Coworking in Columbus, OH
The other day I posted on working from home, isn't all it's cracked up to be and I mentioned Coworking. Turns out there is a Coworking movement going on in Columbus, OH. This group is still in their infancy, but they are in the process of trying to find some locations for office space.
I've signed up for the Columbus Coworking Google Group so I can monitor the progress. The concept of Coworking is something I definitely have interest in. The location of the office space is going to have a lot to do with how frequently I'd use the facilities, but it's something I could see myself using even if there was a bit of a commute (although it would limit my frequency of going.)
Working from home, isn't all it's cracked up to be...
Whenever the topic of my employment comes up, everyone's first reaction when I tell them I work from home is: "Wow, that must be really nice!" While working from home definitely has some benefits, it has some cons.
As Cameron Childress mentions in his post on Coworking in Atlanta, the two hardest things to adjust to are the lack of socialization and self motivation—both are issues Cameron and I have talked amongst ourselves about in the past.
Just got back from the Steelers/Bengals game...
Jenn & I just got home from the Steelers/Bengals game. We left for Pittsburgh on Saturday and spent the weekend shopping, eating and hanging out with our friends Bob & Tina from Indiana.
Saturday we did some shopping and went head backed to West Virginia in the evening to see the Festival of Lights at Oglebay. I've been wanting to get over there for years—I've always heard good things. Unfortunately, we were all a little bored with it. Perhaps there was too much build up for it, I'm not sure. Don't get me wrong, there are some really neat displays, but it wasn't the experience I thought it would be. Perhaps it was just because there was no snow on the ground—that can make all the difference.
What we wore in 1977...
Last week I posted about my grandma's death, I told you about how one of my fondest memories as a kid was going through JC Penny's catalogs and marking the presents I wanted. One of thing I never marked was clothing—except for something Steelers' related.
From this post on clothing in a 1977 JC Penny catalog I think you can see why I never marked any clothing. I must confess though, I had closet full of clothing that looked like the outfit below.
I even had a belt that had double notches—it barely fit through my belt loops on my Sears Toughskins.
Yahoo! Sirius Tuner Widget Skin Modification
Probably my favorite Yahoo! Widget is the SIRIUS Satellite Tuner by Tanner Jepsen. He does a really good job keeping it up-to-date and fixing problems that crop up when Sirius changes their online streaming code—which seems to be too often.
Using this widget, I don't need to worry about loading up Sirius' online streaming site and using their clunky interface. The widget behaves just like the actual radio units. Since it's right on my desktop, it's always just a click away. I'm able to quickly fire up Sirius radio in the morning when I start working.
One of the many features it offers is custom skinning. My favorite skin is the Sirius Black skin:
The problem with this skin is that the target area for each "button" was limited to just the visual blue element. This is because the skin only uses the non-transparent portion of the skin images to calculate the clickable areas. This makes clicking some of the buttons like the "1" channel or the "-" (decrease volume) button very difficult to click.
To fix the problem I modded the skin and added a colored background to each button image to increase the target click space. Feel free to download my modification of the Sirius Black skin.
My Grandma
A week ago Sunday (November 18, 2007) my Grandma (my father's mom) passed away. She had been battling dementia for the last several years and the good days were far and few between. She did quietly in her sleep around 1am EST.
Her death did not come as a surprise to us. I think we've all been preparing ourselves for the day—I know I had been. Regardless, losing a loved one is always hard.
I've been really worried about my father. For the past year (and maybe longer) he had been going to see my grandmother at the Assisted Living facility almost every day. My grandfather passed away over 17 years ago, so my grandmother's death means both of his parents are now deceased. So while I'm sure he's been preparing himself for the day when my grandmother would pass, it still must be a difficult situation to go through—and hopefully something I won't have to go through for many years. From all accounts though, my dad is doing well.
New Blog Live!
Well after several weeks of tinkering and tweaking, I finally got the new blog live. This endeavor took a lot longer than I thought it would take. I knew it would take some time to create the conversion scripts to migrate my old entries to the new blog software, but I didn't plan on the amount of work I'd end up doing on the BlogCFC code to get everything working the way I wanted.
I ended up making a lot of modifications to the source code that I plan on sending to Raymond Camden so he can do whatever he sees fit with the code. I know he's working on v6—which is a major re-write of the software.
Some of the biggest changes I made were in the XML-RPC support. One of the key reasons I wanted to migrate off the software I wrote was so that I could use a 3rd party blogging software. I'm currently writing this entry using Microsoft's Live Writer.
Oh no! Outlook crashing on ntdll.dll! Whew, problem fixed!
So I woke up this morning and Outlook had crashed on me. Every time I'd try to restart Outlook, I'd get the same crash error—even rebooting didn't help. The error was in the ntdll.dll.
