March 2006 Archives

Alex and I have often talked about me tagging along to one of his many conferences, well I told him that I for sure wanted to go to Cleveland with him so I am going to plan some things for me to do.  First off, I absolutely love the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.  I went there several years ago and I can't wait to go again.  Being able to go there while Alex is away conferencing is perfect because he has little interest in going and I can spend all day just wandering around by myself, getting lost in all of the neat things that are there (my personal favorite is Ian Anderson's first flute, it's a pawn shop piece of junk, which makes it all the more cool). 

There's a couple of evenings devoted to things to do, one evening there are two trips to choose, an evening with the Cleveland Symphony and dinner or a Lake Erie cruise (also with dinner).  We considered both of these but the symphony would cost $100 person and the cruise $75 per person.   I would've been all about the cruise but then I went to their website and saw how tiny the boat was, max capacity 75 people and it looked cramped...plus dinner on board, I didn't see how that was possible, and with a cruise there is no way you can decide to leave if it sucks.  So we decided to skip that and plan some fun evening things around Cleveland, which would probably be cheaper and more enjoyable anyway.  I wanted to go to the House of Blues but Alex didn't seem too excited about that either.  I think he was mostly unexcited about the 80s band playing that evening.  I think we'll find some other fun stuff to do though, and we can probably get a decent group of people together by not doing the planned things too.

Although this summer is the conference I'm most interested in tagging along, Alex is going to Germany for a week and I cannot pass up this opportunity either.  Alex will even get a day off of the conference for sightseeing, which I would like to use to take the train to Bamberg where my family lives.  My mother is from Germany so her entire half of the family lives there, including my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  They're an interesting group of people (you haven't seen stubborn until you met my family), underneath their tough exterior you can really see how caring and warm they are, I always thought it was a shame I didn't know them better growing up.  I'm also looking forward to wandering around Germany on my own, it'll be so different from the last time I was there with Carthage Choir, I'm more in my element when I can explore a place on my own than with 60 other people.

technorati tags: activities, fun, travel, conferences, conference, germany, cleveland

I'm a bit excited about this, I'm doing another musical with Springfield High School Drama Club (Holland, Ohio).  They're doing Guys & Dolls, and this will be the first time I've done the show too.  I'm excited because I haven't played in a show in over year, the last one was also with Springfield (Damn Yankees).  This is my third show with them and they always do a great job!  They have a great director, I first worked with Joe Barton on Waterville Playshop's production of Titanic and it was fantastic!  I do miss playing in these shows though, since most of the shows I played were in the Toledo area it makes it difficult to get down there now from Ann Arbor.  I've given myself at limit of a 50 miles drive for shows now, Holland falls just under that, that does leave out Waterville Playshop shows (unless I spend a week with my dad or something).  Since I'm not involved with Maumee Community Band anymore, I don't get called for as many shows either.  I need a new network in Ann Arbor!

If anybody enjoys going to High School musical productions the show dates are April 7, 8, and 9, 2006.  Springfield High School is about 45 miles south of Ann Arbor, right off of US-23 in Ohio. 

technorati tags: sphs drama club, guys and dolls, musical, pit orchestra

I was diligently working on my web project for class last week, the finished product is here.  Well pseudo finished, I've submitted it for my grade already but once I get my grade I'll try to change it around some.  The reason why I want to change it is because the site seems seriously hacked together to me, I did the entire site in HTML tables.  There's a couple of reason why I did it this way, the first is that we could not use an editor for the assignment, we had to do everything in notepad (bleh).  I thought about adding an internal style sheet to avoid the tables, but I have a love/hate relationship with CSS, I love the way it makes life easy (after you've set it up of course), I hate the lack of cross-browser support with everything I do, when I first start a site in CSS it usually takes forever for me to figure out how I want it to look, whether it's going work in Firefox and IE, not only does an editor help with this, I just thought it wasn't worth the time for a web project for an intro class where we didn't even go over CSS to begin with.  I really don't prefer to code all the time with crazy CSS hacks, and I'm only self-taught with CSS so my site becomes what looks alright in different browsers and what's easy enough to do with minimal hacks.  I'll save my limited CSS skills for my client based web design course or something.

