Surprise surprise.

Images first, then text, blah blah blah blah. I turned off the crop setting in wp settings/media, so now the thumbnails should be proportional to the max number I input (300 px). These were then imported after the change and it looks like so far so good. Ready to post. GO!

This should show 3 thumbnails (if they are small enough) in FF plus have a link to the remaining pic(s). This should post in less than 10 seconds thanks to the SUP plugin.

Dig it.

Jason is the man. Check him out at http://friendfeed.com/jasonw22.

Posting at 11:17 am, central. ready GO!

Sup Dog,

This is a test of the emergency FriendFeed broadcast system. Do not be alarmed. Do not undress. This post will be travelling at the speed of awesome thanks to this new plugin called SUP, explained and demostrated by FriendFeed’s Benjamin Golub here.

The local time right when I click publish on this post is:

11:52 AM Central – GO!

What did you do yesterday? Yeah? Cool. Oh, me? Nothing. Except I maybe launched a podcast with 2 friends from opposite corners of the earth: John Worthington of Brisbane, Australia and Mark Wilson of London, Ontario, Canada. Yeah.

I have neglected this blog sorely, yes. But now I’m here, so zip it!

I have been over at FriendFeed for the past 6 months or so. It’s more fun. It’s way easier to post stuff and you get to actually have people read what you write for a change, and they write you back. It’s amazing stuff.

So we created a podcast to get into the various aspects of FriendFeed and what makes it tick and why we love it and how to get the most out of it. I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed putting it together.

Josh

Looking at the main stream in realtime proved to be headache and vomit inducing to most, but now I know how to filter it out. You can create lists and rooms (which have been features of FriendFeed for a while already), then activate them in realtime.

Rooms, specifically can also be embedded in webpages as active, realtime iframe widgets, as shown below.

Here’s an embedded real-time look at one of my fave rooms, the Random Lyrics room:

Tonight this room is very active:

I imagine the next 24 hours will yield many other great ideas for how to use this new feature. Looking forward to them all.

OK, that is all. Please feed responsibly.

Josh

My wife just grounded me. Seriously. My office has become SUCH a mess that it has come to this unprecedented need for discipline. “You can’t buy anything, like, ever again until you clean up this office.” she said. To tell you the truth, I’m relieved. It means she might be OK with me buying something ever again! Alrighty then! No problemo! All-a-sudden cleaning my room became fun.

But first, I need to find some cool stop-motion or time lapse software to take periodic photos of the whole operation and make a cool time-lapse video of the room getting clean. Yeah, so now I’m still sitting here, looking for that, while the room is still a mess. See what I’m up against? I am easily distracted. Wish me luck.

Thanks, Engadget.

It didn’t last 20 minutes with me. I cannot find the proper words to desribe how painful and frustrating this “upgrade” is. First off, every app looks like a Smurf sneezed all over it. It’s pale blue everything! I have nothing against blue, but this blue blew! It was actually hurting my eyes, looking at everyday emails in Outlook.

Office 2007 is the version for Vista, but can also run in XP. I can only imagine the sick feeling even avid Windows users are feeling, who just bought new machines that have Vista and Office 2007 installed.

Get this: If you don’t like the new “ribbon” interface (replaces traditional menu items at the top of each application), then you have to pay 30 bucks for a utility to get to look normal again. WTH??

I predict backpedaling on an enormous scale by Microsoft’s OS and Office Dev departments. And I never even tried Vista itself either… tsk tsk. Never will either. Get a clue, Microsoft! There are millions of us Windows users who would rather die than allow Macheads across the world feel one bit justified in their smug condescension!

I stumbled on this open letter from an actual member (ex-member) of the Academy, who receives screener copies of DVDs to watch and prepare for the voting process. In his own unique words, he manages to express what many people think about the MPAA and DRM and how even the legit viewers/consumers seem to have to live under the constant threat of being sued or seized upon. Don’t know what I’m talking about yet? Just read..

http://www.veritas-anydaynow.com/reconsideringscr.html

It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

When I pulled up to the store, nobody was there except one sales clerk, who was busy playing the demo game of, yes, you guess it, Guitar Hero III, but on the XBox 360. I won’t hold that against him. He stopped to help me make the transaction. I had already put down my 5 bucks to reserve it months ago, then also turned in a popular game a couple of months ago for 40 bucks credit, then took in 6 of our old Gamecube games to trade in for the difference. It worked out perfectly. So I basically got Guitar Hero II, with guitar controller, for the Wii, for about 5 bucks. Granted, we are no longer with the other titles, but we hardly touched them anyway, so it’s all worth it.

I got home and plugged in and cranked up the volume and realized how rusty I am at this game. I had only played it once, but for about 6 hours straight, when I was last in Hawaii (Mahalos, Corey!) I was able to get my bearings in about 30 minutes and then I switched from easy mode to Medium and proceeded to play the story mode. By the way, the Wii version requires you to embed the Wii remote into the guitar itself like in the inset picture here. Very interesting, and one reason the package was 10 bucks less than all of the other consoles.

