“So It’s Come To This:” is a scrapbook for my philisophical essays on the world, casual observations, and personal rants.
Ok…
Its been a while since I wrote something meaningful. Today is not one of those days either. But I wanted to give you a prelude to what I am going to write about:
My New Motto!
I’ve come up with a motto - its not unheard of, actually - but I’ve never used it. But starting with a few key events in my life (that have already begun) I’m going to follow its idea from now on.
Stay tuned faithful readers!
So I’m out in Colorado for a week visiting my family and my wife and I, being hikers, are looking for a good trail. The last time we were here two years ago, we stayed just outside of Boulder and hiked around there. We loved it and although not fully acclimated to the altitude, we did ok.
This time, we are staying in Denver and don’t have a guide to help us find a trail of intermediate difficulty. My wife, however, is fantastic at finding places to go, food to eat, and things to do so I’m not worried. But in researching some trails to hike, I realized that one day I want to do a multi-day hike up Pikes Peak.
Pikes Peak is a 14,000+ ft high mountain in Colorado Springs. When I was a kid, my father drove up the mountain road to the observatory and although I loved the top, I was very nervous going up and down on those narrow, winding, dirt roads. Two years ago, I did that and I had a great time driving it (although I think my wife was a little nervous).
On the way down, we picked up a father/son hiking team who had reached the top somehow but wanted a lift down the mountain so they could shorten the return time. It was after speaking to them that I got the idea to hike Pikes Peak but kind of put it in the back of my mind because I wasn’t an experienced hiker.
I’m not now so I’m not going to do it this year but NEXT year, I hope to be in good shape for an attempt. I’ll bring the needed gear and arrange to stay at one of the half-way lodges that are 7 and 8 miles into the 16 mile trail. I think for my wife and I, we must train hard for this and stay at least a week to get used to the higher altitude before trying. I don’t want to end up like C.W. McAllister if I do this.
This year, I’m going to try mountain biking and visit Winter Park Resort. If I can’t do an intermediate bike trail this year, I’ll add it to my life goals just like I added the Pikes Peak hike.
I’ve just installed Performancing, a Firefox extension and blogging tool, and I have to say I am not impressed. I’m writing and publishing this post with it now and it looks like a good WYSIWYG editor but it is no different than the editor that is bundled with WordPress. Maybe for those who user Movable Type will find it useful but I am 99.99% positive that MT does have a WYSIWYG editor too. Hell, Blogger has one and its free and in serious neglect by Google.
Go to Performancing’s site to see a list of features which you may or may not find interesting. Nothing really stands out for me except one flaw: No spell check.
Supposedly, there is support for the spell check that comes with Firefox 2.0 but since I don’t run it, I don’t get to use that feature. And its not a feature of Performancing, really. Its a Firefox feature.
I suppose the thing I could say about the extension is this: It combines a few features into one platform but doesn’t do them well enough to convince me to not use all the apps it intents to replace.
For example, it has built in del.icio.us support which I can do on my own or with a different Firefox extension. I don’t tag my own posts in del.icio.us because I’m not into to that kind of shameless promotion - I shamelessly promote myself in other ways.
I mentioned the technorati tags earlier but, again, that can all be controlled with a plugin for WordPress. If MT, Blogger, and the other systems it supports doesn’t have that, then this might be useful but for me and my WP blog, its not all that helpful.
There is built in FTP support and image uploading but what system doesn’t have at least image uploading?
You can manage multiple blogs (using different CMS types) all in one place - that is helpful. But Flock can do that and it comes with a spell checker!!
Sorry I keep mentioning that. I can’t get over that missing feature. If Performancing had one, I’d using it all the time in a heartbeat.
Anyway, I’m giving it this shot… and if you think it could be helpful, then you should too. But I still believe that you can do more with either the standard interfaces the blogging systems offer you or with extra tools you can download and incorporate yourself.
I just added another feature to the site which I hope to benefit from. If you scroll down to the bottom of the right sidebar, you will notice a white widget called ‘Meebo Me’. This widget, created by the wonderfully brilliant folks at Meebo, just launched their Meebo Me applet this morning and the moment I saw it, I knew I wanted it for the site.
The way it works is really simple. Meebo is a Web 2.0 style, web-based, multi-client, IM system. It allows a user to log into their AOL, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and Jabber/Google Talk systems and chat with their buddies within their browser window. You can log in once (and quickly) through the main page or you can create a Meebo ID and set up all your IM accounts for easy sign-in later on; the Meebo ID also allows you to configure multiple IM names for a particular service - say, you’re two AOL names (you know, the one you have for work, i.e. your name, and your personal one, FuZzyBunnYsLiperS). It can retain your conversations if you ask it to and you can use that feature while chatting one on one with someone or in a chat room you set up with the site. It doesn’t support everything IM has to offer yet (like file transfers) but not everyone uses that anyway.
So with a Meebo ID, anyone can go to their site and create a widget. When you are done creating one (and you can make more than one), it gives you the code to cut and paste into your website, blog, whatever. Once you do that… you’re done! Log into Meebo and wait for someone to visit your site. When someone does, you’ll notice a buddy show up online in your contact list. If the user types into the bottom text box of the applet, you’ll hear a chime alerting you to the new message. And through that new window, you can chat back. The visitor, by default, gets a weird name and number but they are allowed to rename their own given ID; meebome12345 can become SiteVisitor or FuZzyBunnYsLiperS - whatever your heart desires.
In case I forgot to mention, it requires Flash. The applet doesn’t work with crappy Flash 7 for Linux (when is version 9 coming out, Adobe?) so you might have a problem if you are an Ubuntu user like me. But if you have a Mac or some other boring miscellaneous non-descript computing device, you should be fine.
But I hope that you visitors will use it. I’d like to hear where you are from, what your interests are, your pet peeves, your measurements - oh, wait… Sorry, wrong publication. Anyway… I want to learn more about other people and would love the opportunity to chat with those who find my reviews, ramblings, and rants interesting.
Hope to chat with you soon!
I just noticed that the site doesn’t work correctly in Internet Explorer; the sidebar is missing. I don’t even know how long ago that happened let alone what caused it because I haven’t used IE since Firefox came out as a 1.0. Hell, since I switched to Ubuntu, I don’t even use Windows. I was told that it doesn’t work in IE by someone who is forced into it by policy of the company he works for (Thanks for the tip Michael!).
So I apologize to all the IE users out there. While I encourage you to install Firefox, Flock, or Opera, I don’t want to alienate you IE guys (and gals). But rest assured, I will find out what I did to cause IE to conveniently omit the sidebar. The funny thing about development of any kind is that one typo can cause the entire application to crash and burn miserably. IE seems to be picking up my typo perfectly (probably the only thing it does right).
I don’t know why the Mozilla’s Gecko and Opera’s Presto layout engines handle the exception and not IE. IE’s Trident just doesn’t like it. I’m hoping it’s fixed in IE7 but even then, I don’t know if I really want bad code on my site. I looked at the XHTML validator and found lots of errors but I don’t understand what it is they say is wrong with the code to fix it. But whatever I did can’t be that great of a mistake because the other browsers handled it.
If anyone out there knows what I’m doing wrong, I’d appreciate the feedback and educate me on how not to have it happen again.
UPDATE: I found out why. Two posts had metadata and formating from OpenOffice in them that broke the layout. Chalk it up to me trying spellcheck with WordPress. I still don’t know why IE had a fit with it but after removing the metadata, IE renders the page layout just fine. Sorry IE users.
