i’ve been ignoring my poor blog for a long time, opting instead for the much easier, Twitter. however, i had to post something because the wordpress 2.7 backend is so awesome, it’s just begging to be used.

so we’re back from our road trip.  i really meant to post a list of the fun and interesting stories that happened, but, you know, i didn’t have time.  as per usual.  i would like to state outright, however, that hitchhiking for gas in the middle of Nowhere, Utah isn’t very fun, but truckers can be awesome in a pinch.  (I’d like to thank the guy from Underground Solutions who was driving to SLC from San Diego who picked me up, and also the guy from a local utah trucking company I can’t remember who gave me a ride back to the car.  For anyone interested, we ran out of gas here — note how there’s nothing around…)  that was the most interesting, but not the most stressful event that happened.

alas, we’ve been busy.  we added a new phase to the thinktank reconstruction and that is converting it into a Wordpress CMS type site.  i’ve said before that if you want to do a CMS, probably Wordpress isn’t the best option, but we want to have a bunch of wordpress themes that we’ve built that we can show off so we can show that we’re good at them, and for something small (although getting bigger all the time) like the thinktank site, it works fine.  we’re still doing the theme switching thing, but we’ve only integrated one theme thus far.  the prototype site is up over here and the old site will be pulled down once we finish doing the other themes (and then build some more).

also, we did a redesign of the kidsblog and imported that into wordpress also.  erin did the design and we’re super-excited about it.  i helped with the integration, but mostly it was her.  meanwhile i’ve been playing with the laptop and discovered i can use the iSight (that’s what the camera is called, apparently) to make movies.  gavin really likes seeing himself on the screen so we’ve started encouraging that by starting a vlog that’s posted on the kidsblog.  i’m really hoping to make that a regular feature in addition to the usual news, updates, stories, and pictures of the kids.  i’ve considered doing the vlog thing myself, but i still haven’t settled on it.  so, until i do, this is all you get:

in other news, i want to test out Elgg when it’s released next week and i need volunteers to help beta test it for me.  head over here for info or to voice your interest.

i nixed the single sign on due to the fact that a) it was kind of buggy and b) i didn’t need it anyway.

but in better news.  WII.  seriously.  wii.  it’s wiitastic.  i’m wiidicted.  it’s wiilicious.  and i’ve got wii-arm now.

gavin’s b-day is coming up so we decided to get him a wii.  okay, he’s 3, but he likes crazy weird cartoony animals and games involving such, and the controls are more movement based meaning active and easy to learn, and it’s nintendo which means more games for kids, and it’s a more family oriented thing and it’s cool and and and…anyway, he likes it and it won’t be long before he starts playing.  but that’s getting ahead of the story cuz the point is the wii rocks.  i mean seriously.  more so than i had really considered.  it’s amazing how much more fun what would be a boringly simple and basic 3 inning baseball game or single tennis game is when you’re actually swinging a (wiimote) bat or (wiimote) racket.  even the dumbest minigames become more interesting when that leaning thing you do with an old school nes controller to make the car (or whatever) lean in one direction ACTUALLY DOES SOMETHING.  it’s like someone watched videos of people playing video games and turning the controllers and leaning on the couch in weird angles and said “you know, i’ve got a great idea….”

a wii wasn’t something i’ve been planning on for forever.  actually, it wasn’t until we had the “what do we want to get for g for his b-day” conversation a month ago that i even really considered it.  but when i did, i thought it was a brilliant idea.  and i have been sort of following the press around the wii over the last year and the wii continues to be the most impressive in how it’s been able to grab people who aren’t gamers and appeal to them.  and it’s all in the innovativeness of the movement-based controller.  because nintendo isn’t nuts — it really is more fun to do rather than sit on your arse and watch, even if you remote control the guys on the screen with your fingers.  it’s a visceral thing.  it gets your body moving and your blood pumping and it feels good. and that’s what makes the wii rocktastic.  and it really takes doing it to realize just how wiitastic the wii is.  it makes me want to pack it up and take it with me wherever i go just so i can say “d00d, you gotta play this.”

otherwise it’s been busy, hence no posts.  we set up a freelancer account on elance where the projects and the site seems a lot more professional and businesslike.  i’m excited about that, and about making more money on our own work.

also, just a reminder, i’m sure you all have your calendars marked and have been keeping up, but today is the last day that dr. horrible will be available to watch.  after today, that’s it, it’s off the air and you have to wait for the dvd.  after watching all 3 acts i can say it was good.  not fantabulously awesome, but it was good.  it wasn’t knee-slappingly funny, but it was amusing.  the only real LOL bit was after the “hero” Captain Hammer steals Dr. Horrible’s (Neil Patrick Harris) love interest and they meet in the laundromat and Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion) is gloating and says “She’s with Captain Hammer now.  And these [his fists] are not the hammer.”  He walks away and a full ten seconds later comes back and says “The hammer is my penis.”  the timing and the schoolyard-ness just cracked me up.  and Nathan Fillion is really good at being ironical (to use a Firefly word).

