Sausage Depot versus Veganville.

Normally, I wouldn’t necessarily encourage anyone to sign up for a credit card. Credit card companies are, for the most part, duplicitous piles of garbage that prey on financial ignorance or hardship.

But they are also provide useful tools that can be manipulated to the benefit of the financially well informed.

If you are looking for a cash back card, give the Chase Freedom Card a try. Just pay it off every month.

Use this link to sign up and you’ll get $100 cash back.

To get your $100, you have to make $500 in purchases within the first 3 months.

I get $50 if you use the card before June 7, 2013

I recently upgraded my cell phone. I’ve been using an HTC EVO Shift 4G for a couple years. While I will miss the physical keyboard, how HTC ever decided the paltry amount of phone storage (384 MB) was sufficient still baffles me.

The EVO was a company provided phone and since Sprint didn’t have any phones that were particularly compelling, I set out to upgrade my personal cell (An LG CU500 flip phone).

Based on some great reviews, I picked the HTC One X+ as my new phone of choice. But I encountered a few issues with AT&T.

I ordered the phone from Amazon Wireless on 12/24 with the 3GB data plan. The device finally arrived on 12/28.

I had to call AT&T to get voice service working. There was some issue with the sim card that I was told was already activated, but not working properly.

On 12/29, I left the house and was expecting to have data access on my new device. But that was not the case, so I set about figuring out what was wrong.

When I went to Settings -> Mobile Network, I saw “Connection Failed Due to Incorrect APN Setting”.

So I set about googling the issue.

I found this site: http://forums.att.com/t5/Data-Messaging-Features-Internet/quot-connection-failed-due-to-incorrect-apn-setting-quot-message/td-p/2802701

And added this APN Profile to my phone:

Name: AT&T
APN: wap.cingular
Proxy: leave blank
Port: leave blank
Username:WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
Password:CINGULAR1
Server: leave blank
MMSC: http://mmsc.cingular.com
MMS Proxy: wireless.cingular.com
MMS Port: 80
MCC:310
MNC:410 (note. this could also be 310, 41 or 15)
APN Type: leave blank

All was then well, I had data access. Or so I thought. . . .

Then I woke up on 12/30 to 2 emails and 2 texts telling me I had used over $100 of pay-per-use data.

What. The. Crap.

Turns out that when I ordered my 3GB data plan, it was not correctly added to my account. So the 11 MB I used on 12/29 were billed at $0.01 per KB.

AT&T agreed to credit this “overage”, but I wanted to share this for anyone else upgrading a phone or adding a device to avoid the APN settings above and call 611 for assistance.

From Season 36, Episode 16:

“Come on Sam. Come on now. That costs money.”

Did Samuel L. Jackson drop an F-bomb on the December 15, 2012 episode of Saturday Night Live? And then follow it up with “This is some bullshit”?

You be the judge. Skip to around 6:18 of the videos.

Here’s what aired:

Here’s the Official NBC Version.

Recently, I was bringing a new team member up to speed on a Sharepoint Project.

I wanted to cover some of the list workflows and explain some of the quirky system behavior.

I figured the easiest way to illustrate these workflows would be to export them from Sharepoint Designer and look at them in Visio.

Exporting from Visio worked fine, but when I tried to open the resulting .vwi file in Visio, I got this error:

You may wonder what went wrong and if there is an issue with the export process from Sharepoint Designer. And the answer is nothing and there is no issue.

The process to export workflows from Sharepoint Designer and view in Visio is just a bit goofy and not all that intuitive.

To view Sharepoint Workflows in Visio

1. Open Sharepoint Designer and open the site that contains your workflows.
2. Go to Workflows and select the workflow you want to export.
3. Click “Export to Visio” in the Manage Work Pane
4. Save the vwi file
5. Open Visio and create a blank drawing
6. Go to Process -> Import
   
7. Browse to where you saved the vwi file and import it.
8. Voila!
   

Peyton Manning serving the United Way as America’s Role Model.

Microsoft Visio is not a tool I normally pull out of my toolbox.

Recently, when trying to explain a home network layout to a VP for the seventh time, I had a need for a visual representation of what I was failing to verbalize.

It is with that in mind that I fired up Microsoft Visio to document how I was going to attempt to:

1. Provide better wireless coverage in his 4 story mansion with THICK plaster and lathe walls
2. Extend the same wireless signal out to his new pool house and garage.

I say attempt because in a house this old and large, the signal is going to be weak, no matter what. Of course, that I fixed this issue 9 months ago by putting the best router in place that I could find, only to have him replace it with a crappy AT&T 2Wire gateway without telling me counts for nothing.

Back to my Visio issue. Several times while creating his layout, I would draw the first few objects and then attempt to move one and Visio would stop responding. So I’d try it again, same freeze, but with a different action. WTH?

After a few more rounds of insanity, I got a note saying the “Send to Bluetooth” Add-In may not be working correctly, would I like to disable it? Sure enough, that did the trick and Visio has been behaving itself ever since.

To disable this add-in:

1. Go to File -> Options -> Add-Ins
2. Under Manage:, make sure COM Add-ins is selected and click Go
   
3. Uncheck the box for “Send to Bluetooth” and click OK
   

Hope this helps.

Like I said a few years back when Karen Vail left the show, I’m a big fan of Frank O. Pinion and the Large Morning Show in the Afternoon, currently on KTRS 550 AM in St. Louis.

It was announced last Thursday (10/4/12) that another player, Tina Dalpiaz, was leaving the show. Frank discussed Tina’s departure in the final hour of the show.

I commend the transparency and discussion of a departure.

Click here to listen to the segment clip discussing Tina Dalpiaz’s departure from the show.

Best wishes to Tina and much success to her business.

Currently, Justin Bieber is continuing to sweep the world with his teen pop antics and musical stylings. He is the first true “social media” star. Sadly, Justin built his fame on a lie. Shocking, I know.

In a recent interview with Ryan Seacrest that aired on NBC’s Rock Center, Justin Bieber inadvertently revealed his true inspiration for his success in the music industry.

No, it’s not his soulful singing. Silky dance moves were certainly not involved. Nor did superfluous winking put him head and shoulders above the rest.

Bieber based his body of success on his mop of perfectly coiffed hair that opened the door to prominence and 28 million+ twitter followers.

Unfortunately, he scalped his look from a legend.

He stole from the Zack Morris.

Your Honor, I present Exhibit A in the case of Morris v. Bieber,  ”Rockumentary” (Saved by the Bell – Season 3 – Episode 22).  In this Casey Kasem narrated episode, Zack Morris, via input from publicist Mindy Walitzer, provided the follicle foundation for Justin Bieber’s post YouTube look and style.

Ladies and gentleman of the jury, can you tell me who is who? Bieber is even wearing a glittery jacket these days.

Thankfully, gone is the hair he ripped off from The Beatles. Replaced with another style rip-off.

Ironically, in Rockumentary, the following dialog took place:

Kelly Kapowski: That was the best song you ever wrote Zack.
A.C. Slater: Yeah, I like the title, “Friends Forever.” It’s pretty cool.
Samuel Powers: But we haven’t known each other forever. If we sing that, we’ll be living a lie.

Mr. Bieber, it is you who is living a lie!

It is time to cleanse yourself of this theft. Rinse, lather and keep repeating until you have restored the honor of the Zack Attack. Or at least, go shave your head.

At home and work, I spend a lot of time in Microsoft Excel. Most of the important details of my life are stored somewhere in an Excel Workbook.

For some time, I wanted a way to save a log of the changes that were made to some of the workbooks.

But I didn’t make that change!

The primary reason for needing an excel audit log is Shared Workbooks. Inevitably, when groups collaborate in a single workbook, someone makes a change and then when it turns out to be wrong nobody remembers making the change.

I also think it is insightful to see how you use an application. Is there something you do often that could be scripted into efficiency? This logging gives you the peak behind the curtains.

What gets logged?

The code below will store the Date, Time, Username, Machine Name, Sheet Name and Message about each change. Feel free to track other info as needed, or change around the order of columns to suit your needs.

But only I need to see what happened!

Although I didn’t have a need to hide the Log sheet from my users, you might.

If so, use this code to show/hide the Log sheet. (Reference)

Sub ViewLog()
    Sheets("Log").Visible = True
    Sheets("Log").Select
End Sub
Sub HideLog()
    Sheets("Log").Visible = xlVeryHidden
End Sub

The Code

Below you’ll find the code that you can pop into one of your modules in the Excel VBA editor (Alt+F11).

Public Function LogChange(Optional Message)
    Dim StartTime As Double
    Dim TempArray() As Variant
    Dim TheRange As Range

    Application.ScreenUpdating = False

    ' How Long Does This Take to Run?
    ' StartTime = Timer

    ' Redimension temporary array
    ReDim TempArray(0, 5)

    ' Which row is this going in?
    Lastrow = Sheets("Log").UsedRange.Rows.Count + 1

    ' Set the destination range
    FirstCell = "A" & Lastrow
    LastCell = "F" & Lastrow

    'Store the tracked data in an array
    TempArray(0, 0) = FormatDateTime(Now, vbShortDate)
    TempArray(0, 1) = FormatDateTime(Now, vbLongTime)
    TempArray(0, 2) = Environ$("username")
    TempArray(0, 3) = Environ$("computername")
    TempArray(0, 4) = ActiveSheet.Name
    TempArray(0, 5) = Message

    ' Transfer temporary array to worksheet
    Set TheRange = Sheets("Log").Range(FirstCell, LastCell)
    TheRange.Value = TempArray

    ' Display elapsed time
    'MsgBox Format(Timer - StartTime, "00.00") & " seconds"
    Application.ScreenUpdating = True
End Function

In a past iteration of this tracking code, I tried to use Cell.Value assignments. It was horribly slow. Like 2 seconds per change slow. That may not sound like much, but when you try to enter a range of data and after each cell change you have to wait 2 seconds, you’ll want to pull your hair out. Hence the array assignments which reduced the run time from 2 seconds down to about .06 seconds.

I put this code in Excel and nothing is happening.

Well, I wasn’t done yet, but I commend you on your vigor to try this code out!

You can now call this function leveraging various Events (Open, Close, Save, Print, etc) that are baked into Excel. You do this in the ThisWorkbook code section.

First create some variables to store previous and current values. Place this at the top of ThisWorkbook:

Dim PreviousValue As String ' For Logging
Dim CurrentValue As String  ' For Logging

Then you can choose from the list of Workbook Events to trigger the function.

Example: Log when the file is opened

Private Sub Workbook_Open()
    LogChange ("Opened " & ActiveWorkbook.Name)
End Sub

Tracking Cell Changes

As you’ll see in the sample code at the end of this article, there is some extra code in the Workbook_SheetChange section.

