouth.

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flexing the ol’ wordpress muscle

I don’t know very much about wordpress, but I know enough to be dangerous.  I’ve been wrestling with making my blog perform a little better and I haven’t really nailed it down yet.  I got a message from a friend today that my site was coming up blank and indeed it was.  If I was logged in as admin, everything looked fine, but if I wasn’t the site did come up blank.  I had a conflicting setting between wp-cache and another plugin trying to get get some additional performance.

If you search on the interwebs, you’ll find several people have their “Top 10 WP Plugins” and for the most part, everyone has their favorites.  But, there are a core group that everyone uses.  Once I nail down the performance issues and I am sure they are not related to the plugins, I’ll publish my list, too.

Today was a good day.  I broke my fishing pole a couple of weeks ago, (I’ve been taking the kids fishing at the lake in our ‘hood), and I got a really nice on on clearance at the Sports Authority.   It was $4!  You can’t beat that with a stick.  We also went to a neighborhood block party and had a nice time with all the neighbors.  It was a nice way to spend the Saturday.

If the weather holds up tomorrow, I’ll try to take the kids fishing again

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housekeeping

Tonight, my wife is out with her best friends and I am alone… after getting the kids to bed. I don’t know why, but when she is gone, I tend to catch up on some of the techie stuff I keep meaning to do.

For example, I spent a fair amount of time trying to find ways to optimize the performance of my blog and research themes and plugins for wordpress. Tomorrow, I plan to yank out an extra sound card from our PC since it’s making like difficult for my wife since the USB headset we have just doesn’t… sorry, didn’t mean to rant here.

Anyways, I usually take the kids to the closest Fry’s for a look-a-round but I am not sure if that’s in the cards for this weekend since we have a lot of other stuff to do. Starting with this post, I’m going to “tag” it so in addition to the categories, the tags will help you find related posts faster.

Later, I might post about what I found to be the most popular WordPress plugins. I found some cool ones that seem to make life just a little easier and I found a few that everyone seems to be using.

Have a good weekend!

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let’s try this htpc one more time

I was able to upgrade some of the original PC’s componets with junk I had laying around. I got a motherboard/cpu in the case, (if you were following along, the motherboard I was using had a bad secondary IDE port), so I am re-installing Ubuntu 6.10 on it. After that’s done, I’ll upgrade it to the latest, (I’m too lazy to download and burn yet another ISO), and I seem to remember reading that MythTV is now a standard package with Ubuntu 7.04.

ubuntulogo.png

So, it’s installing now, then the updates and the application install. It will be a weekend project.

My wife’s best friend is coming in into town this weekend so I’ll have plenty of time to jam on this thing and play around with it. I also need to remove a sound card from my desktop. My desktop has on board audio, (pretty nice audio), and I installed Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card I bought for my last PC. I love that card! When I bought it, it was one of the more advanced pieces of hardware I had bought. But, I also use a USB headset and with three sound devices, WinXP sometimes gets confused and it upsets my wife.

Since it will be and just the kids, I am planning on taking them fishing in our lake. We’ve gotten pretty good at catching sunfish and my son got up enough courage to touch a nightcrawler. We’ll go see my Mom, go fishing, and maybe a Cinco De Mayo block party. Before we go, I’ll have to get some provisions.

I also received my 4GB SD card I got from last week’s Woot-off. I had to go out and buy a USB2.0 Card reader since I didn’t have any devices that use SD cards that could format the entire 4GB. Microcenter had a sale on a USB2.0 reader for $12 so I picked it up this afternoon; it works great. So, I shoud have more Mio stuff in the upcoming week.

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when ceiling cat is watching…

Okay,  I admit it, I am taking the low road with this one, but I keep chuckling to myself and think it’s funny…

And with all the talk recently of lolcats, I thought I’d keep with a theme.

So, either you know about ceiling cat, or you don’t.  If you do then maybe you might need a reminder every once in a while that he’s watching.  We were screwing around with our Treo’s 650’s today and I said I thought it would be funny to have the ceiling cat as a background on my phone, so you know… he’d be there watching…

So, therefore, my gift back to the Internet is a “Ceiling Cat Treo 650 Wallpaper.”  Yup, that’s right.  Apparently, if you just use an image that’s 320px x 320px, the Treo will truncate it, so the border on this image compensates for the cut-off.

