I love Indexed! It took me a second to get this one…

Yesterday’s was good too, she drew the graph and had the readers label the data points!

Jessica has a whole book of these called indexed (of course).

So I only thought the Santa Radar Tracker was only semi-interesting. But I brought it up for my cousins kids when I was over there tonight and they went nuts over it (from little kids to a sixth grader). They kept running in to check out where he was in the world. The fact that they give you a countdown to the next update even made it more enticing.

They’ve got photos from various sites around the world and some locations have a video such as this one from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (which includes some very mild educational bullet points in the audio).

THEY PULLED THE VIDEOS (MADE THEM PRIVATE), I’VE REPLACED THE VIDEO WITH A PROMO WITH SEVERAL CLIPS IN IT.

Here’s the direct link to NORAD Tracks Santa – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (and there is a High quality link on that page).

Here’s a little background at the Google Lat Long Blog about the Santa Tracker (and the regular Google Blog).

UPDATE: At 11:11 PM he made it to the United States. I like the video from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

So after 5 years of using MovableType, and talking about sticking with things yesterday, I’m planning on switching this blog to WordPress. As I said a few months back –

I think WordPress is easier to setup and it’s also easier for beginners to do quite advanced things with WP than Movable Type. From the other perspective, I think that doing really super advanced things is easier with Movable Type, while doing ultra-advanced things are probably equal between the two.

I’ve slightly modified that a bit to make it more accurate in what I’ve learned since then. I’m also going to add that

Upgrades appear to be much easier to do in WordPress, they’ve all been pretty painless for me. (I never even liked doing incremental upgrades with MT)

Maybe as I customize things more this won’t be as true but for now it’s been pretty easy. And it’s an educational thing for me too, I’ve really enjoyed learning about it…

So for the next month(?) I’ll be changing and testing things. I’ll be running both in tandem stating soon, I’ll want some posts/archives once the switch is made. I’ll probably switch back and forth a few times as I’m testing so be patient with me as I make changes. The worst tests might be for the people using RSS readers, but I’ll try to keep those disasters minimal. If you see things broken for more than a day it means I didn’t notice, so please e-mail me and let me know.I don’t think I’ll be able to ever import everything the way I want to: keeping all my old permalinks and everything else so that I don’t break a million back-links to my site (and throughout my site). So I think when I do the final cut over everything 2008 and before will stay on MovableType and everything 2009 and after will be on WordPress.

I’ll be documenting this since I’m sure I’ll have to do some interesting things for category archives (I think I’ll fudge the last entry of each category to include the old posts) and searching the archives (this may require two searches, but I’m not sure yet).

If I can’t integrate them very well, I’ll just have a prominent button that says “click here for 2008 and earlier”. And I’ll modify a lot of the old templates to say ‘click here for the new stuff’. I’d just hate to have to do that for all the category stuff.

Any tips on the migration from anyone? Any resources?

I cannot believe how much gas has dropped in the last few months. It’s really insane, but in a good way.

I got this graph from DetroitGasPrices.com. Looks like they shot back up 10 cents in the last few days, but still. Compared to gas prices from 5 years ago, we’re right around the same area but pretty much since then it’s a much better deal.

I was talking two years ago about “how low” prices had dropped but it almost peaked at a dollar less these past few weeks.

FYI, when I buy my gas I try to check DetroitGasPrices.com (I think it’s an offshoot of GasBuddy.com). I’m not going to drive way out of my way for a few cents, but if I’m driving through an area that’s cheap, I’ll wait until I get to the cheaper place…

So I’ve had some pretty crappy pages up at GaryLaPointe.com and I was just planning on putting up WordPress as a CMS for it. Coincidentally, when I went to download one of the betas of WordPress 2.7, it turns out they had just released the final version of WordPress 2.7 so I used that! So far it’s working really great and I’m really liking the 2.7 admin interface (I really didn’t like the 2.6 interface) I think I originally started with 2.3.x.