I was thinking of keeping this site active while I'm at WSU though.  I like the way it's setup and I would like to outline my projects and papers in the coursework section (under resume right now but I'm going to pop that out in the main nav after I get my grade).  Now that it's set up I think that it'll make a good showcase site if anybody is curious what coursework I'm taking, or my resume and experience.  It was a fun project though.

technorati tags: life, wsu, information technology, lis 6080, web project, wayne state

I don't work today so I started reading my feeds and playing around.  I downloaded Flock again, a cool browser that is in development stage.  I uninstalled it last month because I wasn't using it, but now that I changed my blog I wanted to see if the blogging feature were working better.  They are!  All I had to do to set up my blog was type in my URL, then a screen asked for my user name and password...that's it!  No crazy API questions needed.

Of course my issue with Flock now (and before) is whether I can completely switch to a new browser from Firefox, it's highly unlikely.  But on the other hand, since Flock is more task based, it might be handy to have when doing certain things online, like blog posts or photo management in Flickr (all are completely integrated into the browser).  Their favorites are integrated with Del.icio.us, I would like to see them integrated with BlinkList, but that might be my fault for choosing a less than popular social bookmarking site.  I don't hate Del.icio.us, I do dislike their design, which is the reason why I can't use Bloglines (which is a million times worse than Del.icio.us).  I'm not willing to put up with bad or even mediocre design in sites I look at almost every day.

Well, let's just cross our fingers and see how this post works...

***After post update***

It works!  I can even add technorati tags, wish I could add my categories from Flock though.  I have to go to my MT area to do that.

technorati tags: flock, blogging, blog, del.icio.us, delicious, blinklist, bloglines

I'm still settling in to my new blog home, I still have some more work to do, but this week I have to finish my web project for class (I've been a very bad procrastinator). I want to finish adding sidebars to various categories and I'd like to add an "About Me" page to my new site. If my blog still looks unfinished in areas, it probably is...

My overall experience with MovableType though has been quite pleasant (I'm very happy with my choice). I started branching out to some of the other cool things provided by my hosting company, I tried to install a couple of wikis the other day...I'm not a fan of my options though (TikiWiki and PHPWiki). TikiWiki has a lot of options, but too much for what I wanted to do. I can't remember what I didn't like about PHPWiki, I might look at others, but I don't have time to actually try to install one myself. I have a hosted wiki on PBWiki, which I like, but I thought that it might be fun to learn how to do one of my own. Although, I did discover a hosted wiki that's not quite out yet, Wetpaint looks beautiful! I put my email in to be notified when it goes live. I haven't really blogged about what I use a wiki for, but it occured to me one time that it seemed easier to keep my recipes organized in wiki format than in a database (and it has been). I end up modifying my recipes after I make them, I just transfer those edits right away to the wiki, sometimes if my computer is handy I just keep my computer on the kitchen table with the wiki recipe page open while I'm cooking. I didn't really make my wiki with the intent to share it, but I could link it on my site someday, I just like the ease of update capabilities that wiki has.

Technorati : blog, blogs, pb wiki, pbwiki, wetpaint, wiki

AADL - New Books

Originally uploaded by heidigoseek.

Alex and I made it the new Pittsfield Branch Library last night before they closed! It was packed full of people and it truly is a nice branch. Even though I live in Pittsfield Township, I live on the way other side of the township and Mallett's Creek Branch is still more convenient, and not that old itself, so I don't know how often I'd make it out to the new branch. It's still nice to see new libraries for the first time though.

Flickr : aadl, books, geo:lat=42.252981, geo:lon=-83.772855, library, motorola

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the website, The Grocery Game, or not, but I've been using this service for probably a little over a month or two now, and I've realized that it is really a great example of how technology can change our habits in some of the most basic ways.

First of all, I saw the founder of this website on a couple different television programs, including NBC's Today Show. I was fascinated by it from the beginning. She took a mother of a typical family, who probably spends about $200 or more a week (or month? I don't know, I'm not a typical mother of a family of 4 so I'm clueless on the average grocery bill), and managed to get her grocery bill to something like $20 or $40! I couldn't believe it, the same amount of groceries for that amount of money is absolutely amazing to me.

