Category: Technical

I have been playing with Windows Live Writer, the "Ink Blog" plugin for Tablet PC and my Addesso CyberTablet. I have been unable to use my tablet effectively in Windows XP because Windows XP "Professional" lacks the ability to understand a pen input device natively, but Vista Business on the other hand, knows how to handle it well. I think this is the first time I have truely felt like Vista did anything better than XP. All hope isn’t lost, Vista does have some good traits. My only complaint is that there are way too many layers of software at work to make this work. Windows Vista for driver control, the Adesso driver for input recognition, "InkBlog" for capturing the ink, and WLW for making the InkBlog data useful.

Since posting my complaint about the bad placement of the WLW publish dialog I have received two responses through the blog’s comment functionality.

The first from a Windows Live Writer developer, handled the complaint as a request for functionality, this would be very correct handling. Moving the dialog, or at the least not making it completely lock the window would be a good solution. Thank you Brandon for taking time to respond to my concerns about the product. I plan to keep up with the preview releases of the application to watch it grow. I feel that WLW is a very strong application and is quite unique in its category.

 

The second reply, from J. Cheng, suggests that I simply open multiple windows of the same application. I don’t know if you have noticed this or not Mr. Cheng, but thats what I am trying to avoid. Not everyone has unlimited CPU power and memory, and those of us who do have unlimited CPU and RAM are usually limited on the amount of space we can spare in our task bar, and moving to a wider aspect ratio is not an option. I would prefer to waste less resources and be able to chain-blog without the redundant overhead.

 

With the way I have been working lately, I might suggest that it may be feasible for now to run an instance of WLW on each machine I am working at, but unfortunately I work a lot with server operating systems, which WLW will not install on.

 

I like the application a lot, but it is still young, and there are still a lot of problems with it. I will not give up on it, it makes blogging way too easy .

The LG Chocolate II (VX-8550) arrived this morning at 11:26. Took me a while to get it activated after it went through its 4 hour charging cycle. I had to call Verizon and deal with a human because VZW was being a bunch of bitches about my plan and not letting it activate normally because they wanted to have a chance to talk me into a new plan to go with my phone. I’m sitting on my $25 per month plan and my ass isn’t moving from it until I need to. I don’t need a fancy-ass plan because I don’t really go away from home that much, and when I am at home I use my digital phone service instead of my cell phone. Once activated, the phone was connected to VZW and programmed in under a minute. As soon as that process was finished it was a very simple process to connect to "Get It Now" to download my contacts (which had been uploaded using the same process on the old phone).

This phone is very similar in design to my MP3 player (a SanDisk Sansa E250). It is just a little bigger. I believe I will be able to use my phone as an MP3 player as well without a problem. The VX-8300 was supposed to do that function too, but its form was too much like a phone, it just didn’t feel normal to listen to MP3s on it. I’m hoping to combine two devices here for "on-the-go" stuff, although, my Sansa will still be my "at-home" personal audio device.  It will be nice to take the Chocolate in my car and plug it in to the receiver and have whatever music I want with me that way instead of relying on burned CDs (which don’t really work in the winter or summer, or night or morning).

I have spent the last little while working on getting pictures of my contacts into my phone.

This Friday, June 27, 2008, will be a sad day for geeks everywhere. Bill Gates is retiring from Microsoft. In many aspects no one will know the difference, but as Steve Ballmer has been quoted in many articles, it just won’t be the same. Three people have been selected to replace Bill Gates in his critical functions. I used to be such a Bill Gates fan when I was younger, even reading many books about the beginnings of Microsoft. It is an odd thing to think of Microsoft without equating it to Bill Gates. It is something that has always been, but is just days away from being no more.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/142636

Since Jared decided to comment on the material of the holster, I decided to go ahead and post information about the holster itself. It is a very simple holster and it is fairly universal between LG phones (it is shown here holding an older model LG phone). It is made of leather on all parts that come into contact with the phone, with an ABS plastic clip to attach to me.