Now GaryLaPointe.com looks nice. Although if you frequent this site there probably isn’t much there that you haven’t seen here (maybe some photos or something).

It’s got some great new features. I especially like the clickable installation of plug-ins and widgets (but it really needs a much much better search to find them). It’s supposed to run with GoogleGears, but I’m not really sure what it’s actually supposed to be saving me.

Here’s a video showing off some of the new features. Notice the HD link in the upper right corner for some great quality and try it full screen, you’ll love it.

I’ll be using it more and I hope to discover more features as time goes on (and as I wait for the Second Edition of WordPress for Dummies).FYI, If you’re reading this site there isn’t really anything you’re missing at GaryLaPointe.com, it’s mostly just reruns and stripped down versions of what I post here and on some of the social networks. It’s where I point other people for things about my travels without pointing them to all the other stuff I blog about here; I just feel that’s more professional with co-workers and such…

So one of the many sites I read is the Costa Rica Blogger. It’s humorous, has great tips and interesting reads. In particular, today I read a post titled Legal Ages in Costa Rica which lets you know the legal age is for drinking alcohol, buying cigarettes, etc. And related to that he talks about the issue of him trying to get his son into see the latest Batman movie.

In general it’s a blog about Costa Rica covering all sorts of useful information and humorous anecdotes. For example recently they’ve talked about pricing for a dental cleaning, trips to the national park, cost of living and more…

Results for the election are interesting. They’ve got Michigan listed as won by Obama, but only 20% of the precincts have reported. Now most of those being waited for are smaller precincts but there is less than a 50,000 vote difference. Does that even count all the mailed in absentee votes?

A few years ago (in the early days of the Internet) the first time the Michigan government put detailed election results on-line I was the person who put them on-line so I needed to know what time I needed to be available for the uploads. I’m not going to get into particulars (and I’m sure many have changed now) but if I recall correctly, it was way way after the news shows posted their results and after the newspapers printed the results before real tallies were even started. And (if I recall correctly) two of the bigger counties didn’t even get in their totals until the next afternoon.

And pay attention on sites where you see election results they say things like “Results are based on projections and unofficial returns. Candidates listed in bold indicate projected winner”.

But these early “results” are generally correct so I guess I can’t complain. But you generally don’t call a sports game until it’s over unless it’s a landslide. From what I’ve been watching (and it’s not much) just in the last 90 minutes McCain has gained about 38 electoral votes (with 7 states still voting and 9 states that haven’t been called yet) so it’s still got a ways to go.

But if it goes the way Dori predicted we don’t even need the other states votes we just need all the tallies from the precincts that closed by 9PM EST. Just so you know Dori is a computer person, not a political blogger and generally just blogs life and tech (who does occasionally blog political things). FYI – As of 10:30 PM her chart matches all the states we have tallies for so far.

I see websites and blog posts picking on McCain (and Palin) and Obama. I see lots supporting Obama. But I don’t see many supporting McCain…

Maybe it’s just the (digital) places that I hang out? Or maybe that just says more about me…

I usually enjoy Indexed, a site where Jessica creates simple Venn diagrams or graphs that are humorous and/or have double meanings.

Today’s was funny so I thought it was a good time to add them to my From My Feed Reader list (while slightly sticking to my list my political sites first theme).

She’s also released a book called Indexed with new “cards” and best of material in it.

One of the oldest blogs and most political blogs I read is Dean’s World. Their tag line is “Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.” Lots of authors for posts so lots of different viewpoints are shown. They cover topics ranging from politics (mostly) to humor to Battlestar Galactica (and have an open comment post once a weekend where you can talk about anything).

I’m not very political so many times I don’t know what they’re talking about but that doesn’t stop me from coming back. But if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth checking out.

When I say “oldest blog” I mean they are one of the blogs I’ve been reading for the longest time. I’m not sure how I first found them – from a national story or something more local (Dean is in South-East Michigan). Check out some of the many times I’ve mentioned Dean’s World in my blog.