Private Sub Workbook_SheetChange(ByVal Sh As Object, ByVal Target As Range)
    CurrentValue = "" ' Reset the current value

    If Sh.Name = "Log" Then Exit Sub

    On Error Resume Next
    If Err.Number = 13 Then
        PreviousValue = 0
    Else
        CurrentValue = Target.Value
    End If
    On Error GoTo 0

    ' If there is no values, don't run the following. This fixed a custom macro to add 10 formatted blank lines in a detail sheet
    If PreviousValue = "" And CurrentValue = "" Then Exit Sub

    If VarType(PreviousValue) = VarType(CurrentValue) Then
        If CurrentValue <> PreviousValue Then
            If Err.Number = 13 Then
               PreviousValue = 0
            End If

            If PreviousValue = "" Then
                PreviousValue = "EMPTY"
            End If
            If CurrentValue = "" Then
                CurrentValue = "EMPTY"
            End If

            LogChange (Target.Address & " changed from " & PreviousValue & " to " & CurrentValue)
          End If
    End If
    PreviousValue = 0
End Sub

If you just plop the LogChange() function call in this section, you’ll get errors when the variant types on the CurrentValue and PreviousValue aren’t the same. You also won’t get any values for what was changed.

That’s what all the extra code is about; error checking and value tracking.

Note the code in Workbook_SheetSelectionChange as well as it is required to get cell changes to log properly.

Okay, I called the function where I wanted it, but I’m getting an error

Well, I didn’t script the creation of your Log sheet, so go create a sheet, rename it Log and put the headers in at the top of the sheet.

I’d recommend you also put an auto filter on the headers so you can quickly drill down in the future.

What’s the Catch?

Of course, this isn’t perfect code, here’s are the issues:

1. It doesn’t track copy/paste actions. I do a lot of copying/pasting in these workbooks and I have not found a way to trigger the LogChange() when a paste occurs.
2. Same problem for range deletions. If you select an all cells in a sheet and clear the contents, there is no log entry created.If you know how to capture either of these events or other missing events (like formatting changes) , let me know in the comments.
3. It doesn’t track Sheet Deletions.
4. Because I call the function from the Worksheet BeforeClose and Worksheet BeforeSave events, closing the workbook prompts for a save, even if you just saved it. I don’t remove the save call because it is enlightening to see users who NEVER save the workbook, except when they close it.
5. I’m not a programmer. There are probably many other improvements to be made to the code. I should probably re-comment as some of the comments aren’t really all that enlightening.

Even with these issues, I still find it very helpful to see a log of what updates have been made in an Excel workbook.

Sample Workbook

Rather than force you to try to copy and paste from the above text, you’re better off downloading the sample workbook and copying the code from there.

Click here to download a copy of the sample workbook.

Happy Tracking!

I recently upgraded the hard drives in my home desktop and encountered a minor stumbling block that I thought I’d share with you all.

BACKGROUND

My desktop PC is setup with 3 hard drives. The boot drive is a 1TB drive (C:). I then have two 1.5TB drives (E: and F:) which serve as the foundation for my long term storage and file shares. F: is simply a clone of E: via SyncToy. Parts of C: and all of E: then gets backed up offsite with Crashplan.

Recently, the system has sporadically slowed to a crawl where it was unusable. While I rely on my laptop for actually getting anything done, this disruption reiterated to me the pivotal role my desktop PC still plays in my home computing infrastructure.

After some fruitless troubleshooting, I found a smattering of bad blocks on both E: and F: via chkdsk. I was also running with only 10-25% free space on those massive drives. Fixing those blocks pepped the system right up, but I never like to keep crucial data on drives with bad blocks any longer than necessary.

About 4 years ago, I splurged when I bought those 1.5TB disks figuring I wouldn’t ever fill them up. But I haven’t ever regretted having so much storage space. I took this opportunity to again expand my file storage capability by purchasing two Seagate 3TB disks.

Once the drives arrived, I wasted no time in installing them and heading into Disk Management to get my new drives formatted and ready to go.

THE PROBLEM

I’m met with a drive that shows 2 partitions that can’t be combined into a single partition. What in the world?

Turns out, I’ve bumped into another barrier imposed by legacy technology.

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW.

Master Boot Record (MBR) is the partition table format that has been used for what seems like forever. Built into the design of MBR is a hard limit of 2^32 logical blocks of 512 bytes or 2,199,023,255,552 bytes (2.19TB).

GUID Parition Table (GPT) is the replacement of MBR. It offers 64-bit block addressing and has a maximum partition/disk size of 9.4 zettabytes.

That’s one disk with 1,073,741,824TB on it. Holy. Cow.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

So while this is all fine and good and I know why I’m getting two partitions, what needs to be done to fix it?

The great news is that Windows 7 64-bit supports GPT partitions just fine. But how do you change your drive from MBR to GPT?

I didn’t find the answer readily available when Googling. I’m sure it’s out there, but I didn’t come across it. I did however get lucky when I right clicked the on the Disk line while in Disk Management.

Eureka!

After the conversion to GPT and running through the New Simple Volume Wizard, I was able to successfully create one partition on my huge drive.

And in My Computer, I now see:

Oh. Yes.

THE CATCH

There’s always a catch, which is that you can’t boot from a GPT drive without a computer that has a UEFI compatible BIOS. From what I’ve read, not many systems are shipping with a UEFI compatible BIOS at this time. This was not an issue for me, but keep that in mind if you are planning on installing Windows to your huge drive.

References

• The Problem with Big Hard Drives
• Everything You Need To Know About 3TB Hard Drives

If you have a gun and are planning to carry concealed, do yourself a favor and get a Kholster.

They are very comfortable and well constructed. The customer service is also top-notch.

This Memorial Day weekend, all Kholsters are $40 shipped.

Unfortunately, peer-to-peer lending has failed me via Prosper.com. The notes I currently hold through Prosper once closed, will not be re-opened for a few reasons.

1. The Return Sucks . . . really bad

Prosper’s website is boasting a seasoned return of 10.46%. Ha!

Of the funds I lent, about 30% were not paid back.

This in and of itself is enough to flee from Prosper.

2. Statements are sporadic.

Monthly statements should be just that, monthly. Not with Prosper. My January 2012 statement just arrived today. It should have come the second week of February.

Statements do not arrive with any sense of regularity.

3. There are accounting discrepancies and no explanation for them.

Around December 2010, $11.50 went missing from my note value. It was not written off or otherwise accounted for.

I contacted support@prosper.com and asked for an explanation. $11.50 is not going to break the bank when I’m already losing 30%, but I want to know where it went.

They responded that they were aware of the issue and would be working to address it in January 2011.

The last message I received from support@prosper.com was:

Dear Mark,

Thank you for the follow up email. We do also see the discrepancy, once a plan is made for these statements we will email you with further details.

Thank you for your patience in this matter.

For future reference, your Prosper support case number is XXXXXXXX.

Sincerely,
Prosper Customer Support

Fast forward to today. . .

I still don’t have an explanation and Support will no longer respond to my messages reminding them that the problem is not fixed.

Of the three reasons above, number one is enough to avoid Prosper. However, the last two issues indicate a larger red-flag of failed customer service and a lack of an accounting foundation that can accurately track customer funds.

Do yourself a favor and avoid Prosper.com.

Microsoft has never met a gigabyte of storage space it didn’t like for underlying operating system needs. As hard drive capacities have increased, this has gotten worse. While I normally wouldn’t care, the introduction of solid state drives have changed the game. Now costs for storage space have gone back up and limits have contracted.

Once you move to an SSD, you won’t go back. I have the luxury of having a 256 GB SSD in both my home and work laptops. If you threatened to take either from me, I may shoot you.

This evening I was doing some drive clean up using my favorite disk space analyzer WinDirStat. It showed that besides my ridiculously huge Users directory (I have a couple of virtual machines in there), the Windows directory itself was consuming 31.9 GB of space. Good gravy that’s crazy!

The worst offender was the Winsxs directory. To read more about what Winsxs actually does, go here.

I did a bit of googling to try to figure out if and how that folder could be pared down. Most posts mentioned that it is critical to the OS, don’t try to delete it or your sky will fall and your Windows will crash with it. Other sites mentioned a tool that came out with Vista, that Microsoft neglected to include with Windows 7 SP1.

Then I came across this forum.

Which pointed me to this post.

Which gave me this command:

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

What this command does is remove superseded updates that are no longer needed after the installation of Service Pack 1. These updates are still kept around in case you want to uninstall SP1. As I have no plans on doing so, these files serve no purpose other than aggravating my quest to have more free hard drive space.

And that command gave me back 5 GB of space. A 6.5 GB winsxs is still crazy, but just not as stupid crazy as 11.5 GB. I’ll take a 43% reduction whenever I can get it.

Now to shrink the size of the rest of the Windows directory!

For those of you who use OneNote, life is getting good.

Recently, Microsoft released mobile versions of OneNote for the iPhone & iPad.

Today, Microsoft released an Android version.

Microsoft is pitching their web apps as a great and free solution to having your data everywhere. I’ve tried their web apps multiple times and can’t get over the slowness and lack of full features. (To be fair, I base that off of my experience with the Excel web app.) I don’t plan on giving up my full version of OneNote anytime soon.

While these mobile apps will only sync with the web app version of OneNote at live.com, I’ve found that the best use of these mobile apps is to use them as another “Unfiled Notes” section. Capture whatever note you want now on any device and periodically move them over to a regular OneNote notebook synced through Dropbox.

After driving my newly acquired Civic for a few months, the time came to replace the wiper blades. I typically do this twice a year on my vehicles. It usually entails picking up a set of Anco replacement blades and swapping them out.

I recalled seeing, while researching my Civic purchase, that most stock replacement wipers didn’t fit the 8th Generation Civics. The stock wiper assembly are also better looking than the el-cheapo Anco units. So I bought some blades online and went about what I thought would be a 5 minute job.

After 30 minutes of trying to yank the blades off the assembly, looking online for a how-to and eventually digging out the manual, I was finally able to replace the blades.

Here are the manual pages on how to change a wiper blade. This is mostly as a reference for myself, but figured it may help anyone else attempting the herculean task of replacing the wiper blades on a Honda Civic.

These instructions are for a 2009 Honda Civic Si Sedan. While the basic installation steps should be the same for multiple years/models, specifics may vary. I think Sedans and Coupes use different blades. Also saw that the type of blade and wiper arm assembly was changed frequently since 2006.

You may also consider buying your wiper blades from your local Honda dealer, who may install them free of charge.

I complained before about the awfulness of the new tab page in Google Chrome.

