With several Twitter apps on my iPhone I’ve found that lately I’m on top of tweets but not reading blogs any more. I find that I have down time in my day to catch up on reading but not necessarily when I’m in front of a computer. So I thought I’d check out the RSS reader options for the iPhone.
I have finally gotten around to changing the theme for this web site. It’s still a work in progress, but it got to the point where I just didn’t feel the old theme appropriately reflected the tone of the site. So I switched to my work in progress custom theme.
Obviously the new design is very spare and minimal. I do plan to add to it a bit, although it will remain on the minimalist side.
While I tend to think that content is more important than asthetics, this is a personal publishing platform so it sort of behooves me to have a design that is at least somewhat reflective of my preferences. Perhaps that was true of the previous design at some point, but time has moved on.
As I’ve written before, I am a big user of Google Apps for Domains services. This includes e-mail and contacts, but also calendar services. I have tried a lot of online calendar services, but Google’s calendar meets my needs the best. The big down side has always been the lack of proper mobile support. Google does have an iPhone interface to the Google calendar system, but it’s very limited in functionality.
When I got the iPhone I was hoping to be able to sync it with my Google calendar via iTunes, but no such luck. That may work on the Mac version of iTunes, but it does not on iTunes under Windows. So I haven’t had good access to my calendars on my iPhone. Until about a week ago.
Several weeks ago we installed the Disqus comment system and Twitter Tools Wordpress plugins over on the blog at Communications Tool & Die. I decided to install them here as well. I’m using slightly different settings in that I have told Twitter Tools to create a blog post here every time I update there. I’m not 100 percent sure that I really want to do that, but I’m going to try it out.
I’ve also removed the inline Google Ads on this site since nobody ever clicks them and they’re just ugly. I think the banner image ad at the top is sufficient advertising on an incredibly low traffic site.
Also I had a link to an Amazon Unbox promotion which is no longer active, so I removed that link as well.
I still would like to completely overhaul this site, but I haven’t decided exactly what I want to do so I am in a holding pattern on that.
I realized that my about:michael page lists my old old old gmail address that I almost never check any more. So I’ve updated it to my current email address that I actually do read. Let the spam begin. Or, better yet, not.
I’ve been using this theme on my site for ages and ages. But when we set up the company blog at Communications Tool & Die it was clear that any kind of standard theme would not be acceptable. We needed something that integrated into the rest of the site layout. So I took our existing CSS and modified it to fit the needs of a Wordpress theme.
But now that makes me unsatisfied with this site’s theme. Alas I’m so busy with Communications Tool & Die that I really don’t have any time to change this site out. Plus my focus here has always been on content rather than on design. But we’ll see…it may be time for a change soon.
After a lot of behind the scenes work, Communications Tool & Die is now up and running. We’ve launched our web site and are taking our first clients. Exciting times, but also a ton of work. I’ve never been one to mind a ton of work though.
I think there’s a great opportunity to differentiate ourselves in the greater pantheon of web development service providers, as we are positioned to provide custom web applications work for small to medium sized businesses at a price that is affordable but with a quality that has previously been reserved for very large companies and dot-com startups.
Of course we don’t mind doing traditional static sites, business graphics work, logos, business cards, and other traditional design and development work as well. So if you’re in the market to re-evaluate your corporate communications needs, check us out!
There’s a fun television show on the Fine Living television network. It’s called I Want That! and it’s probably not a TiVo season pass pick for anti-consumerism activists. The show is pretty much explained by its title – they showcase a lot of “cool stuff”. I thought I’d post some recent items I saw on the show that appealed to me. Enjoy.
GeoChron is a wall map of the world that actually functions as a clock. It updates the view of the world showing current daylight and takes into account the rotation of the Earth on its axis and other factors that impact the “terminator” on the globe. At the top of the map it shows the current time in each time zone across the world. It’s quite pricey and there are free software programs that provide equivalent functionality. But I like the idea of having a “wall map” clock that doesn’t take up screen real estate. I do work and interact with people all over the world and keeping track of global timezones in my head can be a pain, especially with daylight savings time in the Northern and Southern hemispheres being opposite. I don’t see myself buying one any time soon, but if I had an extra $1800 that I had to spend, I’d consider it.
Reversica makes a hardware mount for cabinetry that allows you to have a cabinet rotate 180 degrees on its axis so that you can hide, for example, a plasma television with bookshelves on the opposite side. When I build my super hero hideout I’ll be sure to get one. But since I currently rent I don’t think I’m investing $3,000 in custom cabinetry hardware to hide a plasma TV I don’t have. But once I do finally buy a place I may re-evaluate.
Several months ago I wrote about using my personal Mediawiki as a Document Management System. I am writing to follow up on my experience with that. It’s actually working out wonderfully. I am always tempted to make things more complicated than they need to be, but for my needs using a wiki for document management works perfectly.
I have uploaded various documents of personal interest, such as time sheets, offer letters, tax information, etc. and I have access to these bits of information from any web browser. Much more efficient than trying to look through my filing system at home, consisting of an underused file drawer and a highly used system of “piles of mail spread around”.
When I started at my current place of employment, we were just transitioning support of a medium sized UNIX environment from another company which had been supporting the installation previously. Unfortunately there was no system automation in place and all changes and updates had to be done manually.
Having been a UNIX systems engineer for a long time, I’m not a fan of manual configuration. It’s time intensive and error prone. So I set about configuring a cfengine installation using Subversion for revision control of the configuration files. My team mates were not familiar with cfengine or Subversion, so I documented their use on our internal wiki.
I’ve had occaision to set up fresh cfengine configurations at several contracting clients now, and it occurs to me that while cfengine is incredibly powerful and useful it can be a bit overwhelming for new users even if they are experienced UNIX administrators.
In my copious free time (yeah, right!) I should start a consulting business around system process automation using cfengine with revision control for more managable and scalable infrastructures.
