You may have noticed that the photos section of the site is currently down. I won’t bore you with too many details, but usually my site is hosted on one of my computers at home. Well this particular computer is currently on a truck somewhere and for all I know it could be in Mexico someplace. During the move I am hosting my site from my buddy Aaron’s webserver. To make my long story short, I couldn’t get all of my picture data onto his server quick enough, so I decided to disable it for the move.

This situation presented a problem for me, as I wanted to share some pictures that Kim took during our 600 mile drive from Kansas City to Denver. Using my quick thinking, I decided to give flickr a try. I know tons of people who currently use flickr and it still appears to be one of the most popular choices for photo sharing. So far I must admit that the service is very easy to use. I don’t know if I could ever make the switch over from hosting my own gallery software on my server, but if I did I think flickr would be on the top of my list.

Anyway, I’ve successfully added 18 pictures from our drive for your viewing pleasure.

If you have some extra time today, you may want to keep your eyes on Woot.com. On a normal day Woot sells one item until it is sold out or until 11:59pm central time when it is replaced by a new item. And not only do they typically sell the item before the allocated 24 hours, they sell the items for really good prices. Today is not a normal day, however, as it is part of a Woot-Off. According to their FAQ:

In Woot-Off mode, a new product is launched immediately after the sellout of the previous deal. There is a half-Woot-life of 12 hours maximum on any product within a Woot-Off that does not sell out. The number of Woot-Off items, sequence, and quantity will not be announced.

So far this Woot-Off has gone through nearly 40 items.

I discovered a new website the other day, BarDiver.com. The goal of the site is to help you find good bars in your area based on the features you enjoy. The site is completely user driven so anyone can enter a bar on the site and then tag it with the features they enjoy. There are only 48 bars listed currently, but I’m excited to see what that number will be after I make the move to Denver. I even found the Bannock Street Garage on the site already, which is a bar that a friend of Phil and Doni started. While they are concentrating on Colorado (Denver to be specific) it sounds like they have plans to expand in the future.

Now that we’ve taken a couple of days to forget about the move, it’s time for us to get right back to it. Kim is currently in Denver for the week and has looked through some more places. Again she’s seen lots that would not work for us and fortunately a few that have some potential of being the one. Maybe by the end of the month we’ll have something picked out, or at least a much smaller list.

As you can tell we’ve been touring lots of places, 30+ so far. To keep track of everything we have been using an Excel spreadsheet to list all of the important details and also our comments. I’ve even gone as far as color coding it for the ones we like (green) down to the ones we dislike (red). This was working great for us minus the fact that we had to send it back and forth in email each time we changed anything.

Today I decided that this had to stop and I finally checked out Google Docs & Spreadsheets. First of all, they made it very easy to import an existing document and just about all of the formatting transferred over perfectly. With just a few more clicks the document was saved online and was shared between myself and Kim. The online storage is great because we can access it anywhere we have an internet connection, so we no longer have to email it back and forth. This also allows us to edit it very easily and immediately save it in one central location. I’m loving it so far!

A recent combination of two of my favorite things, music and the internet, recently went into “public preview” mode. Haystack.com is a social networking site for music lovers. There are only 600 or so artists on the site currently, but I’m sure that number will be climbing high very quickly. In the end, the hope is that users can easily find new music that appeals to my tastes very quickly, while the artists can share the advertising revenue generated by their content.

This sounds like a great idea in theory, I’m excited to see how it all works out. Check it out for yourself, here is my personal page.

The annual football game between the Cincinnati Bearcats and the Miami RedHawks, known as the Battle For The Bell, is this weekend. I attempted to find some information about the rivalry so I could make this post more interesting, but I was quickly disappointed with the results. I found a Wikipedia page for the Victory Bell but there was not very much information on it. I’ve long been a big supporter of Wikipedia, but I only recently started editing some of the pages. So while I was reading up on the Victory Bell I added some additional information, like the chart on the right that lists the winners from each game. If I find more time I may try to dig up more information to add to the entry, but for now it’s a good start.

Interesting facts about the Battle For The Bell:

• The first meeting was the first collegiate football game played in Ohio.
• It is the fifth longest rivalry, in terms of games played, in Division I football.
• The only rivalry that predates this is that between Wake Forest and North
  Carolina, only by a couple of months.

I’ve spent some time today reading the blog of Anousheh Ansari, the first female space tourist. She is currently inside the International Space Station and has been writing frequent entries to her blog from space! I was amazed when first hearing of this. I’m aware of the fact that wordpress can be configured to add entries sent to a particular email address. Although they do not have Internet access on the ISS yet (that I’m aware of), emails are sent and received three times daily. Regardless of how it’s done, her blog entries paint a vivid picture of what it must be like to spend some time in space. Be sure to browse the blog archvies for September to read all of the entries.

Here’s a riddle for you taken from Amy’s blog:

You have a person working for you.
You have to pay them at the end of every day they work for you.
They work for you for 7 days.
You have one bar of gold that you have to use to pay them.
You are allowed to cut the gold bare only TWICE.
How do you pay them at the end of every day with the gold with only two cuts????

I thought about this for a long time, trying to figure out how to cut the bar into seven pieces. After banging my head on the desk a few too many times I took the question to Google and immediately found the answer (don’t click the link unless you really want to see the answer). Hint: don’t think about it the way that I was, the answer is not cutting it up into seven pieces.

While you are over at Amy’s blog check out the rest of her latest entries. She is currently in Geneva, Switzerland for work and will be there for the next several weeks.

No time to write today. Crazy day at work. I need the weekend now! Until next week…

My! Very educated morons just screwed up numerous planetariums.

Last night I made some long overdue changes to the TrustEd Designs website. It’s not really much of a site, just a placeholder really until I get time to create a new site. However, it’s much better than it was before, which was just a copy of the old edpaffjr.com. At least now I have little screenshots and links to all of the sites that I’ve designed completely or parts of (I think). Did I leave something out? If so, let me know. Otherwise, spread the word about my little design company.