Here’s a miscellaneous collection of knowledge that I accumulated during Calendar year 2008.  I would call them random, but really I have applied some sort of cognitive processing to display only certain ones, so it’s really not a random collection, but rather, miscellaneous. You might have known them already.  Big deal.

• Dogs, especially males, will scratch the ground to leave their scent, which in this case emanates from glands between their toes.
• While logged in to a Windows XP machine using Remote Desktop, ctrl-alt-end (rather than ctrl-alt-del) will invoke the Windows Security dialog, to let you restart, look at task manager, etc.
• Plaxico Burress is a person, not a medication.
• WordPress is cool.
• There’s no such thing as a panther.  Panther is a misnomer for a leopard, cougar or jaguar.
• Fernando Tatis is the only Major League baseball player ever to hit two grand slam home runs in one inning.
• In a group, each dog howls intentionally out of tune with the others so its voice is distinct.
• The movie Fargo wasn’t a portrayal of actual events.  Not even inspired by actual events.  The whole thing was made up.
• The UEFA Champions League is a competition comprised of the best teams (by standings from the previous year) of the “best” leagues of European football (the “best” leagues being determined by a complicated ranking system), with better leagues earning their clubs more spots in the competition than the lesser leagues.

So here’s what I wanted to do: integrate some sort of nice-looking image gallery into my WordPress blog.  Sounds easy: just grab some pictures and make thumbnails, then upload all to some directory, then place the thumbnail images in my post with the href of the link going to the full-sized picture.

But alas, several problems arose:

• I’m a computer geek, but my clients aren’t.  I need a user-friendly visual interface type thing so that Joe and Jessica User can make their own galleries without having to size and thumbnail their own images and upload them via FTP and keep track of the image URLs.
• Hand-coding tables and tweaking HTML in WordPress is a pain, so a documented, maintained program that does the formatting would be ideal.

I wanted to make a table of thumbnail images and make each full-size image come up in an unobtrusive div or something like Lightbox does, but making tables and integrating the Lightbox stuff just didn’t seem to do the trick.  So I found Alex Rabe’s NextGEN Gallery that’s an actual WordPress Plugin that has instructions for installation, configuration, etc.  So sweet!  As with most things, it does way more than I need and thus it takes some tweaking to make it fit my purposes, but the end result is quite acceptable.

So, here’s the result: some photos of castles from when Ginger and I went to Europe in 2006:

When Michael Scott was giddy about having risqué photos of Jan, he couldn’t help but share with his buddy.  So he opened up his e-mail client, started a new message, attached a photo, typed ‘pac’ into the ‘To:’ address field and let the auto-fill do its thing, and sent the message on its way.  Moments later, he was faced with a terrible truth: the auto-fill grabbed “packaging@dundermifflin.com”, not “Packer, Todd”, so the photo only reached its intended recipient by way of being propagated throughout the company.  Oops.

The same thing happened to me recently.  Well, a less disastrous version, and I wasn’t the perpetrator.  A coworker sent a link to me that he meant to send to someone else.  In an effort to suggest a smoking alternative to “natalie@” (name changed to protect the guilty), he sent “neil@” a promo for Smoke Electric’s new Crown 7 HYDRO, the world’s most advance e-cigarette.

I’ve never been a smoker, but now that I know about a carcinogen-free, tar-free, non-flammable, deco-style nicotine tube that comes in watermelon among other flavors, I might take a closer look.  Besides, according to the FAQ:

CROWN 7 is an alternative to smoking that offers reduced health risk, freedom to smoke anywhere, social inclusion versus isolation, no first or second hand smoke, virtually odor-free smoking, non-flammability, convenience, and lower cost than traditional smoking.

If it’s environmentally responsible, socially responsible, and won’t make me stink or get kicked out of restaurants, it could be worth a shot!

At the behest of a friend, I finally decided to make a Facebook profile.  Don’t know if I’ll be a big fan of it, but let’s see what happens.