It seems I was correct about my Greasemonkey/Flickr Scripts for geotagging. I went over to the GeoTagging Flickr group on Flickr to see if anybody else was having the same problem, seems they are. It has to do with the newer version of Greasemonkey. I did find a solution through the group though, apparently using Flickrmap and Google Earth, you can get relatively the same results as the other scripts. At first I was a little put off by this solution because Flickrmap is not a free service. I didn't want to geotag all my images on Flickrmap or use their slideshow thingy (you can get all that for free using Flickr anyway), all I wanted was the plain old Geotags for my images. After perusing the posts on the Flickr group, though, I did see this link about using Flickrmap with Google Earth, after I clicked on the link I realized that this was a free service so I set it up using Google Earth and you don't have to join Flickrmap. If you've never set up a new network link in Google Earth before, it's a little interesting at first, but it's amazing the cool things you can do with Google Earth once you got a few in there. I have another one that shows the 50 closest geotagged images directly in Google Earth, no matter where I am in the world.

The link back to Flickrmap didn't work the way it should have (it didn't load my photos from Flickr for geotagging), but I did get my geotags in the end and that's all I really wanted. The bubble in Google Earth does give the geotags when you find a location, which you could copy and paste back to Flickr. This is much easier than trying to determine your geo position from Google Earth, which is not copyable.

Technorati : applications, flickr, flickrmap, geotagging, google, google earth, hacks, maps, photography, software, tools, utilities

It's a bummer, but none of my Greasemonkey scripts for geotagging seem to be working anymore. I've also noticed that my Netflix Queue Greasemonkey script is not working. I wonder if it's because I upgraded Firefox which forced me to upgrade Greasemonkey last month. I had one script that let me get geotags from Google Maps and another that added links from Flickr. The Flickr links are there, but they don't do anything when I click on them.

Some scripts work fine, I hope I can figure the others out because Greasemonkey is one of them extensions that once I started using it, I realize I can't live without it.

Technorati : firefox, flickr, geo tags, geotagging, greasemonkey, internet, netflix, tools, web

I went looking around all weekend for different calendars and RSS readers, I was hoping to find something that worked like I mentioned before. I've been using Yahoo! Calendar for a long time, but I tend to use it on and off, probably because I'm never completely satisfied with it. I did try to hack a daily feed thing using Netvibes, but that didn't work because Netvibes didn't recognize the Rojo feeds at all. I had this problem with most of the places I tried actually. I tried out Pageflakes, which is cool, but a bit flaky at times. I liked how you can set up several tabs though.

I found a calendar that I like though, it's called 30 Boxes, and it's got some very cool features, but the one I like the best is the ability to add RSS feeds to it. I still wish I could schedule feeds but this is a decent enough replacement.

The other thing I'm trying out is editing posts in Writely. Writely is an online Word Processor, there's a module for it in Netvibes, I thought it would be a good way to save potential blog posts and then post them when I'm ready.

Technorati : aggregator, calendar, homepage, porta, rss, tools, web 2.0

Sometimes I get ideas in my head of how I wish applications would work, today I was thinking that I would love it if feed readers could incorporate some sort of "calendar" or "priority" system, or both. I haven't found it yet, probably because this doesn't exist. If somebody does develop something like this I'd like to know about it.

The idea is that I have hundreds of feeds in my reader, each producing a large amount of new items every day. Some I read more often than others, and they're tagged and organized, but when I do get to reading them, I just go down the list of tags one at a time. That means I know what new books AADL is promoting in their catalog, or what the blogosphere is talking about today, but I may not get to what the library world, or even my own friends have to say because after 10 or 20 minutes of reading, I have to go do something else. It feels like I read the same 5 feeds everyday sometimes, and they're not always the 5 feeds I want to read. I could reorganize my tags corresponding to different days of the week (I have tried a version of this before) but I still would like to keep my current tagging in place, and that still puts everything in alphabetical order. The way I see it in my head, the reader would limit the feeds to only show me the ones I designate for a certain day. The idea behind this would be to avoid distractions from other feeds. A priority system would always push certain feeds to the top, so I never miss the ones I really want to read if I only have a few minutes for the day.

