Technophobia

Thursday, May 19, 2005

I got this tidbit from my Dad a little while ago since he’s employed by IBM. He was pretty pleased to tell me about it, too. We are fans of Firefox.

If you’re still using IE at home, rethink that. Firefox is a much better, safer option.

Link: Eric

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Hey, I realized that I inadvertently blacklisted some of you when I was clearing out referrers earlier. My sincere apologies. Try to comment again.

If you are still being told you’re blacklisted, please email me - jen at the domain name. Thanks!

This post shall remain at the top all day - scroll down for new content.

Friday, May 06, 2005

Hey, if you’re one of the privileged that has my work email address, please send me a message. With the assimilation of my laptop to Father Department’s configuration, I lost all of the external email addresses in our old client.

Assimilation went fine, although the required training portion was mind-numbing. I could have taught it. What I thought was going to be some fancy Department specific stuff, it was Outlook/Word/Excel training at the most basic level. *sigh*

My laptop is completely unfamiliar to me now. I have no idea where anything is. Actually, they haven’t finished migrating the servers so I can’t access the stuff I moved from my hard drive in order not to lose it. So it’s temporarily lost and I can’t work on anything.

It’s a banner day.

*/whining*

Monday, May 9: I’ve moved this back up to the top since some of you may not have seen it on Friday. The email request is key since I still don’t have access to the old email program. Thanks!

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

So when TAR started last night I noticed that the little red light that indicates the DVR is recording was not on. So I hit the “My DVR” button to investigate and the menu popped up for a millisecond and then it went back to the regular screen. Wha?

I messed with it a few times during commercials and I still couldn’t get the menu to come up - this button gets you to the menu that lists programs that have been recorded. From there you can press another button to get to the scheduled recordings list. I couldn’t even get the main menu for this section to stay on the screen. Very frustrating.

Anyone have the Comcast DVR? Ideas of what the problem may be?

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

I’ve got a ton of invites for Gmail if anyone wants one. Although isn’t anyone able to just open an account now?

And I’ve noticed that the targeted advertising in Gmail is at times ridiculously amusing. For instance I’ve been in a conversation with a friend and somehow the ads went from stuff about flowers and trees to urinals for women.

Monday, April 11, 2005

Interesting. I got my first comment spam this morning. Just one comment and it was easy to delete because of the way the Expression Engine control panel is set up.

The referral spam is another matter - I try to remember to update the blacklist, but I miss it every couple of days or so and I end up with a chunk of pr0n referrals in the EE log. That is some nasty stuff, too.

That said, EE is a champ at blocking most of it and I’m pretty happy with it so far.

Sunday, April 03, 2005

Me no likey.

Hey, bloggers, you may need to change the clocks in your blogware. You computer will automatically reset it’s clock, but your blogware may not.

In EE, within the control panel you need to go to “My Account” and then click on “Localization Settings” in the left menu. Mark the box for Daylight Savings Time. Otherwise your posts will be an hour off. And then make a note that you’ll need to uncheck the box in the fall.

Monday, March 21, 2005

I just got a phone call from “the jackass who screwed up your file.” As he put it. And it was not one of those that I thought had done it because he’s computer savvy.

Turns out he thought he had saved it to his hard drive before he started to mess with it. He needed to convert it to a WordPerfect file in order to work with some other software he uses. He kind of lost me during his explanation. Anyway, he apologized profusely and in a witty manner and all is forgiven. He also promised to never do that again because he doesn’t want to receive another scathing email from me. Heh.

Now I suppose I should start cleaning up the recovered file that my genius Dad fixed.

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Our internal address list needed updating - partly because it had been a while since it had been done, partly because someone managed to hose the Word file into gibberish.

I spent the better part of yesterday and this morning typing a new list from scratch - this time as an Excel spreadsheet - thinking that would be easier for people to update on their own without hosing the columns.