Today, I found a workaround for this smartphoneish abuse of whitespace.

You can find the fix here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=172036d6e2c73ba2&hl=en

Or if you don’t like clicking, here’s how to fix:

I’ve been using Calgoo Connect to sync my Work Exchange Calendar with Google Calendar for some time. Though a resource hog, Calgoo Connect has worked until lately. Now the website seems to be down and syncing has stopped.

In setting out to find a different way to get work appointments to Google calendar, I came across Google Calendar Sync. The problem with Google Calendar Sync is that it  will only sync from Outlook to your primary calendar. I had two problems with this:

1. I did not want all my work appointments to clutter up my personal calendar.
2. I wanted to maintain the color coding that comes with separate calendars.

I didn’t turn up any other freeware to accomplish what I was wanting to do. Instead, I figured out an obvious solution; create a dedicated gmail account to receive my work appointments and share the calendar with myself.

 Steps

1. Sign up for a new Google account.
2. Give permissions to Manage the calendar to your primary google account.
   (Calendar Settings -> Calendars -> Share this Calendar -> Share with your primary Google account)
3. Download and install Google Calendar Sync.
4. Configure your GCS with your new account from Step 1.
5. Enjoy

Benefits

1. Google Calendar Sync uses far less resources than Calgoo.
2. I don’t recall Calgoo supporting two-way sync. It may have, but being able to create an appointment on my mobile device and have it show up on the office calendar is very nice.

Drawbacks

1. This is Outlook only. Calgoo supported some additional calendar types.
2. The sync app has to be running all the time to sync. The same was true of Calgoo, so not really a drawback; more of a consideration when syncing.

Google is the provider for most of the services I use. I use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader and a bunch of other services they provide. Chrome has become my go to browser lately.

Recently, they have been making some interface changes. Some good. Some bad.

First the good news.

The look is different. Since most of the apps had never received a UI refresh, it was time.

Now the bad news.

I’m not sure the designer of the interface actually uses any of the products.

This person/team needs to reminded of a few of things:

1. My computer is not a smartphone.

Ninety-five percent of my browsing is done on a laptop with a very large monitors. I don’t mind tablets and smartphones; they have their place. But I want a full featured browsing experience when I’m not using a mobile device. The Ipad’s interface is ingenious and simple, but that doesn’t mean it should be everywhere.

Google Chrome’s new tab page now sucks as a result of some Googler thinking they need to make it behave like a smartphone or a tablet. The old New Tab page was extremely useful because it gave a heads up view of my apps, recent closed tabs and most visited pages. It was VERY handy. The new tab page, not so much.

Now I have to scroll between two tabs to see apps and most visited pages. Awful and a lot less useful.

The fix: I’ve seen suggestions to install an old version and turn off updating. So not really a fix.

My wish:

1. Allow apps on the Most Recent tab.
2. Allow more than 8 recent sites
3. Put the Recently Closed back where it belongs

The left navigation of Gmail also suffers from this. I’d prefer to see my chat and widgets in one long window. Why do I now have to click a button to see who’s online, or my calendar widget?

2.White space is not the new black.

I don’t need extra whitespace between detail items just for the sake of having white space. Yes it makes the UI look cleaner. But it wastes a bunch of screen real estate and impacts the usability of the product.

The Chrome screenshot above is good example of purposeless white space. Here’s the image above, but at near full screen.

Google Reader is the biggest victim of this. After the update, I found myself clicking “Mark All As Read” a lot more frequently than normal as I couldn’t focus on the spaced out items. Maybe I’m weird, but I have seen a couple posts on large nerd sites in the past few days soliciting suggestions for the best RSS Reader after the UI updates, so I don’t think I’m alone in this.

I did find a userscript that will help with this Google Reader spacing issue. You can find it here.

New Google Reader without userscript (7.5 items)

New Google Reader with userscript (11 items)

3. Provide a fallback plan

The most maddening thing of all these changes is that Google (who when I looked the other day, still provide a way to show the “Gmail – beta” logo) has been really good in the past of allowing legacy features to persist or giving users the option through application labs to enable/disable suspect changes.

The new UI changes seem to have no options or rollbacks.

Facebook is well known for making interface and feature changes that users hate. They seem to think they know best and that we’ll all be better off for their benevolent tweaking.

Until recently, Google has by and large been the anti-Facebook in making changes that collectively enrage their user base. That seems to be changing and is not a good thing.

By all accounts I shouldn’t be writing this. Even almost 16 hours later, I am still struggling to believe the comeback(s) that the 2011 Cardinals pulled off in Game 6 of the World Series.

The Texas Rangers should have woken up hung over from their post-game celebration. They had the Cardinals on the ropes multiple times . . . but couldn’t knock them out.

Joe Buck said it best last night, “They just won’t go away.”

And as a result, St. Louis is home to a sports rarity tonight. A series-ending, season-ending, winner-take-all single game to determine a Champion.

Let’s Go Cards.

This little piece of magic I posted the other day is getting quite popular. 11,000+ views thus far. And why wouldn’t it with genius like SACK! and slow clap it out?

Only on the Internet can such a piece of crap find a home.

The St. Louis Rams play their home games  in the Edward Jones Dome. The facility leaves much to be desired.

The building was completed in 1995 and there is already talk of replacing it with what should have been built in the first place; an outdoor stadium with plenty of space for tailgating.

When the Rams were under the benevolent rule of Warner the Magnificent in the time of the Greatest Show on Turf, no one seemed to notice the crappy dome as winning covers a lot of faults.

Such winning has gone missing in the last few years. Gone with it is the deafening roar of the crowd throughout the game that was prevalent during the GSOT.

With the lease on the dome requiring it to be in the top 25% of NFL stadiums in 2015, there is an out for Rams ownership if they wanted to terminate the lease and move elsewhere. And off the top of my head, 8 stadiums better than the Edward Jones Dome are: Lucas Oil Stadium, Cowboy Stadium, MetLife Stadium, Reliant Stadium, University of Phoenix Stadium, Ford Field and Soldier Field. This is a problem.

The Rams were poised to make a comeback this season. The injury bug has already hit and it seems the 4th stringers will be taking the bulk of the snaps before long. And I doubt they will guide the Rams back to a winning record, even in a dreadful NFC West division.

Better find a way to whip the masses into a frenzy so no one notices the awfulness of the dome.

The Solution?

So to improve a horrid game experience, the marketing mavens with the Rams have come up with this gem. I believe it played during the loss to the Eagles on Sunday.

I hope that it is a joke, but I fear that is not the case. It originally came from the Rams’ website. Let’s slow clap it out.

I’ve been using Google Chrome for some time. It is a great browser.

I recently started having an issue when viewing Google Maps with Chrome. When viewing any Google Map, I would click to drag the map and the click would hang. I’d let go of my mouse, but the map would still move with my mouse.

As a workaround, I’d right click the map to stop the panning action. This worked, but not very well.

Started looking for a solution tonight and found this: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=4de13e2d893a51b4&hl=en

The common thread between my setup and the initial posters was the Fast Access SSO extension. Go to Tools -> Extensions -> Disable Fast Access SSO.

Restart Chrome and you are fixed!

The Toyboata segment will be coming shortly.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

This is of course the real Top Gear on BBC, not the crappy American version on History channel.

Of course the best line of the segment was used in the introduction and is not in these videos. Jeremy Clarkson states, “Whenever you turn on the news, what is it that’s bogging down the enormous American military machine? Yeah, doesn’t matter whether it’s Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever. You’ve always got a bunch of guys who rock up in their home clothes with a half-timbered machine gun and look all of them in a flatbed Toyota.”

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

But while browsing the show Facebook page, I saw this:

Good to know the end of the show is not yet within reach.

Ever since my first viewing of Back to the Future, I have wanted a Toyota pickup. The movie comes to a close with Marty McFly openinig up the garage to find a gleaming black Toyota truck.

From then on as a child, when I would draw, I would doodle pickup trucks that all resembled a mid-80′s Toyota Truck. A truck that has disappeared from the truck landscape.

Side Note: There are a lot of continuity issues across all 3 Back to the Future episodes. See a few minor differences between the truck and garage in I, II and III here.

Since 2001, I owned this 1998 Toyota Tacoma 4×4 extended cab. I LOVED this truck. It was the perfect size. It was built like a tank and would go anywhere. It got decent gas mileage for a truck (just under 20 mpg). It had over 208,000 miles when I recently sold it.  Yet I can’t replace it with a new truck of comparable size. Tacoma pickups are now classified as a mid-size pickup.

I had planned to keep this truck for at least 350,000 miles. I sold it when I found a small hole in the frame shown above. (Here’s an example of significantly worse Tacoma Frame Rot). Toyota made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. They offered to repurchase my truck for $2,500 less than I paid for it 10 years ago.

Where has the compact truck gone?

Every pickup in America has been on steroids for the past decade and what used to be a compact is now mid-size. What used to be mid-size is now full-size. What used to be full-size is now almost qualified to pull a fifty-three foot trailer. The trucks these days keep getting bigger and bigger. As each truck graduates to the next larger class, the compact truck has been left behind.

To my knowledge, the smallest truck available in the US is the Ford Ranger, which is a good truck, but even it has grown in size the past few years. And Ford recently announced they will be stopping production on the final small truck.

Hello? McFly!

In this day and age of environmental concern and expensive gas, why have all of the major manufacturers chosen to eliminate the most fuel efficient truck models from their lineups? All manufacturers should be building more compact trucks and touting their size and fuel efficiency until marketing budgets are exhausted.

Our benevolent government is behind the death of the compact pickup. Blame them for this vehicular homocide using the weapon of unintended consequence.

From the (very) little I understand about CAFE standards, it appears that the framework of this edict is that the smaller the footprint of the vehicle, the higher the bar for fuel economy. See this site for more gibberish about CAFE mandates.

Rather than engineer their vehicles to meet these progressively more impossible targets, the manufacturer’s killed the small truck. From a business perspective, this makes sense. Compact trucks are a relatively small market and if it required an unknown capital investment to continue to sell them, the shortest distance between two points is to shut down production on small trucks or expand their size until a larger classification with lower fuel goals is reached. Looks like the manufacturers chose the latter.

Government is the problem.

As with anything our government touches, the road to unintended consequences is paved with good intentions. Good fuel economy is a laudable goal. When the end result of a mandate is to accomplish the exact opposite of what its authors intended, then the system is broken. I know this is not news. Reagan had it right, “Government is not the answer to the problem. Government is the problem”.

I don’t work in a job where I HAVE to have a small pickup. I don’t really NEED a truck. There are a lot of companies who REQUIRE a small pickup. Their higher fuel bills and expenses related to these bigger trucks will no doubt be passed on in the form of higher prices.

