Just so you know

Traverse City Wedding Photographer: Dan Stewart

2009-10-07T07:19:00.000-07:00

Now that the wedding season is coming to an end, I'd like to recap some of my favorite photos from the best Traverse City Wedding Photographer I know: Dan Stewart. You can follow his blog, twitter, or become a fan on Facebook.

And my absolute favorite from this year is:

Great Season Dan! You're definitely the best Traverse City Wedding Photographer I know.

Why is it so hard to believe in God?

2009-09-02T12:07:00.000-07:00

I wrote this note a while ago to a friend of mine, and thought some others might benefit

----------------------------------------------------------

Dear Friend,

Throughout the course of the last two semesters I thought a lot about my own life, where I was, where I wanted to be, and where I was going. Of course, it's probably no secret that this was all sparked by your announcement that you had been diagnosed with a terminal disease. Selfishly, I thought about my self in the aforementioned ways but largely neglected to think about you in those same regards. The cornerstone of my beliefs is that as a follower of Christ I should always put others before myself, and until now I was not fully following that principal, but God has given me a heavy heart to reach out to you and remind you of his love and that "life" is not the end.

I was an Atheist not too long ago; one who would passionately denounce the presence of God and find reason to convince myself that "this" was it. Arrogantly I thought that I had the capacity to perceive and understand "this" existence. I made sure there was no room for God, the unexplainable, or the incomprehensible in my life. It was quite a painful and hollow existence looking back on it now. I'm sure you've heard this all before so I'll just get to it: I thought I had it all figured out, or that I was at least on my way to figuring it all out, but I soon realized that I was only equipped with tools (math, science, logic, reason) to explain what I could perceive around me. I held on tight to these tools as it was comforting to to "know" that I could explain almost anything depending on how far I went down the rabbit hole. But these things only serve to reinforce our existing views, not explore or perceive new ones.

The one thing that we can perceive with these limited "tools" that is of any significance is love. We, as humans, haven't developed a framework to explain this phenomenon try as we may (music, poetry, language) and we won't be able to because it is something not of "this", but of "that". "That" of course is that which is incomprehensible, unfathomable, and inexplicable. Love is something that just barely dips into our perceptive range, but a realm in which God exists and from which Jesus came. I thought I knew love before I knew Christ, but what I thought was love was a ruse, a small and misleading feeling meant to trick me into being content with something twisted and much less than the real thing. There is Good and there is evil. Evil, in its most basic form, is holding onto "this", while Good is knowing that "this" is not it and "that" is where its at. I urge you to not be content with "this" and to seek a path towards knowing Christ. Having been lived a life for both "this" and "that" I can attest to quality of a life in "this" while living for "that".

God speed.

- Jason

Jetty Rae Enters Nine West Vintage America Voices Competition

2009-08-30T17:37:00.000-07:00

So, I'm sure by now it's not a big secret that I'm in love with Jetty Rae. Her voice is angelic, and her message much the same, so you can imagine my excite when I learned she had entered the Nine West Vintage America Voices competition on YouTube with her song "Blink of an Eye". I for one will be showing my support by giving the video a 5 star rating; and you?

More information about the contest can be found here: Vintage America Voices.

Leelanau County never lets go

2009-08-21T17:48:00.000-07:00

I got a call a week or so ago from someone at the Leelanau Enterprise asking me if I wouldn't mind being interviewed for an ongoing series they were doing on what those who left Leelanau County and what they're doing now. I spent the next 1/2 hour on the phone and this was the result:

In the spring of 2003, an article published in the Enterprise about Suttons Bay senior track star Jason Stewart was titled, “Stewart Can’t Be Stereotyped.” It detailed his widely ranging interests as well as his athletic talent. Six years, two degrees, a marriage and numerous travels later, that headline still rings true.

Read the rest of the article over at the Leelanau Enterprise. I gotta say, it's nice to be remembered...

Traverse City Wedding Photographer Dan Stewart gets married!