Ceiling Cat Treo 650 Wallpaper

Honesty, this looks great on my Treo.  It would be funny to be out and about and see other people with the Ceiling Cat on their Treo.    We could be the Ceiling Cat Army or the Ceiling Cat Crusaders.    Come up with a catchy name and we’ll use it.

I was going to include my usual list of links, but I think ceiling cat is simply something you have to look for on your own.

I’ve been pretty busy lately.  I’ll have more updates tech updates coming up when I have more time.

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invisible sandwich, part II

LOL! I love this stuff.  Don’t ask me why, I just do.  The guys at work bust my chops since they don’t know why I think this is funny.  It is, and I love it.   In case you missed it, I wrote about the cats and their silly language back in March in the the following post:

I had no idea this actually had so much history.  Tonight I came across another blog that really gets into the nitty gritty:

This was a great post and a real eye opener.   What I also found just as interesting was the comments to this post.   But the post makes a lot of sense and kind of wraps it up in a nice bow.    I won’t rehash what is in the post, rather I’ll  let you read it, but I’ll leave you with some of the gems I found by checking out some of the links there:

Classic stuff.  I do have a cat, so maybe that’s part of the reason it appeals to me.  I’ve always loved crazy internets stuff.  For example, the first time I heard about the Bil Keane goof on Amazon.com, I was dying; really crying, sides aching, the whole nine yards. Amazon.com has since removed much of the jokes, but man, it was the best.  Every once in a while, you stumble upon some sub-culture thing that just tickles you in the best way.  This is one of those types of things for me.

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page 37 of 1458

Holy Smokes!  Tonight I signed up for and began my 25-Hour Sales Postlicense Course which is required for Real Estate Agents in their first year of obtaining their real estate licenses in Georgia.  On top of that, there is a proctored exam that needs to be passed before your one year anniversary.   Thankfully, you can take the class online.  But 1458 pages… it seems like an insurmountable amount of content to muck through.    And doubly-thankfully, the classes now work with Firefox (most OS’es), unlike last time I took an online real estate class where you had to use IE6 on Windows ONLY. *shudder*

So far, the class actually has been pretty good but I’ve only done 20 minutes tonight.   I got just a hair over a month to get it knocked out so I think I am good to go.

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a good spy story

If you anything about me personally, you’ll know that I love a good spy story. When I was a kid watching 007 movies with my Dad, I loved imagining that I’d grow up to be a spy like James Bond. It wasn’t so much the license to kill, rather the gadgets and the cloak and dagger. I have really enjoyed the Bourne Identity movies as I picked up a copy of the original book and loved that, too. As far as I am concerned the movie and the book were different enough that it was almost like two different stories.

I read with relish, Inside Delta Force: The Story of America’s Elite Counterterrorist Unit by Eric Haney. I was enthralled by the spy-craft aspects of the book and was often jealous that the need to sneak past security or evade militants didn’t come up more often in my current line of work.

If you happened to read my blogs from the beginning, (unlikely based on the stats), then you might be aware that I posted about an amazing show from the BBC:

If you check out the links in the post you can visit the BBC pages about the show.

Tonight, I became aware of an excellent read over at Wired:

Continue reading →

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what to write, tonight

I never thought I would enjoy keeping up a blog like this. When I first started, it was pretty hard to write. I didn’t even do a good job writing once a week and I think I was pretty much a curmudgeon when I did write. But, now I like it and I am surprised at how often I think about things to write about. I’ve gotten over the fact that most people won’t or don’t care what I have to say and a big step for me was to come out from behind my curtain of anomiminity on the Internet. I’ll be honest, a blog is a useful tool today when it comes to job hunting or self promotion. Things may come out in a blog that just won’t been seen in an interview. It gives your readers a little glimpse in just who you are and what you are about. I like it and the feedback I’ve gotten from people has been very encouraging. I get a lot of hits on my Trixbox and Mio posts, so that’s pretty cool.

I haven’t gotten over the fear of posting about my family or sharing pictures of my family. Having my personality out there is one thing, but my family is another. There are a lot of creeps out there, as you may know and the thought about giving them any fodder is disturbing enough as it is. Maybe over time it is something I’ll get over… or smarter about. Time will tell.