Even though I don’t have to have a compact truck, I loved my truck. I recently purchased a Honda Civic. I would have rather purchased a new truck, but there wasn’t one available in the size that I wanted. I do imagine getting a sheet of plywood for projects around the house is going to be much more tricky in the future.

Wal-Mart corporate lore says that the idea for the greeter was born in Louisana, when none other than Sam Walton himself walked into a store with a shoplifing problem and was welcomed by an “associate” put there by the store manager. His charge? To welcome customers and make sure merchandise was paid for. Eventually, this idea was deemed to be so great that it has been instituted in every other store across the country.

The Wal-Mart greeter was born.

Thirty plus years later and this grand plan has not been re-evaluated. I’d like to suggest it is high time to take a look at whether these greeters are necessary, effective or capable of accomplishing their relatively basic jobs.

Greeters don’t actually greet.

Rarely do I walk into a Wal-Mart where a greeter actually says “Hello” or “Hi” or even acknowledge that I am indeed entering their store. I’ll often greet them and often times get a startled response.

Though as a greeter, based on some of the clientele entering a Wal-Mart, I wouldn’t speak to them either. For a lot more examples go to: www.peopleofwalmart.com

Want to return something? Not without a sticker.

Usually, the employees posted up front are wrangling carts, talking with other associates, lazy or trying to figure out how to print out a label so a customer can return something.

Greeters are integral to the return system, which also sucks.

Wal-Mart, I realize that people steal a lot of stuff from your stores. I realize that measures need to be in place to protect against shoplifing. It used to be that you would use an old price gun and put a pink sticker on the return to prove that it had been brought in and not taken off the shelf. Low tech and relatively fast.

The system now? These older and slower individuals are using handheld computers with tiny buttons. They scan every item. They print out labels out for every item.

Here’s a recent example of this wonderfully efficient system: I was returning 3 items that were less than $10. First, Mr. Greeter was unable to find the barcode. Once he did, he scanned the entire length of all three items to make sure he hit the UPC code. After fumbling around with the handheld computer, the labels printed, but he didn’t have the dexterity to tear them off; he had to cut them off with scissors. The total amount of time this took? Over 5 minutes.

What is the point of this insanity? Low-tech and funtional has been replaced with high-tech, pointless and downright stupid. Will the return desk take anything back without a greeter-printed sticker? No, the system collapse, and I’m left wondering why I didn’t just go to Target in the first place.

I would also wager that the amount of shrinkage from incompetence and employee theft far outweighs that which is prevented by this greeter-based checkpoint in the return process.

Greeters don’t check receipts on exit either

Besides welcoming shoppers, the greeter is also supposed to make sure merchandise is not leaving the store when it hasn’t been paid for. As every Wal-Mart I’ve been too recently has an electronic inventory control system, it would seem this job has been effectively outsourced. Though, even when the bells and whistles sound, no associate stops the shopper to check what piece of merchandise is leaving the store.

So why don’t greeters greet?

30 years ago, there were 2-4 doors to cover the store as people entered, it was easier for shoppers to be greeted. Now, there’s a good 50 feet of entryway to cover. These folks aren’t up to the task.

More likely someone in middle management in Bentonville, Arkansas decided that they could utilize an existing paradigm to synergize the merchandise re-entry system  and customer acknowledgement initiative and by doing so would save zillions of dollars. In the process they distracted the greeter from doing the one thing that it is clear they should be doing when someone enters the store; say, “Hello”.

Next cost savings initiative? Get rid of the blue smocks and replace them with the cheaper bag uniform scene here:

To sum up, most greeters should not be employed. They should be retired. They should be playing shuffleboard and catching the early bird special at 4pm. I understand that such picturesque retirement is not an option for all. But if they must work as greeters, then for the love of all that is holy, please fulfill the title.

This car is a blast to drive and doesn’t have too many annoyances that I needed to address. I figured I’d share a couple of them as others out there might also encounter the same issues.

Daytime Running Lights

I’ve never been a fan of daytime running lights. To me they just make the driver of a car with them look as if he or she forgot to turn off his or her lights. As more people drive cars with DRL, the less effective they are as a supposed safety mechanism.

This is the first car I’ve had where turning off the DRL was not an option on the headlight on/off switch.

To disable your daytime running lights: remove fuse 37 from the interior fuse box.

Seatbelt Chime

The United States has turned into a very safety conscious nation. It seems that every police and governmental agency wants to ensure that every person in a vehicle is firmly strapped to any wreckage. Except, of course, if you are a young skull full of mush riding on a school bus. In this case, be prepared to turn into a missile should your crotchety driver hit anyone whilst turning around to yell at you.

While I believe it prudent to wear your seat belt, I find these seat belt laws and “Click It or Ticket” campaigns to be revenue-generating wastes of time. A government cannot ticket a society to safety, but they sure can bring in a lot of revenue in doing so.

The auto makers engineer seat belt nag systems that are  horribly annoying and persistent. Can you turn them off? Of course not.

That said, if someone has a reason to not wear their seat belt, that is their call in my opinion.

After searching high and low for a solution to disable the Civic seat belt nag, I found these: Ebay – Seat Belt Nag Disablers. They work well and for $4 shipped, they were well worth it.

Enjoy.

Recently, I ran into a new limit of 10 items that CAT has put in place. Frustrated, I started searching for a replacement and didn’t find much.

I recalled reading about an open source Google Analytics tool called Piwik. I hadn’t tried it out yet as for most sites Google Analytics is hard to beat. I gave Piwik a try and found that it works pretty well for giving insight into ads on Craigslist.

To install Piwik, you’ll need your own web server capable of running MySQL and PHP 5.1. You can follow the Piwik install instructions here: http://piwik.org/docs/installation/

Once you get Piwik installed successfully, login to your site and then Settings -> Websites and choose Add New Website.

Enter a name for your item or site. Fill out any of the other items, if you’d like and click Save.

Then click View Tracking Code. 

Because Craigslist does not allow Javascript, you need to use the Image Tracker Code. This is also why Google Analytics can’t be used. (If Google provided an image tracker, I’d have probably used that. I couldn’t find one.) Ebay and a host of other sites don’t allow Javascript either and you could probably use this method on those sites as well.

After clicking Display Image Tracker code, you’ll see the code you need to copy/paste into your ad. The only part of that you have to copy is:

<img src=”http://yourdomain.com/piwik/piwik.php?idsite=1&rec=1″ style=”border:0″ alt=”" />

Repeat this for each item you are selling. After you get sites created, wait a few hours/days and you’ll begin seeing data showing up in Piwik under the All Websites view. You can also select each item from the Dashboard tab to get more detailed info.

I’m not sure why Craigslist is against providing insight into viewers of ads. I would not be at all surprised if they come up with a way to block this method too. In the meantime, however, hopefully this will give you more information about potential buyers of items you have for sale online.

Enjoy.

Steeper’s Tea versus Liquorville.

Salvation Army versus Homelessville.

Lifters vs. Plasticville.

This comes from Season 29 Episode 2 (originally aired on October 11, 2003).

Benny’s versus Omletteville.

Anyone know where to find a pair of those gloves?

Tonight they featured an entertainer named Ieshia Moss.

Click “Read More” to view the video of Miss Moss.

This self-titled Black Barbie comes from the hip-hop/freestyle/mostly-freestyle genre.

Her inspiring performance  included booty poppin’, booty shakin’ and hand flailin’. Wearing some “wonderful” boots and a colorful face to match . . .

She. Tore. Up. The. Stage.

More impressively, the number was improvised as she forgot her routine and had to start from scratch.

Where did she get such skills? Well she revealed a long held secret that she used to be a stripper.

Yowza!

Update:

Her music was from the Levels Music Group and is called “Shake It Low”

The Parking Lot at my office

The company I work for has been in the same building for 10+ years. In that time, zero maintenance has been done to the parking lot. Stripes were finally painted about 4 years ago. While stripes are helpful, the potholes are getting ridiculous.

I hope these ducks are paying rent.

Gargoyle Carving in Webster Groves

If traffic on I-270 sucks in the afternoons, which is about 35% of the time, I’ll take the scenic route home. Doing so takes me past 35 South Rock Hill Road, Webster Groves, Missouri 63119.

While this house has a nice curved roof line, a few months back a new feature appeared. I am normally not a fan of lawn art, but this is just freaking awesome.

Front View

Back View

Another picture available here: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5302/5651541970_8e0f612953_o.jpg

Based on a brand on the back of the carving, I found it was done by Wood Den. You can find more of his work here: http://www.wood-den.com/

OBL

The world is a better place now that Osama Bin Laden is dead.

Sidenote: I keep thinking of the Vince Flynn character, Mitch Rapp when I picture the operation. I’d highly recommend his novels.

I doubt it will happen, but I would love to see an interview on 60 Minutes with the team that performed the raid.

I’d love to shake the hand of the man that saw OBL through his sights and pulled the trigger. I’d love to hear what was going through that man’s head just before the moment he sent a round through Osama’s.

“Facebook”

Is it me or is Facebook turning into Bartlett’s Quotations 2.0? Seems like a lot of folks have some sort of introspective or witty quote as their status these days.

I for one don’t update my status as I believe most people don’t give a crap what I happen to be doing at any given time (I’ve got this website for that sort of thing). But let’s not get all “preachy” people. Just tell the world your day sucked, you can’t wait for the weekend, *sigh* or your eating cheetos and be done with it.

Until next time . . .

OneNote is the holder of random bits of information that would otherwise be strewn about my bookmarks, saved files or thrown away and forgotten. It is SO handy. In a lot of ways, it has become the dumping grounds of my life. If I were a college student, OneNote would be my favorite application.

I’m also a big fan of Dropbox.

Dropbox keeps me sane by allowing me to have one set of data spread across multiple computers. It backs up, it versions and is just awesome.

Put OneNote and Dropbox together and you have a match made in heaven.

Well, almost.

Until today, I had one major problem using OneNote with Dropbox.

If I were on a home computer and sent something to OneNote, it would go in just fine. But then if I went to one of my other systems to pull up that content, it wouldn’t always be there. Sure enough, I’d check the file path and find that Dropbox had gotten confused and created a conflicted copy.

If I didn’t realize that something was missing right away and started capturing to my Unfiled Notes from a different system, I’d lose data.

The source of my problem was that I had set all of my systems up to copy to the same Unfiled Notes notebook. This made sense during the setup as of course I want all my Unfiled Notes to be together and accessible in one place. But the more I ran into this conflicted file business, the more frustrated I got.

