It is Friday

On 4/29/2005, In General, By Will

Today I report on sev­eral unre­lated things. I real­ized it has been a week since I posted, so here is what has been going on.

New Site

I have almost fin­ished up a new site for the Asheville Real Estate Net­work. The site makes use of some­thing called IDXSearch, which is a prop­erty search tool for MLS list­ings. In order to use it, you have to frame the page from the IDX web site in your site.

I don’t need to men­tion the plethora of rea­sons that frames are a hor­ri­ble thing to do to a web site, but nev­er­the­less, this was the only solu­tion offered. I was more dis­turbed to see that the IDX tool doesn’t work very well in non-IE browsers, and offers no capa­bil­ity to cus­tomize the inter­face. It just goes to show that there are still pro­gram­mers stuck in 1998.

More Crain Reviews

Using Google and the refer­rer logs for crainspeed.com, I have located a few more reviews online of the Speed re-release. I posted links to them on the front page of Crain site. I con­tinue to be amazed at the response to the CD, 14 years after it was orig­i­nally released.

Cool Art­work

Even though I am mar­ried to a tal­ented, trained artist, I have never been much of an art afi­cionado. How­ever, a few styles of art have always caught my eye, includ­ing the style used in vin­tage magic posters.

Today I ran across a site about the illus­tra­tions of Arthur Rade­baugh, whose work you will likely rec­og­nize if you have ever looked through old Life mag­a­zines. Some­thing about the orga­nized, struc­tured style I like. It is rem­i­nis­cent of the Soviet-style pro­pa­ganda posters from the USSR era.

Oh Yeah

Oh yeah…Alicia is preg­nant again.

 
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PC Tips — Being Free

On 4/22/2005, In Internet, Work, By Will

Here is a col­lec­tion of free soft­ware util­i­ties you can use to keep your Win­dows PC run­ning in peak performance.

I com­piled this list after doing a lot of research test­ing among var­i­ous appli­ca­tions and com­put­ers. In my opin­ion, the ‘big­gies’ such as Nor­ton and McAfee are bloated resource hogs that don’t per­form as well as they should. You can expect to fork over at least $30 a year for them, as they force you to renew your sub­scrip­tion after 12 months.

Why use these tools when there are free alter­na­tives that run faster, do a bet­ter job, and take up fewer resources?

Antivirus

I rec­om­mend the free ver­sion of AVG Antivirus, which is fast, thor­ough, and free. I liked it so much I paid for a copy of the enhanced ver­sion for my main PC just to sup­port the com­pany. That doesn’t mean the free ver­sion lacks any­thing impor­tant, because it is indeed full-featured.

Spy­ware

The old faith­ful, Spy­bot Search and Destroy does an excel­lent job of find­ing spy­ware, and keep­ing spy­ware from find­ing you. It is impor­tant to run the updater weekly to make sure you are pro­tected from all the lat­est threats.

Win­dows Optimization

To replace the tools that Nor­ton Sys­tem Works offers, I sug­gest you down­load and install Easy Cleaner, which does every­thing Nor­tons does but with­out the resource hog­ging. From clean­ing up your reg­istry to clear­ing out old tem­po­rary files, Easy Cleaner is fast, small, and powerful.

Fire­wall

Only recently did I learn about Kerio Per­sonal Fire­wall, but since I have installed it on three machines and used it for a cou­ple of weeks, I have been thor­oughly impressed. One sug­ges­tion: when installing it, choose the ‘basic’ inter­face and not ‘advanced’. That is, unless you are a savvy com­puter geek.

Other Sys­tem Protection

Another cool tool to keep things from get­ting bro­ken in Win­dows is Win­Pa­trol. This tool puts a lit­tle black dog named Scotty in your sys­tem tray. Scotty will bark at you when some­thing weird is going on, such as an appli­ca­tion try­ing to change your hosts file. Scotty mon­i­tors your sys­tem files and pro­tects them from spy­ware, tro­jans, and the like.