2009-08-12T13:37:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago I attended Traverse City Wedding Photographer Dan Stewart's wedding in Traverse City, MI. Needless to say the wedding reception was extremely beautiful and transpired amid the sole 30 minutes of sunshine seen that day (thank you God!). The reception, however, was just... well, you'll get the idea if you watch the photobooth video from the Wedding:

The Stewart Wedding Photo Booth, One to Remember

Congratulations Dan and Liz!

Photoshoot with Jetty Rae

2009-05-05T12:12:00.000-07:00

A few weekend ago, I had the pleasure of tagging along with Jetty Rae and Dan Stewart for Jetty's upcoming "Nobody" CD photo shoot. Wow, Dan Stewart totally nailed the style and feel for which Jetty was going. She wanted a sort of eclectic, vintage, organic feel and I really think Dan got it. Check out photos from the shoot at his blog.

Empty Folder Creation with Wordpress as CMS

2009-03-30T16:31:00.001-07:00

Another experience I thought I should document to be helpful to others... this time it's about the wordpress installation on danstewartphotography.com.

A while back we decided to move away from a proprietary Ruby on Rails application for danstewartphotography.com and opted for a Wordpress CMS + Pictage web presence. ProPhotoBlogs provided the awesome CMS + Template and Pictage provided the commerce and client interaction. Great solution for a photography who has a brother who doesn't have enough time to work on said ROR app anymore :)

Since Wordpress was going to act as a CMS as opposed to just a blog as before, we decided to give wordpress it's own directory as to not clutter up the root dir (as if it weren't already) and so the URLs for the various Wordpress Pages wouldn't all be /blog/page_title (higher level directory and more relevant semantics = more SEO friendly). So we moved wordpress from /blog to /wordpress, brought index.php out into the root and modified it to use /wordpress for dependencies. Simple enough, right? Well... not quite.

Since the blog had already been in use for sometime, there were countless references in the db to /blog, including uploaded images for post content. So, we dumped the db through phpMyAdmin (4.8mb mind you!) fired up TextMate, searched and replaced all instances of /blog/ with /wordpress/, and updated the db.

At this point there shouldn't have been anymore problems due to the move... like I said, there shouldn't have been anymore problems. Of course, there were.

Every once in a while a folder named "blog" would show up in the root directory. Normally, this would just be an oddity but in this case it was interfering with a permalink we had setup for a Wordpress Page rendered the actual blog. If a directory with the name of the permalink for a Wordpress Page is present in the site root, the directory gets precedence. In this case, the directory was empty, so when a user visited danstewartphotography.com/blog they'd see an apache generated directory listing of *nothing*. Not good for those subscribed to blog!

Further investigation revealed that the folder was being created every morning around 5:30am. There were no existing cron jobs that were creating this folder, there were no references to it in the db, yet there it was, every morning around 5:30am. Very strange.

I still have not determined what is causing this folder to be created. My only guess is that there is some configuration file used by one of the plugins (or possibly Wordpress itself) that is referencing that directory and creates the folder when it hits a "!exists" statement. Argh, still bugs me.

I didn't have time it trace the problem any further, so instead I turned lemons into lemonade...

Wordpress uses clever (and simple) .htaccess files to direct URI requests to permalinked pages (Rails does the same thing). So, I just put a modified .htaccess file in the suborn /blog directory which made the browser redirect to the correct permalinked location:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . . /index.php [L]

The RewriteRule . . /index.php [L] is the important bit that routes the URI request to the index.php in the root folder. Case closed... sort of.