Today, the solution finally dawned on me:

1. Create a dedicated OneNote notebook for Unfiled Notes.
2. Create a section in the notebook for each computer.
3. Point each system to the appropriate section from Step 2 Under OneNote -> Options -> Save & Backup -> Unfiled Notes Section.

So if you made the same mistake I did in putting all your Unfiled Notes into the same file from different computers, hopefully this fix will help you.

While this show features a lot of odd stuff, a gentleman wanting to sell his drag racer and trailer featured a phrase that I never thought I would hear on TV.

Sir, you may think your trailer and drag racer are worth $30,000, but I can assure you, the Mark Williams rear-end is worth way more than a measly $10K.

Thank you for your help in selecting a color for my roof. I know that voter turn-out was light, but the results were close (9 to 8), but the favorite, Thunderstorm Grey pulled out a win.

Before

After

Now as to why it took a year to post the results? Well, while a new roof is installed, I was not at all impressed with the contractor who did the work and it has taken quite a while to get all the issues resolved.

If you are local to St. Louis and want to know who to avoid, contact me and I’ll let you know who did it.

This was going to be a post about Albert Pujols and his stalled contract negotiations. I was going to give a compelling and well thought out argument that the Cardinals will be just fine without him.

But then the Cardinals suffered a massive loss with the season (plus) ending injury to the Horse of the Rotation, Adam Wainwright, so I scrapped that post and started over.

So a shorter mention on El Hombre

As good as Albert is, and he is phenomenal, he is a smaller piece to the Cardinals’ success than Mr. Wainwright.

If the Cardinals don’t meet his contract demands, that salary will be used towards the multiple pieces needed to plug that gap. But again, as good as he is, there are more value-oriented players to play first base.While he is consistently awesome, I’m not sure the Cardinals can afford to pay him for future production when that production is almost surely going to drop in 4-5 years, but his pay will be based on his 10 year track record of awesomeness. Sure they have the money, but what good is Albert when you can’t field a team around him?

If the rumors of 10 years/30 million are in the ballpark of what Albert is seeking, then let the Cubs (who seem more than eager to throw crazystupid money at Albert) or some other sucker sign him. They can be saddled with him in his 40′s at a price that will be WAY too much for a past-their-prime slugger who currently has so many aches and pains he doesn’t run out ground balls to first.

And even Albert can’t save the Chicago Cubs. They are forever doomed to the suckitude we are all accustomed to.

A Real Ball Breaker – 12. to. 18. months.

I was listening to a local morning show on Wednesday when it was announced that Adam Wainwright was returning to St. Louis for a medical evaluation. Just before the announcement came, Cardinals starter, Jake Westbrook was being interviewed and was discussing his recovery from Tommy John surgery. He was commenting that it was 2+ years before he was back to what he thought was his normal self.

The true impact of Adam Wainwright’s injury is not just limited to 2011. Adam probably won’t return to the lineup until June or July of 2012 at the earliest. Even then, he probably won’t be 100%. So Adam, notwithstanding his now tenuous contract situation, is basically out for 2 years. Suck.

20 game winners do not grow on trees. Pitchers who are still sharp after 115 picthes are rare. True staff aces that make what Wainwright made in his current contract are non-existent. Adam is the top of the rotation. While we still have a solid rotation with Carpenter, Garcia, Lohse and Westbrook, it does not look nearly as promising as it did a week ago.

A few notes on the Blues

It is still hockey season, and as with any team in the Western Conference (except the Oilers), the Blues are still in the playoff hunt. The Blues were also active last week in the trade market.

The Departed

I’m indifferent to Eric Brewer’s departure. He was always a solid defenseman who got a raw deal from the fans. It wasn’t his fault he was what we received for the Pronger salary dump during an ownership transition. Pronger was awesome. News outlets report that Brewer was a strong leader for the team, but unfortunately, his leadership did not advanced the playoff hopes of the Note.

Erik Johnson on the other hand has been disappointing as the first overall pick in the 2006 draft. Here are the names of some of the other players we could have had: Toews, Kessel, Staal. I never understood why we picked him to begin with and he hasn’t lived up to his #1 overall pick billing. He gave up the puck a lot in our zone and I’m glad he’s gone.

Jay McClement has been a stalwart of the Blues for some time. His consistent energy and penalty killing skills will be missed.

The Additions

Chris Stewart was the only player I recognized as he consistently scored A LOT against us. He seems to have gelled very well with the team and thus far has 6 goals in 5 games. He’s the big butt we’ve been lacking since Keith Tkachuk retired. I look forward to seeing his posterior parked in the goal crease for some time. The Blues definitely got the better end of this trade.

Let’s Go Blues!

If you care to follow the ol’ Marktastic Site on Twitter, do it here:

@MarktasticSite

I have no clue as to what will be posted there as of now, but follow now for what I’m sure will be even less updates than you get through this master piece.

So this site is published on WordPress.

Generally, I love WordPress. It is a terrific publishing engine that has all but rendered my desire to create websites from scratch moot. I’d just like to address one thing I’d love tweaked.

But I have run into this issue enough though lately that I figured I’d share it. And really, #3 below is what motivated this post as I lost what was almost a complete item when I tried to add a picture.

For instance create a new post or page and try any of the following:

1. Change Publishing Options. You can’t change the status, visibility or time of your post. Clicking the Edit button does nothing.
2. Adding Tags & Categories. It doesn’t allow it
3. Adding a picture. If you try to click on the add picture (or any other media for that matter), your browser will load the upload tool, but it will do so in the same window you were working on. If you have drafted any content before clicking the add media button, kiss it goodbye.

How do you fix all this weirdness? Quite simple, save a draft. This should be addressed by my own frequent advice to Save Early and Save Often, but I have butted up against these issues too many times lately.

It would be terrific if after typing in a new post for 3 minutes or so that a draft is automatically saved. (I picked 3 minutes as that is what I am used to in Outlook.)

I can understand why this feature is not included as for a lot of folks it would result in quite a few orphaned drafts and clutter up the works in that respect. But man would it be handy.

I’ve been using TrackMyShipments.com for some time to keep track of all the packages that arrive from Ebay, Amazon, etc. It was a handy tool to show you the status of shipments for USPS, UPS, FedEx and DHL in one place.

After creating an account with TrackMyShipments.com, it went something like this:

1. Buy something
2. Get a shipment notification
3. Forward that notification to Track@TrackMyShipments.com

I found out the hard way today that TrackMyShipments.com has ceased operations. A notice on their site said they could not discover a business model that produced enough profit to allow them to expand they way they wanted to, or something like that. It’s a shame as I don’t recall any advertising or freemium options on their site.

I set out to find a replacement and via Lifehacker.com found TrackThePack.com*. (Note to Lifehacker: Your new site design is much harder to use than the old one. Not a good change.)

A few notes on TrackThePack.com:

1. The interface at TrackThePack.com is much better than I was used to at TrackMyShipments.com
2. The e-mail parser at TrackThePack.com is MUCH more aggressive than I am used to. It created 6 shipments out of one notification that I forwarded to it today.
3. I wish that the TrackThePack.com e-mail parser would take the Subject Line and assign it as the Note/Description of the shipment. That would be handy.

If you find yourself tracking a bunch of packages, give TrackThePack.com a shot.

* Due to the wealth of information at Lifehacker.com, I can’t find the exact article that pointed me to TrackThePack.com, so I give you this link instead.

I recently found myself building an SCCM package for Adobe Reader 9.4. Sure enough, I got it tested, packaged and distributed just as Adobe Reader X was released. I mention that only as a disclaimer that I don’t know if the following works with Adobe Reader X.

After testing with a pilot group, some of them mentioned that the default toolbar in Adobe Reader 9.4 had a couple of things they didn’t want and a few items that the did want.

Here is the default Adobe Reader toolbar:

Here is what I wanted it to look like:

I set about trying to find where Adobe stored the settings for that toolbar and had the hardest time finding it. I finally stumbled across it here. Since the answer was not easy to find, I figured I’d use this as an excuse to update my oft-neglected site.

The location of the Adobe Reader toolbars are found here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\9.0\AVGeneral\cToolbars

So customize your menu to your liking and then export that reg key and you’ll be good to go.

The other problem I ran into is that I had set the regedit /S “myregfile.reg” command in SCCM to be run under an administrative context. Because Adobe stores the toolbars in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, you have to make sure that your program is set to run Only When a user is logged on so that you can force it to Run with user’s rights.

These are uncensored, so watch accordingly.

Dick in a Box

Mother Lover

3 Way

If you at all think that the federal government has reached its tentacles too far into much of American life and hope for a way to suppress the constant growth of government, this book provides very factual, very rational means of doing so from the perspective empowering the States in the way and means that the framers intended.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Perhaps the best look at why our economic house of cards almost came crashing down. Unfortunately, trillions in money we don’t have were squandered to perpetuate the myth that our economy is back on solid footing by politicians seeking to avoid being in office when it comes crashing down. This book was very well written and very easy to read.

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by AJ Jacobs

I actually read this and “The Know It All” by AJ Jacobs. Both are entertaining books. If only I had thought of putting myself through the torture of reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica (now obsolete thanks to Wikipedia), or living as literally, the Bible, for one year. I’d have probably shot myself in the head before day 365.

The Investor’s Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between by William J. Bernstein

I’ve always been a big passive index fund investor, but this book confirmed that which I already believed. It also introduced the idea of Value Averaging, which I will be researching more into the future. VA provides a boost in investment returns over my normal Dollar Cost Averaging, but requires a bit more calculation.

NOTE: The links above are through my Amazon Associates account, so if you pick up any of these titles, please use the links above.

In honor of that, I bring you Harry Caray, sort of.

Go Cards!

My house is in need of a new roof and I am stuck picking out a shingle color. Thus, I turn to you, wise Internet, to lend your assistance to help whittle down the choices of shingle color.

Here is a photo of the house:

The type of the shingle will be Tamko Heritage shingles. All of the color options can be found here.

Please take the poll or leave a comment below to let me know your thoughts, or suggest another color.

As I said, I’m currently stuck trying to figure out which color would look best. I’m debating between the following colors:

Antique Slate

Old English Pewter

Oxford Grey

Thnderstorm Grey

Weathered Wood

Thanks for your help!
Marktastic

I’m willing to ship books (via UPS), provided you paypal me the money, but this will be a better deal for those of you in the St. Louis Metropolitan area.

Contact me if you are interested in any of the titles listed below.

Recent Titles (P=Paperback | H =Hardback)

Bargain Bin – $3 Hardback | $1 Paperback

Using Cisco VPN in a 64-bit Windows Operating System

I recently made the switch to Windows 7 and at the same time made the jump from 32-bit to 64-bit.  So far so good, except for. . .