Not even two hours after I sent out the email to let folks know the new list was available and requesting that they check it over, I get an email from one of our guys in a suboffice saying the list is gibberish!

Un-freaking-believable.

Taking a look for myself, it is indeed gibberish - not one single person’s information is decipherable amidst the gobbledygook that is now in the file.

I have no idea how they managed it. I don’t know what they’re doing. It shouldn’t be this difficult to update a stinking Excel spreadsheet! What sux is that I deleted the Word doc and shredded the prinout that I used to recreate the new file. I’ve done a search on my hard drive, hoping to find a cached version of either, with no success. If any of you know how to ferret out “deleted” documents, I’d appreciate some guidance.

LATER: I found an old hardcopy from October 2004. Sheesh.

Sunday, March 13, 2005

I finally got around to adding stylized headers over there in the sidebar. And you may have noticed that the link color has changed - with the blue headers, the blue links kind of got lost ... although the visited links are blue, but will affect me the most, I think.

What is fantastic about EE (and I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I love this particular feature) is that with the global variables I didn’t have to make that many changes to all of the templates for the headers - most of them are embedded in their global variable so it was one line of code that got changed just one time. Sweet!

For non-EE users what this means is that for every section in the sidebar there is an individual global variable. Embedded in the main templates is a simple {code} line (and it really is just that little tidbit) in the place where that information goes. What’s great is that for the pages that have those sections, I just put that little snippet. When I make a change (say, to update the books I’m reading and have on deck), I just change the variable and it updates on all pages. Very cool.

If you’re thinking of making a blogware switch, I encourage you to take a serious look at Expression Engine. It’s an excellent product that is very easy to use. And I have yet to be comment spammed or trackback spammed. It’s well worth the money.

Friday, March 11, 2005

I just attempted to post a follow-up to yesterday’s post and it got lost in the ether.

Our network is so sketchy some days. I also lost an email earlier this morning that I spent some time composing.

So frustrating…

Thursday, March 10, 2005

I was just thinking the other day that it was time for me to hard code my main blogrolls now that EE has the global variables feature and it is so easy to use without cluttering the main template. Given that Blogrolling is down this morning, I think I have a weekend blog project.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

My parents and I found our new church through their website. We thought it looked good and conveyed the information we sought.

Thinkling

Rob T. asked for samples of good church websites because his church is ready to update their site. I posted the link to my church and just went back to the comment thread to find that someone had recommended the Heal Your Church Website blog. I’ve been meaning to check that out for a while, but never got around to it. But I clicked over today.

Scrolling down a bit, I found this post about McLean Bible Church’s website. The opener made me laugh out loud (it’s a great parody of the real thing). Go take a look, I’ll wait.

MBC is a rather respected church in the local area and it’s seen some remarkable growth in the last 10 years. I jokingly call it Willow East because they have close ties to Willow Creek in Chicago. But I attended church for a short time at MBC back when they had moved into their last “new” building in McLean. Their pastor is the real deal and has a heart for reaching this area with the Gospel. And I have friends who are members. For a while I considered going back when I left my old church, but I wasn’t really interested in a mega-church and the Lord led me to FCC instead.

I have to agree with MeanDean of HYCW that it’s not necessarily seeker-friendly to imply that users are lame because they don’t have Flash installed or pretty much demand that the user install it even though if they scroll down a tad they’ll see the content they were hunting down anyway.

Monday, February 21, 2005

As a favor to my blog buddies, I thought I’d pass on that The Thinklings crew are having some technical difficulties. They have the blog on .org and .com and for now the .com link works. So until further notice, click The Thinklings for the main blog and click Mysterium Tremendum for Jared’s blog.

I’ll update again when they have the .org blog working again.

In the meantime, Bill/Jared - I’m impressed with pMachine’s hosting service so far. Tech support is very responsive, the price is reasonable, and they speak blog.

I have a Gmail account that I’m barely using, but I have 50 invites available. Anybody want one? You have to post a comment with a real email address to which I can send the invitation.