Interesting enough, it did prompt me to install the Windows Live Toolbar, which I must say I was somewhat hesitant, I've already got the Google Toolbar installed, but I must say this toolbar aint half bad. One of the strongest features of this new toolbar enhances Internet Explorer with tabbed browsing functionality, a feature I have long yearned for with IE, I'm still not keen with installing IE 7 Beta, it feels like an AOL application! 

I've been one who never thought a desktop application was a necessary tool for a blog, but Live Writer changed my mind. With the numerous "Views" available, this tool actually makes blogging more enjoyable.  

The draft feature is one I didn't know I needed until I had it; how many times have I gotten a thought and started 2 or 3 lines of a new blog, then due to life's eternal need to keep me busy, had to abandon what could have been my best entry yet!

Live Writer also includes a built in spell checker and saving dictionary file, an obvious necessary feature; no one ever accused me of winning any spelling bees.

All in all, I think I'll be using Live Writer from now on, I haven't one bad thing to say about this app, Kudos, Microsoft.

Download Microsoft Live Writer

Take into consideration everything mankind has accomplished, especially during the past century, science, technology, quality of living, etc; and still we must all suffer the reality that is the Department of Motor Vehicles.

White males are more than eight times as likely to kill themselves as women of the same age and the risk increases as they get older, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

Bought a new toy! Motorola Q! Windows Mobile 5.0 (Already built an application in Visual Studio 2005, had a bit of an issue with certificates when I went to deploy, but found a quick and easy way around it here), 1.3 Megepixel camera, bluetooth (This really cool PC remote control feature), chock full of geek fun!

Atomic engineering helped to develop 110 Ghz circuit speed, a Guiness world record?

So, I went to purchase a copy of LiveStats server for a client that wanted the best web site analytics package out there, and lo and behold, DeepMetrix has been purchased by none other than Microsoft! I guess it doesn't come as much of a surprise since Google purchased Urchin and integrated their technology into Google Analytics and AdWords.

Notice my Google ads not working?

I am currently disputing charges of click fraud with the behemoth, they claim that this site caused click fraud, yet they fail to show proof or even give any details. I have furnished log files, testimonials, what else do these people want? Just an ant against a giant. Oh well, guess they will just keep my earnings and I'll switch to another link network. You gotta love shady business practices such as this.

I have lost all respect for Google.

If you don't secure your wireless router, it an almost certainty than at some point or another, someone will use your network.

If you don't really mind, or have a spare wireless router and a linux box (doesnt hurt to have some *nix skill either), you can turn your cyber-thiefs upside down! This page describes some very easy steps to serving your thieves upside down content, or even blur just enough to be annoying. This page has my vote for the day, I'm loading up a Linux distro as I type, gonna have some fun!

Upside-Down-Ternet

Someone close to me, for the past 2 years has been proud to be a SuicideGirl. It was a well deserved honor, for Inocencia (Her SG Name) is an amazing and wonderful woman. From early on she was quite fond of the community of awesomely talented and empathetic individuals. Although with time, she began to get the feeling that the staff, particularly, Missy, were somewhat 2 faced.

One day, Inocencia, came across a website offering pornography content, licensed content you could "lease" to use on your very own porn site. For some reason the girls in the sample pics seemed awfully familiar to her. She then realized the pictures she was looking at were actual SuicideGirl pics, without the familiar SG logo, she was looking at pictures of her friends! How did this happen, she thought? With a little investigation she actually found out that SuicideGirls had actually sold the content for that exact purpose. This was absolutely appaling to Inocencia, she submitted her pics to a web community of like minded individuals, who appreciate the girls as art, not as meat.

Angry at this fact, she decided to vent, to whom else, but all of her friends on SuicideGirls. She made a "Journal" entry mainly venting how she felt and that she felt betrayed by Missy. Lo and behold, not 2 days later, Inocencia goes to login as she regurlarly does and she is redirected to "Renew your membership" page.

What ???

She asked if I could log in and see what was up, I agreed.

Once logged in, I went to her profile and was floored to see that she was "Archived". I ran a quick search through the boards, and found a posting by Missy, it read "For private reasons Inocencia has requested to be archived". What? She requested to be archived? This was absolutley ridiculous!

So, I in turn decided to post on my "Journal" a little message of what I thought of this, mind you I am a paying member. This was my post:

"Actually, Inocencia DID NOT request to be archived, she was archived without so much as an email notification. The most likely reason is that Inocencia reported on her blog that SG is actually licensing their content to PORNOGRAPHY SCUM in order to generate revenue. The truth of the matter is that SG is no longer run the way it was started, it has become a money hungry machine who does not care about the people it tramples along the way.
Inocencia was repeadetly asked to modify or altogether remove her blog entries, what happened to free speech?
It's a sad truth Missy, why do you lie, Inocencia never asked to be archived."

Not 4 hours after my entry, I decided to check if I had received any comments, after login I was unable to reach my profile page. I checked in my account settings, and this is what I saw:

Well, so much for free speech and open minds. I absolutely love what SuicideGirls was when it began, now I'll just sit and wait for the death of this souless abomination.

