Resolutions has it's advantages

I use a laptop 100% of the time.  Both for work and home.  It runs in 1280x600 mode.

 

I hooked up a monitor tonight to the laptop, thinking I'd see what kind of work I could do with an external monitor.  It defaulted to 1024x768 mode.  Ugh.

So I fiddled with it a bit, and was able to get it to do 1280x1024 .

Oh My Goodness.  I love screen real estate.

If I ever start working from home on a more consistent basis, I will get a desktop box, and I want two monitors, one for my main monitor and one for Outlook, which I'm in 100% of the day anyway...

I love screen real estate.  Just wish the monitor was a flat screen and not a big honking CRT.  But beggars can't be choosers.  It was here. :)

 

Technorati Tags: DPI, Resolution, Screen Real Estate

Is the internet slowing down?

Used to be, I would send an email to someone and they would get it instantaneously .  Now, when I send my from my work email address, thanks to Webmail.US , it flows pretty quickly.

But my two home email domains, hosted on a hosted service that provides email, webhosting, FTP, etc all on the same service, for a set fee every month (very reasonable fee), mail does not flow quickly.

I had set up my one home account that if email came into it, it should immediately be forwarded to my mobile phone as a text message.

I know this normally works very fast, as I've tried it from work and I get the text message on my phone within about 2 minutes.  Great.

I set up one of my home accounts to forward to the phone, and sent a test email to it at 2:00pm this afternoon.  Thirty three minutes later, I got a text message on my phone.  The message had JUST ARRIVED at my domain.  I know this isn't Webmail.US's fault (where the email originated), as I sent the email to my gmail.com account and my hotmail.com account and both of them got the email within about 4 minutes.  That's acceptably fast.

Thirty three minutes is NOT acceptable, in my opinion.  I would switch my two domains to Webmail.US, but the lowest price service is $60 a year, which isn't bad, but I only have two accounts.  So, for now at least, I'll stick with what I have and HOPE that my hosting provider cleans up their act.

Argh.

Technorati Tags: Webmail.US, Teleflip

Google Analytics

I remember "back in the day" when I worked for a small startup company and we had a guy dedicated to doing web statistics for us, making a boatload of money.  We sent him to special classes to learn the software, he learned to implement it, analyze it, whatever we needed, he would do.  It was called Webtrends.  It was 1995.

Twelve years later, you can implement the same statistical analysis (maybe not to the extent that the Webtrends does) with Google Analytics.  A free service from Google.

For the All Stars Tournament we just went through, I shot photos of each game.  After each game, I would put together a slideshow of the images and then put them up on my photography business website, sending a link to the parents from the team.

This is when I started using Google Analytics.  Pretty interesting stuff.

I found that my most popular viewers were in South Dakota.  They spent the most time on the site and on the galleries that I had sent links out for to access them directly.

We live in Washington state, and I'm not even sure I know anyone in South Dakota.  But that's the state with the most hits on my galleries.

Interesting stuff.  With about six lines of code that Google provides for you.

Webtrends, I hardly knew ya.

Technorati Tags: Webtrends, Google Analytics, All Stars 2007, Pacific Little League

Vacation coming up...

I'm taking a week long vacation next week from my day job.  Originally I was taking this because the All Stars softball team that my two oldest daughter's were playing on was going to win and go to the state championship.

Unfortunately, after being undefeated in the first three games of the tournament, we got beat in the last two games of the tournament and finished in second place.  Still a great tournament, the best that this particular league has done at the minors softball level, ever.

So, I decided to take the week off anyway.  My kids are in Vacation Bible School all week in the mornings, so I'm going to get some rest, look for a new job, and just vegitate.

I thought about driving to Alaska to a place called Hyder, Alaska, where there are brown bears hunting salmon and they are very photogenic.

But it's a three day journey by car to get there and a three day journey back. No one in my family seemed interested, and making an 1,800 mile trip by myself just didn't seem all that appealing.

Oh well.  At least I'll get some stuff done around home, and (try) not to think about work for a week.  We'll see how that goes.

Technorati Tags: Hyder, Alaska, Brown Bears, Spawning Salmon, Vacation

GrandCentral is offically part of "The Google"

As I wrote in a post previously, there was a rumor going around that GrandCentral had been snapped up by Google.

Apparently, according to a blog post on the Google Blog and on the GrandCentral blog, this is true news.

Congrats to Vincent and Craig and the folks at GrandCentral.  It's a great service, hopefully to be made all the better with the resources of "The Google".

 

Technorati Tags: GrandCentral, Google

How to ruin your whole day....

My two oldest daughters are playing All Stars softball this year, and today was game number one of the tournament.

No softball team in the last three years has won the first game to continue on in the winner's bracket.  Until today.

We won, 20-11.  The score kinda belies the real game, because either team could have easily won this game.

Anyway, I spent the afternoon shooting pictures.  Had some killer shots.  Also playing at the same complex was the boy's baseball All Stars from our Little League, so after shooting 200+ photos of the softball, I decided to switch memory cards and go shoot some softball.

Big mistake.

I dropped the memory card that had the softball pictures on it and didn't notice it until I got home.  Frantic, I drove back to the field to see if I could find it, or if some kind soul had turned it in.  Nada.

So, after a day of shooting, I have about 127 pictures to show for it, 99.9% of the boy's baseball All Stars. 

Frustrating.  Infuriating.  Made me want to cry.

But, we won.  We get to play tomorrow.  The girls played well, and my youngest All Star scored two runs for us, pinch running.

So, all in all, it wasn't a horrible day.  But watch those memory cards folks.  They'll disappear on ya.....

Updated: Well, I didn't actually lose a memory card.  I did something much more stupid.  I shot the first game with a 4 gig memory card, took it out to switch it out with a different memory card.  Unfortunately, I grabbed the four gig card AGAIN, and put it in the camera.  I turned the camera on, thought that I had just not reformatted the card, so I reformatted the card in the camera and went about my merry way shooting baseball.  I was able to get the pictures back (most of them anyway) using some software called PhotoRescuePC.  Whew!

 

Technorati Tags: Memory Cards, Baseball, Softball, All Stars 2007, Pacific Little League