Category: Life

Categories
Life

Dear Sandy Claws

Sandy Claws!I’ve been an ok boy this year. I haven’t killed anyone at my new job, yet, but I really don’t see that happening. I think I’ve worked hard this year and I was kind of hoping you could deliver one of these lovely items to our home on Christmas morning. If not, I understand, but it sure would be swell.

  1. iPhone 4 (16GB would be great)
  2. 15-inch MacBook Pro (2.66GHz)
  3. iPad with WiFi (64GB would be awesome, but a 16GB will do just fine.)

Those items are from Rob’s Dream Wish List. I understand if those are a bit too spendy, that’s ok, there are other things I’d like to have. I have a list of stuff on Amazon as well as Think Geek, and my lovely wife always finds me special gifts that really make my day, so ask her if you need help.

Hugs and Kisses,
Rob

“I want an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle!” – Ralphie

Categories
Life Politics

Suicide

Coloradoan: “Just last week, a bipartisan group appointed by the President called our national debt a ‘cancer’ that is threatening our country from within,” Udall, a Democrat, said in a statement Tuesday. “As I’ve said for many years, our looming debt is perhaps the greatest challenge to our economy and our national security. Now, exactly four days later, we are being asked by the president to add $900 billion to that debt over the next two years.”

I feel sorry for our children, and I’m really miffed at President Obama, but the GOP has nothing better to offer and Bill Clinton can’t run for President again.

What’s a nation to do?

Categories
Life

Welcome to Zombieland

Money Magazine: “ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. (MONEY Magazine) — Joshua and Irene Vecchione are cleaning the dinner dishes one evening in October when Joshua’s cellphone rings. It’s Rhea from the Chase collections department, and she wants to know if he has $123,000 today. That’s what it will take to get the Vecchiones current on their mortgage.”

Gulp. We’ve been trying to sell our home for six months. Reading this kind of stuff scares the crap out of me.

Categories
Life

For Sale: America

The Independent: “Here’s an example of how you have worked together. In 1995, the House was going to finally repeal subsidies for growing tobacco, because an addictive cancer-causing drug didn’t seem like the most deserving recipient of tax-payers’ cash – until Boehner walked the floor of the House handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to his fellow elected representatives. They changed their minds. The subsidy stayed. Explaining his check-dispensing, Boehner says: “It’s gone on here for a long time.” So get your bids in: the House is open for business.”

Categories
Life

Are You Entitled?

TPM: “Maryland physician Andy Harris (R) just soundly defeated Frank Kratovil, one of the most endangered Democrats on Capitol Hill going into the November election. And he did it in large part by railing against ‘Obamacare’ and pledging to repeal Health Care Reform. But when he showed on Capitol Hill today for an orientation for incoming members of Congress and their staffs, he had a different question: Where’s my government health care?”

Categories
Life Technology

Testing dlvr.it

Happy Thanksgiving!I’ve been using ping.fm for quite a while to update my social sites with links to my weblog posts, until recently that is. It looks like ping.fm is suffering from its popularity. The nasty spammers have discovered it and have messed it up for the rest of us. If, like me, you relied on Samuel Aguilera’s great WordPress plugin Shorten2Ping you’ve probably had trouble updating ping.fm, unless his recent e-mail fix worked for you. It didn’t work for me.

I’ve had a dlvr.it account for quite a while now but didn’t have need for it. Now I do. Dlvr.it will publish my weblog posts using a tried and true format, RSS. A while back I used FriendFeed to publish everything, it too used RSS, and I loved it, but once Facebook got its hands on FriendFeed it became kind of crusty and took forever to update my social sites. Too bad, it was a great technology.

Here’s hoping dlvr.it fills that need.

Fingers crossed.

Categories
fun Holiday Life

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman.The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving:“The next morning the old horse was found without his saddle, and with the bridle under his feet, soberly cropping the grass at his master’s gate. Ichabod did not make his appearance at breakfast—dinner-hour came, but no Ichabod. The boys assembled at the schoolhouse, and strolled idly about the banks of the brook; but no school-master. Hans Van Ripper now began to feel some uneasiness about the fate of poor Ichabod, and his saddle. An inquiry was set on foot, and after diligent investigation they came upon his traces. In one part of the road leading to the church was found the saddle trampled in the dirt; the tracks of horses’ hoofs deeply dented in the road, and evidently at furious speed, were traced to the bridge, beyond which, on the bank of a broad part of the brook, where the water ran deep and black, was found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin.”

Like I said, be careful tonight trick or treaters.

Categories
fun Holiday Life

Happy Halloween!

Trick or treaters, be careful out there. Watch out for ghouls and ghosts as well as dogs and cars.

Come on by for some candy, if you dare.

Categories
Life

Fixing Shorten2Ping for WordPress

I’ve been using WordPress for my weblog for quite a while now and I find the ability to extend the basic functionality to be one of its greatest strengths. The developer community is amazing to say the least. I rely on a number of plugins to publish this weblog, but none more than Shorten2Ping by Samuel Aguilera.

Shorten2Ping allows me to use the excellent ping.fm, which allows me to post updates to all of my social networks, so when I publish a new weblog post Twitter, Facebook, and a couple of other spots are automagically updated for me. No fuss, no muss… until recently.

To get Shorten2Ping to work I have to provide an API key assigned by ping.fm. This is basically a handshake that allows Shorten2Ping to communicate with ping.fm on my behalf and publish my updates. (Yes, that’s an oversimplification, but you get what I mean.) About a week, or so, ago Shorten2Ping started receiving “Your API key has been suspended. Please contact us regarding this matter.” messages from ping.fm when I’d publish a post. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, turns out I wasn’t the only person with this problem. The author of Shorten2Ping got to the bottom of it. Ping.fm had a spam problem and disabled his developer key.

“The problem is that seesmic suspended it because they say that Shorten2Ping is used by spammers users.”

What to do?

All is not lost. Samuel patched up his plugin, and with any luck it’s going to work when I publish this page. If it doesn’t I’ll publish an update to this post, but hopefully it’ll work first time out.

There are a couple of things you’ll need to do after updating Shorten2Ping, it should show up in your WordPress Updates, so go install it.

First thing you’ll need to do is visit ping.fm and copy your posting e-mail address. Once you have that you’ll need to go to Plugins, locate Shorten2Ping and click on Settings link.

Next you’ll want to select Ping.fm email from the Send Notificaiton To combo-box.

Finally click on the Notification link and paste the e-mail address you copied from ping.fm and paste it into Posting email

Once you’ve done that you should be able to post using WordPress and once again update all your favorite social networks.

UPDATE: This fix requires more than the above steps to work. Apparently you’ll need support from your web host. The new Shorten2Ping “fix” requires the php mail() function. Apparently I don’t have that support enabled, and many folks probably don’t. I’d imagine it’s a security risk. Maybe we can convince Samuel to create Shorten2DlvrIt? Dlvr.it will also publish to your social networks just like ping.fm.

Categories
fun Life

Extreme Pumpkin Carving

Frankie.Villafane Studios: “If you have yet to try and carve a pumpkin in a 3-D manner you need to. Its fun and everybody enjoys a cool pumpkin. Unfortunately they begin to rot less than a week after carving so be sure to take plenty of pictures. You can experiment with ways of preserving them but I find nothing works better than a nice photo. Some chefs that I have carved for put lemon juice on the faces to help slow down the natural molding process that will occur.”

You gotta love “Extreme” Pumpkin carving. Wish I had the skill to do this sort of stuff. I’ll bet there are some folks at LEVEL that could do this.