A Day Late

So we’ve had this inversion in the valley which, apparently, is never going to end. Initially the lack of visibility and the nasty looking air was all that bothered me. Now, I’m convinced the thing is making me sick. Every morning I seem to feel a little worse (throat is a little more sore, cough is a little worse, little more congested, etc). It’s like getting a cold that takes a week and a half to come on and doesn’t go away. A few more days of this and I’m heading down south for warmer temperatures and CLEANER AIR!

I move in one day and I have yet to pack a single box. Ugh, this is gonna be a long weekend.

Well, I couldn’t resist. I decided to splurge and upgrade to the new Powerbook G4. I have hard time walking away from a good deal, esspecially when it’s for something I’ve been thinking about getting.

I’m going to try and sell my other Powerbook. I’ll probably end up putting on eBay if I can’t find anyone who’s interested. So, if anyone’s in the market for a Powerbook G4 1GHZ SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-R) 512mb RAM 60GB HD 802.11b (airport) 15″ LCD with 3 year AppleCare extended warranty and OS X 10.3 (Panther) send me an email to powerbook@jwholmes.com.

I love it, by the way.

Remember how I was complaining about what a pain it is to keep my address books synchronized? At work I have my Microsoft Exchange contact list that I use with my dell laptop and Compaq iPaq handheld. At home I have my Apple Powerbook which connects with my t68i cell phone via bluetooth. In other words, I’ve basically been trying to keep 2 address books synchronized, by hand. My method was to use my Exchange account as the master and occasionally export it to a file, wipe out all the contacts on my powerbook and phone, import the file I created from exchange into my “Address Book” on my Powerbook and then sync it to my phone. A few problems I’ve run into with this approach:

1. I can’t update anything in my phone or on my Powerbook because it’ll eventually get wiped out and replaced with what’s on the Exchange server.
2. My Powerbook and phone are often out of date because I only do an import every month or two. The out of date Powerbook I could live with, but the phones become a real deal breaker.

Those are basically the only two issues, but they’re big ones. Well, tonight I was thinking it was about time to do another import and I was looking around in “Address Book” on the Powerbook and noticed a setting in the preferences that says “Synchronize with Exchange”. WHY WHY WHY did I not find this sooner? I punched in my Exchange server connection settings, opened iSync, clicked “Sync” and voila. Everything synchronized, the Exchange server, Address Book, cell phone, EVERYTHING! Everything stored in one central location, ya can’t beat it. Well, actually you can, it only works with Address Book, not iCal. I can live with that, I’ve never been concerned about having my calendar on my Powerbook but it would be nice.

P.S. Is it sad that I get excited about things like this? Yeah, it probably is.

I’ve been meaning to add some pictures to my weblog for quite a while so tonight I decided to spend a little time and develop something. I’ve been using Gallery for my photo gallery and I wanted something that would integrate somewhat with it. Here’s what I did:

1. I created a photo album in gallery called “Random” (I set the thumbnail size to be 200 for the album).
2. I uploaded a bunch of photos that I wanted to appear on the weblog to the “Random” album.
3. I wrote a nice little php script that selects a thumbnail of a picture at random. The picture also links to the larger picture. That’s about all there is to it. Here’s the code:
   

   <?php
   
   $d = dir(”../albums/random/”);
   
   while (false !== ($entry = $d->read())) {
   
        if (false !== ($pos = strpos($entry, “.thumb.jpg”))) {
   
            $picArray[] = $entry;
   
            $linkArray[] = substr($entry, 0, $pos);
   
        }
   
   }
   
   srand ((float) microtime() * 10000000);
   
   $pos = array_rand ($picArray,1);
   
   echo “<a
   
   href=”/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=random&id=”.$linkArray[$pos].”" target=”_blank”>”;
   
   echo “<img src=”/”.$d->path.$picArray[$pos].”" border=”0″/></a>”;
   
   $d->close();
   
   ?>

4. I thought it might be nice to add a border to the pictures, to accent them a little. To do that I added a few lines to the style-sheet template in MovableType:
   

   .randomImages {
   
        font-family:verdana, arial, sans-serif;
   
        color:#333;
   
        font-size:x-small;
   
        font-weight:normal;
   
        background:#FFF;
   
        line-height:140%;
   
        padding:2px;
   
   }
   
   
   
   .randomImages img {
   
        border: 2px solid #a98c4b;
   
   }

5. The last step was wrapping my php script in a div tag:
   

   <div class=”randomImages” align=”center”>
   
       …PHP CODE HERE…
   
   </div>

That’s all there was to it. I’m pretty pleased with the results. All I have to do to add more pictures is upload them to the “Random” album using gallery. One of these days maybe I’ll try and integrate it more tightly with Gallery and pull the picture caption also.

It looks like I’m going to be moving in a week or two. I really don’t like moving, but this should be a good change. I’m moving into an apartment in Orem. Just me, no roommates. But, that also means I’m going to have to furnish the place. I’ve already put some money down on a sofa and love seat but that’s about it. It helps that I already have a few things like a TV, bed, armoire, desk, etc. I was going to get a new bedroom set but I think I’ll just stick with what I have right now to save some cash. Anyway, looks like I get to look forward to lots of heavy lifting in the near future.

I know making New Years resolutions is a little cliche but I’m gonna do it anyway. Over the last few months I’ve been thinking about a few things I wanna accomplish over the next year. So, here’s a little list (in no particular order and I reserve the right to ammend, delete and make whatever changes I want). In other words this list is in no way binding. I know you’re already thinking, “uh huh…I bet he’ll be real successful.” Yeah well, we’ll just have to see.

Things I’d like to do:

• I’d like to do a lot more fly fishing. Actually I’d just like to get better at it (a lot better) and I think that translates into doing it more. Practice makes perfect, right?
• Lose some weight (yes, you knew it’d be in here somewhere). Not a lot of weight just 15 or 20 lbs. I’m starting to develop a belly and I’m afraid it needs to go. The next item is related.
• Redevelop the habit of going to the gym regularly. For about a year and a half I was really good about this. I’d go at least 3 or 4 times a week. Then I took my two week vacation over the summer and moved out of my apartment shortly after. As often happens, the disruption was enough to break the habit. I haven’t stopped going altogether, but I’m not going enough to do any good.
• Try and figure out where I would like to be in 20 years and what I’d like to be doing. I guess I could call this strategic planning. I think this’ll be the toughest thing to accomplish.
• Be a better manager. I have a few management responsibilities now and I’m kind of struggling with them. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s any easy solution. I can read books, I can go to classes, but ultimately I think I just need to develop more experience. With that said, I still need to be more proactive about it.

Although I’m not gonna add it to the list I’d like to spend more time developing and updating the weblog (how many times have you heard me say this?). Seriously though, I’m surprised how quickly time goes by. It seems like I add an entry and the next thing I know it’s two weeks old. Well there’s the list, so that’s all for now.