I guess I like the calendar idea, also, as I explained before, I like to see things and I don't often log into my feed reader everyday. As I'm writing this though I'm thinking of a way I could hack a system using Netvibes, which I do see everyday, and my feed reader, Rojo. Netvibes allows me to add feeds to my start page, I can even show and hide certain elements on the page. Using Rojo I can categorize my feeds using days of the week, like I mentioned before, but Rojo has an added feature of allowing you to get an RSS feed of categories (or tags). I could actually take that category RSS (the new ones corresponding to the days of the week), and add that to my Netvibes, where I can see it when I start my browser every day. I'm not sure if it will help, but it might be worth a shot...anything to tame the information overload. Until somebody invents my perfect feed calendar it might just have to do :)

Technorati : calendar, feed readers, feeds, netvibes, organization, priority, rojo, rss, tech, tools

Art mentioned this link in a comment but I wanted to post it on my site because I thought it might be of use to somebody else, or for future reference:

EduBlogs is a blog hosting service for librarians, teachers, students, and education professionals. They offer free space and a "fully featured" WordPress blog. I just popped in to look at it and it looks like quite an impressive tool.

Technorati : blog hosting, blogging, blogs, edublogs, education, librarians, library, students, teachers, wordpress

I got my car back this afternoon! It's quite a bit happier and so am I because I paid absolutely nothing to get it fixed. It turns out that a recall notice that I got in the mail last week had everything to do with what's been wrong with it. It had something to do with the spark plugs so the engine was misfiring or something. I knew about the recall but I honestly didn't connect that the notice and my car problems were in any way related. The recall came up when I took it in to the dealer to get it fixed though, and once they fixed everything it's working much better.

Unfortunately they also found a list of 4 other problems that will cost me a lot of money. I declined to get them fixed for the time being though, since this is a new dealer I want to get a second opinion from our "old dealer". Actually we still go to our old dealer so they're not really old, they're just 45 minutes from our apartment now. Alex usually gets his oil changes and stuff done when I work on a Saturday, he just drives me to work then he hangs out at the library when he's done, the old dealer is only about 15 minutes from my work.

It would be nice to get a new car and all, but in a year or so my car will be paid off. Not only will it be paid off, but the balance on my loan has been lower than the blue book value of my car since the day I bought it. It's not that much of a difference, but it's nice to actually see your car as an asset and not a constantly depreciating piece of metal. I only have 140,000 miles on it, which sounds like a lot, but for a Honda it means that I could put another 50,000, maybe more, with little problem. I sold my last Honda at 170,000, I even sold it with bad brakes. I can't remember what we got for my last Honda because my dad took a huge cut from that, but I think it was around $1000 or so. I often wonder if that car ever made it to 200,000 or not...I would consider it an achievement to be able to get my current car to that. We do have Alex's 2003 Civic that we'll probably eventually buy out of the lease...Alex wants an Accord and he has an automatic; I only like to drive manual now...plus I don't prefer his model either so I would much rather keep my 10 year old Honda than inherit his 3 year old one. The only real reason to buy a new car would be because I want one and not because I need one, and that doesn't seem a compelling enough reason for me.

Technorati : car, car problems, car repair, civic, honda, honda civic

It seems like I've been working continuously on this website for about four days now, but I believe I now have the Southern Great Lakes Symphony website at some sort of temporary completion.

I had a few major hurdles with this site, it's not perfect, but it's better. First I took everything that was originally updated in FrontPage and cleaned up the code in Dreamweaver. That wasn't too hard with some FrontPage migration extensions I found for Dreamweaver. The 'Clean Up FrontPage HTML Sitewide' extension is awesome at getting rid of the crap code that FrontPage spits out. Then I migrated everything to CSS, I tried to keep the site design the same, mostly because I didn't want to spend too much time redesigning everything...at least not right now. After that it was just a matter of cutting and pasting into my new CSS template, and making some minor tweaks here and there. There's things I'm not happy with, but overall I'm happy there's a format now.

Technorati : css, dreamweaver, front page, frontpage, html, sgls, symphony, web design, web site, website

I barely got started on my way to work this morning when my check engine light came on. "This can't be good", I thought as I did a complete (probably illegal) U-Turn in the middle of Michigan Ave. as I headed back to my apartment. I'm blessed with vehicles that don't break down much, and I'm hoping that the fact that I'm a month overdue with my oil change is not a factor. Normally I'm pretty good about the oil changes, but I also don't worry about it because the Honda recommended is much higher than the normal 3,000 miles that they normally recommend. Lately though it's been weird in cold and rainy weather. I almost never warm up my car, and it's never been a problem before, but the past month or two, if my engine is cold, it will jerk a little as I'm driving, until it's warmed up to normal. It was doing this again this morning when the light came on.