I was thinking about Kraftwerk today as I walked out to lunch. As I mentioned in the past, I wept as I read the wikipedia article about them. I was able to get one of their CD’s that was a reissue of a 1974 concert. Holy smokes, it was good. It totally blew me away. Dig this from Amazon:

Amazon.com essential recording
Kraftwerk built upon the international success of Autobahn by expanding their conceptual conceits to an album-length exploration of radio waves (and the band’s other favorite wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum). Musically, the album represents a quantum leap of pop sensibility; though still distinctly a “prog” soundscape, its brilliant melodic hooks (best represented by the title track and “Airwaves”) are organized in more traditional–read shorter–form. In tracks such as the minimalist audio-verite “News,” Kraftwerk pay homage to another of their musical influences, the great modern composer/theorist Karlheinz Stockhausen. “Antenna” foreshadows the techno-gods they became, with its electronic washes and clever less-is-too-much lyrics, which read, in total: “I’m the antenna catching vibrations; you’re the transmitter, give information!” Radio-Activity is an underrated masterpiece waiting to be rediscovered. —Jerry McCulley

It is good stuff. The problem is, this isn’t something someone might just pick up on a whim. It’s kind of out there and I think if you had the chance to listen to it somewhere, you might like it.

So, this might be a nice opportunity to show a video that you might enjoy.

The album I have has this song in German. I like it better than the way it sounds when they sing in English. This is a great song to chill out with headphones on.Finally, if you liked some of the above website, I’ll suggest a few more.

Man, the bass is making my table shake. Awesome.

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POI’s on my mio c310x

Update 240407: Be sure to check out some updated instructions in this earlier post: POI’s on the Mio c310x, part II! Both ways work, it’s up to you!

My sister-in-law recently bought a Mio c310x from Frys.com; they have them for $189 free shipping, (until supplies last). It’s different enough from her old(er) Garmin, there is a steep learning curve. I guess if you get used to one UI, then it might make it more challenging to learn a new one. I was over at her house tonight trying to show her how to input POI’s, Points of Interest, into her Mio via the PC. It was a little challenging since I began to forget how I set it up and by the time I got it going we had to leave. So I promised her I would write something up. This should help you get up and running for adding your POI’s quickly and painlessly. First, you need some things before you begin:

(Leah, if you are reading this, you are already past this point. You got everything you need!)

By the way, I should mention that as Realtors, I am keeping that sort of functionality in mind. The overall goal is to make a list of properties or addresses and visit each one in the most efficient manner. Oh, and this is all Windows based. So far, I haven’t seen any way to do this on a Mac.

I’m not going to get into the how-to’s to install ActiveSync or the rest of the software. Here’s what you need to do once you get all the mentioned software installed.

  1. If you haven’t already created and save a POI on the c310x itself. You need to do so. the iGo software looks for a specific database file that doesn’t exist until you do. Simply go into the “Map View” or similar (depends on what skin you are using), and find an address. If you are in the Map view, you should automatically get the bottom menu that pops up and says, “Save POI.” If you save it, you will have your iGo.db file that we need to have initially on your device.
  2. Fire up Google Earth. Select “My Places” and select “Add” and choose “Folder.” Name the folder something useful. In my example, I named my folder “List of POIs.” Next, in “Search” box, make sure the “Fly To” tab is selected. Enter your address here.

  3. As Google Earth zooms in, you should see your address in the lower pane in the “Search” box. You can click and drag that entry into the folder you made in step 2. Repeat for the other addresses you want.

  4. Next, you need to export the folder to a file you can read into the iGo POI Explorer.
    1. Right click on your folder from Step 2 above.
    2. Choose “Save As” and pick a place and a name where you can find it and remember what it was called.
    3. You are done with Google Earth… for now. Close it up.
  5. Next, connect your Mio and have it connect with ActiveSync. I would suggest have it connected for the next steps.
  6. Fire up the iGo POI explorer program. If you haven’t gotten it setup yet, go to Tools -> Options and make it look like the following:

  7. Next, import the file you made in Step 4.
    1. In iGo POI Explorer choose File -> Import -> POI’s from File. In the “Files of Types” menu from the Import window, choose “Google Earth KMZ file (*.kmz)”:

    2. The folder now should appear outside the “iGO POI Database.” Drap it into the top level “iGO POI Database so it appears with your other POI’s. After you do this, it should show up in the main tree and all of your addresses you entered are shown as coordinates. Pretty slick if you ask me:

  8. Now, I found I need to restart my Mio twice. How you restart it twice is up to you, but I don’t see the changes unless I do. So, after the second restart, fire up Mio Map. Choose your favorite method of looking at the Map or Cockpit and check out your POI’s:

    display_6.jpg

    display_7.jpg

  9. Notice how the address are ranking from closest to furthest. At this point you can just choose to “route to” the next closest POI. You can set up a “route” if you want. But this should get you going.

