Murder close to home

There have been 2 murders in the last 3 days in our small community. The latest was last night and literally took place just blocks from where I live. Kind of sad. The ex-husband of a woman drove to his ex-wife's house and shot and killed her. This morning he took his own life.

Not the kind of newsworthy stuff you want your community in the news for.

Customer Appreciation

I really felt appreciated today, just as it seems I do whenever I go for service at our local Ford dealership (you can sense the sarcasm, can't you?).



Our local Ford dealer was having a 15 year anniversary sale/event. If you purchased a Ford vehicle from them and still had it you could register to win a Ford Edge. They said win a Ford Edge. Then you look into it further and I would take issue with that wording. You actually win the use of a Ford Edge. It is a 2 year lease with 10,500 a year covered (kind of low on the mileage allowance). Anyway, you can turn it back in at 21,000 miles if that occurs before the two years without owing anything additional (of course, there could be charges for excessive wear, etc. as is normallly the case with a lease). Anyway, both of my vehicles were purchased at this Ford Dealership, so I drove down Friday to enter. They would only let me register once for the vehicle that I had with me, even though I could give the information about the other vehicle. I stated that I couldn't make it back in the next day, and the saleswoman told me that they would still be taking entries on Monday and Tuesday. I drive by the dealership on the way to and from work everyday, so today on the way home I stopped in and stated to the same saleswoman that I was there to enter and she said that I was too late, they already drew for it. Why did you tell me to come in Monday or Tuesday and not mention that you were drawing at 5pm. Once again, they wasted my time.

Anyway congratulations to Shannon Luebbert on winning the lease.

State and Federal E-Government in the United States, 2007

Brown University's 7th annual report on State and Federal E-Government in the United States, 2007 is available.

I was sad to see Missouri (http://www.mo.gov) drop from 20th to 22nd.

Some of the sites like the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Missouri Department of Revenue, the Missouri Department of Conservation, and the Missouri Department of Social Services are a few of the more frequented sites in the Missouri state government webspace.

It might be interesting to see the raw data for the study, which one can purchase here.

Create PDFs

Here is a handy open source utility for creating PDFs.

 

It is called PDFCreator.  You can find it on the pdfforge site or on SourceForge.

Limited Edition Marvel Comic

My Limited Edition Marvel Comic, The Patriot Factor, came.

Winding Road Archive Copy

It does appear that Winding Road has done away with the PDF version. The new archive version is fine, but I did like my old PDFs.

ARCHIVE A COPY
One of the benefits of our new magazine platform is an improved archive copy. Unlike the old PDF, the new downloadable file will contain all multimedia elements, and can be read online or offline. To download your copy, open the magazine and click "download" on the toolbar at the top.

Issue 24 of Winding Road is out.

You might want to hop on over to Winding Road to check it out.

Notebook

Have you tried Google Notebook?

You can download the browser extension and install it which will make clipping items to the notebook a bit handier. You'll see it in the lower right hand corner of Internet Explorer. See the pic below.

Football is just around the corner.

Football season is drawing near, so I have been getting JC Sports and LC Sports updated.

Grand Central Web Button

Grand Central gives you the oppurtunity to post a web button (they currently have 6 to choose from in different sizes). The web button will allow someone to call your Grand Central number without giving out the number. I really don't expect that I would get any serious calls this way, but I figured I would throw it out here. As one can with any calls coming in, you can configure how the call is handled. Right now calls received from the web button are setup to go straight to voicemail with the default greeting. If you would simply like to hear what the default Grand Central gretting sounds like activate the control (pic above) and then click Call on the pic to get started. You'll then have a spot to put your name and phone number, once you have done that simply click Call Me. The system will call you and put you in touch with my Grand Central account. Leave a message if you would like. If a tame enough message I might use it to show how one can actually post/share messages received via the Grand Central voicemail.

bonj

Invited to Grand Central

I ended up getting a hold of a Grand Central invitation and before being able to post about it received another one shortly thereafter.  Thanks graystatic and thanks Julian.

I have a lot of playing to do, but so far it looks pretty neat.  I'll try to post more about it later.

So, no need to send invitations my way.  Thanks!

Grand Central

Grand Central is one that looks pretty interesting.  It reminds me of the product I saw years ago called Wildfire.  I believe Wildfire was only available for California phone numbers at the time that I saw it.  I believe there was a charge for it as well.

We'll have to see what direction Grand Central goes now that it is a Google product and if it remains free.

I have put in my request to reserve a number as I would like to try it out when it is available.  I doubt anyone I know is going to get an invitation to the beta, but I still might try to track one down.

So what are you?

Take Alistair Doulin's multiple choice test to find out what your programmer personality is.

FTP in Batch File

Here is one that is still handy.  Trying to ftp something on a schedule.  You can use the Windows AT Command to kick off a batch file and within the batch file you can call ftp with -s to run a script (.scr).  Nothing special about the .scr file, it is just a text file with a .scr extension.  Just put the .scr file in the same directory as your batch file.

You can check out Microsoft Article ID 313565 for specifics on the AT command and Article ID 96269 for specifics on FTP batch scripts.

Sick

I have been sick. Last week I was diagnosed with Pleurisy and today was diagnosed with a secondary bronchial infection. Kind of a pain.

Not sure what the cause is yet.

Picasa Upgrade

Picasa 2.7 is out.

PDF Generator/Creator

Are you looking for an Open Source PDF generator/creator? If so, you might check out PDFCreator.

Blogger and Podcaster

The July issue of Blogger and Podcaster magazine is out.

Sprint Customers

Sprint breaks up with high-maintenance customers

As a Sprint Customer, I can easily understand why someone would have to call Sprint repeatedly to find out information about their account.

Those that have hung in there even though they have had to call repeatedly are probably customers that Sprint should look to be keeping. Some have probably wanted to get out of their contracts, but as they would have had to pay an early termination fee have stuck it out. Well, now they get released, Sprint loses customers, and gets bad press. I guess we know who the winner is on this one.

Software Support

Today I spent 45 minutes on the phone trying to get serial numbers so that we could install an upgrade of our Adobe Contribute software under our maintenance contract. Adobe steers you towards an online chat or e-mail address for help, which I have found out the online chat doesn't work through our firewall. Upon finding a phone number and talking to Jack for 30 minutes, I was transferred to another rep.

Side note:

It struck me kind of funny when Jack asked for my first name and phone number and after providing it, he asked if I minded if he addressed me by my first name. I said that was fine, but now I wonder what he would have called me if I said no.

Once reaching the second rep and explaining that we had maintenance on our Contribute licenses and we were trying to install the latest version, but needed the upgraded serial numbers, the rep found our maintenance for the software, but did not show that we owned any licenses of the software. So, they were fine with us purchasing the maintenance when we didn't even own their product?

As it turns out, the name and address that the original licenses were purchased under was different than the name on the maintenance. This the result of the original licenses being purchased prior to our consolidation, so the naming is different. From information given to the rep they were able to see that we had some licenses under the old address, which were originally purchases when it was a Macromedia product. He stated that these were in a different database and what we need to do to get our upgrade under our maintenance is to fill out a Adobe Open Options - No Charge Upgrade Coupon Request, supplying in depth information about each of our 17 licenses. I don't know what is worse, the fact that he could at least see some of the information, and I still have to go back and try to track everything down to prove our original purchases, or the fact that the PDF No Charge Upgrade Coupon Request form, used by the company known for PDFs, looks like it was thrown together by an amateur.

1st Check

Believe it or not, the pennies do eventually add up. Today I received a check in the mail from Google for $100.36.



If you don't have AdSense on your site, you might think about it.