Yup, I'm off to see The Palms Daddy... Seth Harwood!  He's a writer (and podcaster) of crime fiction and is on a book tour for his first book...  "Jack Wakes Up".  He'll be in Philly, which isn't TOO terribly far from Washington DC, so I'm headed up there with a co-worker (he'll be on his brand new Triumph Rocket III Classic, which he picked up last weekend) and maybe my friend Rob (he's still waffling).  It'd be cool if Rob can pull the trip off, but no biggie if he can't.  It'll still be better than two days at the office.

We'll be cruising up there on Wednesday to catch Seth's reading at Robin's Book Store, then we'll probably do a bit of bar hopping and just chill out with The Palms Daddy.  Then we roll back in Thursday.  I spent some time this weekend getting Blue Bayou (my Yamaha FJR1300) back in shape and she's purring like a kitten.  A big angry 1300 cc kitten, but purring none-the-less. :)  All of my electrical gremlins from the last major trip have been vanquished, she's got clean oil and fluids and she's loaded to go.  Can't wait to get some gears stretched out on the way. ;)  It'll be interesting to see how quick the Rocket is...  I've never ridden with my co-worker, but he seems like a reasonable guy.  I'll let him set the pace.  I just hope he doesn't think his 2300 cc hunk of British iron can hold a candle to Blue.  :)

Ok, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. But, I did get another one of my pictures published. This time, it was from my trip to Scotland. I took a few shots while I was in Edinburgh and one of them is now up on "Schmap Scotland". You can check it here... It's one of the "Our Dynamic Earth" shots. Sorry there's no direct link, but Schmap is a bit odd and they only give me a "widget", which pretty much just advertises them.  But, here it is anyway if you prefer that route...  I think if you mouse over the little marker it'll pop up my picture, but I can't be sure.

The joys of being sick... again.

I've been fighting off something all week...  at first I thought it was the flu, which would have been weird, since I had the flu about two weeks ago.  Now I think it's a sinus infection.  It seems like it's starting to go away, but it's taking its time about  it.  To make matters worse, we've got two people on vacation this week and one other with family he's been having to run back and forth to the airport.  That leaves us very shorthanded, and bosses tend to get real nervous when the "mail guys" are missing.  So, I've just had to suck it up and deal with it...  no time off for me this week.  :(

EeePC camera shot...  pretty cool that this little tiny camera is way better than the one the office provided...  a $200 Logitech critter.  The Logi looks like carp compared to this.

L8rs!

I've been using Live Writer in it's various versions for a while now.  The Writer team recently released the full version (previous version were "beta") and I've been using it for a couple weeks on my laptops.  Unfortunately, I've been fighting with it at work for a while now.

Fortunately, I think I've got it "mostly" figured out.  Before I kick you a partial solution, let me explain the issue first.

Someone on the Live team decided to make a "live" installer.  That means that you can't actually download any of the Live applications.  Instead, you download an installer and then it goes and fetches the applications when you run it.  It uses Windows Update to do this.  That means that if Windows Update doesn't work flawlessly for you, you can't install any of the Live apps.  Behind a corporate firewall?  Got a proxy?  Got a GPO smacked down on you that blocks Windows Update?  Too bad!  My opinion... this is stupid not to offer an alternative.

I hit http://support.live.com in order to see if they'd kick me an installer and got the usual "twelve step" fixing your computer script from the tech who replied...  The usual stuff... turn off AV, turn off your firewall, delete all your temp files, run Windows Update (hah!), remove all existing Live apps, reboot, etc.  I did all this, even though I knew I still wouldn't be able to reinstall any of the Live apps.  Sent back a lengthy reply stating the issue, all the steps I completed, etc.  No reply as of yet.

So... I simply copied the Writer directory from one my laptops.  Here's the bits you need to know...

1. The new version of Writer lives in C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer - go get it, copy it to your blocked machine.
2. You need to create two registry keys (both Reg_SZ) if they don't exist...  HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Writer\InstallDir
   HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live Writer\InstallDir
   Set both of them to your directory path (should be C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\ if you're using the normal location.)