Featured Blogger on Concentrate Media Blog

2009-03-18T10:19:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I was contacted by Jeff of Concentrate Media, an online Ann Arbor area magazine, to blog about the happening in A2. The first of a two part series was posted today. Nothing too special, just little bit about the "underground" tech community in Ann Arbor, but worth a read nonetheless. Check out the post "The Underground Tech Community".

iPhone tethering with PDAnet

2009-03-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

I was one of the early iPhone adopters who used procedures called "jailbreaking" and "unlocking" to enable the use of my new gadget on T-Mobile's network instead of AT&T's. At the time, T-Mobile had superior prices and I didn't want to go through the trouble of changing carriers. However, when AT&T started to offer 3G service, I promptly jumped the T-Mobile ship and signed a 2 year contract with AT&T. Of course, once I was with AT&T there was no real reason for me to jailbreak and unlock my iPhone, and to this day I do not have an unlocked iPhone BUT yesterday I found something that completely made the "risky" jailbreaking process worth it: PDAnet.

PDAnet allows you to "tether" your iPhone to your laptop or other wifi device through and Ad-hoc network connection to allow internet access of both devices over the iPhone's 3G connection. The procedure is simple and pretty painless! In fact, I'm on my laptop at this moment writing this post over my iPhone's 3G connection. If there is one reason to jailbreak your iPhone, it would be for this ability. The only down side I've found this far, is that due to some firmware bug (or perhaps feature?) the phone doesn't always charge when both the WIFI and 3G connections are in use. Reports of this vary greatly, and in fact I have found that in some cases the phone will charge when connected to a wall charger, but not through USB; for others the conditions for a successful charge are reversed.

Needless to say, PDAnet is a great product that fills a very large connectivity hole. By the way, AT&T is rumored to be offering this very feature (iPhone tethering) for an extra $30 per month in the future!

Where did my MySQL server go?

2009-03-04T08:19:00.000-08:00

If you're a rails developer who has rails app deployed in a shared hosting environment, you've probably dealt with the frustration of "unknown configurations" and smacked your head on the desk a few times trying to answer the question "how is this different from my development environment?" I've been there, and the latest episode in this saga is this humorous little error when using script/console:

ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: Mysql::Error: MySQL server has gone away

After a bit of Googling, I found this post which essentially says that if you're in a production environment, which I was, you need to specify script/console production to avoid this error. In my case, with Site5, the MySQL server "goes away" after 15 seconds or less. If anyone has a more in-depth explanation of this issue, I'm all ears, but for those of you looking for a quick fix, this should be it.

GMail Adds Helpful Multiple File Uploader!

2009-03-03T07:11:00.000-08:00

I'm very happy about this... the GMail team has added a feature that shows you the upload progress of files you are adding as attachments AND enabled multiple select of files from within the open file dialog box! Check out the blog entry for more information.

Stack Level Too Deep!

2009-02-20T15:27:00.000-08:00

Site5 recently updated their ruby and rails installations system-wide which, of course, broke the danstewartphotography.com application I've been working on for the past year. Evidently, I had some ruby gem dependencies that needed to be reinstalled and some code the that needed to be "2.2ified".

I was in Boston late this week interviewing for a position with Aptima (great company by the way) and didn't have the time to look much into a problem I was having after freezing my app to Rails 2.0.2: stack level too deep. Typically, this error occurs when you have an infinite loop somewhere in your code, and indeed this was the case for my application, BUT it wasn't my fault! Well, my coding fault anyway.

Turns out, the version of Mislav's awesome will_paginate I was using was causing the error; I'm not sure exactly what the problem was, but the loop initiated in the "method_missing_with_paginate" method in lib/finder.rb. It had something to do with freezing the app to 2.0.2 and this plugin not being compatible.

Long story short, if you're getting a "stack level too deep" error in your ruby app and you're using will_paginate, you probably just need to get the lastet version of the plugin from Mislav's will_paginate github.

Article Featured in the SI Magazine

2009-02-10T11:40:00.000-08:00

A while ago I wrote an article about my summer internship with Belkin International in the Netherlands for the SI Magazine. I just got a PDF copy of it the other day so I thought I'd put it up for anyone who wants to read it.

