Monthly Archives: February 2009

Braid

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I had been wanting to purchase the Xbox Live Arcade game Braid, for quite some time having especially liked the demo. I do not know the reason, but the normal price of 1200 msp (Microsoft Points) seemed too high to me, no matter how much I enjoyed the demo, and so I waited. The deal for this week on Xbox Live is that the game is only 800 msp, which after you do the conversion of dollars to msp (80 msp = $1) is a difference of $5, so I went ahead and downloaded it.

There is also a delightful theme that was released for the Xbox 360 dashboard, but the new premium themes cost 250 msp, which is about $4 just for a theme. I’m not sure I’m ready to put down any money on that either.

Lightbox [Update]

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Lightbox, for those of you that do not know, is the “thing” that allows the pictures to pop up on the website in their own neat little box with the shaded background. It also allows the viewer to go easily, through arrows on the right and left of the picture, to go to the next picture in a set. I use this feature whenever I either post pictures on the front page with a post and also in the pictures section of the website where I keep special holidays and events.

I am happy to say that it is working again, but quite honestly I do not know why it is working again. I know that after the update none of the pictures behaved right with the plugin enabled, and I spent several hours trying different things to get it to work, but all that was to no avail and I left the situation unresolved with a post on the front page. Now everything seems to be working as it should, so that’s good.

Weekend Visit

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Michelle came over for the weekend. The kids and I finally had a chance to give her the presents we got her for Christmas. She was very pleased with the Guitar Hero: Aerosmith game with the guitar, because apparently that was on her wish list and she did not get it from anyone else. I unfortunately did not get a picture of her with her presents, because I wasn’t actually home when she opened them. The kids were just so excited to have her open the gifts finally that they did not wait till I got home.

It was nice having her out for the weekend. It has been a long time. Hopefully she will be able to come out again soon.

Some Pictures

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I forgot to post these. I took them a few weeks ago when we got a whole lot of snow. I had to shovel the driveway twice, really three times, that day. It was impossible to drive anywhere and school was canceled for all.

I made the kids go outside and enjoy it some. I thought for sure that they’d enjoy it, because I know I always did. I remember getting bundled up with gloves, scarfs, hats, and whatever else just to go outside and enjoy the ground being covered in snow. We would make snow angels and snowmen. We would throw snowballs at each other. Those were fun times.

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Movie

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Kristy and I took the kids to see Coraline. It was actually Kristy who got the whole thing going and I just kind of tagged along. I have to say that it’s been hard for me to get motivated to do things on the weekend when I’ve often been staying up till the late hours of the night to get homework done.

The projection was messed up, so the screen was set about a foot (I’m really just making that measurement up since I have no idea of the actual size of the screen or anything) too low and even after I complained about it the matter was not resolved. This became really obvious, because at one point during the movie something is written at the bottom of the screen and we could not see it. We got three free tickets because of it, and that is good enough for me. The movie was still enjoyable and the children seemed to enjoy it a great deal.

Friends

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I ran into some friends of mine from my days at Best Buy at the University of Akron today. They are doing quite well and I was glad to see it. When you don’t see people for a long time you hate to see them again and them to have fallen onto hard times or something. They are planning on graduating this semester, which means that they will be looking for a job and most likely not staying here in Ohio. I just want to be the first to say that Ohio will surely be a poorer place to live without them here.

Report Cards

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The report cards are in for the children. I know they can do better, and while I feel as though that is almost cliche, I really do believe that they can. I have to evaluate how I can better guide them to utilize their time more effectively in getting all their assignments done. It’s certainly a balancing act as always as we try and balance having a clean room, having the homework complete, and doing whatever else it is that they need to get done for that day.

Adding Pictures to Flickr

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I need to add pictures to flickr for them to show up in the new little widget I have here, so what I needed was an easy to way to get pictures off my phone and on to flickr.  I went to the same place I always go when I have questions about what is and is not possible concerning my phone and that is Krhainos.

He let me know that there is a really simple application that sends my pictures to flickr with relative ease. I can pick pictures off of my phone or send them as soon as I take them. This program is Shozu. Now I can take pictures of the places I go and the things I see and you can all see them as well. I think that’s really cool.

I know Agent2690’s blog is made up almost entirely of pictures with very little, to no actual typing. I always sorted of wanted that reversed for my own blog. Now with a pictures section and this widget I think I’m getting close to that reality.

Sidebar Attraction

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I was reading through some of my friends blogs, and I noticed that Rombus added a flickr.com "widget" or whatever you want to call it to the sidebar of his blog. Now I just signed up for the site myself, even though many of my friends have actually had an account for a very long time. I also downloaded a program for my phone that allows me to upload photos directly from my phone to flickr every time I take a picture. It only made sense that I should add something similar to my own site.

I don’t know if wordpress, which is what I’m using to run this site, is dying or maybe just has an extraordinarily bad community, but it actually took quite a lot of work to locate a widget that would work. I know they are still updating wordpress, so someone is still working on this thing and improving it, but the widgets, which are supposed to be a great easy way to add things to the wordpress site, are lacking in almost every way. If you start your search for the flickr widget on the wordpress site you will be confused as it links to a site that hasn’t been updated in several months and actually provides one broken link and a widget that breaks the latest version of wordpress. That means that you should probably start with google.

I do have a warning about google. "Someone" has been spamming sites with a "how to" video on this subject, and I say "someone" because I know exactly who it is since they say so at the beginning of the video, but I have no intention on naming or linking to this rubbish. The problem is that this 10 minute video, and it really is the longest 10 minutes of your life, goes on and on without actually saying anything or helping in the slightest. I know now why you have to go to college and take courses on teaching, and that reason is because otherwise you will do a horrifically bad job at getting a point across and waste everyone’s time.

I finally found a working widget, which I have down to the left now. I made some slight edits to it. I think the author of the widget was being just a tad too prideful, so I removed his name from the bottom of the widget, and I have to say that’s the first time I’ve seen someone put their name on their creation where it is actually going to show up on your site. I intend on taking more pictures, sending them to the site, and then I’ll probably move that widget up so it’s up top for everyone to see when I’ve got a collection of photos that is worth seeing.