This and That

Since words can’t do justice to the amazing experience that was being a part of the AWESOMETOWN team, I thought that I would share some of my pictures with you from the weekend. A lot of them are shot from behind the stage, but this was not me trying to get a new creative angle. Enjoy.

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The original plan was to hop on the train to Brussells, Belgium but due to the fact that the train’s stopped running at 10pm back to Rotterdam I decided that there would be a need for a Plan B.  A few recommendations and google searches later I decided to head to Utrecht for the day. I am glad that it worked out that way. I took a few pictures throughout the day that captured the adventure. Here they are for you to enjoy (in theory):

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WordPress

This will be the first part of the series and we will focus on five plugins at a time for WordPress that I find to be extremely useful. As I have said before I think that WordPress (NOTE: currently running WP v2.7.1) is one of the greatest pieces of open-source software EVER created. Yes I feel that strongly. I’m a psuedo-tech-savy individual, but if that isn’t you don’t be afraid this utility is made for you and me. That’s why I love it. Y

For the first post I will randomly pick five of the plugins that are currently being utilized here at This and That. As I add, replace and remove plugins on the site I will make an effort to document the process and let you know about any issues that occur.

1) Plugin Manager - This is one of the most practical and easy to use plugins I have seen in a long time for WP. Without this  when you find a plugin that you like, you have to download the .zip file to your local machine, unzip it and then upload that to your web server to activate via the WP Admin Control Panel. Not anymore. Via Plugin Manager all you need to do is go to the Add New section of the Plugins menu item and search for plugins by a variety of methods (term, author, tags) and when you find the one that you want click on the title of it and up pops a new window giving you all the information about the plugin, but with a new twist Install Now. Click the button and your plugin will be installed right before your eyes and it even allows you the option to activate once it is installed. It doesn’t get any easier than that.
Author’s Homepage: http://www.drunkadmin.com

2) Google (XML) Sitemap: If you create content on the web and no one knows you published it, is it really content? One could argue that there is a lot of content on the internet that no one knows about with the last reported number of blogs currently being in excess of 184 MILLION. According to sitemaps.org, “Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.” This plugin helps to let the rest of the world outside of your mom, wife, siblings and car pool know that you have a blog.
Author’s Homepage: http://www.arnebrachhold.de

3) Exclude Page(s): This is a new find for me and it already has come in hand on one of my other WP-based sites http://www.awesometownfest.com. In the past, I would have to custom edit the .php files to not show certain pages and let them remain hidden from the navigation menus, but now that has all been simplified. With this tool all you have to do is un-check the option to include the page in the navigation menus and it will still be accessible via a direct link, but will not appear in any page menus. Simple, but highly useful feature that will come in handy ten-fold.
Author’s homepage: http://www.simonwheatley.co.uk

4) Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button: If you’re creating content on the web, you want as many people to read, view or stream as humanly possible. This plugin makes that even easier. No need to leave the site just click this easy to use button and you’ll see a laundry list of options to share, save, bookmark and even email the current content. This is a feature you see everywhere and will want to have on your site. A good rule of thumb that I like to use is to give people options and this will do that for you. Some of your readers might be on facebook, while others like to use delicious and others might just want to e-mail to a friend or colleague and this has all of that with one simple click or roll-over of the mouse. You can configure it to be on the bottom of all your posts, pages or only those on the homepage of your site. It’s really up to you. Note: there is also a similar plugin from the same team that allows your users to subscribe to any, but since WordPress is easily configurable for RSS feeds I don’t use this feature.
Author’s homepage: http://www.addtoany.com/

5) Akismet: This is not the coolest or flashiest plugin available for your WordPress blog, but it will be one of the unsung heroes of your site. As seen in the comic books, power can be used for evil and there in lies the ongoing issue of having to defend against SPAM and bots that auto-post junk to your comments and clutter up your sites. If you don’t get them under control they will feed on your content and make your life hell, plain and simple. I have seen this several times when moderating message boards and on this very site before I made this new friend. Automatic Kismet or Akismet for short is looking to rid your site of spam through an “collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging” ( via akismet.com). Once you’ve installed it, (note: you will need to get a Wordpress API key) you will never have to worry about track back and comment spam on your blog again.
Author’s Homepage: http://ma.tt/

That’s all for now. Please leave comments below…

I approve this Trailer.

Thanks to everyone who donated to the St. Baldrick’s Foundation. Yesterday was the big day, so here is the before and after photo. ENJOY.

before the shaving

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Technology is an always growing monster, but the good kind like in Monster’s Inc. There are very few industries that have been effected by technology more than the music industry. In my lifetime alone there was the invention of the record button to make mix tapes with my ridiculously sized boom box off the radio, the Compact Disc, mp3s and my personal favorite the external USB friendly hard drive which is a great tool for storing obscene amounts of music digitally.

Napster

Looking back on the history of the music technology tango, we have Napster who came onto the scene in the mid-late 90s and is still seen as one of the pioneers of the getting new music into people’s hand movement and they did it by way of peer to peer file sharing. Similar technologies are used today in the way of BitTorrent and online file sharing (senspace, mediafire, rapidshare, etc.) and it continues to evolve due to the growing popularity of the personal mp3 player(iPod, Zune, etc.) As a music fan there is always music a few clicks away, which translates to Life is Good!