So I've made an appointment at a Honda dealer. It's not our normal place because our normal place is in Monroe, but hopefully they're as good as our normal place. One thing I hate about being in a new city is that you have to find new normal places. This dealer is right down the road from us though, so at least they're close.

In the meantime I can't make it out to work. My appointment is tomorrow morning and luckily I don't work again until Wednesday, but I have two days to pitter around I guess. I already changed into my flannel pants (it's raining and gray, I think I deserve it), and I'm going to finish the symphony website today. I might start my class website too but I just got an email that our student webservers are down. I have a movie to watch ("In Good Company"), and I think I got "Dinner for Five" from Netflix around here somewhere. Might as well make the most of my time off. :)

Technorati : car, car problems, check engine, check engine light

I'm excited, a fun library gathering right in my backyard! I was reading John Blyberg's blog this morning, resident tech guy at Ann Arbor District Library, and discovered that several AADL people and Ann Arbor's own Superpatron are hosting a Library 2.0 Unconference. Many interesting people plan to attend!

An unconference focuses on who is going to be at the event and what they're interested in. The organizers provide space, transportation information, enough blank surfaces to write on so that people can self-organize, and a general theme for the day. Everything else is up to you the participants.

I love the sort of open agenda of this, it sounds fun and creative. Anyway, hopefully I'm able to schedule this around work because I think it would be great to go and talk with people. I've also never been to the downtown branch, since I live in Pittsfield Township I spend a lot of time at the Mallet's Creek Branch, I don't mind going downtown on occasion during the day but it's usually to go have lunch with Alex, I don't normally think of going to the library while I'm there.

***

Update: Just got email from my boss, she said it should be ok for me to go and and she'd also like to go herself...it should be a really fun day then.

Technorati : aadl, library, library 2.0, library camp, unconference

From my phone
Originally uploaded by heidigoseek.

I'm just messing around with Flickr today and I decided to check out how to send pictures from my phone to Flickr. It's not a great photo but this is looking out from our back patio.
I want to mess around with taking pictures to see if it's possible to get any good ones from my phone :)

I also wanted to point out that it is such a beautiful day today!!!! I just checked my weather widget and it says it's 68-degrees in Ypsi! I had to open up the door, I'm itching for summer to start now.

Flickr : apartment, home, motorola, phone

Tahquamenon Falls - Upper Falls
Originally uploaded by heidigoseek.

Just a quick post before I go read my book and watch some SNL. With all the moving around on my blog I forgot to mention that a Michigan Blogger picked up one of my Flickr images. This image of Tahquamenon Falls from our camping trip was posted on Michigan in Pictures. The site is pretty cool though, I bookmarked it with my other Flickr contacts. Most of my Flickr people are from Michigan, I'm thinking because it's such a picturesque place to live!

Although I have to admit that the other pictures of the falls included in the post are far better mine. Especially the one taken in the winter. It's just absolutely amazing!

Flickr : geo:lat=46.571548, geo:lon=-85.249615, geotagged, mi, michigan, tahquamenon falls, up, upper falls, upper peninsula

Organizing for Your Brain Type : Finding Your Own Solution to Managing Time, Paper, and Stuff

I'm about halfway through this book right now and I'm really enjoying it. The book is a pretty quick read, you only really need to read the chapter corresponding to your particular brain type if that's all you're interested in. Initially the author talks about the importance of considering your brain type in certain organization skills. Often times we're forced into conventional ways of organizing when our brain is not comfortable with it. This is how most of us that want to become organized fail in the process. There's a 50 question test determining your brain type, one of 4 types that correspond to different areas of the brain. The test is alright, there are some strange questions on there but I was honest and I think my particular outcome was expected. I think what has helped me the most though is understanding where my type does not fit into the author's prescribed formula. I have a greater self-awareness when it comes to what I do, how I do it and, and why, because of this I will be able to determine if the author's solutions will work for me or not.

The purpose of this post is only to test out a format I'm working on for my category pages. One thing I've generally disliked about my blog in the past is that I add all of these little tools, javascripts, and rss feed related things to my sidebar that it usually just looks like a cluttered mess. I've decided to save my front page for the links and tools I really want on there the most and move some of the extra stuff to the pages relating most to their category. I just finished up the book one and if you click on the books category link you'll see the stuff I added there.