Unfortunately, you do have to register to comment, but they do make it pretty painless and it does count out a lot of the junk.

So I keep meaning to share what blogs I’ve been reading (187 different ones are in my feed reader as of today), this will be my first of my new category called From My Feed Reader.

I’m starting with Feministing because I’ve been enjoying their election political commentary and since it’s election time I thought I should start with them (instead of saving them for later). While it’s a lot more political than I am, I enjoy listening to many of their opinions (it’s a multi-person authored blog).

Young women are rarely given the opportunity to speak on their own behalf on issues that affect their lives and futures. Feministing provides a platform for us to comment, analyze, influence and connect.
- from the Feministing Mission Statement

In addition to their main blog. they have:

A FaceBook group that you can be a fan of,

A variety of YouTube videos,

and a MySpace group page.If you already read it or it turns out you like it, leave a comment to try and encourage some others to try it (notice that I didn’t ask for comments if you don’t like it).

And since it’s the season, I’ll probably choose my few other more political blogs to post over the next week; but only one other comes to mind (remember, I’m not that politically active).

I’ve made minor changes to my Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds so please me know if you have any problems with it. I’ve also made the RSS feeds be extended entry feeds so let me know how that is working.

Thank you.

So getting user updates about other users on FaceBook is interesting, but I always think ones like this are strange:

It just strikes me as odd. I suppose it’s not any odder than changing your profile to stating that you’re married, but one generates congratulations and the other doesn’t.

UPDATE: In addition you can change your profile (this is the same person’s info whom actually made this change today) to read:

Jane Doe So it’s an strange system. It might as well as have a category labeled “confused”.Sorry for the crappy image edit but I guess I never installed graphic programs on this laptop (I’ve got something but I’ve never understood layers properly).

BTW – Feel free to add me to your FaceBook profile if you use FaceBook.

I just haven’t been able to keep up with all the blogs and web sites I read. I’ve never gotten into using the RSS feed readers very much. I like using the sites the way people have decorated their layout, what they chose to do tells me something about the person, not seeing it makes me feel like I’m missing something. But if I’m not actually getting to their site and reading, I’m really missing something, right?

So I thought I’d try Google Reader out, I choose Google for several reasons:

It’s all via the web so it’s multi-platform; most web readers are multi-platform, but Google apps are pretty Macintosh friendly.

If I’m in need of a fix they’ve got a mobile interface for mobile phone browsing (actually you can do most things Google on your phone at http://m.google.com/.

No matter where I read the feeds it coordinates them all so you know which feeds have been read.

They’ve got an off-line version using Google Gears, this is what motivated me to do do this with Google. This means if I plan before I don’t have a internet connection I can sync my feeds to the computer and read the feeds off line but when I sync the computer back up, it marks the feeds as read (or stars them or what ever other things I do to the feeds).

I thought there was a Java version of Google Reader that I could put on my Palm Treo 755p phone, but I can’t find it. That would make this even more useful. Does this exist? Can someone point me to it if it does?

ADDED LATER: I guess it doesn’t cache the images for off-line viewing(?), disappointing, but I can live with it.

So I took an hour or two the other day and put all my sites in my blog roll into Google Reader. This took some time, but I think it was worth it. I think I’ll add some of my news sites in there also (those weren’t in my BlogRoll). There were several thousand posts marked as unread since it doesn’t know what I actually have looked at, so I had to bite the bullet and mark them all as read. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to mark “all posts older than 1 week as read” (or something like that) so I had to mark them all.

WOW! I can can get through all my feeds pretty quickly now. It’s so easy it almost makes me feel like I’m rushing, I need to slow down and chew my food enjoy the reading. Read the help for the key shortcuts! I’ve got it so when the reader starts up, it defaults to all the posts I haven’t read and I can just hit the space bar to scroll through them all, as I space through them it marks them as read and scrolls through them.

