Well I'm off skiing until next Tuesday. A 70 inch base, and possible fresh powder on Saturday!



technorati: skiing, vacation, new mexico, ruidoso, ski apache

Created 258 weeks, 2 days ago

State Farm has got the bases covered.

If a giant meteor crashes into an ocean and the resulting giant wave destroys your stuff, its a Tsunami and thus falls under Tsunami coverage.

State Farm Tsunami description screenshot

technorati: Funny, State+Farm, Meteor, Insurance

Created 258 weeks, 3 days ago

I received the following surprise while g-stringing for Austin hotels (screenshot below). I had a graphic icon in my familiar image-free ad-bar on the Google search results page.

Google included a small image indicating that a merchant has support for Google Checkout. I don't think I like where this is going. Stop, I want off.

If I have to live with this, at least lets go with a smaller Checkout icon. Something more discreet.

technorati: Google, checkout, search, ads



Created 258 weeks, 3 days ago

I will be in Austin 3/9 [Friday] - 3/14 [Wednesday] for SXSW interactive. We are staying at the Radisson on Cesar Chavez. Aside from the panels and netops, who already has party plans?

technorati: SXSW, interactive, Austin, conference

Created 258 weeks, 3 days ago

So the name is a little cheezy but I hope everyone likes it. It is an xml, multi-user, multi-login, template driven, portfolio / dossier management program using asp.net 2.0.



Demo end-user view:

http://www.dotssier.com/demo/dossier_us/

login: abba2000




Created 258 weeks, 3 days ago

Wait... What?

Created 258 weeks, 5 days ago

When will I learn not to enjoy entire bottles of wine on my own. As if I am some obscure short-story fiction writer with an addiction to table wine. I bought Ashley some fine chocolates for Valentines day and I think I must have eaten about 6 of them last night. They were so %*@$ good. Raspberry-caramel is my new favorite candy.

In other news I was reminiscing through some of my old digital photos and I realized I haven't been to a county fair in a while. I used to love those. I need to find one out here soon.

Created 259 weeks, 10 hours ago

I bought some flowers through 1-800-SendFTD for my sweethearts this year. I thought it very funny when I saw the charge reflected in my Bank of America account summary. Take a look for yourself:

Happy Valentines day everyone. Hope you enjoy the downers I sent you!


technorati: valentines, day, flowers, funny, 1-800-sendftd

Created 259 weeks, 2 days ago

I just merged my Flickr Account with my Yahoo! ID.

Ashley wants me to think I just sold my soul to Yahoo! I guess in a small way she is on to something. I mostly just dislike the look of the Yahoo! sign-in page.

technorati: flickr, yahoo!, merge

Created 259 weeks, 2 days ago

After Ashley and her Google folks made the trip up to Squaw Valley on Tuesday, I decided to make the trip out there early Sunday morning to get in a day of skiing. They had been getting new snow since she had left on Wednesday and it was still snowing when I arrived at the park around 10:00 a.m.

The powder was lots of fun with skis but I did wish I had taken a snowboard because that is the way to enjoy that much new snow. Squaw Valley must have had about 30 inches of soft powder in some of the drains. Also the Tram was closed due to high winds. At least I got in a full day and came away with some good pics of the snow storm and resulting whiteout.

technorati: sking, tahoe, squaw valley

Created 259 weeks, 2 days ago

I performed more testing tonight on the RSS Preview script using my modular overlay system and I found very few additional bugs (CSS issues aside).

I mentioned in an earlier post that i wanted to wrap it up as an Add-on for FireFox. Well here it is: an RSS Preview script add-on for FireFox (beta).

First it was authored as a greasemonkey script and then I used this User Script Compiler to create the Add-on. That means there is also a greasemonkey script for RSS Preview if you use greasemonkey. If you don't want to install it to your browser, the RSS Preview tool is also available as a bookmarklet.

technorati: firefox, rss, add-on, greasemonkey, userscript

Created 259 weeks, 2 days ago

Today I am releasing the first public beta test of a generic overlay framework I have been working on. The framework is designed to have 'pluggable' functionality for any type of script you can dream up to include inside of it.

I have hooked it up with a small tool that checks a Web page for RSS links and provides you with more options for each RSS link than web browsers do. When it finds an RSS link it gives you the ability to subscribe to the feeds with several RSS readers or social bookmark sites. It also gives you the ability to preview the feeds with a small embedded grazr window without having to subscribe to the feed.

To beta test the script visit the RSS preview beta install page and follow the directions to hook it up in your browser. Please submit your feedback to my contact form or as comments at this post.

If you would to just  test how the bookmarklet works (using this page as an example), try clicking this link while in your web browser.



If I can get most of the known bugs worked out (and I don't find many new bugs) I will release the framework overlay script soon. I also need to tidy up the code and make it more oo  (Lee, want to help?).

I have a few more ideas for plugins I will build into my own toolset. I also think I can create have created a FireFox Add-on that runs the script from a button. The RSS link subscription button is also a separate project I will be releasing soon.




Thanks for testing. Remember, please submit your feedback to my contact form or at this post.


technorati: bookmarklet, rss, browser

Created 259 weeks, 3 days ago

I have far too many irons in the fire right now. It is time to pull some out to check how hot they are.

Prepare for some new releases before I go on vacation in New Mexico next weekend (for some awesome skiing I hope).

Created 259 weeks, 3 days ago

A friend of mine just got a MacBook pro and will end up using Windows as the primary operating system. The MacBook specs are pretty good and couple that with the ability to run OSX to test RIA and web apps on and it seems a logical choice for our field. I hope he keeps me updated on know how it goes because this is exactly what I am looking to do in a few months (when leopard comes out).

I have both PearPC and an older Mac, but the emulator is complex and slow, plus lugging around a second machine for occasional testing sux. Does anyone else have any feedback on how well Vista on a MBP works.

I need to know if not only Windows Vista works at native speed, but how about Visual Studio, Adobe suite and JRE apps?

technorati: windows, apple, macbookpro

Created 260 weeks, 1 day ago

I am trying to finish up a small mod to dasBlog to allow for AJAX enabled comments. I went a tad bit overboard and decided to juice it up with some visual effects. I might pull those for the next build as they just munged up the script for Safari.

If you would like to check out the very early work, see the test blog here and post a comment if I still have comments enabled and you have one of the supported browsers.


technorati: dasBlog, ajax, comments

Created 260 weeks, 2 days ago

Fancy this, search capabilities in the Firefox Web Developer add-on 1.1.3. This has been on my feature want-list for a while. It works just like I dreamed it would. Thanks Chris!



technorati: Firefox, add-on, Chris+Pederick

Created 260 weeks, 3 days ago

So Google is taking Ashley and her coworkers skiing during the middle of the week. How about them apples. She is packing all of her snow gear, board games and booze while I pack my chump laptop and paperwork for work. @#$**!


technorati: Google, skiing

Created 260 weeks, 3 days ago

I have been working on adding support for AJAX comments to dasBlog with what little time I have lately and it is just about wrapped up.  Test it out at my AJAX comments test blog.

I started with the bits that Justice Grey had built in for the auto-save feature and extended it to work with UI interaction and back-end validation.

I will create a new UI layer soon that will look and perform better, but the underlying framework is just about done.

technorati: dasBlog, Ajax, comments

Created 260 weeks, 4 days ago

So stay tuned.

Oh, and I'm in on the secret now. Thanks!

Created 260 weeks, 6 days ago