we’re going to california in about a week and i managed to get a macbook on ebay for $700 bucks (2ghz, 2gb ram, 60gb hard drive, office, logic, ilife  pre-loaded — i’m stoked, altho not so much about the office, i’ll probably dump that and get open office), so maybe i’ll do a road journal or something.

also, we’re giving the thinktank site another overhaul, with a dropdown menu to select the site theme.  it’s pretty exciting, and awesome.  we’ve got 4 themes up so far.  we need to figure out which one to use as the default.  behold the awesome.  we’re still working on more, but it’s functionally complete.

w00t!

Wordpress and KickApps are now playing nice.  the single sign on app is working and all is right with the world.  there were a couple really little dumb things that needed tweaking.

looks like the single sign-on thing isn’t working right….when you create your wp account it doesn’t pass the authentication to the members/community site.  sorry about this folks, i’m getting it worked on.

UPDATE

well i got the join link up top working…sorta.  it’s just not using the single sign-on.  but it’s a temporary fix…

UPDATE 2

okay, so the links at the top work to get in but the user registration is separate from the wordpress registration for the time being.  i’m leaving it that way until i can find a solution to integrate the two.  :/

so we got a new client for thinktank.  it’s a wordpress blog, and it’s mostly maintenance and updates, but it’s still pretty cool.  our client wants to build/integrate a social networking component, so i did some researching and found KickApps Social Networking Software.  the more i read into it and compared the alternatives, the cooler (and more KickAss) KickApps became.  they run a SaaS — Software as a Service, an intriguing concept Wired wrote an article about a while back.  what it means in this case is that the social networking software is provided by and hosted on KickApps’ servers.  you setup the gateway, and everything else lives on their side.  which means less twiddling, infinitely easier setup, no maintenance (other than cosmetic stuff) and also means, for them, that they get to control the flow of traffic and how things work monitarily.  you see, as a free service, they control 2/3 of the ads that show up on the site.  1 of the 3 ad banners you control and can set up as you please.  there’s an option to buy out the ads, but according to the video on their site, it starts at $100/month for 5000 clicks — not a small-scale deal.  they have an impressive client list though; professional sports teams, vibe, npr, universal music, etc.  and it plugs right into the standard cms apps.  not just joomla! and drupal but also wordpress.  it’s exciting enough of a concept to tempt me to create an account and set one up here.  even though, you know, no one visits me, really.

i also just finished optimizing this blog for search engines.  from which i learned a few things about seo-friendly coding, and hopefully does something to counter the last part of the paragraph above.  all this seo’izing and working on a new blog made me think of making affiliate buttons for thinktank.  well, the other thing that made me think of that was the email i got that said that firefox set the world record for most downloads in a 24 hour period for the firefox 3 download day campaign.  it all made me think that creating more ways for people to link back to thinktank couldn’t hurt, and the buttons are prettier than my cleverly unobtrusive “website designed by thinktank” tag at the bottom of our sites.  oh, the other thing the seo stuff taught me (or reminded me, really, i already knew it, but i wasn’t implementing it) was that it’s better to link the whole phrase “website designed by thinktank” than just the “thinktank” which is what i was doing before.

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in other news, i got my computer working again, although i haven’t had a chance to look at the old hard drive, see if it’s usable, and figure out wtf happened.  for, you know, fun, and because i wanted to figure out what hardware i should get, or more accurately, if the hardware i was planning on getting would be comparable, i downloaded 3Dmark06 — the standard benchmarking tool that gaming magazines use to rate.  it seemed kind of silly to be using this benchmarking tool that i’ve read about in computer gaming world, but i wanted to see how erin’s system (roughly the equivalent of my broken system) compared with the media center which i was using (roughly the estimated equivalent of what i would be using).  i made a fatal error in doing this — while the mainboard and processors would be comparable (the mainboard i got was a mini version of the one i’m using in the media center) the fantastic graphics i was experiencing in guild wars on the media center was not due to a highly advanced onboard graphics processor which was my assumption at the time.  in fact, it was from the graphics card i got for the media center specifically because i needed s-video out to go to the tv.  as such, erin’s computer with an nvidia geforce 6600 ranked about a 600 and some change on the 3Dmark06 test.  the media center (not designed as a gaming computer by any means and only holding 1gb ram) ranked a 300.  these were, of course, piddly compared to the high scores of people who actually cared to build a gaming system and uploaded their scores to futuremark’s database.  so my plan was to get 4gb ram to overcompensate.  but, as i wrote in one more to file under “it’s always something”, i only had 2 ram slots and my power supply wasn’t spiff enough anyway.  so, having to order a new power supply, i also ordered a new graphics card as well, an off-brand nvidia geforce 8400gs.  it was the cheapest and most powerful solution.   when the power supply came, i started installing vista ultimate, and when the graphics card arrived a couple days later i started transitioning over to my new/old system.  in all, it’s performing well.  my new 3Dmark06 score is around 1600, and guild wars nightfall looks gorgeous — pretty much like the screenshots on their site.  so i’m a fairly happy camper and using a mostly functional operating system again.  while vista isn’t as simple and intuitive as osx and the start menu is all fuXX0red — seriously more messed up than previous versions imo — it works, the glass effects are pretty and it is better than XP and it’s no 95/98 by any means.   it’s definately an advance, albeit not a ground-breaking one.  there are a couple issues:

when i started using vista on the media center i discovered a problem — while i could create new folders (and new files through the right-click option) i could not NAME them.  i.e. New Folder.  New Folder (1).  New Folder (2).  etc. etc.  no matter what i did, i couldn’t get it to work.  apparently, after googling a bit, i discovered this was fairly common and required a registry hack to fix.  annoying, and a waste of a couple hours of banging my head on the computer screen.

random lockups and freezes in explorer, especially when accessing files on a shared network drive.  both vista computers do this so i can only assume this is fairly normal as well.  also, having to log in to the network drive after every reboot is obnoxious and i’m still trying to figure out how to save my password.  :/

so that’s the scoop.  a few quick, final closing remarks:

to answer the comment in my last post: avatars are user icon things for social apps like blogs and forums and messaging programs, but also are used by microsoft to visually represent different users.  it’s sort of the digitized representation of yourself to the world.

i’m planning on sending off my 8mm reels to get transferred to dvd in the next couple weeks.  once i get the dvd back i will rip the video, add new soundtracks and post them here (possibly to youtube as well).  i’m also going to do something about the gavin video and the guy in a hat video (guy in a hat might need to move to youtube also, just for kicks).

i want a google phone.

yes, i’m playing guild wars again.

look for joss whedon’s Dr. Horrible in a couple weeks.  it’s gonna be aweX0me.

so it’s been bugging me for a while.  why is it that in the comments of my posts, there are avatars (or generic, blank avatars), but no way to use/change/update/upload your avatar?  i even poked around in the user preferences in the blog several times trying to find where “upload avatar” was located, to no avail.

finally, i stumbled on — literally stumbled, i have no idea how or where i found it and i can’t find it since — the source of wordpress’s avatar implementation.  wordpress uses Gravatar which stands for Globally Recognized Avatar.

aside from sounding like some kind of lost Transformer (in actuality, Gravitar is a long lost Atari arcade game), Gravatar-enabled sites allow you to use a single avatar across the board without the need to re-enter all your profile info, upload a picture, etc.  now, to date, Wordpress (well, and Gravatar) is the only thing i’ve found using this.  however, it’s a neat idea.  having a centralized location for all your profile info is a good idea for that matter.  one place to register and then you can use that account (it verifies by your email address) across the board for everything.  sort of like the failed Microsoft Passport theory, except, you know, functional.  of course, Gravatar suffers from the same flaws of Microsoft Passport, which was participating sites…

anyway, i created my gravatar account and got my pic uploaded and voila, now my comments have an avatar.  so make your own gravatar accounts, people, because i’m sick of looking at those empty avatar shells.

it’s been a long time coming, i finally updated the blog design. i’ve done a couple custom wordpress themes for thinktank clients now, and it was about time i did one for myself. it’s not really anything new, although the banner is totally new. but the css was recoded by hand. the overall design is keeping in line with the thinktank site — i really like that look.

so, if you haven’t heard, firefox 3 is coming soon. the mozilla organization is trying to set a guiness world record for most downloads in a 24 hour period. so head on over to Spread Firefox headquarters and pledge to download on Download Day (date to be announced).

personally i like the idea of a wordwide “download day” — but i think it shouldn’t necessarily be focussed on one software. so my pledge and what i propose to you — all 5 of you, dear, dear readers — is to download AS MUCH AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE on whatever day mozilla decides to be “download day.” let’s put so much pressure on the servers that we clog the internets tubes, knock down a couple servers, piss off the riaa, whatever. let’s celebrate download day with some good old fashioned destruction.

oh, and if you were curious, trent reznor compiled a mix that features the artists he’s touring with this summer. you can download it for free — it’s got full art and stuff. pretty neat.

and in completely other news that’s pretty much interesting only to me — i noticed from my google analytics report that i got some bumps in hits and search referrals when i talked about gaeta and bsg. and it made me think, huh, so if i actually talk about stuff that people like — they’ll go to the site? weird. so i think i’m going to start dropping BATTLESTAR names to STAR TREK get some extra FREE PORN hits ENLARGE YOUR MEMBER. we’ll see how it VIAGRA goes.