Before I knew it I was put in charge of the management, development, and production of Belkin marketing for more than ten countries. I found myself on conference calls with Belkin sales representatives from Sweden who needed specific materials for vendors for their regions, tracking down a hiccup in the production of Turkish packaging, and designing “out of the box” experience surveys, all within the first week. Needless to day, I was a little overwhelmed, especially after working more than 70 hours that first week, but definitely up for the challenge.

You can read the entire article from the link on my project management page.

Panasonic DP-CL22 OSX Installation

2009-02-08T07:07:00.000-08:00

This weekend was I given the task of setting up a Panasonic DP-CL22 Color Laser printer for my wife's families home of networked Macs. Their old setup had their printer connected via USB to PIII Compaq, which worked fine except no other computers could print to it. When the new iMac came equipped with with WiFi, we decided to utilize the DP-CL22's ethernet interface to facilitate network printing.

There were a few major problems I ran into during this setup...

The default password for the DP-CL22's web interface is apparently either "0000" or "00000000" depending on the source you believe, accompanied by the default user name of "root". Someone must have changed it along the way and I found no documentation on how to reset it. The DP-CL22 manuals were of no help to me although the Network Setup documentation might be of help to those troubleshooting network configuration errors. The DP-CL22 network setup tool was useful put required I know the old password before setting the new one.
The printer is evidently only distributed overseas as the only DP-CL22 drivers I could find were from Panasonic's Japanese site and a search on Panasonic's support site revealed nothing.
The DP-CL22 drivers provided by Panasonic don't seem to work properly... whenever I sent a print job to it, it spit out a bunch of blank pages and one page with some garbled "Adobe 3.0..." header text.

At this stage I started to play around with the various "Generic PCL" drivers available in the OSX printer setup system preference pane. I tried using "Generic PCL 6/PCL XL Printer - Gutenprint v.5.1.3" driver with some success (it actually printed!) but the documents would not print in color. Apparently the the Gutenprint drivers I was using did not support color printing, but Gutenprint pointed be in the right direction.

Openprinting.org has a number of opensource printer driver solutions that would work in OSX. Gutenprint didn't work for me, but I started trying other drivers even though they were not specifially for the DP-CL22. The final combination that enabled me to print over a network in color with the DP-CL22 was the following:

Download and install hpijs
Download and install Foomatic-RIP
Download and install Ghostscript for Mac
When adding the printer, make sure the protocol is "Line Printer Daemon - LPD"
Make sure your printer IP is static, or has lease time of forver on your DHCP server or router.
Once you type in the IP, under the "Print Using" drop-down, find "HP Color LaserJet Series PCL 6 CUPS".

That should be it. Now, when you print from within an application, you can choose the various color options from the "Printer Features" drop-down selection.

One final note: don't use the Panasonic supplied ColorSync profile. I did a few test prints and the "Automatic" setting better approximates the colors (evident in purple color printing).

Hope this saves someone the hours I spent this weekend trying to get it to work!

UPDATE: The above method does not work for printing PDFs... you'll probably get an error like: PCL XL Error. Subsystem: KERNEL. Error: ExtraData. Operator: ReadImage. Position: 19.

To fix this, make sure your printer is using the "HP Color LaserJet 5 Foomatic/hpijs" driver instead of the "HP Color LaserJet Series PCL 6 CUPS." You may have some issues with color accuracy, so play around with different color profiles until you find the best match.

Honeymoon in Hawaii

2009-01-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

I just got back from my honeymoon in Hawaii with my wife Brittni. We had a great time on the Big Island snorkeling, 4x4'ing, and beaching it up. Britt took us to her favorite snorkeling beach, Children's Beach, and we had a great time watching the sea turtles:

We'd love to live in Hawaii someday... anyone on the Big Island have an apartment they want to rent?

Senior Portraits and Senior Photos in Suttons Bay

2008-10-30T07:12:00.000-07:00

If you're looking for someone to take your senior portraits in Suttons Bay, look no further than danstewartphotography.com. Dan's unique and contemporary style ensures that your senior pictures will be like no one else's. His combination of technical mastery and artistic expression are evident in not only his senior portraits, but also his nature, architecture, and journalistic photos.