Downsides:

I really miss the feel of the site though. Sometimes I’m reading something and I’m like who the heck is this? and I check and realize that I know the person but it’s out of context so it’s hard to tell. Makes me want to figure out a way to brand my feed.

They have feed recommendations, but they could be a little better and a few more of them.

They’ve got some other features like “Shared Items” and “notes” but I haven’t used them yet. Any tips?

I uploaded a album of sunsets to FaceBook. These are from my last two trips to Costa Rica. There are a few dozen and I think all of them are labeled where and when they are from.

If you are a member of FaceBook be sure to add me as a friend while you’re there. Just click on “Gary’s Profile” at the top and then “Add as a Friend”.

(I didn’t realize that these public links to Facebook photo albums expire, I’m not even sure how long they last. That’s annoying, I’m glad I only used them for a few albums…)

So you can see, I’m pretty much at my low peak for things under my control. The problem is most of the things that have gone wrong haven’t been much under my control. As long as things start to get better I don’t care how the chart looks, but I’m really looking forward to working my way up to the 20th!

I used a desktop widget for my Mac to generate this, I like this one since it shows six cycles. If you’d like you can try an on-line Biorhythm generator but it’s only got 3 of the more traditional lines (I ran mine on-line for fun and the three do match up pretty good).

Later: I just found this web site that calculates the primary and secondary biorhythms.

The Tico Times is the english weekly paper from Costa Rica. For the last eight months I’ve been subscribing to the paper edition of The Tico Times. I’ve mentioned my Tico Times delivery issues before, it usually takes a while to get to Michigan but it’s much easier to read on paper than on the screen (they also offer a PDF subscription).

I’ve wanted to see what’s going on in the country when I’m not visiting. I’ve been paying attention to opinion pages, letters to the editor, classifieds and more local ads. Of the five times I’ve been there it’s all been in April or between the end of November and beginning of January (and really only covering half-a-dozen different weeks) so I’ve really only seen a portion of the year while there. So I’ve been paying more attention to the non-tourist type articles; when I’m there traveling I’m generally looking more for what’s going on there at that time.

I’m about 17 days from needing to complete my 101 in 1001 list, I haven’t been working on it much so it’s time to revisit and cross a few things off. I’ve only completed 52 of my items. Looks like I’ll complete about 6 more. As resolutions go I’m still above average as I’ll have done more than 18 items a year :)

So I love my 101 list but some things just didn’t get done. I thought I’d have done better. Things I could have done to ensure I accomplished more:

Don’t pick bands to make an effort to go see if they might not actually tour.

Don’t pick a location to travel to when your interests might change (instead say “visit a country overseas that you haven’t been to before”)

Don’t pick something to go to (like SXSW or Burning Man) that doesn’t ever fit the schedule of the job you have.

Some items should really be two or three items.

Don’t have too many items dependent on other items.

Don’t make them too much work and not fun (I think I created some to just fill the list)

Don’t pick so many vacation items, you might want to go somewhere else (especially when you consider I’ve gone to Costa Rica 4 times in the same period).

Don’t pick such complicated items (do ______ once a year) that should have been separate items

If I would avoided the above I probably could have easily accomplished anther 20. Some were just are impossible to do based on the items I picked.

A few items I’ve just recently finally crossed off (but I might have actually done them months ago)
Take Mom to England
Get something for my car to integrate my iPod better
Move somewhere else local?
Go one week without using any cash
Change all exterior bulbs in my car

I’ve got a few that I did make some progress in the right direction so I’ll credit myself a few points. But I’ve got a bunch that didn’t get touched.

This is kinda cool, I like the map with the Olympic Medal winners marked on it.

You can click the little tab at the top to just show the map.

So I’m tempted to migrate to WordPress (from Movable Type) I think I’ve got it all figured out on how to even retain my current URLs (as crummy as they are) so that I don’t have a bunch of broken links.

