... yeah, that's the spot.

I really, really miss having a dog.  At least I have web videos like this to fill part of the need.

It's been almost two years since I posted a random picture from our trip to Salzburg, but strangely enough I never posted the mini-tip for inserting a random picture from a SmugMug gallery.  It's actually simple enough.  Just insert an image link which points to random.mg with the album id and desired image size.  The URL ends up looking like this:

http://pictures.little.org/photos/random.mg?AlbumID=1886470&Size=Thumb

You can find the AlbumID by browsing to one of your SmugMug albums then examining the URL.

Go forth and randomize!

Now this is just pretty damn cool, Windows Media Center, NBC and TVTonic have collaborated to provide Summer Olympic coverage delivered direct to your Media Center (and through that to your Xbox too). 

Paula asked the important question: "Why should I care? I'll just TiVo it."

True, you can get the Olympics via TV broadcast (and time-shifted via your PVR of choice) or on demand from NBC's site.  The thing I think is a killer feature is that you can specify the events you want to watch instead of having to fast forward through an hour of equestrian events just to watch track and field (or vice versa).  Heck, you don't even need a TV tuner card to get the programming (most of it in ED and lots in HD).

Sure, there are limits: you have to be in the US and you have to have Vista Media Center (32 bit only).

Get the full run down from TVTonic's site.

Well, technically it's a video off the web, but I wouldn't have found it without Joel McHale.

Want more? Some more Beaker action here!

One of the reasons I'm a huge fan of smugmug is because they've made it possible for their customers to enhance and extend their web pages.

I wanted to have a gallery on my smugmug site which consisted entirely of my favorite pictures.  One of the ways I could do this was by taking each picture I like, then making a copy of it into a new, "favorites" gallery.  While this would have done the trick it also means having to manage duplicate files and I would no longer have the context of when the picture was taken.  I had to find a better way.

While trying to figure out if there was a good way to do this I stumbled across David's automatic "recent" featured gallery. The recent gallery used JavaScript to insert a gallery of recent pictures into the smugmug web page.  I realized that with a little massaging the code could instead display a gallery based on a keyword.

I now have the feature I desired: a gallery of all my favorite pictures which didn't require duplicating pictures and was automatically updated.  Anytime I find a picture I like I simply add the keyword "favorites" and it is automatically included in the favorites gallery. Check out my smugmug site to see it in action.

If you are interested in doing the same thing on your smugmug site, I've written up complete instructions and provided downloadable JS files to cut and paste into your smugmug control panel.

Note: I really must give all credit to David for this since I really just trimmed and modified his code for this.

I think it was pure voodo, but I have dasBlog 2.0 installed now.  I hope it sticks.

Now, off to copy all my content back, migrate my modified page layout, ...

It's stuff like this that makes e-mail fun at work.

Tim e-mailed to let the SharePoint team know he was working at home sick, this was the exchange we had...

Tim :

Hi Team,

I’m going to stay at home with the germs. I heard that it was a popular pastime for the team these past couple weeks.

Tomatoes are not to blame! Please, don’t turn against them.

And don’t worry too much about me; I took a vitamin (Flintstones COMPLETE [More COMPLETE with Choline]) , so everything should be fine.

Sincerely,
-Tim

Reeves:

Since Fred is bigger than Barney is he more nutritious?

Tim

I’d have to assume that Fred’s additional mass of chalk and artificial sweetner contributes no nutritional value.

I imagine molds of many characters, each receiving the same miniscule scoop of vitamins and minerals, moving down a conveyer to a second, varying-sized treatment of filler.

I don’t know if they do anything to even out the nutritive content. Perhaps they’re all liquids that eventually bake or cool.

When they’re formed, they go into a bottle and then I eat them.

That’s how health works.

---

You want to know the rest of what's in Flintstones?

I had a glass or orange juice then brushed my teeth.  Ah, refreshing.

Why does it taste horrible if I drink orange juice after I brush my teeth but it's tasty when I brush my teeth after I drink orange juice?

---

Oh, turns out the orange juice I like is made by Coca Cola company... who knew?

If you're looking for a great starting place for finding SharePoint information, then check out the SharePoint Learning Resources site.  It's a searchable resource for both developers and IT workers and even offers feeds so you can stay up to date on the latest additions.