SuicideGirls
2001-2006
R.I.P.

Update October 17th 2007

Read what other BS SG is pulling on a photographer, geez Missy do you have a soul?
http://apneaticmedia.com/

_{This is a speed test of your browsers javascript engine, yes, javascript can be a primary factor of speed. Once the html and script have been downloaded by your browser, it must get parsed and processed by your browser. I honestly wasn't surprised as to which browser outperformed the rest, it's code is written so low level.}

_{Javascript Browser Speedtest}

Just announced, CNN has just launched a new department, I-Report and it's recruiting the entire world to become reporters!

They even include a ToolKit which gives some trade secrets for taking the perfect photo or video.

The proliferation of video devices and computers should make for a very interesting experiment. I beg to wonder how much CNN will censor or shape the reports submitted by users to their own agenda.

A little while back I was doing a gig for a gentleman very familiar with patent trolling. He was constantly digging at me to deliver him ideas, ideas that could be produced into a consumer product. Being accustomed to solving logic based problems through software, it was to be an interesting task. To make a long story short, one of the ideas both he and I prefered was a small desktop device that would:

1) Accept receipts, business cards, scraps of paper with a recipe, any paper within certain dimensions into a double sided scanner, which would scan and OCR

2) Temporarily store OCR information to internal cache, and triple check consistency of reaped data. Snapshot would be sent to a workstation client, which in turn would request confirmation from a user that all data was acquired. Once confirmed, the "machine" would transfer scraps of paper to a shredder device that would then permantely destroy original copy

3) Share data to Personal Information Datastore and link back to electronic reproduction.

Unfortunately, this idea was never followed up on, heck it wasn't even patented (Want to make it happen, let me know!).

Today I read about Intuit's launch of their 2007 version of Quicken personal finance package, which they tout as a virtual file cabinet.

"The ability to easily download or scan important financial documents and create a permanent digital archive inside Quicken makes perfect sense to people and will certainly help them locate these documents at tax time or years later if audited."

I certainly hope this is an attempt towards something resembling my idea. To be free from all of these pesky little papers that I seem to amass on a daily basis, would be a welcome blessing.

I am one of those "old timers" when it comes to HTML design, heck I still remember using Archie to find good junk! Hence, for the longest time, I avoided using CSS for anything other than maintaining look and feel when doing web design, HTML tables were the only way to go for positioning elements on a page.

One of my first attempts was RespectThyCustomer, I was intent on adding rounded corners, an almost mandatory feature for any site looking for the over-hyped Web 2.0 moniker. So I went a Googling for some rounded corner CSS examples and was bombarded with 1001 different way to do one thing. Baffled, and not wanting to spend way too much time, I began looking for a wizard, something that would take all of the grunt work out of this task that is supposed to be menial. I came across several different wizards, none of which truly impressed me, but I settled on one, and trucked forward.

Today, after speaking with a good friend, he showed me his little wizard that he built. Wow, was I impressed (yes, his CSS Kung-Fu is much better than mine), not only is quite adaptable, the code is quite small, and it can be actually be emailed without necessity of attaching an image.

Check it out here!

Thanks Dave!

So, have you heard of LinkieWinkie? An enigma, wrapped inside of a puzzle that calls itself a social experiment.

"a very altruistic little site and loves to be talked about." - Quote

A spider of some sort that crawls the blogosphere in search of mentions to itself. Using it's uknown logic, it then adds links back to the reference on it's home page.

When you run a WHOIS lookup you get this:

Registrant:
   Denise Russell
   33 Kirby Drive
   Telscombe Cliffs
   Sussex
   BN10 7DY
   UK  
Record created on 22-Jun-2006

So we can deduce that the "creator" of this little project hails from the UK and this domain was registered fairly recently. It seems to have developed quite the following based on its traffic stats in a very short time, perhaps just all the blogos-buzz.

Yes, I'll bite as well, I'm interested to see where this leads and curious as to the amount of traffic I'll receive if my link does make it on to the home page!

I'll report any findings back here, Cheerio!

Other sites where LinkieWnkie is mentioned:

http://arteccentrix.blogspot.com/2006/07/what-is-linkiewinkie.html
http://thisbiochemicallife.com/2006/07/26/what-the-hell-is-linkiewinkie/
http://www.senserely.com/james-the_meaning_of_linkiewinkie.php
http://rumboard.com/2006/07/linky-winky/
http://thepinkpanther.typepad.com/pinkie/2006/07/follow_up_linki.html

PS:

http://www.linkiewinkietracker.blogspot.com/
http://postmodern-living.blogspot.com/2006/07/linkie-winkie-take-3.html

Just found this great little trick!

Have you ever attempted to Remote Desktop connect to a server running Terminal Services and received the dreaded "Too many active connections" ? Fret no more! Just open up a command line and type:

mstsc -console

This will open you're RDP client, type in the server addres, and voila! You're connected to the rarely used console session!

Thanks goes to Jon Galloway through Haacked