So, if you're in Northern Michigan (Traverse City, Suttons Bay, Kingsley, Northport, Leland, Glen Lake, Empire, Charlevoix, Petoskey, etc...) I recommend you get in touch with Dan Stewart and book your senior portrait experience; you won't regret it!

Talking Points in the News

2008-10-29T11:52:00.000-07:00

Talking Points has been receiving a lot of press lately, probably due to the fact that the University of Michigan did a press release on it. If you want to see a list of places that have written about Talking Points, be sure to check out the project management section of my website.

Information Evolution

2008-04-23T08:54:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note... I got an email today letting me know that I was featured in an online periodical called "Concentrate."

"Talking Points was born when Jim Knox, an adaptive technology coordinator at the university, demonstrated a rolling cart that could announce radio frequency identification (RFID)-tagged locations, like room numbers and coffee makers, for blind people. SI student Jason Stewart was inspired to evolve the project, modifying it for outdoor environments to help the blind navigate through Ann Arbor. At the end of 2007, he assembled a student team for the independent study project, funded with a $10,000 Opportunities in Collaborative Spaces grant."

Read the rest of the article here.

Jetty Rae

2008-04-17T08:05:00.000-07:00

Recently I had the opportunity to hear Jetty Rae play at Short's Brewery in Bellaire Michigan and I have to say that of all the music performances I've attended Jetty Rae's stage presence and voice made this one the best yet. I could go on for days about how haunting her voice is, or about how I get chills when I hear her sing, or about how her beauty radiates and livens the room... but instead I'll just let you listen to her music for yourself:

If the music isn't playing in the player above (I've heard from many people that it may not) I suggest you login to amiestreet.com and try again; people have reported mixed results using this method.

Jetty has a number of songs not on her debut album, one of which I was fortunate enough to hear at Short's earlier this week. She calls it "Love is salvation." Listen to the lyrics on this one, their quite beautiful. Here's a video of her playing:

Want to know more? Check out Jetty Rae:

Jetty on MySpace
Jetty on Facebook
Buy Jetty's CD on Amistreet
Jetty Rae on Ourstage

I hope you enjoy her music as much as I do.

Interviews

2008-03-27T11:26:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note... Jay Jackson, media coordinator and producer at the SI, e-mailed me to let me know that the video interview I did at the expoSItion is ready to be viewed by the public! Be sure to check it out on my site (part of the AIF project):

http://www.thunderandwalls.com/interface_and_interaction/

Additionally, I am off to Seattle on April 7th to interview with Microsoft for a User Experience Research internship for the summer of 2008. I'm really excited!

expoSItion

2008-03-17T17:11:00.001-07:00

The SI annually hosts the expoSItion (notice the SI cleverly placed in the middle of the word). This, being my first year in the SI, was my first time participating in the event and am happy to report that it went very well. A lot of great potential employers, including Microsoft and Sapient, were there to check out the projects on which we've all been working this and last semester (see this list). I had three posters of which I had a part in the project development, so I was running around trying to me "available" at all of them; I was successful for the most part, I think, but next year, I'm going to try to do it a little differently.

Tomorrow, I have back to back interviews with Microsoft then Sapient, so I'm getting geared up for that. I plan on talking about my product manager role in talking points and about my 622 interface and interaction analysis project.

Mootools Fx.Slide and Multiple Divs

2008-03-01T23:39:00.000-08:00

While working on my own website I decided to switch from prototype.js to mootools.js so that I could use a lightbox style popup for flash videos. Unfortunately for me I had already spent a few hours setting up a list of collapsible items using prototype.js's Effect.toggle. "No big deal" I thought "I'll just replace the onclick="Effect.toggle('div_id')" with the mootools equivalent. Needless to say it was not going to be that easy.