Perhaps this weekend I'll curl up with a warm laptop and do a little light reading.

This is much more exciting to me than it is to the rest of the world.  I have cleared my inbox and my workload is now tracked by my task list.

Why is this good?  It now means that I'm not using my inbox to figure out what I need to do next.  Why is that bad?  Because the contents of my inbox are controlled by everyone else more than they are controlled by me... makes it hard for me to be in control of my tasks.

Now I need to actually get the stuff done.  The upside is I know what the stuff is.

Ah, it's that time of year again... announcements of fake stuff. 

I do however, really want an Xbox wireless helmet.

Yesterday after sitting on the beach for the morning I started getting anxious.  I wanted to get home to get to work on our house and dig into projects at work.  Perfect timing, I guess it's time to go home.

 
Paula and Reeves enjoying a fruity drink on the beach.

As is becoming the trend lately, Paula is the first to post... so I refer you to her blog for details.

For those of you at work, don't worry, I've already forgotten your names.

I love listening to music, I have gigabytes of tracks stored on my Home Media Server but there's a catch: who has time to look through nearly twenty-thousand tracks to pick out just the right grouping of songs? 

Enter Pandora, a fantastic streaming music service which takes a song or artist as input and then creates a steaming radio station based off the musical "genes" of your choice (for more, see The Music Genome Project).  It's fantastically easy, and it's free to listen from your computer.  Try it out, you don't even need to create an account to start listening.  Genius!

The whole experience is really quite slick.

• Land on the home page and you're prompted to enter a track or artist... no login to get started!
  
• Playing music to fit your mood is as easy as picking a song or artist.  Let's say I'm in the mood for some Yes, type in to the box, click "create" and Pandora sez: 
  
• Sweet, what about the rest of the songs?  Next track is Pink Floyd:
  
• You can rate each song, telling Pandora to play more like it, or not play that song anymore on that station.  You can also look up why any song is playing if you're curious.
• While it's free to listen to on the web you can also pay a nominal fee for Pandora goodness on your other devices.  For example, if you have a Sonos or Squeezebox you can pay $36 a year to stream custom, commercial-free radio stations around your house.

What's playing on the Yes station?

While Pandora is almost magical, it isn't infallible. 

• If you listen for a long time (several hours) you'll start hearing repeats. 
• Pandora sometimes seems to get its wires crossed... our Dixie Chicks station will occasionally play Corn or Guns 'N Roses.  Huh?

It's also worth noting that Pandora doesn't allow you to play any song you like at any time (like Napster), but that also allows them to have pricing more like satellite radio.

Now what I'd like to see is Pandora for my own music.  Let me pick a track then have Pandora create a play list I can sync to my portable media player.

It looks like there's going to be an attempt to resurrect BattleBots on ESPN, but apparently, without Jason.  Jason did point out, however,  Popular Mechanics choose to mention him before Carmen Electra in their article.  SNAP!

I guess this was shown during the CES keynote this year, but I just saw it for the first time while watching the keynotes for the MS Office SharePoint Conference this AM. 

Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip

... now I'm just annoyed.

here's Elmo!

After changing the batteries on her son's Elmo doll, Elmo appears to be channeling Jack Nicholson.  The programmable doll is able to learn a child's name and repeat it as part of a variety of phrases.  A glitch, however, makes it sound like it's saying "Kill James".

Death-threat Elmo brightened my day a bit until I watched the CNN video.  What killed the buzz?  The mother is obviously angling for a cash settlement from Fisher-Price.  Fisher-Price offered to replace the toy and investigate, so why does the mother still have the toy which she states has her "distraught" and is causing her a "hassle"?  She clearly thinks she's holding a little red lottery ticket.

C'mon lady, take the replacement doll and laugh it off!  Worry less about how your kid is affected by the doll and more about what he learns from how you handle the situation.

I coworker sent these to me... they're too fun not to share:

 

 

There were a bunch more fun visual advertisements in the e-mail, I stuck a bunch in a cool advertising gallery on our picture site.  Enjoy!

... trying to absorb a whole new job is really taking it out of me.  Perhaps a little stop motion to get me going...