The Cisco VPN Client

From what I have read around the intertubes, Cisco will not be making a 64-bit VPN client. They instead are encouraging folks to use AnyConnect. Currently, my office firewall is not properly configured to use AnyConnect and with other more pressing tasks at the moment, is not likely to be configured any time soon.

So my interim solution was to use VMWare Workstation to run an XP virtual machine for the sole purpose of connecting to VPN. While workable, this was not ideal.

I searched the other night and came across this post, which points to a great answer.

The Solution

Shrew VPN Client

Shrew works great and more importantly allows the import of .pcf profiles.

If you on a 64-bit OS and need to connect to a VPN, give Shrew a try.

So the nerd level of this post is slightly higher than normal, but I have recently been working on a couple of Windows Server 2008 R2 systems. The machines are running on VMWare ESX 3.5.

Randomly, and usually while browsing the Start Menu or Windows Explorer, the system would hang. It was still responsive to ping, but I could not access the system through VNC, Remote Desktop or the VMWare console.

I started searching for answers and came across this thread, which points to the VMWare SVGA II driver as the problem on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

The recommend doing a custom install of VMWare Tools to deslect that SVGA driver, but I found that disabling the driver in Device Manager was just as effective and faster.

So if you are having random lockups, freezes, hangs or stalls on Windows Server 2008 (or Windows 7) and you are running VMWare ESX, disable the SVGA II driver and you should be good to go.

Al Gore, Mindy Kaling, Lindsey Buckingham

Leslie Faree, James Franco, Lindsey Buckingham

About a year ago, I recommended to you, the handful of readers of Marktastic, that Lunarpages was a great place to host a website. This site was initially hosted there.

I want to apologize for any of you that took my word and went with Lunarpages. They are awful. I found quickly after this site got up and going that it would be frequently turned off by Lunarpages “Support”. Apparently, a portion of my site was pegging a the processor on my shared server. I run WordPress with a lot of plugins, so I can see that this would be possible if I had a suspect plugin or script installed.

What was very frustrating is that there was no warning about the disabled site and no usable information was provided about which script was causing the problem, when the problem was occurring or for what duration. I would get a process listing from their server showing that index.php had gone rogue, but that was all.

I would go back and forth with their tech support and eventually they would re-enable my script, even though I wouldn’t change any part of my site. It got to be too much, too often.

I had already pre-paid for 2 years of service when I gave up and sought out a refund from Lunarpages. Well, they have a very shady policy that only offers a refund within 30 days of opening an account. If you decide to abandon them before the end of your term, you are out the money.

I searched for a new host and am currently with Dreamhost. Thus far, they have been great. My site has not been turned off and the features of the site are so much better.

Ultimately, I’ve abandoned Lunarpages and would highly discourage anyone from using their service. Because they suck.

Dear St. Louis Blues:

I love you. I really do. You’ve been my hockey team for a long time. I’ve put up with a lot of mediocrity. I’ve put up with those God awful jerseys that had way too much red in them. For a time, I bought into the notion that simply making the playoffs was a successful season; that maintaining a streak of 26 consecutive playoff appearances was a great accomplishment. After the lockout, I hoped that your streak would be broken, so that the focus of a season was not getting to the playoffs, but winning them. The new ownership groups seems committed to that end.

This season has been hard for me. I had really high hopes of you extending the progress you made last season. Given all the young talent we have, we should be poised to make a deeper run toward Lord Stanley’s Cup. But you are letting me down.

Maybe you need to steal an idea from baseball and bring in a closer in the last 10 minutes of the third period. A Mariano Rivera quality shut-down-pillow-stacker that does nothing than make sure you don’t blow a late lead.

Maybe you need to not be so complacent with a third period lead and keep attacking. You sit back and let the other team shoot. Guess what? They are more likely to score when you let them shoot.

Or maybe it is as simple as allowing Cam Janssen to go out and beat someone’s face in late in the third period. Okay, maybe not, but at least it would be more fun.

Just do something different so we can get back to winning!

Thanks,
Mark

Kathie Lee, Tom Hanks, Sean Connery and Burt Reynolds

Tom Cruise, Adam Sandler and Sean Connery

Bill Cosby, Sharon Osbourne and Sean Connery

I wish Hulu would post the Brian Fellow’s sketches with the porcupine and the goat.

The Spanish police should teach classes on the proper way to stop a criminal.

I love Microsoft Excel. Excel is far and away my favorite application. It has recently helped me lose over 30 pounds.

Some History First

I first became acquainted with Excel on a Mac Classic in junior high school. It was an awkward time for us both. She appeared in grayscale and on a screen that was not adequate to display all that she could offer.  I was buying my jeans from the husky section and didn’t quite appreciate my nerdiness.

My love affair with this blockish beauty took off as I was preparing to leave the ranks of higher education. I needed a way to keep track of the big bucks that were soon to land square in my wallet. It was a good match. We had our awkward moments, particularly in the summer of 1999 when we took a hard drive and crashed. Data amnesia syndrome hit us hard and we lost all the history we had established. In the years since, Excel has proven a capable mistress at taming my financial tracking into a mundane, but well managed, afterthought. She has also expanded her role to keeping tabs on almost all other areas of my life. Just last year, she even started telling me when my car needs an oil change.

The Decline

While Excel has proven quite adept at keeping up with the monetary minutia of my existence, I’ll be honest and say that, as tends to happen in long relationships, the focus on maintaining myself as a presentable partner slowly eroded.

I’m an average sized gentleman. I’m 5′ 8″ and my drivers license shows I tip the scales at 170 lbs. That weight has not been accurate since I got my license at age 16. In the years that have passed since then, my girth has grown slowly, but steadily every year, with the exception of maybe one.

Now even at the aforementioned height-weight proportions, I realize that medically, according to BMI, I would still classify as “Overweight”. I’ve always been on the portly side. More recently, though I hide it well, however, my weight class could only be described as “Fatty McLardbutt”.

The literal tipping point came for me when I tipped the scales at a way-too-fat-206-pounds. On that day, I finally allowed Excel to step in and do what she does best. I had considered asking her to help in the past to stem the tide, stop the bleeding and help me fit into pants that were now more than a bit snug and get back to use some belt notches that hadn’t seen action in years.  I thought I could keep genetics and my healthy appetite under control, but time had proven to me that I was too much of a sucker for candy dishes at work, delicious pastries and general snackertainment when bored.

=VLOOKUP(“Help”,My_Weight,206)

I was wrong, I needed Excel, my belle, to set the table. But instead of setting the table with tasty morsels of nearly raw steak and potatoes, I needed a bacon-wrapped spread of raw data, formulas and graphs.

In August of 2009, I started tracking my weight and food/beverage intake. Almost instantaneously, the pounds started coming off. My sheet featured some conditional formatting (gains in red, losses in green) to color code my weight change, a line graph that shows my weight over time and summarizes the progress made thus far.

It was instant accountability! Accountability  that I had never before existed for me. Ignorance of my eating was banished from my list of excuses. No longer could I wander my office and stop by one of the many candy dishes for a helping of 7 mini Kit Kats or 13 bite size Snickers. The times of eating 3 ice cream bars after dinner . . . GONE. Now if I followed the path of fat, I would have a Hansel & Gretel like trail showing me how I got there.

The Less Rotund Recap

I’m down to 175 lbs. My initial goal is to get back to 170.  Once I get there, I may try to make it to a range that according to BMI is no longer in the “Overweight” category, or I might just let myself go.

A few more items to note

1. I don’t exercise with any regularity.
2. I eat a lot of fast food.
3. I don’t track calories. Just the food I ate and what I drank with the meal.
4. Even with accountability, a lot of willpower is required to side step candy dishes and birthday celebrations to limit my intake. I usually drink a glass of ice water when temptation hits.
5. Except for donuts from Heaven Scent donuts, I don’t eat anything at the office.

I mention those caveats only to shed more light on the secret of my success. And really, it is no secret at all. Track what you eat and lose weight.

Since it is a new year and losing weight is a popular resolution, I figured I’d share my grid with you all to help you.

Click here to download the excel sheet.

The sheet probably not fully tweaked as it is a standalone version of the one I use everyday. Feel free to comment if something is broken in it.

If you find this helpful and you drop a few pounds, by all means, please Support This Site!

Here’s to your own weight loss.

A tweaking option for Microsoft Excel

I hate the default color scheme that ships with Excel 2007. So I’ve customized it to create a better looking theme. The sheet available above will probably look funny under the default excel color theme.

You can see how to install a better color theme here.

I know you can choose from a host of other color themes that are available, but most of those suck too.

So I made my own and thought I’d share it with you.

Click Here to Download a Zip File that contains Grid.xml

When you get this file, extract it to the following location:

%AppData%\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes\Theme Colors

This equates to the following:

Windows 7/Vista

C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes\Theme Colors

Windows XP

C:\Documents and Settings\YOURUSERNAME\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes\Theme Colors

Note: These directories won’t exist until you create a custom color scheme. To do so:

1. Open Excel
2. Page Layout -> Colors
3. Create New Theme Colors
4. Save

Dear Sony Pictures:

2012 sucked. Bad.

Please do refund me 158 minutes of my life back.

Thanks you in advance for your help with this matter.

Sincerely,
Marktastic

A while back, I got a Bag of Crap from Woot. It included a limited edition (1634 of 2000) Woot Bucket.

I have not found a good use for this beautiful bucket in the year or so that I’ve had it, so I’m selling it and a few other Woot collectibles.

If you would like to be the owner of a very rare Woot bucket, head on over to ebay and place a bid or two. If you win, you also get, some Woot Lights and a couple never-used, flying Woot Monkeys with purple capes.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220500078476

Bid Early & Bid Often!

These wonderful sites also provide an RSS feed so you can subscribe using your favorite reader.

People of Wal-Mart

Photoshop Disasters

There, I Fixed It!

Fail Blog

I’m a fan of So You Think You Can Dance on Fox. I’ve posted before about my favorite routine on the show. And I was extremely happy to hear that season 6 of SYTYCD would be on this fall; no more waiting until summer for the next season.

The one good thing about tonight was that everyone got to dance in their own style and they were good.

It seems though that SYTYCD has finally reached BIG SHOW status and with that they got themselves a fancy pants bigger set/stage/studio . . . and so far it sucks.

The stage itself is HUGE. Like 8 times the size of a person huge. It dwarfs the dancers and seems out of balance. It is just too imposing a presence when dancers are doing their thing.

I think the other reason I didn’t like tonight’s premiere is that the camera angles are all screwy. Thus far I’ve noticed that the cameras are:

1. Zoomed in too close and you can’t see the feet.

2. Shooting up at the dancers. The camera is below the stage and presents an awkward angle.

3. On a decent level but crooked or too close of a shot. And it would rock back and forth.

4. On a camera from way the crap out in the balcony or suspended from the ceiling of the airplane hangar where they shot this.

