Tag Archives: Help

I’m Crowdsourcing My Next Car Purchase Decision

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All my car people, I need your advice! I’m sure you’ve all heard by now that I’m moving to San Diego. When I move there I’ll need a car. No more public transit or riding my bike to work for me unfortunately.

Honda-Civic-versus-BMW-3-Series-Coupe

My original plan was to do a two year lease on a car. That seemed like a good idea until we broke down the mileage. 12,000 miles a year just wouldn’t cut it for me I fear. The overage charges for a lease are pretty high and the amount of money spent over the two years is closing in on the cost of a decent used car.

So that leaves me with buying a car. Deal is I might only be in San Diego for six months so buying a car to own for years and years might not be practical but at the same time I don’t want to suffer through six months of a clunker right?

Here is where your advice comes in. I’ll list a few needs and maybe you can give me some ideas of what car to get, should I go used or new and maybe even where to buy it in San Diego? Continue reading →

WordPress Twenty Twelve Livefyre Conflict Resolved

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Big thanks to two Twitter friends who took it upon themselves to solve what was to me a major issue on my blog. I explained it in an earlier post but basically comments took up twice as much space as they should. That made for an ugly comment section.

Turns out the problem was two fold. First WordPress’s Twenty Twelve theme simply puts too much space between comments. The second problem was a CSS conflict with Livefyre was double-nesting all the comments, thus doubling the space taken up. Five comments in a row would end up taking ten comments worth of space. So the solution? Much easier than I thought!

Lines 1-5 prevent the double-nesting of comments (or so I’m told via @onebrightlight). LInes 6-12 close up the space after each comment and lines 14-16 remove the extraneous lines WordPress insisted on adding to my blog. The last bit of help came from @BigCloudMedia. He later went on to help me close in the extra space on my sidebar between items. How kind!

So now my comments issue is fixed and my sidebar spacing issue. Thanks Twitter, but especially thanks to Christopher Kennedy and Big Cloud Media.

WordPress Experts, I Need Your Help!

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For the last few months I’ve been having issues with pop-up ads showing up on my blog. Originally I thought it was a bug with my new favorite commenting system, @LiveFyre, but that was ruled out. They were even kind enough to look around my blog for the problem and couldn’t find it.

I’ve done just about all that I can think of. I manually went through my WordPress database cleaning out extra tables and entries down to the bare essentials. I got rid of all my plugins and themes, deleted every orphan database entry, wiped my WordPress install and even got my host involved.

They did some searching and twice found an iFrame with malicious code injected in it. They removed the malicious code, twice and the problem stopped, before coming back each time.

I did my own tests, Acunetix, Norton, SiteLock and M86 security scans all came back clean. One of my Twitter friends, @TheDigitalNinja, did his own scans and found nothing. Continue reading →

Quick Google Wave Tips

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Google Wave's logo
Image via Wikipedia

Seems anyone who visits my social media landing page, That’s Justin, asks me, how they hell do you manage it all.  Honestly, I don’t know.  It’s a bit distressing at time but I wouldn’t give it up for the world.  I’ve made so many wonderful connections, received job offers, sold prints, purchased goods, gotten better service and more all simply by using social media sites.

Here’s one of the newest.  Google Wave.  It seems the biggest question around Google Wave is, what is it, followed by, how do you use it.

Google Wave is essentially online collaboration, email, bulletin board, instant messaging and more all wrapped into one.  Right now I think we’re all still figuring out how to best use the service but I have a handful of ideas in my head!

I admit the service is pretty overwhelming but here are a few tips that make it usable for me.

The first thing you might want to do create a few saved searches, these are three I couldn’t live without.

creator:me -is:note:

This search shows all the notes/waves I created

onlyto :me is:unread:

This search shows all the notes/waves that are to me and are still unread.

with:me is:unread:

This search shows all the notes/waves that I am a direct participant in and are unread

Another quick tip, to end an input session, instead of clicking the “Done” button, try this keyboard shortcut

Shift + Enter

You can use the same shortcut to enter a reply to the last post in the wave.

Control + E will edit a post.

Save a lot of time, speed up collaboration!

That’s about it for now.  As I come across really helpful Google Wave tricks/tips, I’ll share them.  Maybe I’ll just embed a wave into my blog, that sounds like a great idea!