(thanks Jason for the vid)

I really liked the last Cadillac CTS-V and probably would have bought one if the interior didn't feel so cheep.  I also like the tweaks they've made to the styling of the new CTS.  I'm not sure, however, that I like the new CTS-V.

Sure, it's got all kinds of sexy under the hood and the interior looks much improved... but the outside looks like they made it a bit too bumpy/bulgy.  I'm sure they wanted to make it seem extra-tough... but it's looking like they may have gone past the look of a sleek athlete and ended up with something a little more cartoon superhero.

  

I'll reserve final judgement until I see it in person, but with 550HP & lbs/ft I suspect I'd never want to be looking at it from the outside.

via: autoblog

The stress of moving and changing jobs has kind of put me off blogging... so for updates I refer to you Paula's blog.  She has been much better than I about blogging as of late. :)

At any rate... after a much delayed flight from Dublin to Chicago we're relaxing in the American Airlines Admiral club.  I must say, AA is going down hill.  The aircraft here from Dublin was a total beater (our seats had no functioning lights and the channels on the AV system wouldn't change).  The Admiral's club is not much better, the seats all look like the upholstery hasn't been cleaned in a decade.

Yep, delaying my flight for several hours forcing me to have a 5 hour layover makes me grumpy.

Bah!

Paula and I are complete old fogies... we rang in 2008 from bed.  On the plus side... it's the first time in several years we've actually been awake at midnight. :)

Have a wonderful, safe and peaceful 2008!

One of the things Paula and I have found is the off season is really nice.  The weather may be cooler but the prices are lower and (my favorite part) the crowds are lighter.

There is, however, one more thing I was noticing today: the lighting is dramatic for most of the day.  If you're trying to take pictures during the summer, they really look best at sunset and sunrise.  During the winter, however, the sun is lower and the light is more dramatic.

 

Grenada has been a joy so far.  I was a bit stressed at the beginning since my grasp of Spanish is pretty much nil, but I've decided to relax and let Paula handle it all. :)  After spending most of the morning traveling yesterday we had an early dinner then walked around a bit near hotel.  We slept about 12 hours then spent today going up and down the hills that surround the Al Hambra palace.  Tomorrow we head up the hill to see the grand Moorish complex, we can't wait.

I've got a new job (soon)!  The beginning of next year I'll be joining the Sharepoint team in Redmond, Washington.  I'm super-excited about this new position.  I'll be moving into the greater Office organization and getting a chance once again, to work with friends from the past. 

While Paula and I are both really excited to be moving to Redmond we're still a little bit stressed and sad.  We're facing down our second international move in less than two years (can you say "gluttons for punishment"?) and are a little disappointed to be leaving Ireland. We love the Irish people, the country and especially the convenient travel.

We will, however, be over the hump soon and are working hard to distract ourselves (went to Waterford last weekend, going to Spain this weekend, going to western Ireland in early December and to New York for Christmas with my sister <phew>). 

January 14th is my first day... so I'm sure the time will fly.

... because this may take a while.

If you're like me and like to adjust the look and feel of your SmugMug site then you'll love this: a visual reference for the SmugMug Class and DIV IDs.

I was poking around Chris MacAskill's SmugMug galleries and came across this wicked cool reference.  I'm now going to load the printer up with 8x10 photo paper and print this beauty for my wall.

... Fight Like Apes!

With an EP title like "David Carradine Is A Bounty Hunter Whos Robotic Arm Hates Your Crotch", how can you not love these folks?

The quirky title might grab your attention but the Dublin quartet will definitely please with great tracks and a style described as "synth-grunge".  Check out their My Space page and have a listen.

 

Note: I realize "Whos" is not "good English"... but that is the album title.  They are, after all, quirky.

I've made no secret of how much I love SmugMug.  Great price, straight-forward UI, unlimited photo storage, open APIs... blah, blah, blah.  You want loyal customers?  Simple: make a great product and support it well.

Well, here's another tip for loyal customers: give 'em free stuff for no reason whatsoever.

I logged into SmugMug tonight to check the stats on my pictures and guess what?  They're going to send me stickers and a camera strap...  just 'cause.

I'm feeling the love.