I figured maybe there as something in my POP3 account that Outlook was having problems reading, so I snagged a tool to allow me to read the headers and delete messages. In my POP3 account were some messages with some Shift-J encoding—so I thought for sure that was the cause of the crash. However, even after deleting those messages I was still getting crashes.
After over an hour of troubleshooting, I was getting pretty frustrated. I figured at this point it was either some Windows Update that installed itself or a add-on causing the issue.
It's Steelers time!
I'm starting to get real pumped up about the upcoming football season. The Steelers new Head Coach, Mike Tomlin, gets me more excited every time I hear him speak. He just says all the right things. The real measure of a Head Coach is how they handle things on Sundays, but I think Tomlin will prove to be the next great Steelers Head Coach. I can absolutely see why the Rooneys were impressed by his interview.
For a 35 year old HC, he sure seems awful old school. From listening to his football philosophies, you'd think he was a 60 year old HC coaching in the 60s. He certainly fits the mold of a Steelers HC.
Training Camp starts this Monday, so more and more news should start rolling in every day. To get you started, here's a summary from Tomlin's news conference.
Mobile Live Search v2 Released
The Live Search Team just released released Mobile Search v2. Windows Mobile Live Search is one of the few programs I frequently use on my Windows Mobile 5 phone. I'd recommend this as one of the first applications you install when you get a new Windows Mobile phone.
Here's a list of some of the new and improved features as defined by the Live Search Team:
- Movie Showtimes: Want to see a movie but don’t know what’s playing? Get Movie Showtimes near you and be on your way!
- More Local Data with Reviews: Want to go out for dinner but not sure which restaurant to pick? Let your fellow restaurant goers help you out — make a decision based on user ratings.
- Maps: View Mobile Virtual Earth maps wherever you are. For improved performance, pop in your storage card to enable the large cache option. Street maps, Aerial and Hybrid are supported.
- Directions: Lost? Get found with better support for GPS integration and improved turn-by-turn navigation. We’ll even prompt you to auto-reroute if you get lost!
Happy 40th Birthday Sgt. Pepper!
It was fourty years ago today,
Sgt. Pepper was first aired and played.
While its never really gone out of style,
and its always guaranteed to raise a smile.
So may I introduce to you
The album you've known for all these years
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Happy Birthday Sgt. Pepper!
New Dream Theater video: The Dark Eternal Night
Dream Theater's released a bootleg "video" for The Dark Eternal Night, a new song off their soon to be released album Systematic Chaos. Everything I've heard off this album rocks. It's their best album since Six Degrees or Scenes From A Memory. Anyway, here's the video courtesy of Dream Theater and You Tube...
Pittsburgh Steelers WM5 Theme
I just posted this in my last blog entry, but I thought I'd it deserved a separate post.
I finally decided to share my Windows Mobile v5 Pittsburgh Steelers Theme. Here's what the theme looks like:
Pittsburgh Steelers WM5 Theme
Maybe I do like my Windows Mobile 5 Phone...
I have to admit, a few times over the past two months or so, I've been tempted to throw my Windows Mobile phone out the car window. It was locking up on my with increasing frequency. I was to the point where I had to soft reset at least once a day, and I was lucky to make it through the day w/out it locking up on me. The worst part about it locking up, is you have no idea the phone is dead until you go to use it. I was also lucky to get through the day without the battery draining on me. It really was all very frustrating.
I finally decided I'd try to do a hard reset on my phone to see if that would improve things. I figured if it still acted the same way, it had to be a hardware problem. I knew I had installed and removed a lot of software after getting my phone—while in the pursuit of getting the phone to work the way I needed it to. Having read various Windows Mobile forums, I also learned that I had done several things that could cause lockups. So I was really hoping the hard reset would fix things.
So, almost 2 weeks ago, I spent the day doing a hard reset and then getting my phone back to working order. I am happy to say that my phone is working better than ever.
Windows Live Search for Windows Mobile is way cool!
Work recently purchased me a Verizon XV6700 Pocket PC (running Windows Mobile 5) so that I could better keep in touch w/our server farms. It's been an interesting 2 weeks playing w/the phone. I'm still learning the ins and outs of it using a PDA phone. It's definitely powerful, but it lacks a lot of "normal" cell phone functionality out-of-the-box. I'm planning on writing a full review later.
Anyway, Microsoft has released a version of Windows Live Search for the PPC. It's pretty darn slick. It's a shame you can't use aGPS with the mapping functionality, but this program runs very well on WM5. I'd definitely recommend checking it out.
I've heard the J2ME version doesn't work as well as Goolge Maps for J2ME, but the version designed especially for Windows Mobile runs exceptionally well (at least so far, I can't say there aren't any slow memory leaks w/my limit usage.)