One major bonus of using mootools is it's 'domready' capability, which can tack on js functions to normal html tags without the need to add extra parameters. One major downside (for me atleast) is it's pretty damn difficult to write a function that will take care of a specific effect for a bunch of differently named divs. You essentially have to write one function for each target div, for example:

Let's say I want to Slide.toggle a div named "this_div." Here's the code:


var mySlide = new Fx.Slide('this_div');
 
$('toggle').addEvent('click', function(e){
 e = new Event(e);
 mySlide.toggle();
 e.stop();
});

Notice that "this_div" is hardcoded into this script. You may ask "Why not just wrap the whole thing in a function, pass it parameter, and activate using onclick="toggleSlide();" in the html?" Valid question. I tried doing exactly this for about 2 hours before I finally gave up... For some reason, if you wrap the above done in a function on the first toggle event takes place; any subsequent events do not take place on that element. I'm not a mootooler or a js guy so I really don't know why this was happening.

After much googling I found this post and I was able to adapt it to suite me needs. Basically, the poster recommends implementing the following function to recursively do through the child elements of an element, hide the description divs, and then toggle the area you want to click:


window.addEvent( 'domready', function(){
 $$( '.moreInfoWrapper' ).each(function(item){
  var thisSlider = new Fx.Slide( item.getElement( '.moreInfo' ), { duration: 500 } );
  thisSlider.hide();
  item.getElement( '.divToggle' ).addEvent( 'click', function(){ thisSlider.toggle(); } );
 } );
} );

So the html to accompany this would be:


         <div class='divToggle'>
   <h3>Click to Show/Hide</h3>

  </div>
  <div class='moreInfo'>
   <h3>More Info About Item 1</h3>
   <p>Here is some content.</p>
   <p>More Content</p>

   <p>End of Content</p>
  </div>
 </div>
 <div class='moreInfoWrapper'>
  <div class='divToggle'>

   <h3>Click to Show/Hide</h3>
  </div>
  <div class='moreInfo'>
   <h3>More Info About Item 2</h3>
   <p>Here is some content.</p>

   <p>More Content</p>
   <p>End of Content</p>
  </div>
 </div>

If you are trying to manage multiple FX.Slide effects on multiple dynamically generated divs using mootools, this approach is the best way I've found.

Bad APE = Leopard Boot Hang

2008-02-18T20:49:00.001-08:00

So tonight, right before I was about to start some very important work due tomorrow, I had the genius idea to install Bad APE. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the product it's basically and application enhancer for OSX. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with Leopard, and if you install it, like I did, you'll be met with a solid blue screen that won't disappear during your next boot.

I was at home with no other computer and thought I'd have to do a complete reinstall; luckily for me, I just got an iPhone. Armed with the device, google and a jug of orange juice (we all have our oddities) I found a blog post about this very problem:

http://www.silvermac.com/2007/leopard-installation-problems-blue-screen/

The post basically tells you to boot into single user mode (cmnd+S during startup), check the disk (/sbin/fsck -fy), mount it (/sbin/mount -uw /) and rm -rf the following items:

/Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane

/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationEnhancer.framework

/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle

/Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist

For some reason this didn't work for me (I was met with "read-only file system" after each command), so I ended up just booting to the Leopard Install DVD (hold c during startup), entering terminal and deleting the files through there like so:

1. cd /Volume/osx
2. rm -rf /Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane
3. rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/ApplicationEnhancer.framework
4. rm -rf /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle
5. rm -rf /Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist

Once this is done, all I had to do was repair disk permissions (use the Disk Utility bundled with the Leopard Install DVD).

And now here I am, blogging about it in hopes that this knowledge will help someone else.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I must return to whatever it was I was supposed to be doing before I got distracted. Now where did I put that Urban Sombrero...

Thinking about selling your iPhone on eBay? Here's something you should know...