Dear developers of Windows Live Writer… with keeping the Microsoft tradition of multi-tasking, I humbly request that you move the publishing indicator to the tray, and get it out of my way, so that I can chain post in peace. Better yet MS, go ahead and make WLW tabbed, just because you can’t steal the idea directly from another product doesn’t mean it isn’t good.

 
WLW Publishing box – Its big, it locks the parent window and it’s useless

 

After wrestling with choices for a new cell phone before my new 2 year timer begins, I finally made a choice. I have selected the LG VX8550, also known as the Chocolate. I ordered it in black. I got a different type  of belt clip for this one. Instead of my usual dorky rigid plastic clip, I’m going with a more open holster that will allow me to access my phone quicker. Ordered the data cable with the phone, but I don’t think it will be of any more use to me than the one for the VX8300 was.

I was very excited by the LG Voyager at first, but for what I do, it really isn’t practical.  I’m not exactly a cell phone geek, but for some reason I am excited about the Chocolate, it might be that attraction to shiny black things that I have… but this one isn’t leather. Anyway, Ill post more info once the phone arrives next week.

I now have 10 email accounts in Thunderbird. Why? I don’t know. I don’t do enough shit to need that many accounts!

curtis.kularski.net
This is the oldest account in Thunderbird. I have had this email account for many years. This account now seems to be where a lot of crap I don’t care about ends up landing. I don’t read most of the mail that lands there. There is a bit of SPAM that goes to the box, but its a manageable amount. There is a wild-card address system associated wit the account that doesn’t really meet my needs anymore. With just throwing a few things around I can probably easily cut down the amount of "real" email that goes to this box and remove it from Thunderbird, checking it by web when I really need to.

 

studboi.net
I hardly get any mail on this account, but when I do it is personal or important, so I think I want to keep it in Thunderbird.  Kind of a fun domain name too, which always gets votes for keeping an account.

 

j———-s.net
Email provided for me by a friend. Mostly for dealing with stuff from his website, usually of an erotic nature. I don’t really use this account anymore, and it is highly spammed, mostly because it has been so public for so long. I don’t really think I need to keep this in Thunderbird… or in some cases, at all. I get some email there, but only for things like Yahoo Groups, which I can easily move.

 

s———-h.net
Another erotic purpose address. This one is probably a keeper, its kind of a cute address and I like it, so no need to remove it from Thunderbird, but it is further reason to remove the previous account from Thunderbird.

 

claymentality.net
When I thought I was going to be a ceramic artist, this was a good address.  It gave me a foundation for creating a ceramic business. I’m not sure I want to do ceramics like that right now in my life, and I certainly don’t give out an email address on the domain to many people. I think I should kill the account and make it an alias account to go to one of my other remaining accounts, that will also remove it from Thunderbird. Maybe one day… if things change, I will reinstate it, but for now, I don’t need the excess bloat.

 

kularski.org
Well isn’t it obvious? Its my personal email on my family domain! I’ve got to keep it…. don’t I? Ok, heres the deal with this one. This is an email address I use all the time and keep up with, but I don’t ever read it in Thunderbird, honestly I think checking it with Thunderbird is fucking (WLW has flagged "fucking" as being misspelled) obnoxious. I almost always do this one with the Google GMail interface. Account will stay, but it doesn’t need to be in Thunderbird.

 

x.pcfire.net
Designated junkmail collector! I have filtered, tagged and flagged this account really well in GMail, so its a really nice replacement for the above mentioned curtis.kularski.net address. I just added this one to Thunderbird this morning. I love using this box, but I can’t see myself ever checking it during the day regularly enough for it to matter. My voicemail goes there, my notifications for things go there, its like an all-in-one collector. It needs to be in Thunderbird.