Really, it doesn’t have the same feeling as past seasons. The crappy camera angles coupled with a stage and backdrop that dwarfs and looms over the dancers just creates an awful separation that sucks to watch.

I’m hoping that when they start the competition tomorrow night they are back in the normal studio and all is well again.

Also just found this: Mia Michaels will no longer be featured on the show.

Which also sucks.

If you are like me, you have several USB Keys sitting around doing nothing. It’s time to repurpose those old drives. Turn them into a swiss-army drive that contains any possible program you might need . . . and for free!

I’ve been a big fan of the Portable Apps suite for some time. Granted, most of my software is installed locally, but it’s nice to have an alternative at hand on a spare flash drive for use in a pinch.

Having portable applications was great, but Portable Apps don’t update their application list to new version often enough for my liking and the update process was also more manual than I would have liked.

Enter Liberkey.  I haven’t noticed any apps missing from any of their suites that I used before. In addition, they have a great updating utility. The apps also seem to be updated to the current full version more quickly too.

I’d highly recommend installing LiberKey and giving it a try.

Today is the day that you thank the nerd in your life for saving your bacon and for keeping your computer running.

http://www.sysadminday.com/

Gifts of food, technology and cash are of course welcome and encouraged.

I present to you two of the greatest uses of the Internet that I’ve seen in the last 13 days.

Awkward Family Photos: http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/

Photobomb: http://thisisphotobomb.com/

Both have RSS feeds, so you can have the hilarity delivered straight to your Google Reader, or whatever newsreader you like. Enjoy!

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
• He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
• He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
• He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
• He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
• He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
• He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
• He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
  • For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
  • For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
  • For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
  • For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
  • For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
  • For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
  • For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
  • For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
  • For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
• He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
• He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
• He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
• He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
• He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Tired of a bank that pays you less than 1% APY on your hard-earned cash? Consider peer-to-peer lending. I’ve used both Prosper & Lending Club in recent times and am happy with both. You get WAY better returns (currently 10%+), with slightly more risk, but why let your money just sit there put it to work.

If you want a bonus for trying either system, please click the links below.

Lending Club Referral Link

Prosper Referral Link

*Note – Prosper is currently in an SEC quiet period, so you can’t sign up with them at the moment, but when they open up again, try them!

Link to Site: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/33

I had an opportunity to go to a couple Blues games last week. It was a playoff atmosphere and both games ended in a victory for The Note.

What was also intriguing was the dance that a good majority of the Scottrade Center would do before a power play. Ameren UE sponsors the power play and the theme music is a 2Unlimited song.

There are a couple of YouTube clips of this dance. Here and here.

So I came home curious and started searching about how this dance started and found a couple of forum threads on the at stlblues.com here and here.

From what I can tell, one guy started doing this dance (the forums point to a guy named Brock Boner or Jago). If the guy who started this is Jago, then this YouTube Clip supposedly shows him. Brock Boner sounds fake to me, so I’ll go with Jago. A group near the Top Shelf area saw him and started mimicking him and it has caught on very quickly.

Pretty hilarious stuff.  I hope to see all 19,250 present doing this in the playoffs. GO BLUES!

View Full Screen

Hilarious.

Classic

In recent weeks, I’ve started using Dropbox. It’s a nifty little web app that allows you to store crap online. Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Self, that’s not all that great, the Internet is full of people storing crap online; just look at YouTube.” and you’d be right. . .

Except that Dropbox provides a desktop utility that syncs your data to their servers and to any other client you have setup. So what does this mean to you? (They get bonus points for providing cross-platform clients.)

Well, it means you can use it to sync any file across multiple computers of different operating systems simply by saving it.

For instance, you could sync your Firefox profile across your home laptop, your work laptop, your home desktop, your second work computer and for good measure the mac you have at home, but never use. And that’s what I’m currently using it for. I like my Firefox just how I like my Firefox and by having one profile across the multiple computers, I don’t have to install the same extension upgrade 6 times, or repeat the same configuration steps multiple times. It’s very nice.

This is just scratching the surface of what Dropbox can handle.

If you want to test Dropbox, sign up using the link below:
https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTExMjEzNTQ5

I was cleaning out some old files on my system the other day and found this clip, which is by far the my favorite routine to date on SYTYCD.

This was choreographed by Wade Robson. I thought it was called Hobo Cabaret, but I think he might have referred to it as vagabond cabaret. Either way, it’s great stuff.

Enjoy, Hobo Cabaret.

Millstadt is a quaint little town; most of my recollections of growing up there bring back memories of classmates who loved 4-wheelers and didn’t really approve of black people.

I also recall a Golden Dipt factory that was neighbor to one of the best fish stands around. I only knew it as “The Millstadt Fish Stand”. All that aside, I’m craving some good fish and am looking for some recommendations for some quality fish fries in St. Louis County.

So far, I’ve found some info here, but it’s 10 years old. It recommends (among others):

• St. Gerard Majella in Kirkwood
• St. Joan of Arc in South St. Louis
• St. Peter Parish in Kirkwood

If you know of a church, parish or restaurant that has good fried fish, please leave a comment with the details.

Basically, Charter is filing for bankruptcy. I mention this, because if you have service through Charter, including a charter.net e-mail address, you may want to consider using an ISP Independent E-Mail Address.

I haven’t heard if service will be affected through this bankruptcy filing, but anything is possible.

I am a large fan of the radio program “The ITD Morning After” on 1380 AM in St. Louis. 1380 AM has a terribly weak frequency. To compensate, the audio content from each show is put up daily on www.insidestl.com. (Sidenote, I’m a believer that every radio program ought to be available online. This would be great for archival purposes, higher audience loyalty and to allow their audience to listen at their convenience, but I digress.)

When I first started listening, insidestl.com was running on WordPress and it had a podcast and I gave little thought to the daily task of downloading the audio files to get them on my Zune (yes, I’m one of the 5 people that has a Zune). I used an app called FeedReader was able to download all the audio files from the site’s main RSS feed. Then the site transitioned to a DotNetNuke (DNN) platform that will referred to as the ITX debacle.

The ITX debacle removed functionality and ultimately left a lot of folks (message boarders namely) wishing they could go back to the old system. I preferred the old system, but only because the new version of the site has not provided a podcast. The audio files are still uploaded each day, but it has required me to download them manually.

Post ITX Debacle, I’ve gotten around having to download the audio files individually using the  DownloadThemAll (DTA) FireFox add-on. That has worked okay; it provides a single button click to download all files and I didn’t have to put too much thought into it. But I still had to think about it and remember each day to use DTA to get the files, which was just too much.

Now short of continuing to wish that www.insidestl.com would provide a podcast, I started looking for an automatic method to download the content. A short search led me here, which subsequently led me here.

The end result? I have a fully automatic method for downloading audio from insidstl.com

Here’s how to do it:

1. Download WGET from here.
2. Extract the file you downloaded in step 1 to c:\wget on your hard drive.
3. Create a file called sites.txt file in c:\wget. Edit it to contain: http://www.insidestl.com/ITDMorningAfter/tabid/88/Default.aspx
   Or download sites.txt from here.
4. Create a file called insidestl.cmd file in c:\wget
   Edit it to contain:
   
c:
cd \wget
wget -r -l2 -H -t1 -nd -A.mp3 -erobots=off -i c:\wget\sites.txt

   Or download insidestl.txt here. (Rename it to insidestl.cmd after downloading.)
5. Create a new scheduled task that executes insidestl.cmd at the time of your liking. Audio files are usually uploaded by 11:00 am in my experience, but I scheduled mine for 3pm.

You now have a fully automatic method to download that day’s audio with no thought or action required. This will download the files to c:\wget directory. If you’d prefer the files to end up in a different directory, modify step 5 above to include a move command to your preferred directory.

For more help with WGET, click here

For those of you looking for quality sports talk in the morning, look elsewhere. If you are, however, looking for 3 hours of daily grabass, “The Morning After” might be for you.

UPDATE (2/4/2010):

Lunarpages didn’t turn out so well for me. Read more here.

If you happen to be looking for a web host, and don’t to pay a lot for it. Then check out Lunarpages. I moved all my sites to them a while back and have been impressed with both their value and support.

Please use this link when signing up for your new Lunarpages account to support this site.

One of the greatest SNL clips ever!

Congrats to Matt, Carrie, Jackson & Annika on Ike’s arrival.

UPDATE:

Pics are available here: http://shirkdogs.blogspot.com/2009/01/isaac-william-shirkey.html

Tom’s 12 Laws of Life

I am celebrating a birthday today. And I found some Red Box coupon codes that I know I won’t use before the end of the year when they expire.

So it’s my birthday, but you get the gifts.

If you use one of the codes, please leave a comment to let everyone else know which ones you used.

Codes

• 7K3GKWX
• F3MZD2K
• 2PQBR4V
• QJWPG4K
• 5WPLPDC
• XTN8N35
• VFBQ19Q
• JM8XQF2

Again, if you use one. Leave a comment so others know not to do so. And don’t be greedy. Share with the rest of the intrawebs.

Happy Thanksgiving. Let’s all show how thankful we are by donning our extra loose pants and stuffing our faces full of stuffing and other good food business.

I was a huge fan of GI Joe back in the day.

Check out this article for some good entertainment: 20 of the Greatest GI Joe Vehicles Ever

It seems as if the period of try outs for Karen’s spot is over and that Tina Dalpiaz won the job. Though she seems to still have a probationary period to serve out, I think she’s here to stay.

Congrats Tina.

Step 5 – Build the SimplePie function call and process the result

There are tons of ways to customize and modify what I’m about to demonstrate; for much more info, visit the SimplePie Documentation Page. For PHP help, visit this site.

The first thing we need to do is make a call to the SimplePie function using the feed for our spreadsheet that we determined in step #2 and store the result in an Array.

$gsRSSArray = array(SimplePieWP('http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/pYpgiAA4C958k2u5UzDJYJw/od6/public/basic?min-row=1&min-col=8&max-row=4&max-col=8', array('enable_order_by_date' => false)));

Now we have our data in an array to be used. But I found SimplePie inserts some quirky html into the array. This includes wrapping the array in a div and putting line breaks between each array element. To eliminate this extra markup, we are going to dump the array out to a variable (one character at a time), strip some of the markup and reform an array.