2007-06-27T14:29:00.000-07:00

On my way back from work today I stopped by my local Cingular (now at&t) store to ask the salespersons there a few questions about the iPhone. I had planned on waiting in line, getting an iPhone, then selling it on eBay to turn a quick profit (grad school is expensive) so I asked questions about the contract, the activation, and the return policy. Here are the things I learned from my visit about which you might not already know:

1. We all now know that activation of the iPhone is done through iTunes, so buying the iPhone will be as simple as walking into an Apple or at&t store, giving them you money, and walking out. However, if your credit isn't up to snuff you'll need to make a $100 deposit in order to activate your phone. You can do this either at the store on through the iTunes activation.

2. You can't use your iPhone, at all, until you activate it with at&t. As one of the sales associates put it "It's just a $600 paper weight if you don't activate it." So if you plan on playing around with it before you sell it on eBay, you can't unless you activate it and sign a contract.

3. If you activate the iPhone, you can use it for three days before you can return it without being charged a restocking fee, cancellation fee, activation fee, and monthly service charges.

4. If you activate the iPhone, you can use it for 14 days before you can return it without being charged the cancellation fee, the restocking fee.

5. If you activate the iPhone, you can use it for 30 days before you can return it without having to pay the cancellation fee of $175.

6. If you activate the iPhone, keep it for more than 30 days and decide you want to cancel your service and return the phone you have to pay for everything above.

Now here's the kicker...

7. If you activate your iPhone, and decide to cancel your at&t service YOU HAVE TO RETURN THE iPHONE! It wasn't clear how long you have to keep your service in order to keep then phone when canceling.

So, if you want to sell your iPhone on eBay DON'T ACTIVATE IT before you sell it. I know the temptation will be intense to open up that beautiful little box and play around with the iPhone, which you can only due once it's activated, but if you do you won't be selling your phone on eBay.

Good luck.

Picasa 2 on OSX with Crossover Mac

2007-03-15T16:02:00.000-07:00

I was a windows user for a long time, too long in fact, but I finally made the switch to OSX and it's been great except for one thing... I missed Picasa. It's really a great photo management program and since iPhoto really wasn't meating my IPTC data expections I decided that I need to figure out how to get Picasa running on my MacBook. I googled "Picasa for OSX" and that gave me pretty much nothing except a bunch of links to posts about people, like me, wishing that Picasa would run on thier Mac. Google released a linux version of Picasa so there was hope that a version for OSX would soon be out but unfortunately as of the date of this post Picasa is only for Windows and Linux machines.

I was using Picasa though Parallels Desktop for a while in combination with a mapped network drive in windows to my photo directories in OSX but the need to boot windows every time I wanted to look at some photos became really annoying. I then came across Crossover Mac from Codeweavers which lets your run some windows applications without the need to have windows. Sure enough I downloaded the software, installed Picasa and I was up it was up and running within minutes! Viola! I was so happy to have Picasa running natively in OSX, even Picasa's spiffy DirectX animations worked.

The only problem I have been having is getting Picasa to import the directories I'd like it to import; even though I ask it to monitor specific directories and import the photos from that directory and it's subdirectories it still took me about an hour to get all 3000+ of my photos in Picasa. A small price to pay for having this wonderful program on my computer.

Thanks to "Donut" for pointing out that if you used the Picasa 2 designed for windows 98 you will experience a new perfect photo editing experience with almost no bugs!

Hopefully Google will soon release Picasa Mac so that I don't have to use this work-around for very long.

Gift Reward Center R.I.P.

2007-03-04T11:00:00.000-08:00

They've made the transition from legitmate company to just another misleading online scam with thier new addition to thier T.O.S. :

"For purposes of participation in this program a user will be deemed to be Fraudulent if the user signs up for advertiser’s offers and subsequently cancels three (3) or more of those offers for which a purchase has been made within a 90 day time period from the date of signing up for the offer. Additionally, any user that is deemed to be Fraudulent will not be given credit for any other offers that were previously completed and will be banned forever from participating in the company’s programs."

So if you don't stay on with the offer sites for 90 or more days (except for 3) you are apparently a fraud and are disqualified.

Well, if was fun while it lasted!

More information here: http://www.joshclark.com/blog/?p=189