My reluctances in joining a social networking site were manifold:

• I have had a Web site for many years that gives updates about Ginger and me and our exploits; I have this blog where I share with the world my important musings; so I didn’t need yet another site.
• I still gag a little when I hear anyone mention a myspace page, and gag a lot whenever I have the misfortune of actually seeing one.  Myspace is the bad apple that spoiled the whole idea of social networking sites for me.
• I would rather not have to keep up with information in multiple places.  I actually did a research project in college about storing volatile information in multiple places and the headaches that ensue from managing all the instances of duplicate data or what happens when you don’t.
• I’m not freaked out about it or anything, but there’s something to be said for NOT having your life’s details out there on a public network to be seen by who-knows-who.
• I’m lazy.  Which doesn’t necessarily mean that I didn’t want to start something, but made me wary of getting into something that would just fizzle out due to lack of interest.
• I might be annoyed with so much activity.  In this age of instant communication, some people send a message and expect a reply right away.  I’m not like that.  I can let something sit for some time while I stew on it.  People might think I don’t like them if I’m not up to their level of chatter.

But despite the reasons for not Facebooking, there are reasons for it, which I decided threw the balance in its favor.  The whole point in having neilandginger.com and a blog is for some sort of interaction with the world, including friends, family, and random strangers, and that interaction is enhanced as traffic is increased.  Kind of like marketing.  So Facebook may funnel some traffic to the places where the real good stuff is.  Not to mention, it’s an acceptable way to reestablish casual contact with people I don’t hang around with any more due to geography, etc.   So here I am, Facebook: NeilMeister the reluctant social networker.

I e-mail myself all the time.  If there’s a thought I have or a transaction I need to record, I’ll send myself an e-mail rather than trying to remember (which doesn’t often work) or writing a note (which would pile up on my desk).  So even though the thoughts can and often do go unresolved for a long period of time, the only waste is a small amount of increasingly-cheap disk space.

I have found myself e-mailing myself a lot more recently, because I have been coming across more articles and other tidbits having to do with the 2008 presidential election.  My intention is to sort through a bunch of information that interests me and jot down some of my own commentary.  I missed the November 4 deadline to get this done before the election, but I’ll have plenty of opportunity to think about and share my thoughts on what went on and what continues to go on in its wake.  Nothing is “over”; it’s just that the 2008 election, just like the ones in 2004, 2000, 1996, etc. interesting tick mark along the continuum that is the timeline of our history.

All this is to say that instead of e-mailing myself so much, I’ll post to this blog pretty much unedited.  That drives me nuts, because I hate to communicate stuff that I haven’t had much time to edit in my mind and on the page.  But hey, there are two things that give me peace about this: not many people are going to read it anyway, and if they do and comment about it, that will give me the kick in the pants I need to take some time to clarify.

With the launch of Google’s Chrome web browser last week, I decided to expand my browser collection to include it and a number of other lesser-known ones. Being a web developer myself, I got used to looking at web sites in the biggies, Firefox and Internet Explorer, but I decided to have a couple others handy to make sure certain elements (mostly having to do with CSS and JavaScript) rendered reasonably well in other browsers.

Quick Launch bar with 12 browser icons, among others.

When Firefox got to be a hot topic a few years ago, having grabbed a bunch of the market share away from Internet Explorer, I decided to use Firefox primarily and haven’t gone back.

Look Familiar?  IE 7 caught up to the rest of the world with tabbed browsing!

My computer at work had Netscape on it for some reason. Uh, I guess AOL decided to end development on it, but if you want to get an unsupported oldie, you still can.

I added Apple’s Safari, basically just in case there was any difference in the way it handled CSS or JavaScript in the web applications I was working on.  I was able to detect and treat one issue as a result.

Opera gave me a little more variety.

K-Meleon was the first browser I got just for the sake of getting another browser.  Nothing distinctive.