I added code that links to my reading list that I keep on AllConsuming. I've also added a few book specific links. I will keep developing the category pages as well as my main page as I can though.

I wasn't really sure if I'd be able to accomplish this but I found some MT plugins and figured out how to install them tonight. I'm starting to get the hang of using MovableType now, I actually figured out an easier way to do sidebars in the process so now I don't have to add Dreamweaver code to my site.

Technorati : all consuming, blog, blog format, books, categories, movable type, mt, mt plugins

I have another website to work on, and this isn't exactly what I wanted to do this morning. I got an email about updating the symphony site for the next concert and I realized that I didn't have all the pages finished and up on the server yet, so this morning that's what I've been doing.

I took their previous site and made it css based and cleaned up all of the crappy FrontPage code that was in it. Their server files are a horrible mess too. This morning I deleted ever single file from the server and uploaded all of my new ones only. I saved the original files to a cd so at least we had them somewhere. I can't even describe how badly organized these files are. There are about 3 or 4 duplicates of the same image files in different folders, all of their old program pages were there and some of them were linked live to the site already (grrrr), and most of their images were buried down 3 or 4 different directories. A lot of the old page titles were reused, so even though it is now 2006, the page title for a page may have referred to a concert in 2004 or 2005. I guess I decided it was better for my sanity to just start over.

There's still some bad links on the site now, this is only because I haven't finished all of the pages. Now it's just a matter of cutting, pasting, and editing the text for each page. I think I'll go back and change the live site so the bad links aren't linked for the time being. I hope to have this all done before the weekend and then I won't have to worry about it anymore.

Technorati : front page, frontpage, symphony, web, web design

I downloaded an editor that seems pretty cool but it's doing strange things to my posts, it looks like it's adding an excerpt of some sort but I don't like excerpts so it's just repeating my first paragraph.

I know, it's annoying but I can't fix it now, I have to go to work in 15 minutes.

There's crazy things happening with my internet connection here today too. I'm on my wireless in my living room but my connection is fluctuating, sometimes dropping. At one point it dropped to 18 Mbps, which is extremely rare...I wonder if somebody else is on the connection. I normally don't care, our connection is secured anyway, but if it's hurting my normal service then I do care.

Technorati : weblog

Alex and I got new phones this past weekend and I'm so happy with what we purchased.

We went with the Motorola V360, it is the coolest phone I have ever owned.

Our last ones were free phones we got when we signed up for T-Mobile, two weekends ago my phone sort of died. At least I think it died. I had noticed that I hadn't got a single phone call or message in over 2 weeks. Normally this wouldn't surprise me but I usually expect a message from my sister or mom checking in when we don't talk for over a week or so, my other family I could generally go a month or two without calling. I was kind of suspicious when I got a call from the main branch library at work about something I put on hold through the system, she asked me if I got my message on my phone. Normally I don't hear the phone ring with our bad apartment reception but I do have enough signal to get my messages, this time I got nothing. I finally figured out how to check my messages from another phone and decided it was time for a better phone. Some time after that I also noticed the pathetic sound the phone was making when a reminder message came on, plus it didn't vibrate anymore...if it wasn't dead yet, it sure would be dead soon. I went hunting around on the T-Mobile site and found an upgrade offer if I signed on for two more years, it was a pretty good offer too. We're happy with our T-Mobile service so the contract thing doesn't bother us either. We got a new phones for both of us! Ok, even though Alex's phone was fine (same phone as mine), we generally can't buy a new thing just for one of us...if one of us gets something new, the other one does too. This completely makes sense in our minds so I hope we don't have a lot of kids, otherwise we'd be spending a lot of money on them.

We decided on this one because we were sitting in front of the tv one day and saw the commercial for the iTunes phone or something, Alex wondered if T-Mobile had any MP3 player phones, I just happened to have my computer on at the time so I looked it up, and so they did. It also has a camera and video option, both are pretty cool, I might sign on for the extra web stuff and see if I can't take pictures to my Flickr account once in awhile. What I like about this phone is that is has expandable memory. The phone came with a 64MB card but I could upgrade the memory to 512MB if I purchase a new card. Currently I've only been using the MP3 player to listen to podcasts when I work out, I can fit two one hour podcasts on there, I had to cut the size of them in half using iTunes though, which wasn't too hard. I wouldn't mind the higher memory card so I can download audio books to it. I don't necessarily have to save images and video to the phone, I can have them sent to an album on T-Mobile or use the direct phone memory. I would much rather use my digital camera for higher quality pictures, but spontaneous picture taking with the phone might be fun.

