As usual I’m slacking on keeping anything on here up to date. So I figured I’d toss a quick post up to throw out there that I spent last week in Woburn, MA, for training on a CMS product that seems to have a lot of promise, but is fairly clunky to work with. I guess that’s the price you pay for a system that’s that flexible.

In other news last Thursday something in the server room at work caught fire. Everyone at work is fine, but they’re still in the process of rebuilding our server environments and getting the network reconfigured. It sure keeps things interesting though.

Chris: web 3.0 will come when someone releases a browser that bounces you between myspace and wikipedia and nowhere else.

Our online pharmacy is the perfect resource for people to get their drugs without any hassles or awkwardness. cialis We work hard to make sure you save money every time you shop with us. levitrasoma At our online store, you pay less and get more. viagra

So Ether.com has launched their service which they describe as “paypal for time”. Essentially you sign up and give them information on your area of expertise, then set your billing rates you want to use for your time. Then they set you up with a toll-free number and an extension that points straight to you so that people who need help with something can call in, agree to your rate and get in touch with you. (Obviously they let you schedule available times and aim where you want the calls to go to and all that sort of good stuff, and you don’t have to take the calls right away, you can give a call back within a window of time.)

Conveneiently I’ve been approved as a beta user so if there’s anyone out there who needs some deep web-techy nerd action you can give me a call. Either by checking out my Ether page or by calling my number directly at 1-888-MY-ETHER ext. 01379886.

Paparazzi 0.4 is out now! Get yr OSX website capture action on!

Paparazzi! 0.4 has been released! This version includes preliminary AppleScript support and update checking.

Update: Never one to let sleeping dogs lie, Mr. Weaver has already fixed a glitch and upgraded things to 0.4.1. Huzzah!

Update: Never content to let me not look like a slackadaiscal idiot, herr Weaver has updated to 0.4.2. Sally forth and install.

Pete writes about snoring (and records it no less, i just might have a new ringtone!) and links up a piece on sleep apnea from decafbad (that sounds eerily similar to my own situation) the same day that I try to call to schedule a sleep apnea screening and nobody at the office answers the phone.

This morning between dropping Bailey off at the Vet’s to have surgery for her entropion and my own doctor’s appointment, I stopped by Borders and picked up a copy of The Art of Project Management. I’m still getting started with it but this little bit struck me and I wanted to toss it out there while I was still thinking about it.

New projects are created with the intent to change the state of the world by modifying, building, or destroying something. Maintaining the status quo—unless that’s the explicit goal, for some strange reason—is not a successful outcome. The world is changing all the time and if a web site or other project is not as good today as it was last year, it generally means that it’s fallen behind because the goals were misguided or the execution of the project failed in some way.

But gee, Mike, what else is on your reading list lately?

• PHP Hacks : Tips & Tools For Creating Dynamic Websites (Hacks)
• Head First Design Patterns
• Oryx and Crake (See, it’s not ALL techy-stuff.)

Whoever is running your offsite “Verified by Visa” password protection scheme is costing you purchases from Firefox users. How you may ask? well their HTML code is so wrong that it’s impossible for Firefox users to recover their password if they can’t guess it in the first 3 tries.

For example this:
<tr height='10'><td align='left' valign='top' width='100%'>
<span class='mbody'>If you have forgotten your password, you will need to create a new one.</string>
<string name=”s_text_2″><![CDATA[Please enter the information below to verify your identity.</span></td></tr>

is so wrong it causes all the other text on the page (including the form it references) to not render at all on the page (not to mention just boggling the mind in general).

One more quick bit: Happy Birthday Andrea. And happy holidays to everyone.

Okay, so obviously I’m having some issues with the whole “post by email” scene. So I’m just going to call it quits and plan on updating when Andrea and I get home (internet access is just dialup here). I’ll keep posting some bits on my Flickr account so keep an eye out over there I guess.

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IFdldmFoIGZvciBwb3N0aW5nIHRoZSB0cmFuc2xhdGlvbikuCg==

——=_Part_1366388_831882.1135364300066
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Location: smil.txt
Content-Disposition: inline

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IGZhci4=
——=_Part_1366388_831882.1135364300066–

Today Andrea and I head off to Missouri to visit her family again for Christmas and Andrea’s birthday. Trying to take as little techy stuff as possible (cell phone, iPod and the MyFi XM Radio that Andrea gave me for Xmas is about it), but I have set up Wordpress to take posts by email so I may still get a post up here now and then.

Happy holidays, everybody.

So friday night there was a fire in downtown Annapolis. Andrea and I found out about it on saturday morning, but it explained all the helicopters and such we had heard the night before. A five-alarm fire broke out in three attached historic buildings on main street after an electrical short in the walls of one of them. There were two things about this that I found interesting.

The first is that the story got coverage on WashingtonPost.com, the Baltimore Sun’s website and MSNBC, but NEVER made it to the front page of the Annapolis local newspaper’s website (caution java applets and no redesigns since 1999 ahead). Who even right now, after they’ve declared that one of the 3 buildings is condemned and needs to be torn down today is featuring this as the top story on their homepage: “Santa is sailing into town!”

The second is that by the next morning, there were already photos of it on Flickr in the Annapolis photo group. Not in that “things get on flickr fast” kind of way but in that “wow, some people here really do use technology” way.

Update: A couple more pieces about the fire…

• WUSA: Investigations Continue Into Historic Annapolis Blaze
• Firehouse.com: Annapolis, Maryland Five-Alarm Fire Damage May Be in Millions
• WBAL video piece (page only works right in IE)

Update Two: Bruce Godfrey has posted Annapolis Main Street Fire - A Personal Account over on his blog.

I know you’ve always said the “signal was weak” here in our apartment, and used that as an excuse whenever there was a problem with our cable modem. So why is it that periodic outages (as in, about every hour the internet will cut out for about 5 minutes) based on our “signal strength” have just started in the last three or four days?

It seems I’m having a lot of “No Ranging Response received - T3 time-out” errors, just like in this thread from broadbandreports.

Creative Commons is running a fall fundraising campaign! So everyone should get out there and get donating.