Google Chrome.  Nothing chrome about it – It actually looks kind of like a piece of plastic.  Two standouts: 1) no normal window frame around it (annoying for me but that’s just my preference), and 2) the home page default includes your ‘most visited’ pages as thumbnail screenshots (don’t like that either).

A coworker mentioned Avant Browser.  Not suggested, not recommended, just mentioned. Like Safari and Chrome, Avant has no standard window frame around it.  But at least it looks like a piece of sheet metal rather than Google’s plasticy Chrome.

I’ve happened upon the SeaMonkey Project before, thinking, “who wants yet another browser?”  Well, I do, now.  The SeaMonkey Project is an “all-in-one internet application suite”, including a browser (“Navigator”), mail and news reader, IRC chat client, and even an HTML editor (“Composer”).  Sounds like the new Netscape. Thankfully there’s an option to install only the browser sans all the other bloatware.

Maxthon is full of features, some of which may even be really cool, like Super Drag&Drop, Screen Capture, and a bunch of plugins and other addons.

The “Media Streams” frame at the top of the Flock “Social Web Browser” might be interesting to some, annoying to others.

I really just got GOSURF so I could have a 12th browser installed. The main GOSURF site is in Chinese or something.

I got my rebates today, significantly reducing the out-of-pocket cost of maintaining my antivirus stuff. Instead of purchasing a renewal license for my existing Symantec Norton AntiVirus 2007 installation, I got a whole new one, Symantec Norton AntiVirus 2008 from Buy.com, because, of course, it was cheaper (eventually). I’m always looking for deals on stuff I get anyway, so when it comes time to get hardware or software, I shop around a bunch. At the time of this writing, one can buy Symantec Norton AntiVirus 2008 from Symantec for $39.95 (plus shipping of $7.00+, no tax unless you’re in CA, MN, or WA); shopping around, you can find it for a few bucks cheaper with free shipping. Back in June, a few weeks before my subscription expired, Buy.com was running a deal that basically got it to me for $6.41. Pay $35.57 for it at the time of purchase (no tax, free budget shipping) and get two rebates: a $20 “competitive/upgrade” rebate if you can prove you own a previous version or a competitor’s product, and a $10 “if you get it from Buy.com” rebate. So that comes to $5.57 + two 42¢ stamps = $6.41. Not bad for keeping my antivirus software up to date for a year.

I say all this not to congratulate myself on saving $29.16, but to extol the virtues of being patient enough to take advantage of deals when you can. I’m not a big fan of buying seasons 1-4 of The Muppet Show just because you have a 20% off coupon, but if you’re going to get something anyway, deals abound.

A sampling of deals I’ve taken advantage of from this year:

• My QuickBooks 2001 that I had been using to make invoices and keep track of financials for my business was having problems – some related to being too old to get updates, features not working because of their dependence on Microsoft Internet Exploder Explorer version 5. So in March I bought Peachtree Pro Accounting 2008 by Sage for 41¢. Well, it was $145.00 from Buy.com again (free shipping, no tax), with a $145.00 rebate. Total Cost: one stamp to send in the rebate form.
• Ginger’s notebook’s hard drive crashed, so we got her a replacement computer (it was old and slow enough that it made sense enough to replace the whole thing rather than just the hard drive) – a Lenovo ThinkCentre M55e desktop PC from PC Mall for $294.99 ($344.63 including tax & shipping). We saved about $150 because it was an “open box” product but still brand new).
• Our soccer team has taken to going to Buon Giorno after our games on Saturday nights, so when they offered 10% extra on gift card purchases, I was all over it. For $20 down, I got a $22 gift card, which I’m using for my regular purchases.
• At various times, our local Tom Thumb store runs specials on meat. Specifically, it’s great to get Certified Angus top sirloin steaks for $4.99/lb instead of $7.99/lb!

Yeah, you can say I’m cheap. But I prefer “frugal” or “smart”.