Well, it took a bit longer this time around to get 25000. Seems all the games I’ve been playing aren’t giving up much in points. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve mostly been playing Halo 3 during this time. In any case, I made it to 25K!
Random Stuff
It’s been busy of late. I’d been on vacation for almost 3 weeks with just a few days of work in between. My parents were in town (hi Mom) a couple of weeks ago. Then I was out of town for my wife’s family. That wasn’t really a vacation, though. But I’m back in town and finally getting around to checking my site and doing a little a blogging. So, here are some random thoughts for the day!
Fun with Google Maps—Where’s My House?
While my parents are in town this week we were reminiscing about old places we’ve lived. I’d been trying to remember where we used to live in Oslo, Norway. I remembered the street name, but my attempts in the past to find it didn’t find the street. I was pretty sure I just didn’t know how to spell it. I thought my luck had ran out.
Enjoying a Moodstream
Ran across this interesting site in my feeds and thought I’d share. Getty Images has combined their stock images with their audio stock to create what they call Moodstreams. They are billing it as a brainstorming tool, remember they are trying to sell photography and audio. The brainstorming concept sounded interesting, but I was skeptical. I gave it a try and it is actually pretty interesting.
Playing With The Lorenz Attractor
I was searching for some pov-ray liquid routines and ran into an interesting article on The Lorenz Attractor In 3D. The Lorenz Attractor is an interesting equation and surprisingly beautiful. Since there was a sample pov-ray macro on the site, I thought it would be fun to generate some pictures. I don't have much yet, but I think these look pretty cool. In some ways, these look like galaxies colliding. What do you think?
Busy Lately
I haven’t been updating much on the site lately. Mostly it is because I’ve been busy with other activities. My daughter’s Softball games still dominate most of my evenings. Between games, the youngest had a school concert on Tuesday. I’ve been trying squeeze in some GTAIV or HALO3 in the later evenings, but that doesn’t always work out.
Power Supply Woes
Well, I had a weird power outage here at the house today. Once of those drops that goes down a couple times before staying off. Seems most of my electronics made it through okay. However, my daughter’s computer took a powder. It wouldn’t turn on and the LED on the back was blinking. Ugh.
Fun with Article Images
If you hadn’t noticed, in addition to adding reflections, I’ve been updating the images I use for my articles. I did this once before, but I added a silly highlight that just didn’t look right. I decided I need to make some changes.
Embed, Object, and Standards
When I added that visitor map yesterday, I wasn’t all that concerned that it used an embed object. That is, I wasn’t concerned till I tried to validate my site. It isn’t something I do that often, but I’d made enough changes that I thought it would be a good idea. I expected a few validation errors, I tend to forget to encode the ampersands in URL’s, but I was surprised about all the errors around the embed tag. I don’t tend to play with plug-in’s myself, so I was blissfully unaware that the standards based tag is object. Although I’m not a big standards freak, I do like to see my pages validate. I was on a mission.
Giving Who’s Amung Us a Try
A number of other sites that I frequent are using a visitor counter service called Who's Amung Us. The site is easy to start using, just request the url, select a style and add to your site. Bingo, all done.
Going Full Time with Safari
I never thought I’d change browsers again, but I’ve found myself using Safari full time now. I really enjoyed using IE7, but a few of Firefox’s features had me hooked on it. The problem is, I’ve always had memory issues and, lately anyway, frequent hangs and crashes. I tried Firefox 3 beta, but it wasn’t much better and the plugins I used hadn’t been converted yet. IE8 is horrible, more alpha then beta. So, I decided to give Safari a try again. I haven’t regretted it.
Goodbye Arthur C. Clarke
Sad to say, but Arthur C. Clarke died to today. I enjoyed reading Authur's books and following his career, but it was his movie, 2001, that I enjoyed the most. Watching that movie as a kid, in re-runs of course, really got me excited about space, science fiction, and computers.
Fun with Reflections
In playing around with iTunes, I really like the way the CoverFlow looks, especially the reflections. So, I started searching around to see if there was something similar for Vista. I didn’t find any finders, but I did run into a few javascript scripts that had some neat features.
Minor Tweaks
Must be a coding night for me, as I’ve been cleaning up a few things and fixing bugs. First up, I’ve been tweaking the way the tags display on the site. I added the ability to limit the tag cloud display and then did just that in the plugin. Now, only the top 25 tags show. I also now sort case insensitive. I also added a “View All Tags” link, since I don’t display all the tags by default.
IE8 Beta Not So Great
So, I actually liked IE7, but ended up going to FireFox because I really liked some of its features and plug-ins. However, I’ve always enjoyed the look and feel of IE7, so when IE8 Beta was announced, I wanted to give it a try to see if IE8 was going to win me back. I have to say, it won’t with this beta. I have to say, I hope beta 2 is better because IE8 isn’t winning me over.
Got My HD Receiver Coupon Today
Woo Hoo! I received my official government $40 coupon to receive HD TV today! Yes, I still own all boring analog 480i TV’s — that’s standard def for those not in on all these HD resolutions. Yeah, I really don’t care about HD, but I do want to get broadcast TV still.
360voice Dynamic Userbars Launched
As much as I use the 360voice.com data, I thought it only fitting to give back. So, today I launched 360voice Dynamic Userbars. If you’re a 360voice user and like userbars, show your pride by adding one of these images to your forum signatures.
HD DVD is Dead, Long Live DVD
Well, I’m a bit peeved that Toshiba threw in the towel. Good bye HD DVD, I hardly knew ya. It may not have had the density of Blu-ray, but I’m still convinced it had the better technology. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter to me though as I’m still in the Analog 480i age.
Analog to Digital TV Count Down Userbar
I just realized that the US has just one year left till all the Analog broadcast signals are turned off. As someone who still doesn’t own a digital—or even HD—TV, I’ve created this Userbar countdown to remind me of that fact: Good thing I have satellite. 😉 You can check out my ot
RSS Pains
You would think that using an standard would mean that your RSS feed would work just about everywhere. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to always be the case. All those RSS 2.0 fixes I did on my site seemed to have broke the feed to MyBlogLog. Not sure what it doesn’t like as other RSS 2.
20K - Keeping the Streak Alive
Woo, woo! Was finally able to get 20K GS last night. Seems like it took forever.
I Want to Go Fast ... Speed Testing
I’ve been having a lot of stuttering and slowness of late on my Internet connection. I’m thinking it may be my router, but I decided to validate my Internet Speed (1.5MB DSL) and ran into a pretty good speed test site. My Internet looks pretty good (hit 1.2MB to Chicago), so I’m still not sure what is going on. Thought I’d share the one I tried.
Playing around with Ubuntu
I gave Ubuntu Linux a quick run. I grabbed the 7.10 iso, burned it to a CD and rebooted my laptop. Sweet and easy. I’d heard Ubuntu was pretty good with laptops, which is why I wanted to check out this Linux distribution.
Cool Halo API
This is pretty cool. Hawty McBloggy blogged about a site that generates some spawn time stats (Halo 3 - Time Wasted Respawning). The script is interesting. But more interesting was that it makes use of a Halo API.
Stopped using Xbox Live for Gamer Card
Due to issues Ive been having where Xbox Live!’s gamer card, I've converted my gamer card to one from MyGamerCard.net. Recently, it appears that Xbox Live! has been requiring you to sign into their site before showing someone’s gamer card.