One of my worries is right now a lot of my pages score pretty good in Google searches, amazingly good sometimes, especially since my site doesn’t rank super high anyways, and I’m afraid of losing that rank. I’m not sure if it’s just that I built my pages well? or maybe my meta tags or if the structure of the page helps? or what? It’s just always done pretty good so I don’t mess with it.

What will I lose if I convert? What might I gain?The other thought is to leave my Movable Type site alone, delete the index page and use WordPress from now on but have links to the old pages. I’d need to keep the MT software so that comments and search would still work (I’d modify the WP search pages to say “you only searched the new site, click here to search for old stuff”). But I’d still have to maintain updates and such on the old site and check for spam and more….

Hmmm…. I’m either talking myself out of keeping the old one separate or possibly not migrating at all. I’m not sure which…

Google hits One Trilion unique URLs!!! That’s huge! They have an intersting article titled “We knew the web was big.

I’m proud to supply 0.0000002 percent of those pages! (At least I think I did the math right).

Have you seen my news coverage yet?!? I’m so excited!!!

If the video doesn’t start, click the image once the video finishes loading.

Or go straight to http://GaryForPresident.com/

So I’ve always enjoyed the Waiter Rant but now he’s got a book called Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip–Confessions of a Cynical Waiter. Most of the stories are pretty good, but probably a bit embellished. Spend a few minutes at the site if you think you might like it but go back a few week to before he starts talking about the book.

I think the cover is a little boring, they’re a little more open overseas, here’s a picture of the UK cover of Waiter Rant…

I thought this word cloud from what I’ve been tweeting was kinda cool. I created it at TweetCloud.com. These whow the most common words I’ve tweeted, bigger means I’ve tweeted more.
I’m on vacation right now, and I do miss Twitter a little bit. I want that constant stream of information. I also have been thinking of things to tweet and I can’t.

I can compose a full blog post when I don’t have ‘net access (and I can even backdate it) but I can’t with twitter. I probably won’t use twitter at all while I’m out of the country. I’m not going to use what little internet access I have on that, we’ll see, maybe I’d find it useful in a different way.

So I’ve been trying to use Twitter more and I found TweetStats to show me how much.

To give some background: TwitterFeed is actually how my blog posts get cross-posted to Twitter so those really don’t count much (started using this Oct 15, 2007). And I just discovered FriendFeed recently. But you can see that tweeting with Twitterific (w/phone and web) I’ve far surpassed that. Significant if you look at the below chart and see most of it’s in the last month. And by looking at my blog post counts (to the left) for the last few months, you can see blogging has declined. But I’ll blame the low blogging on 3 things: Twitter (but I am micro-blogging), busier at work (to tired at night to blog) and being sick this season.

Thanks to Julia Roy for pointing it out to me (via Twitter).

Argh! I’m annoyed with creating user accounts. Everyone has their own damn process for passwords:

all numbers

must contain one upper-case character, one number, and be at least 8 characters (but ONLY 1 uppercase letter)

no characters other than letters or numbers

must be 8 characters

But no, I can’t use 12 characters with letters, numbers and punctuation because it’s more than 8 or because it doesn’t have a capital letter.

An the real pain is when you go to log in, they won’t remind you of this “rule”. And I really like it when it says “username” when what they really want is my “e-mail address”.

My absolute favorite stupid rule is the hint to get your password must be at least 8 characters. Sorry, my hometown, mother’s maiden name, first pet and street aren’t that long! How am I supposed to remember this.

And all these companies need to have the ability to handle multiple e-mail addresses. It’s such a hassle when I need to change something (for something I signed up for 5 years ago) and I can’t remember their rule and the e-mail address I signed up with doesn’t exist any more.

Can you suggest some Detroit-area people to follow on Twitter? I’m looking for something that has a local geographic flavor, like Dearborn (or Detroit) Michigan.

