I’m a bit preoccupied at the moment with some backed up email (what’s new?) and my presentation for next week which isn’t quite complete, but a couple of quick items for your consideration:
- Backups:
On the drive over to the airport this morning, I was thinking about my personal backup situation which if anything is more primitive and inefficient than our RedMonk procedure. While it’s not the most cost efficient solution possible, I’m sure, I’d more or less convinced myself by the time I got to DIA that this weekend I’ll begin the tedious process of getting at least my music and documents up onto either S3 or one of Joyent’s offerings. After reading about what happened to Alex today, I’m now scared that I didn’t manage to do this before I left. - Asterisk:
Quick update for those of you interested in Asterisk. My new VOIP provider Telasip finally finished porting my Packet8 home number over to their service last week, and for about 10 glorious minutes I had everything working. Calls to the home line also rang my office and cell phones, voicemails triggered not just SMS notification but actual WAV files arriving in my email account, and all the weird Asterisk features – like weather reports via the phone – were working like a charm. Then I got the bright idea that I should update my trunks (Asterisk speak for phone lines – sort of) with the ported number, and as soon as the last update hit my installation everything stopped working. Meant to fix that this weekend, but the WordPress stuff took priority. Also, the hardware device I was going to use to patch in both my RedMonk POTS line and my cordless phone is no longer on sale. One step forward, two steps back, but I’m getting closer. - Blackout Dates:
The word ‘blackout’ is definitely not a favorite of mine. It’s bad enough that DirecTV blacks out the NESN Red Sox feed that I pay extra money for according to rules that they can’t explain to me (this drives me absolutely crazy), but the airline blackouts are killing me. I have three free flights on Frontier at the moment, and probably another four on American, and one or two on other carriers like United or US Airways. Can I use them to get home to NJ for Christmas? Of course not. The entire week before Christmas is blacked out. What’s the purpose of accumulating free flights if I can’t use them? To add insult to injury, it’s looking like the flight home for Christmas is going for about double what it does any other time. - Themes:
Those of you who visit the site rather than pick this up via a reader have probably noticed that the site looks different seemingly every hour. There are two reasons for this; first, I haven’t settled on a final theme yet, and two, there’s a bug in one of the themes that apparently causes WordPress to revert to the default periodically. Your patience – and feedback if you like/don’t like one of the themes – is appreciated. - Impress:
I’m really quite frustrated with the latest version of Impress (2.0.4) – OO.o the Powerpoint equivalent. It’s crashed better than a dozen times since I’ve been working on my latest deck, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why; there’s nothing complicated or unusual about it. Unfortunately, my options are limited. I really can’t see myself running Powerpoint on top of CrossOver Office, which I have installed, because while I haven’t had any huge problems with that application I’m not terribly fond of it either. Most of the online presentation designers I’ve seen, a la Zoho, include only very basic output options so I’m not thrilled about them. I’m really going to think hard about doing my next presentation on the 13th in S5 or an equivalent. - Speaking of Presentations:
My Photoshop and/or GIMP skills being more or less non-existent, I’m wondering if one of you can tell me how to do something that seems totally basic. I’d like to start giving more presentations with non-white filler, but run into the problem that our logos are generally red text on a white background. I need, therefore, to make the white transparent, so that the graphic renders properly on a variety of backgrounds. It can’t be that hard; can any of you tell me how to do that, preferably using tools I have (read: GIMP)? Thanks in advance.
As a reminder, I’ll be here in Stamford until Thursday, returning (hopefully) late that night. Best of luck to my friends back in Denver what with the 6 inches of snow and single digit temperatures expected tomorrow. Sounds like a lot of fun 🙂