The band Dispatch greatly benefited from Napster’s infiltration of the college market and were able to grow to become one of the nation’s most popular unsigned (by choice) bands. The Grateful Dead, Phish & the jamband music scene as a whole grew exponentially off the back of its fans sharing their music. Originally it was the classic B+P where you’d send someone blank tapes and enough money for postage and they’d make a copy of the show and send it back to you. These were very popular especially with list service groups. I know I made a lot of trades back in the day via rec.music.phish and The Phish Bowl on AOL. Now through BitTorrent and sites like etree.org and the Live Music Archive it is even easier to get shows right after they happen, the previous way could take weeks to get you your favorite show from someone’s list. Now we have instant gratification. Read the rest of this entry »

My wife & I have a list of 5 artists / bands that we have yet to see that are still alive and playing. A top of both of our lists (#1 or #2 on both) is Paul Simon. When we were dating there was a period of almost a year where we would each month get the other person an album that we loved or thought that they needed to have in their collection. She gave me Graceland as a gift one month and it has since been a constant in my musical library that always puts me in a good mood. I have always enjoyed his catalog, including a lot of Simon & Garfunkel, but that album always stands by itself to me in a league of its own.

Fast forward to present day. In early January it was announced that they would be re-opening the Beacon Theater in New York City, a musical landmark. The performer for the two night-extravaganza would be, that’s right you probably guessed it, no other than Paul Simon himself. Tickets were to go on sale with the dreaded Ticketmaster three weeks before the show. I was beyond excited to try and get them and in turn get to cross him off the list. The ticket gods weren’t in our favor as I don’t have an American Express Gold and so I couldn’t get tickets via the week-long pre-sale. Really? A week, these people are so rich that they need a week to get around to buying tickets?! As you can see I’m a little bitter :laugh:

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When I was in 6th grade I had just moved to a new area of Philadelphia with my family. I was the new kid in school, which wasn’t that bad at the time because the girls took a nice liking to me as I was different than the other boys. My old school was uber-Catholic and a lot more strict intimidating from the nuns side of things, so intermingling wasn’t really my thing. That and the fact that I was still a child.

Somehow during this year I got a girlfriend and started ‘dating’ one of the girls in my class and my friend started dating her friend. Back then I think that was how it worked you dated one of the girls and her friend had to date one of your friends. After our “super romantic” first kiss, I felt like big man on campus meanwhile I think on a good day I was 4 foot 2. I was a wee lad for many years especially going into high school where I didn’t break the 5 foot barrier till the summer. So what does any super serious in a relationship in 6th grade boyfriend do when Valentine’s Day approaches? If you guessed go to the mall for only the best merchandise money that your parents gave you can buy, you’re right. Read the rest of this entry »

DVR

I love it. It is a friend and member of our family.  If you have a TV you should have one. It’s that simple. No longer should you be a slave to the traffic light TV guide.  Watch the shows when you want, when you want. As the idea of spawning is discussed I can see how this would come in handy for those who might have to watch kid programs when their favorite shows are on or whose schedules are all out of whack and at the mercy of the little one(s).

I remember many moons ago if you had a night class or were going out and wanted to watch something you’d have to set your VCR and hope that you were skilled enough to be able to program the VCR properly and you could only record ONE show at a time. The times they are a changin…

TiVo

Tivo is the originator of this great service and the first to offer it commercially, but while they are still in business it seems their idea has been borrowed by cable companies all over the world. We have the basic DV-R package with Cablevision where we can record two shows simulataneously and I belive we can store upwards of 100 hours on the lovely device. There are limitations where you can’t watch a third show while you are recording two of them at the same time, so this can be annoying when a new program comes into the mix that you want to deem DV-R worthy or see if you like a series premier, etc but that isn’t the end of the world IMO.

In coming weeks / months we will be switching over to the AT&T U-verse plan which takes DV-R to a whole new level. We will be able to record more shows concurrently as well as share all DV-R’d programs on any of the cable boxes in our abode. This is great for the Gossip Girls, America’s Next Top Model, Medium, etc. that the wife likes to add to the DV-R mix.

att&t

There are two other great features that have me excited about the switch to AT&T. The first is the ability to program the DV-R from the web, this will come in handy when you’re staying late for a meeting or just forgot to put something down to record.  The second which is seasonal is the integration with Yahoo! Sports for Fantasy Football and giving you up to the minute stats on the members of your team right on the screen. This is sweet, but will make the misses a little crazy as she already feels like a football widow on Sundays during the season.

Now from a total nerd perspective the concept and the design is fairly simple. By that I mean I know how it works I just don’t know how to create one. Basically it seems to me that you are just recording using a hard drive with a UI that allows you to decide the amount of space (shown to you as time) that you want to allocate for a specific project. The device then writes that data to the hard drive and organizes it in the dataset to make it accessible from the DV-R menu. This is the front-end that sits over top of the data to make it easier to find for you.

From a TV watching standpoint you get to watch TV more efficiently. For a one-hour program, you have roughly 15-20 minutes of commercials that aren’t necessary anymore. This isn’t good in terms of advertising dollars and getting you to watch their commercials, but I’m willing to bet that this issue is already in the works by the big wigs. So do the math you get 2 ‘one-hour’ programs and can watch them in only 90 minutes time. More time to get your work done or watch another show (or two). It’s your choice and that’s the best part.

I’m off to catch up on some TV…

March 6-7-8 2009

So as you may or may not know I was lucky enough to score two 3-day packages for Phish’s return three-night run at the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, VA on March 6,7 & 8 2009. We’re very excited to be able to be there for this special occasion as I brought Sue with me to the previous hiatus return at MSG. Unfortunately due to the whole being a teacher thing, Sue can’t take off more than one day during that period of time in March due to it being during the testing period at school. The obvious choice was to take the time off to be there for the Friday night show.

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