I’m always looking for more people to follow, but today I’m soliciting suggestions for the Detroit area just to get a slightly less global feel for this Twittery goodness/chaos. I’ve got a lot of great people that I follow, but I’d love to see some tweets about local restaurants, bars and music.

So send me a message @GaryLaPointe with suggestions or tell someone you know to follow me and I’ll find them or just leave a comment. Thanks!

So I’m using some Costa Rica photos to test the new free on-line edition of PhotoShop. It’s very cool, does more than what most desktop packages do, but while limited, I don’t need much more. They give you 2 GB of free storage. It’s got cool slideshows (full-scren if you like) but I’m sure it breaks some browsers…

Looks like you can even download your photos in their original size. They’re still in beta so who knows what they’ll charge for more storage (or features?).

They do give you a way to put thumbnails and links to photos with having to use their viewer. Although it seems to be a 2 step process (thumbnail then link) for each photo. But it’s cheap, high-res and the flash interface is great.

If you love PhotoShop, I’m sure you’ll hate it. It’s pretty as spplications, but since I don’t use any features past version 1, it’s very nice and easy to use. Here’s a link to the palette with all the main options on it. It’s even easier to use than I need it to be (and it has more features to use too). It e-mails a really nice graphical html link to your friends too.

So I’ve really been trying to use Twitter more. I read and tweet more at my computer than when I’m out. When I’m out I tweet some but don’t generally read. I do have it set to get a text message on my phone automagically if someone tweets my name. If you don’t know what Twitter is:

You can see what I tweet. All my personal blog posts get tweeted automatically.

You can see who I follow with twitter.

You can “follow me” (but you have to set up a free account with them) and get all my tweets sent to your cell phone so you can see what I’m thinking about an blogging about.

There is a nice mobile interface and you can even subscribe via RSS.

I really got on the blogging boat late because I didn’t get it, but once I started I was hooked immediately. This isn’t working for me yet, but I’m still trying. On GeekBrief I saw the folks at CommonCraft created a video called Twitter in Plain English and it’s a pretty good explanation with interesting animation.

But it still feels like Instant Messenger (IM) to me, but only 140 characters. It’s definitely more than IM, but it really just feels like the next step in its evolution. The clients feel like IM, and using the web interface at Twitter fells more and more like a web chat client.

The biggest difference is that you direct your message to everyone in your group, not to a specific person. So occasionally you see a comment directed to someone else that you never saw the preceding comment, so then you can go see what they said and see if it’s someone else that interests you. You can send direct messages, but I don’t think that’s very common and I can never remember the command (it’s “D TwitterUserName TheText“).

I’m a huge fan of SpamArrest, a mail program that uses challenge/response CAPTCHAs to only allow mail from humans, instead of from spammers. It works great but the price has gone up from $60 for two years to $90, so I’m checking for other options. It’s only an additional $30 but if the price jump is $30 (or worse, 50%) every 2 years, it’s gonna get kinda pricey in the next few renewal cycles. The price jump is kind of large after a few years especially since I know many of their costs should have gone down (disk space, servers and bandwidth); the software is already written and has had minimal user changes over the last two years.

Honestly, I’m sure it saves me more way than $45 a year worth of time. But can something save me more time, I know in the past MailBlocks saved me more time. So I’m looking for suggestions for some other Challenge/Responce mail system.

There is one thing I really dislike about SpamArrest, while I can use any mail client to read my mail, to check and approve spam I have to go to their web site and that takes a lot of time (and this is a feature I miss from the now deceased MailBlocks). The reason I have to check it is for mailings from new companies that I deal with and for people who don’t pay attention to the e-mail that gets mail back to them immediately to ask them to confirm they are human (I even have info about me and a picture of me in the e-mail so they know it’s really me).

