Yesterday I signed up for an account at SocialVibe, which is social network that allows you to raise money for causes that you want to support by choosing a sponsor and displaying a badge of that sponsor that they give you. I’m not a huge ad guy, so i like to avoid them as much as possible to avoid disrupting the time spent here for my visitors. But at the same time, this type of advertising has sort of drawn me to it. I think it’s the idea of taking something that you have, and using it to help enrich or improve someone else’s life or quality of life.
Personally I think the added social network aspect of it may be a bit much, as I’m already a member of the large well known ones, and really don’t need yet another one. But if that’s what it takes to keep them running and around, I’m for it.
CSS has always been a weak point of mine. I’m more of a visual learner, so looking at just the code doesn’t really get me very far. Pretty often I either tweak or add something to my blog, which in turn requires some CSS to make look right. For example, just a few days ago, I added a background image of a shadow underneath any image that I insert into a post as a medium size image. This would have taken me quite a bit longer, if it weren’t for the Firefox add-on Firebug.
Even with already having a DSLR camera, I’ve been wanting a high megapixel compact camera that would easily fit in my pocket that I could take on bike rides. My D200 would be awesome to have with me all the time, but there are times when I’d rather be a bit more discrete and others when I don’t exactly have the room for it. So I picked up a factory refurbished Nikon Coolpix S550 off of eBay last week. I went with another Nikon because I’ve very much enjoyed the one that I have now so far and really like the quality of their products. It’s about the same size as my enV2 phone and is going to be great for snapping some shots while out on some bike rides this summer. I’m not by any means going to make it my priority camera, as that would be kind of silly, but it’ll be nice to be able to capture some of the things that I would like to shoot when I don’t have the D200 with me.
My new 2GB worth of RAM came from Crucial today and I didn’t waste any time installing it. I think it actually took more time to plug everything back into the back of the computer than it did to install the RAM.
Computer memory came up at work this week and got me a little curious about mine here at home. My desktop at home would probably be considered out of date compared to the new PCs that are out now. I’m one that usually multitasks alot and uses multiple memory hogs at a time, ie. Photoshop CS2. Even so, I figured upgrading the memory would be a cheap and easy improvement, especially when I noticed that I only currently have 512MB.
I used the system scanner that Crucial offers to determine exact upgrades that should match my PC without any problems. It scans your computer and shows you what your current system configuration is as well as recommended upgrades. I ended up picking up an additional 2GB for a little under $40 total after shipping and sales tax.
We’ve had a digital camera around our house for probably the last 10 years. The way I used to copy our photos off of the camera was to simply make a folder called ‘Family Photos’ and copy the photos into it. As time passed, the folder would simply act as a timeline of oldest to newest, which turns out not to work well at all.
Previously if you wanted to find a picture of a certain holiday, you would just scroll down using the thumbnails view in Windows until you found the pictures that were taken around that time. I know for certain that my dad has spent long periods of time before looking for certain pictures. It’s just a messy way of storing them in hindsight; especially when the numbers get into the thousands.
I’ve had reorganization on my mind for quite some time and happened to stumble across a site a few days ago, OrganizingYourPhotos.com, that lays out an example of a tree structure using levels and other tips for organization. This gave me the motivation to work on it today. The idea is to start out broad and narrow down the event or place until you get down as specific as you want.
According to the Baylor Conficker Eye Chart, my computers at home and work both are free of Conficker. It’s funny how much media attention this received back before the first of the month and afterwords almost nothing at all. I just happened to stumble upon this while surfing the net rather than seeing it broadcasted on the news or whatnot.
I’m giving my parents a hand and am going to start doing the book-keeping for my dad’s work. For the past 20+ years, they’ve always done everything on paper, and since I’m going to be doing them, I’m making the transition over to doing it all electronically in QuickBooks. The plan is to finish this first quarter on paper while entering everything from Jan 1st up until that point in QuickBooks to get caught up, and then start doing it from there on out solely in the program. I already have a good understanding of doing the book-keeping, and am actually looking forward to the completed transition and doing it all myself.
Lately, my computer has had a really bad case of humming loudly and nonstop. Loud enough that to listen to music you have to turn the volume up over the sound of the fan. Loud enough that if I don’t shut it down before I go to bed, I can lay in my room and hear it hum.
This afternoon I took the time to open it up and clean it out w/ a can of compressed air. I was very surprised at how the dust had caked up so bad on the backside of the computer. Not to mention how bad the inside had looked.
These pictures show exactly why it was so loud and why the fan ran constantly. I guess I could be ashamed to show how bad it was, but maybe it’ll help remind someone to clean out the dust bunnies.
Not that I have much right to complain since I never did pay for a subscription, but I’m finally dropping Yahoo! Music here at work for the popular music site of Last.fm. It’s been around for a few years now, but I never have really checked it out too much until the other day. I really like it so far because it creates a record of what all you’ve listened to, so if you ever wanted to look up a song you heard earlier, it’s there. Whereas on Yahoo! Music, at least to my knowledge, you just have to wait for the song to come around again. It has a few other neat things like recommendations, where it’ll recommend groups that are similar to those that you’ve added into your media library, and a social network setup.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
—
© Copyright 2007-2012 Shane Holden
All Rights Reserved.