Perhaps in my next post, I’ll continue about setting up a route with the various POI’s. I hope you found this helpful.

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drew carey’s sporting adventures

I finally cleared off some of the old Formula 1 races I’ve been keeping on the ol’ Tivo so there has been some room for it to record some of its suggestions. Tonight, it had two episodes of the Drew Carey Show. I watched one of them tonight while I was cleaning up the kitchen. I’ve always liked Drew. I used to watch his show when it was still on for its first run. I even read his biography. I like him a lot and think he could be someone I’d get along with great.

As most of you know, (you’d have to be living under a rock if you didn’t), last year’s FIFA 2006 World Cup was in Germany. We had originally planned to go and entered ourselves into the lottery. My brother-in-law is from Germany and he was thinking it might be a tough place to take the kids so we planned on the guys going to see the games. His village is near Stuttgart, which was one of the main venues.

We didn’t get tickets in the first round. There was a lot of controversy around the tickets, heck there was a lot of controversy around the whole World Cup. First, there were a total of 2.1 million tickets available. Of that 2.1 million, only 800k were release to the public for purchase. The remaining amount was for promotions, corporations, sponsors, etc. So people were horked off on that. Second, Anheuser-Busch won some sort of exclusive contract to be the only beer served in the stadiums. My sister-in-law was in Munich when this was announced and she said it was almost rioting in the streets. Later, they changed their tune allowing local brews to be served inside the stadiums but had exclusive advertising rights to something like 3km around each stadium. Then there was a whole bunch of other minor things that kept popping up trying to rain on those who got to go to the parade.

Aside from the games that where televised themselves, there really wasn’t much insight as to what was going on inside Germany during the games on TV. I wanted to be there so bad I could taste it. I watched as much and as many of the games as I could.

Then, I just happened, literally by flipping channels to catch a short glimpse of some show Drew Carey was doing on the World Cup inside of Germany. I set up a Tivo seasons pass and manages to snag the last three episodes. How I wished I knew of this beforehand.

Lo and behold, I give you Drew Carey’s Sporting Adventures:

Drew Carey’s Sporting Adventures

Here’s a link to higher menu on the show. Strangely, I can’t find it directly on the Travel Channel’s website:

  • http://travel.discovery.com/fansites/drewcarey/videoupload/index.html

This was a great show. The combination of soccer, Drew Carey, stuff going on inside Germany, the other people who came to be part of it… it was a wonderful, underrated show.

Drew was traveling and working as a professional sports photographer. He didn’t have access to all the games, just a few of them. The show consisted of about 10% of him taking picture and the rest of the show was about things to do or exhibits to see or Drew hanging out and talking to the foreigners who came for the games.

First, I was surprised at how family orientated it was over there. Germany really went all out on setting up safe areas to watch the matches and make sure that violence was kept to a minimum. Second, everyone was really nice and friendly. Drew was funny and approachable and you really got a flavor for what was really going on there. It wasn’t just about the soccer, but also the people and cultures that make our world interesting and fun to be part of. There was no politics, no anti-American sentiments. Just people uniting for the lover of the game. I loved it.

In some of the episodes, Drew was accompanied by his friend Greg Proops. If you’ve seen Who’s Line is it Anyways, you will remember him. Greg also does the voice for Bob the Builder. I like Greg. Again, I imagine him someone with whom I’d get along with. They sure had fun.

I was really bummed that I didn’t see the first three episodes. It did not appear that the Travel Channel was going to replay them. I did manage to find them using Bitorrent. There wasn’t many sharing it so it took a long time to download, but I am glad I got them.

I hope Drew does more shows like this. He was really great and people seems really willing to talk with him. The show was great but more or less unheard of when I talked to people about it. I hope you have a chance to check it out sometime. Maybe the Travel Channel will replay it sometime.