 
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Good Times

On 4/18/2005, In Family, General, By Will

I turned 32 this week­end, and in cel­e­bra­tion, we had some folks over to cook out on the new gas grill Ali­cia bought me. We ate a lot of meat, includ­ing burg­ers, hot dogs, and fish. There is noth­ing like a good Ball Park Frank to raise the bar and make you won­der whether or not you will live to tell the tale. Ahhh, the joys of ani­mal lips.

With Ali­cia hav­ing a hand in the mak­ing of the burg­ers, potato salad, and cole slaw, you know it had to be good. Store­bought will not do with her, and her flair for adding just enough of this and that makes it all taste great.

I plan on branch­ing out and find­ing many good things to do with my new grill. Ali­cia was shocked to see me perus­ing the Joy of Cook­ing sec­tion on grilling…

I have posted two new photo gal­leries, one of pics from my cell phone, and another of higher qual­ity dig­i­tal cam pics, both from this month (includ­ing yesterday’s cook­out). Check out the Will’s Ye Olde Photo Gallery.

 
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Ogling Google

On 4/15/2005, In General, By Will

I posted before about Google Maps and how cool it was, sur­pass­ing MapQuest in capa­bil­ity and usability.

Now, Google has added a new satel­lite view to their maps. For exam­ple, you can do a search for an address, click the “Satel­lite” link, and see imagery of the loca­tion you are look­ing at. This is not new tech­nol­ogy, but it is now in a form that is eas­ily con­sum­able by the masses.

This has stirred up some mixed responses from peo­ple around the inter­net. Some peo­ple con­sider it a tool for envi­ron­men­tal account­abil­ity, where we can see things like the clearcut­ting around Nanaimo, British Colum­bia.

For those arm­chair trav­ellers amongst you, Google Sight­see­ing offers you the abil­ity to see the world in your paja­mas. I found the Planes In Flight post, where peo­ple sent in shots of air­planes cap­tured by satel­lites in, pretty neat.

You never know what sorts of things might be caught that shouldn’t be, how­ever, some obvi­ous ones have been doc­tored up (notice the “drawn-on” rooftops”). Oth­ers are kinda funny, and some are weird (a giant com­pass[?] at Edwards AFB).

Still, the detail in these maps is nowhere near as com­plex as that of the prop­erty search I found for Bun­combe County, NC, where you can see me & my shadow walk­ing up my dri­ve­way, my truck out front, and Alicia’s car on the side of the house:
My House

 
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4–11

On 4/11/2005, In General, Internet, By Will

It is National Infor­ma­tion Day, which we cel­e­brate every April 11 (because, hey, it’s like, 4–11 man). On this day it is good to do noth­ing but surf the Inter­net in search of use­less facts, urban leg­ends, and the cold, hard, truth.

OK, so maybe I made this up and it is only I that cel­e­brates National Infor­ma­tion Day. All­right, all­right, I have never cel­e­brated it before, and in fact, I have a lot of work to do today, so I shouldn’t be wast­ing any more time.

At least I finally got my taxes done last night. So much for my new-year’s res­o­lu­tion of hav­ing them done before the end of March.

 
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Tunes and Tweaks

On 4/7/2005, In Internet, Music, By Will

My old col­lege chum Chris Geer emailed me the other day. I hadn’t heard from him in a while and it was good to hear that he is stak­ing out his ter­ri­tory on the WWW.

A cou­ple of years back, Chris asked me to sit in on banjo when he was record­ing in the stu­dio, and I had not heard the songs we did since that day. He was kind enough to send me one (and is look­ing for the other), so I posted it on my free music site for down­load. It’s under the “Mor­gan ‘Chris’ Geer” sec­tion of that page.

While I was doing that, I real­ized that my entire music site was get­ting cramped, so I went ahead and redesigned it from scratch. Why I chose to do this at 9pm on a Thurs­day night, I don’t know, but thanks to the magic of Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets I was done in an hour.

So, then I started look­ing at the disheveled appear­ance of this site and messed around with the typog­ra­phy, lay­out, col­ors, and other stuff. You may or may not notice a cleaner appear­ance now. I plan on chang­ing the header soon.

I also cleaned up the links at left, remov­ing some dead ones and adding some new ones. So take a few min­utes to peruse all the newness.

 
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