 

ncsu.edu, uncc.edu, and unc.edu
These three encompass my academic email world, but honestly, they don’t need to be in Thunderbird all year round. I would love to find a way to consolidate all of these actually. I don’t mean find a way to get a NorthCarolina.edu address (would be UNC System Email), but more or less, pick a school to be my home and keep all of my email on one mail server. Only problem is, spacing isn’t allowed the same on all of them, so I don’t know what to do. I suppose I should pray and come back to these. It seems like every time I enroll in a class somebody wants to give me a free email address.

 

That leaves me with 6 addresses still to consider in Thunderbird. I guess baby steps are key here.

 

I should also confess… This isn’t all of my addresses, there are about 5 more that don’t even get considered in Thunderbird. I really don’t need all of the email addresses I have been given.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am writing some of my blog entries in "Windows Live Writer" now. It is a little simpler than logging into Movable Type every time I want to make a post, but there are a lot of problems with it as well. First of all, It doesn’t understand the multi-level category concept, therefore all of my categories are in a flat list, which in some situations makes very little sense. Also, I can only select one category at a time, bummer.

Windows Live Writer is a more comfortable writing environment for me, its more like writing in Word, including the auto-save functions. I am not constantly being careful of what I do in my browser so that I don’t crash mid-edit. MovableType offers some protection, but not enough to make me happy.  WLW allows me to set a publish date, the same as MT does, but for "in the moment" posts, it posts the actual publication time, not the time that I first thought about writing, which is often a few hours before I even get started on anything. There is also the benefit of Microsoft’s wonderful spell checking engine, I am not relying on A-Spell or the OpenOffice spelling kit to give me bad suggestions.

The coolest thing about WLW is that it offers some really neat plugins that help me do what I want to do. For example, I can now link in Flickr content without having to either publish from Flickr or create my own little linked thumbnail set. Some of the plugins are a little lame though, most of them are for programmers (makes sense, programmers wrote them), things like "code snippets" and "insert from console". Neat features, just not useful to most people (but they are useful to me sometimes). There also some more blog-traditional plugins, like the "currently listening" and "tags" plugins. I’m looking forward to using the Amazon.com functionality at some point, it looks really cool.

Some problems I have run into are that it won’t install on Windows Server at all, which nocks out 2 of my primary systems from being able to run it, restricting it to my laptop and to only one OS of my desktop (Vista). The other thing that pisses me off is that there is only 1 ink-blogging tool available and it is for TabletPC users only. I want to write from my tablet too damn it!

I wish WLW were more of a "full service" blog tool, but I’ll take what I can get. It would be neat to manage comments and be able to respond to them from here, but I cant. I never thought I would use a WYSIWYG blog application, but I am and I kind of like it.

WLW is part of the Microsoft Windows Live Desktop Pack if you wish to give it a try. You can get it at http://get.live.com/ (felt great not having to do that link by hand).

This morning I opened my Google Analytics account and not shockingly…. my site about my erotic interests (not even really considered porn) gets about 60 hits per day now, that’s up from like 40 in January. DisturbingThoughts is still sitting reliably at about 15 hits per day. The sites clearly have very different audiences. Oddly enough, not everyone who visits either site do I know personally. There are a few repeat visitors to DT, and a lot to SB, but I don’t know these people personally (Thanks for spreading my seed Google!). The funniest thing though, the hits to both sites from Greensboro, NC stay almost exactly even and the same on both sites… almost like I’m being stalked. At about 111 hits per month from Greensboro, I think something is going on there 😉 Maybe my peanut gallery of friends might want to chime in with some ideas there?

 

Even though Disturbing Thoughts has been around way longer and has more high quality levels of misguided thought processes than SB, SB is the one that appeals to the erotic side of people and therefore it gets more hits. Maybe I’m wrong though, maybe there just aren’t enough good sites for porn?

 

ok, I was going to link to this video, but since Windows Live Writer has taken it upon itself to reinterpret my wishes (Thanks Microsoft!), I’m going to leave this here for posterity. OK, so I add YouTube to the list of places I can’t directly paste links from (Flickr, Amazon, Picasa Web and eBay are some others).