In the meantime, I’m using my free gMail account. I want to see how well that works, they give me all sorts of space for free and it’s pretty fast and it works well on cellphones (their client, their web interface and should work with phone clients). They’ve got a fancy web interface and plain web interface so it works pretty well everywhere. Although, with my client I can’t see the spam folder there either. Google lets you create additional addresses for the same account and have decent filters. Plus, they will let you use your own domain if you’d like to; so if it really works out, I’ll attach my GaryLaPointe.com domain to it and use it for my mail (as long as that supports IMAP). And if it works as well for me, it’s free! There’s some weird mapping between GMail and the Mac Mail.app (I think by default you get duplicates of the mailboxes) but there’s some work arounds, or maybe the new Mail.app in Panther fixes it…

Also, I figure after trying it for a few months, SpamArrest might send me a promo to lure me back. If that’s the case I’ll know I’ve done due diligence to try another option and I’ll have possibly saved a few bucks in the mean time.Actually, I have one other minor complaint about SpamArrest, the interface could be faster. There’s something about the web interface that slows things down. I notice when I travel, it’s unbearably slow and I’m not sure why. But it’s a huge minus when I travel…

I do get some referral dollar$ from SpamArrest (maybe $8.75 a year?), so I figure if I’m sending clients to them, so are others (therefore, they’re likely growing).

So I found a free offer code for CreditKarma. They’re offering free daily credit scores (from TransUnion). Use code CKFRND as invitation code at https://www.CreditKarma.com/ (I’m not certain I should be giving this code out, so I’m not hot-linking the site address) I found this at SlickDeals.net. The site is appears to besponsored by advertising and you will not be required to enter your credit card information or sign up for trial offers, but you will receive relevant partner offers (i.e. junk mail) based on your profile. This will not affect your credit rating (other than you paying attention to it).

I’ve always wondered how much my credit score fluctuates but even when I’ve had free offers before, but I’ve never bothered to log on every day to check. This looks like that on-line they give you a nice progressive graph from when you started (it’s hard to tell since I’m just on day one), hopefully it keeps a daily tally even when I don’t log in. Plus, they rank you to national stats and other members; their community has a some good credit, I actually score better nationally than with their membership (and I’ve got great credit).

UPDATE: So I’ve done this for a few days and it looks like the graph is just going to get me monthly averages, although it appears to pull the score daily (but it hasn’t changed for me yet).

UPDATE 2: I did ask for a credit increase on Wednesday, I was charging a few vacations so I wanted some wiggle room and I noticed my score went down three points today. I’m not sure if that’s for the credit check or the one vacation I already charged and sine it’s raised my debt level a tiny bit…

I’m sure someone out there can help me with my problem, but I don’t know what to call it so I can’t Google it. I’m trying to create some banners that are 865×180 pixels (the specific size doesn’t matter, that’s just what I’m using today). I’ve got lots of images that are way bigger than that so I need to be able to zoom in and out and see what it’ll look like if I crop it. I’ve been doing it with some other tools, but my zooming scales are limited with Graphic Converter (I need some in-between scales) and with iPhoto (I do want to do this on my Mac) I’ve got no decent way to see what the crop will look like. Graphic Converter almost does it, because if I’m close (but bigger) I can paste it in a smaller window and fine-tune it; but when I want to look at an image at 20% or 30%, it’s not an option,

Obviously, I’d prefer to not have to get an ultra-exspensive tool for this. But there’s got to be a better way than I’ve been experimenting with. I’m hoping a flash tool that I upload my photo to and it zooms around for me. Or maybe just using a tool in a way I haven’t tried it yet…

It’s been 4 years today since I started blogging. It wasn’t really a plan. I had just looked into it for a bit and one day I had something to say and kept going…

I think this will be post number 1677 (that averages to a little more than 1 posts a day) and 2,299 comments.

Thanks for listening and commenting everyone!!!!! And if you’ve just been listening, speak up and say HII’m also guessing I’ve had about 1,000,000 spam comments deleted with via my different filtering systems (about 30,000+ spams deleted by hand).

I need a better way with MovableType to reply to a comment and also post the reply to the web site at the same time. (Anyone?)