Right now, the de-facto Google Wave guide is, in fact, The Complete Guide to Google Wave by Gina Trapani.

What are your thoughts/tips/tricks/etc? Leave ’em in the comments!

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The Cake and a Movie Movement

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Wow, this Cake and a Movie thing seems to be taking off, at least on Twitter. There are reports of #CaaM being held from California to Illinois to North Carolina to Florida and all the way across globe in Australia. How awesome is that?

I registered CakeandaMovie.com today but haven’t decided how I want to build it out. Another WordPress blog? A Joomla or Drupal content management system? I’m taking ideas from anyone that has them.

With this site I want to help other people host their own Cake and a Movie gatherings with movie reviews, recipes, tips… etc etc. I’d love to figure out a way to have a live stream of the #CaaM hash tag from Twitter. Anyone know how to do this?

Another cool feature would be for people to post their Cake and a Movie events for others to join, a GoogleMaps integration would be great. Plus people could submit their movie reviews and recipes, how fun would that be?

Make this whole #CaaM thing go big. I feel that in a time where there is so much uncertainty, when we are all a little bit down, something like this could be the very thing that helps pull us up. Sometimes it’s just the simple things.

Plus… these get-togethers are a blast! Just search for #CaaM on Twitter and see what everyone is talking about!


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The 300 Megapixel Enigma

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I just love my Nikon D700, if that wasn’t already evident through my last post. With this new camera I plan to take my photography to an entirely different level and with time and a whole lot of sweat, hopefully I’ll get into Stanford or Yale for a masters in photography.

Meanwhile I’ll be plugging along, taking pictures for pleasure, money and class.

One picture I took for pleasure, and sold for cash, and had commented on today by Iron Fist is titled Shades.

It was one of the first pictures I took with my new Nikon D700. I took it when I was in St. Louis with Karen (@ok2baprincess) at a loft-warming party.

And, until today, it seemed like a normal picture because until today, I had never tried to print it.

When I did, something strange happened. I had to decrease the size of the image by 75% to get it to fit on the A3 paper I was using. Typically I have to decrease the image by ~2-10%.

I went back to the Image Size window in Photoshop CS4 to see what was up.

At 360dpi, standard printing DPI for me, the image was at 21,000 pixels wide! That’s roughly five times larger than it normally would be.

What was really crazy to me was the fact that this wasn’t the first time the Nikon D700 had put out a 21,280x14140px image that clocked in at 1.2gb. It had happened just a couple of nights earlier when I was printing pictures for my photo critique, from a different computer.

So I guess I’m just asking you for your thoughts. How could this happen? I’m not complaining, the pictures still look super sharp and print just marvelously. But if I can get a camera to shoot at 300mp every time, well then hell yeah I want it to shoot that way every time.

Well, every time as long as the image isn’t terribly noisy.

Any theories on why this is happening? Thanks friends.


Twitter API Bug?

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Ever since @Jestertunes started messaging me on Twitter while in San Francisco for the 2008 Pride festivities, I’ve been addicted to the micro-blogging/social-networking behemoth.

It really took off when the iPhone apps for Twitter started popping up and even more so once a decent desktop application came to fruition in the form of Tweetdeck.

But recently I’ve been fucked over by the Twitter API limitations.  See, you are only allowed 100 pings to your Twitter account via third party applications such as Tweetdeck or Twitterriffic per hour.

Normally that’s OK for me.  I’d like more but 100 has been enough 95% of the time.

Every hour, on the hour, the API resets.  Except in the past week mine has not reset, which means I cannot update my Twitter, or view my friends’ updates.  Boo!  It also means my Brightkite to Twitter stream isn’t working.

Even with just a minute or two into the hour, I’ve exceeded my API limit.

I changed my password just to make sure there wasn’t another application through the internets hacking my account and loaded up Tweetdeck again.  Tweetdeck had my old password credentials but somehow updated all my replies and friends’ updates.  Doesn’t that require access to the Twitter API?

So I messaged @Twitter for their help and did my best to be light hearted.

Did I succeed?  I sure hope so.  I at least hope they can fix my account cause I’m dying getting all my friends’ updates via text message.  It’s making me crazy having my leg vibrate so much 😉

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