First we clear the variable to hold all the characters

unset ($RSSParseString);

Then we dump the array into the variable one character at a time

foreach ($gsRSSArray as $key=>$value) { $RSSParseString = $value; }

And then we create our new Array based on the <br /> markup

$RSSParseArray = explode('<br />', $RSSParseString);

At this point, you now have an array of your data without any <br /> characters in it. Though a lot of different options are available for processing and use of the data, I needed to save it and display it at any given time. To do so, I stored each value in a Session Level variable and did so using a Switch Case.

foreach ($RSSParseArray as $key=>$value)
switch($key) {
case 1:
$_SESSION['gsPrincipalDue'] = $value;
break;
case 2:
$_SESSION['gsInterestDue'] = $value;
break;
case 3:
$_SESSION['gsPaymentDue'] = $value;
break;
}

Your first array element might have a <div id="simplepie"> in it. To eliminate that, Add this line to your first case:

$tmp = trim(substr($value,strlen("<div class='simplepie'>$"), strlen($value)));

My example data is numeric and I want to format it in a standard currency format ($X,XXX.XX). To do so in each case, store each array value in a tmp variable and add the following lines.

Extract the only the digits from the Array value and trim any excess characters from the string.

$tmp = trim(substr($value,strlen("$"),strlen($value)));

Convert the string to a number and format it to two decimal places.

$tmp = number_format((float)$tmp,2);

Store the result in a session variable and put a dollar sign back in front of it.

$_SESSION['sessionVariableName'] = '$' . $tmp;

Putting it all together and we get:

<?php
$gsRSSArray = array(SimplePieWP('http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/pYpgiAA4C958k2u5UzDJYJw/od6/public/basic?min-row=1&min-col=8&max-row=4&max-col=8', array('enable_order_by_date' => false)));

unset ($RSSParseString);

foreach ($gsRSSArray as $key=>$value) { $RSSParseString = $value; }

$RSSParseArray = explode('<br />', $RSSParseString);

foreach ($RSSParseArray as $key=>$value)
{
switch($key) {
case 1:

$tmp = trim(substr($value,strlen("$"),strlen($value)));
$tmp = number_format((float)$tmp,2);
$_SESSION['gsPrincipalDue'] = '$' . $tmp;
unset($tmp);
break;
case 2:
$tmp = trim(substr($value,strlen("$"),strlen($value)));
$tmp = number_format((float)$tmp,2);
$_SESSION['gsInterestDue'] = '$' . $tmp;
unset($tmp);
break;
case 3:
$tmp = trim(substr($value,strlen("$"),strlen($value)));
$tmp = number_format((float)$tmp,2);
$_SESSION['gsPaymentDue'] = '$' . $tmp;
unset($tmp);
break;
}
}
?>

You could create as many cases as cells that you are receiving through the SimplePie array and could further customize the processing steps to your liking.

So now that we have our Session Variables populated, what do we do with it?

Step 6 – Install and Activate the PHP Execution Plugin of Your Choice

Since we have our data as we want it stored in Session variables, the only thing left to do is to display the contents of each variable where needed. This will be done using a php echo command.

There are many methods to execute inline PHP code. I chose the PHPExec plugin. The ExecPHP plugin does the same thing. And Sniplets are intriguing (in fact in this demo, that’s what I’m using).

The PHPExec code is:

<phpexec><?php echo $_SESSION['YOUR VARIABLE NAME'];?></phpexec>

The Final Result:

Principal Due: $250,000.00
Interest Due: $318,861.22
Payment Due: $568,861.22

So Where Do I Put this Code?

What I did was create a section in the header.php in my theme and inserted the function calls there. That way each page load on my site would read and store the Spreadsheet data in the Session variables. This is overkill, but I had 7 different cells to display without wanting to generate unique code for each cell.

I also found that trying to build the entire thing using PHPExec was hairy at best and using the Visual Editor to compose pages would delete my code. It got to be very frustrating. ExecPHP does the same thing. There are ways around this, but I haven’t explored them fully. Storing your code in the header.php (or another template file) bypasses this code deletion. You still have to echo the Session variables and those can still disappear due to the visual editor issues, but its much simpler to recreate an echo statement than it is to recreate all of the above code.

While creating this demo, I discovered the Sniplets plugin. It allows you to compartmentalize your code in Sniplets. You could create a sniplet for each cell you want to work with and use their markup to return the result where you need it. For this example, I used the above code, but echoed the results instead of storing them in Session variables. The Switch Case in my Sniplet looks like this:

switch($key) {
case 1:
$tmp = trim(substr($value,strlen("$"),strlen($value)));
$tmp = number_format((float)$tmp,2);
echo 'Principal Due: $' . $tmp . '<br />';
unset($tmp);
break;
case 2:
$tmp = trim(substr($value,strlen("$"),strlen($value)));
$tmp = number_format((float)$tmp,2);
echo 'Interest Due: $' . $tmp . '<br />';
unset($tmp);
break;
case 3:
$tmp = trim(substr($value,strlen("$"),strlen($value)));
$tmp = number_format((float)$tmp,2);
echo 'Payment Due: $' . $tmp;
unset($tmp);
break;
}

Sniplets thus does a couple of things for us. First, Sniplets solves the code retention issue that PHPExec and ExecPHP have when you view a page in the visual editor as there is no php code to insert into a page or a post. This plugin also bypasses the need to store the results of each case in Session variables.

There might be some more upfront work to create all the Sniplets you’d need, so I’m not sure it saves any development time. Regardless of any time savings, it makes more sense to use this compartmentalized approach versus trying to force your php inline into your pages and posts and having to modify template files. I’ll be modifying my technique to use Sniplets.

Update – October 2012: 

So Sniplets is no longer being developed. It is also actively conflicting with the updated WordPress Core. When activating the plugin, it gives an error “The plugin generated 907 characters of unexpected output during activation. If you notice “headers already sent” messages, problems with syndication feeds or other issues, try deactivating or removing this plugin.”

Sniplets is also preventing various Java elements on a page in the UI from rendering properly. It still works, but it has become a pain in the rump to work with.

So I’ve updated the site where I use this Google Spreadsheets data injection to use Shortcodes UI. Seems to fit the bill nicely. One quirk of this tool is that you can’t echo php. You have to set a variable and return it. Not the end of the world, but something to take into consideration.

Summary

All in all, this is a solution that works to get data from Google Spreadsheets and insert it inline into your pages and posts. It needs some refinement. I don’t claim to be a programmer, so some of the code is probably not as efficient as it could be, but it works and that’s what matters most.

If you have questions or would like to share ways to improve this method, please leave a comment.

Background

Recently, I was converting a site from ASP to WordPress. This site details a mortgage loan and its amortization schedule. The amortization schedule is built with Google Spreadsheets. I found it much easier to work with the amortization data in Google Spreadsheets as opposed to storing it in a MySQL database, as I have no experience working with Databases and can do a lot more with Spreadsheets.

As such, I needed a way to pull data from the Google Spreadsheet and display it as needed in a given web page. In the ASP version of the site, I used a script from Bytescout, which pulled data through the RSS feed of spreadsheet. This worked really well and I hoped to replicate it in WordPress.

I looked for a similar solution in the form of a wordpress plugin. I tried:

• inlineRSS – I ran into issues getting feed data without a barrage of errors.
• Inline Google Docs – I got this to work successfully, but it did more than I was looking for. It showed the entire sheet without any options to only pull in specific cells.
• inlineFeed – I know I tried this, but it didn’t work, though I can’t remember more than that.

Ultimately, none of those worked, and I was thinking I would have to start learning MySQL and become a database expert. Then I found SimplePie. Keep reading for how to integrate your Google Spreadsheet data into WordPress pages.

Step 1 – Create your spreadsheet in Google Spreadsheets

For this example, I’ll be using this spreadsheet. You can use any Google Spreadsheet you’d like. You will need to isolate the data you are looking to return in it’s own cell. By this I mean that if you want to do some data manipulation of any of your data, store the result in its own cell. Your spreadsheet will handle the calculation, RSS will deliver the result.

Step 2 – Determine the RSS Feed for your spreadsheet.

After you have your sheet created to your liking, we have to figure out the feed for that spreadsheet.

Google uses the following format for the spreadsheet feeds:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/list/<DOCUMENT ID>/od6/public/basic

In our example, the document ID is: pYpgiAA4C958k2u5UzDJYJw. We obtain that by looking at the address bar of our spreadsheet:

To obtain specific cell data from your spreadsheet, use this format for the feed:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/CELLS/<DOCUMENT ID>/od6/public/basic

To further restrict what cells get pulled over, you can add the following variables to the feed address:

• min-row
• min-col
• max-row
• max-col

Using our example spreadsheet to obtain the values for Total Principal Due, Total Interest Due and Total Payment Due (Cells H1 to H3) through the RSS feed would be:

• min-row=1
• min-col=8
• max-row=4
• max-col=8

Putting this all together, the feed for the cells in our example is:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/pYpgiAA4C958k2u5UzDJYJw/od6/public/basic?min-row=1&min-col=8&max-row=4&max-col=8

UPDATE (4/22/09) – In the URL mentioned above, you see an od6. I recently added a new spreadsheet I wished to publish and had to change that to od7. Just an FYI in case you are running into problems.

Step 3 – Install and Activate the Simple Pie Core Plugin

About this Plugin

This plugin does absolutely nothing except load the core SimplePie library so that all other plugins that utilize SimplePie can all share the same up-to-date version. It also helps minimize potential conflicts between SimplePie-powered plugins.

Step 4 – Install and Activate the Simple Pie Plugin for WordPress

About this Plugin

This is the official plugin from the SimplePie team. It relies on the SimplePie Core plugin, and includes several features:

• A configuration pane under the Options tab in the WordPress software.
• “Multifeeds” support (merging and sorting multiple feeds together).
• MUCH better control over the plugin’s output.
• Simple, easy-to-use tags for nearly every piece of data that SimplePie can output
• Support for multiple templates
• Global configuration of default values for several configuration options
• Ability to override the defaults for any given feed — including giving a feed it’s own output template.
• Ability to post-process feed data (e.g. stripping out all content except for images).
• Support for internationalized domain names.
• Support for short descriptions is configurable.
• Support for PHP 4.x and 5.x.
• And much more!

Both of the plugins are required to build any code using SimplePie.

Click here for Part 2!

I picked up a 30 GB Zune last Christmas off Woot.com for $85. It has been worth every penny.

I find that I encounter few issues with it and generally just works.

Every so often though, my unit powers off when I shift in my chair at work. This is due to static electricity generated by my big butt.

And even more rarely, my Zune just stops responding all together. If this ever happens to you and you are looking for the magic key combination to reset it, here it is:

Hold the Back button and the Up button on the directional pad until you see the Zune logo

This effectively reboots your Zune. It does not delete any of the media on your Zune.

Note: If you find this doesn’t work, make sure your hold button on the top of the Zune is not locked.