Anyway, I've been dying for an MP3 plaer for the longest time, I figure this was the only way I'd get one for awhile. I only really wanted one to use while I was working out or out shopping so I could listen to podcasts or audio books. Both of these things I hardly have time to listen to anymore and I generally listen to music when I have my computer open on iTunes, since I have about 4 or 5 gigs worth saved there.

Technorati : camera, mobile, motorola, mp3, phone, t-mobile, tmobile, video

Well, I think I'm done messing around with the site for awhile. I'll probably get to updating the sidebar links and all that soon but I'll have to work for the next few days so it might not be until this weekend before it gets done.

It took me some time to figure out why things weren't working, it was little stuff though, like not closing tags right and that sort of thing. I got the last dvd of season one of Desperate Housewives in while I was working on it though. I love that show! It's all great Sims 2 story stuff ::sigh:: I wish I had time to play Sims and work on that site too.

However now I have to get motivated to fold some laundry before we go to bed.

Technorati : blog, blog design, movable type, mt, weblog

I did some more messing around with the site this morning and I think I finally got a handle on using MT and updating my files. I did some more tweaking to the sidebar and to my files and everything is working out quite nicely. I have to update three more archive files though.

I've done most of my editing using a combination of programs. I mostly use Dreamweaver but you can't get a real sense of the layout using design view in Dreamweaver so messing around with the css file doesn't help me much there. The MT tags confuse Dreamweaver but I certainly don't want to touch those unless I have to at this point. Dreamweaver does some things really well though, especially synchronizing my files to the server. The one thing I recently discovered about Dreamweaver though is that creating library items to help keep things consistent is really a time saver. This is about the only Dreamweaver specific code I don't mind having in my files. Since I want to make sure my sidebars stay the same throughout the site I think I'm going to spend some time setting that up using Dreamweaver today.

I did most of my css testing using Firefox. I used the live html page and opened up the "edit css" box from the web developer toolbar. From there I was able to mess around with my css file while not having to worry about Dreamweaver's design view mess. I can also save the file through Firefox and Dreamweaver will update it automatically when I come back to the program.

Then when I wanted to ftp files directly to the server I used Core FTP Lite. I might also have the FireFTP Firefox extension downloaded but either one works for a quick ftp. Dreamweaver works fine if you're messing with files that are already there, but it's not too intuitive if you're trying to add files that don't exist yet. I find it easier to add them and then start messing around with them in Dreamweaver.

I think I'm going to take a break and go workout now though. I do have the day off which is quite nice, I think I may be able to finish most of the legwork on my new site today.

Technorati : blog, blog design, movable type, mt, weblog

I've been working hard all weekend and the fruits of my labor (so far) are now revealed! I've been trying to settle down in my new home on the internet and I do still have some more work to do. You'll notice more when you venture into my archive pages, but with my html and css files pretty much the way I want them I don't think it'll be too hard to fix those another day.

MovableType has an interesting plugin that handles templates which is called StyleCatcher. In order to save myself some headache down the road I decided to keep my css and html files in the same format as their initial templates. I tweaked my css file to look similar to my old site though. I still have some more tweaks to go as I continue to update the areas where I can change the layout. Actually I think this is the coolest part of the file, I only have to really change one line of code to change between two column and three column formats. The only thing I really kept outside of their format was my banner. I've never really liked how css has ever handled my banner images so I put it directly into my html file instead.

I'm also unveiling my new banner! I think the new and improved 'heidi go seek' banner is quite stylin'. I'm extremely proud of my limited Photoshop skills. The picture is one of my favorites, taken this summer on our camping trip the the Upper Peninsula. The lighthouse is the Crisp Point Lighthouse on Lake Superior and our favorite spontaneous stop the whole trip. Someday I promise to get the rest of our UP pictures up on Flickr for the world to see.

Of course there is a long list of things I should be doing instead of this. I was actually thinking today that I should be working on the website I need to be making for class, considering that one I'll be graded on.

Technorati : blog, blog design, movable type, mt, weblog