Note the two different keys in step two... one is "Windows Live Writer", the other is "Windows Live\Writer".  This is important if you ever install any plugins.  Plugins designed for the older version need the "Windows Live Writer", plugins for the newer version need "Windows Live\Writer".  Also note the trailing slash in the directory path of the value... required!

You'll probably have to reconfigure your blog settings, as they may not copy over.  But, at least it works!

• 0.5 hours checking and replying to last night's emails.
• 1 hour system maintenance...  checking event logs, queues, etc.
• 0.5 hours meeting with boss to talk about vendor
• 1 hour conference call with vendor to talk about why we're not happy
• 0.5 hours with the other team member talking about vendor
• 1 hour team meeting talking about what we're supposed to be doing
• 0.5 hours replying to emails about what we're supposed to be doing
• 1.0 hours lunch (talking about what we're supposed to be doing)
• 0.5 hours with other team member deciphering a batch file that does some really freaky stuff to our mail clusters every night.
• 0.5 hours figuring out how to rewrite said batch file into something that (a) makes sense, and (b) works.
• 1 hour meeting with other vendors who are trying to sell us "cool tools".
• 0.5 hour meeting with other vendors who are trying to sell us "cool tools".
• 0.5 hours replying to emails I missed while in meetings.

Out!

One of the cool things I noticed about BlogEngine.net is that it shows a quick list of how many posts I've put up each month.  Unfortunately, the side effect of that is that it shows that I'm just a big 'ole slacker.

So, now that I have a "measuring stick", I'm going to see what I can do to rectify my post deficiencies.  This is one is all about the blog itself.

Two of the things I don't like are support and "features".  The support is kind of lacking at first glance.  There's a Wiki and a bit of online documentation, but that's about it.  The Wiki is also somewhat, uh, lacking.  There is some decent technical info there, but not a ton of it.  There's very little in the way of "how do I do this" stuff, which is what I'm really needing.  There is also a "forum" of sorts, but it's hosted on Codeplex...  which is not geared for forum discussion.  It's more like a glorified guest book.  But, I guess I'll hang out there for a bit and ask some stupid questions and see what pops up.

The "features" are a bit odd.  The product definitely needs some fleshing out.  For example, there's an option to build "pages" that aren't a part of the main blog.  This is cool (and very useful), but there doesn't appear to be any decent way of getting them IN the menu system without editing theme files somewhere.  I haven't figured out how to do that yet.  Guess I need to go squat in a Codeplex forum for a bit.

Anyway, that's it for now.  I'll probably slap up an non-techie post a bit later this afternoon.  L8rs!

There be some funkness going on here.

I'm at it again...  changing out the blog software.  This time I've decided to go with BlogEngine.net instead of Graffiti.  Graffiti was ok, but it had some quirks and limitations I didn't much care for.  I'm sure it'll rock eventually, but it's going to take a few revisions to get it right.  

Blogengine so far works nearly flawlessly and it has a LOT of features.  I'll go into some of them later.  In the meantime, expect to see the old content filtering in slowly as I update everything.  L8rs! 

Hey all,

Just figured I'd toss out a bit about my completely amateur photography efforts.... 

I generally post pretty much every picture that's not total garbage up on Flickr.  Apparently people search Flickr a fair bit and have managed to come across a few of my pictures.  I currently have a small handful of my photos posted on some reasonably prominent sites...

Some shots from Aruba are posted up on British Airways' web site and on WhatsOnWhen's site.

I also have a shot up on Pixel-Peeper as a comparison shot of the Canon 18-55mm F/3.5-5.6 lens (that thing gets a ton of hits).

I also have two other requests to publish a couple of other photos I took in Scotland.  I'll post the links up once they're final.

None of this has gotten me any money yet (and probably never will), but there's smthng satisfying about knowing that people appreciate at least some of my efforts.

Laters!