One of the coolest features of this new version is that I had to battle (yes, a guitar battle) Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine to get to the third level. We had to trade off licks and try to mess each other up by shooting over power-ups that make playing even more difficult than it already is! Tom was not very difficult to beat, but later on, I had to go up against Slash, as in Guns n Roses and Velvet Revolver. Slash actually plays on this game (as did Tom Morello) and the playing is absolutely brilliant. It’s prefect for a guitar battle. I quickly learned that I was no match for Slash and repeatedly lost to him. After a while I broke down and read the manual (sigh) and realized that I should be timing my “shooting” of power ups over to Slash more strategically. Once I figured that out, I was able to beat him fairly easily. After beating Tom Morello, I got to play a song with him, Bulls on Parade (RATM) and after beating Slash, he joined me for Welcome to the Jungle (GnR). Very cool.

The songs on this edition are really fun to play and vary widely over the guitar-shredding spectrum. From Pat Benatar’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot to Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast (I jumped up and down when I saw this one on the list! and yes, it is super fun!) There’s even Pearl Jam’s Evenflow, Heart’s Barracuda, and very special treats like Metallica’s One (yes, the entire thing) and Living Colour’s Cult of Personality! (I was totally head banging to this one, so much that I royally messed up my part, but didn’t seem to care!)

The final battle was with the devil himself (sort of, it was Lou Reed) playing The Devil Went Down to Georgia, side by side with the devil. Don’t make any mistakes or he owns your soul! I did manage to beat him and the entire game was beaten…but only on medium level. Try playing a few songs on Hard. The gap between Medium and Hard is great, and the gap between Hard and Expert even greater, so there is still much guitar playing to be had for sure. But at least now the songs are unlocked and we can choose to play which ever at whatever level we want.

As if all of that weren’t enough, the Wii version comes with online play mode. I played bass on Cult of Personality with some stranger named Wick. I also played more later on with others, but this is a VERY cool feature for this game. You don’t have to worry about not being good enough because you get to choose your skill level individually and you can choose battle or the friendlier co-op mode where you simply play bass and guitar, the two of you. It does not allow you to see anything about the other person, nor does it allow you to chat or anything, so it is safe for kids to play pretty much anyone online. The other thing that surprised me was that the entire catalog was open for playing online even though I had not beaten the game yet, to unlock the songs for my own game.

There are also songs and other accessories to buy at the store (pretend money earned from playing, not real money here). You can buy new characters/players, guitars, outfits and a bunch of songs that I have never heard of. Perhaps this is the indie label way to get exposure for bands or lesser known songs…offer them up as bonus songs on Guitar Hero?

The entire family except mommy has had a turn at the game. Sarah is showing the most promise so far. She already beat Tom Morello and is very happy to be rocking out. I expect to have tons of fun with this game for many months, hopefully years, to come.

excerpt:

Re: Function to Return 1st of Month

Code: ( text )

CDate(Month(Date()) & “/1/” & Year(Date()))

That’s
CDate(Month(Date()) & “/1/” & Year(Date()))

Yesterday I bought my name. My name as a domain name. Honestly, I couldn’t believe it was available! My pal Justin told me that if I didn’t buy it, he would (and probably sell it to me for 5-10 times more later, after I come to my senses! What are friends for, right? :p ) So I bought it, along with a really good deal on hosting. Only $5.95 per month for like an insane amount of storage space and bandwidth and features. So I’m pretty happy about that. Supposedly, I can add a bunch of domain names to this hosted site (gotta pay for them, of course) and manage them all from one place. I added this WordPress blog to it in minutes and am already using the ftp site for all kinds of fun stuff. I can even add 2500 emails. That’s not a typo. Two thousand five hundred different email accounts. So let me know if you want an email for yourself that ends in joshhaley.com, I’m selling ‘em cheap!

I’ll let you know how it goes.

joshhaley.com

Just a reminder, nothing makes you look cooler than giving the gift of geek!

I like Gmail, use it every day, so I thought I’d pass this along.

Josh

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqOLFTsMJmU

10-05-2007 This just in…youtube made this person take it down due to a copyright claim. Ouch!

I am tapping this blog out on my cell phone. The Moto Q is a pretty cool little device. Anyway, just in case myspace decides to eat this blog like it has others…I will keep this short.

I will not have a laptop with me on this trip (there’s no wifi at our hotel anyway…whats up with that?) but will be doing most if not all of my online stuff on this phone. That’s pretty fricken convenient!

We are very excited to make this trip and I can hardly believe that we will be eating plate lunches within the next 10 to 12 hours! OK..nuff about all that for now. Will write more once we’re there.

Josh

+josh