Posts from — January 2008

Props to my Brother and his wife for this info…  Verified on Snopes.com.

I lost my Mom to a stroke so I hope that this helps you.

Perhaps you can save someone you love after learning this?

STROKE: Remember The 1st Three Letters…. S.T.R.

My nurse friend sent this and encouraged me to post it and spread the word. I agree.

If everyone can remember something this simple, we could save some folks. Seriously..

Please read:

STROKE IDENTIFICATION:

During a BBQ, a friend stumbled and took a little fall – she assured everyone that she was fine (they offered to call paramedics) …..she said she had just tripped over a brick because of her new shoes.

They got her cleaned up and got her a new plate of food. While she appeared a bit shaken up, Ingrid went about enjoying herself the rest of the evening.

Ingrid’s husband called later telling everyone that his wife had been taken to the hospital – (at 6:00 PM Ingrid passed away.) She had suffered a stroke at the BBQ. Had they known how to identify the signs of a stroke, perhaps Ingrid would be with us today. Some don’t die…. they end up in a helpless, hopeless condition instead.

It only takes a minute to read this…

A neurologist says that if he can get to a stroke victim within 3 hours he can totally reverse the effects of a stroke… totally. He said the trick was getting a stroke recognized, diagnosed, and then getting the patient medically cared for within 3 hours, which is tough.

RECOGNIZING A STROKE
Thank God for the sense to remember the “3″ steps, STR . Read and Learn!

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer severe brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke .

Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:
S * Ask the individual to SMILE.
T * Ask the person to TALK and SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (Coherently)
(i.e. It is sunny out today)
R * Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.

If he or she has trouble with ANY ONE of these tasks, call 999/911 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

New Sign of a Stroke ——– Stick out Your Tongue

NOTE: Another ’sign’ of a stroke is this: Ask the person to ’stick’ out his tongue.. If the tongue is ‘crooked’, if it goes to one side or the other , that is also an indication of a stroke.****

A cardiologist says if everyone who gets this e-mail sends it to 10 people; you can bet that at least one life will be saved.

****  snopes.com reports that the tounge test may have too much room for interpretation and that sticking with the original 3 tests is best.

If you use WordPress a lot like I do, you’ve no doubt noticed the shortcomings of TinyMCE, the default WYSIWYG text editor for writing posts and pages.  I’ve looked into replacing it in the past, but never came up with a viable option that didn’t cost a bunch of money or that wasn’t a headache to manage.

Today in my web travels (researching how to write a Webservice with PHP) I came across FCKEditor, a free text editor that seems to have a lot more going for it that TinyMCE.  I began to look into how I could incorporate it with WordPress when it hit me – DUH, someone has likely already done this work.  So, I googled FCKEditor and WordPress and sure enough, a kind gentleman by the name of Dean has made a plugin to marry the two together.

It’s as simple as downloading his plugin and activating it.  Within 2 minutes, I was writing this message to let everyone know the good news.

So far, FCKEditor seems to be exactly what I wanted – more power over my WordPress posts with less hassle to do it.  It’s what I was hoping for with Contribute CS3, but I’ve already let you know how that went.

Here’s a quick screenshot of it:

In fact, it has it’s own image upload manager, which is really great.  I used it to put up that image and it went so much smoother than it would have been otherwise – between using the WordPress option or FTPing it myself and copying the URL, getting the capitlization correct, etc.

So, two thumbs  for now.  I’ll let you know more as I discover it!

UPDATE:

Here is a picture of the full editor – just so you can see that it isn’t as "limited" as the pic above suggests…

I don’t understand Sony.  How can a company that is so big, be so stupid and be so successful even though they are so stupid?

I like to play video games.  I specifically like Pirate games, because Sid Meier hooked me on his game Pirates! years ago when I was playing games on an Apple IIgs.  Now, even after a re-release and update of that awesome game, and many other ones in between, I’m still quite a sucker for launching a broadside of grape shot and grappling my way into some fancy swashbuckling.  I just can’t help it.  Some people have Gin or Poker, I have Pirate video games…  But, enough about me.

Have you heard of Pirates of the Burning Sea ?  It is an MORPG centered around privateering, piracy and naval battles during the height of caribbean mayhem.  I’d tell you to check it out, but hear out my story first.

It is a very cool game.  I spent some Christmas money ($50) on buying the game, and was ready to pony up my $15 a month after that to play this bad boy (I know, I’m nuts, but see paragraph 2 of this post) but there has been one major glitch.  Flying Studio makes Pirates of the Burning Sea (PotBS), and they are a pretty neat game studio.  Unfortunately, they have partnered up with Sony Station and Sony Online Entertainment (of Everquest infamy) to “distribute” the game and to do all the monthly billing.

Lets just say, that’s not going well.  The game went live, and I can’t log in.  I click on the Support link in PotBS and I’m taken to Flying Lab.  I submit a question and within an hour or so they tell me that they can’t help me, that it is a Sony issue.  Well, being the forward thinking person that I am , I had already submitted a question to Sony Station asking them the same question.  I’ve given them my CC, I’ve tried to subscribe, etc.  It tells me I have until February 25 to play, but yet says my subscription is closed.  Who knows, its a screw up, but they’ll fix it right?  Well, wrong so far…

I wait and wait and they never contact me.  2,4,6,8, 10 hours go by and still no contact.  Thinking that maybe because I classified it as a billing question that it wouldn’t get handled until Monday, I tried to log a different technical support question just to see if I could nudge some action.  Well, their system told me “Your question has NOT been submitted” and then continued to tell me that I’m not allowed to log a second issue until my first one is fixed.  Excuse me?  WTF is that?  Nothing like making me feel taken care of…

So, that pissed me off.  I then looked further into how to contact technical support and I found a page telling me that technical support is only available Monday through Friday from 10am to 7pm so I was basically S.O.L until Monday.

Now, OK – maybe you are thinking “What’s the big deal?  Its a weekend and their support is closed, what’s so crazy about that?”  Well – think about it - these people host ONLINE GAMES!  When the hell do people play online games?!  At night and on weekends, yet these idiots are only open during the day on weekdays.  Typical Sony bullshit – totally focused on themselves, and not on their customers.  For a company that is supposedly focused on entertainment, they sure know how to ruin a good time. 

They’ve screwed up their PC hardware (just ask my brother about his laptop), they screwed up by abandoning the Clie, they still stubbornly insist on putting Memory Stick on everything they make, and they have pissed people off for years with their Station online gaming.  And yet they survive.

There was a “Rate our Answer” button on the page telling me that Technical Support wasn’t available on weekends, and I couldn’t resist, so I sent them the letter below.  Maybe I’m screwed in the head, but this crap pisses me off.   I only get so many free hours in a week, and lately whenever I try to spend a few of them blowing off some steam with a game, I end up in a tech support nightmare.  Anyway, drop me a line and let me know what you think… Am I over reacting, or is Sony as clueless as they appear?

This feedback is about:
http://help.station.sony.com/cgi-bin/soe.cfg/php/enduser/popup_adp.php?p_faqid=10404.

What can we do to make the answer to this question better?

It could say that technical support is available on the weekend.

Let me spell it out.

When do people play games? In their free time. When do people have the most free time? During the weekend. So, when do people play the most? On the weekend. And, when is technical support needed the most? When people are playing the most, which as we already know, is on the weekend.

Yet, Sony Station technical support isn’t available on the weekend. That’s completely stupid. And, typical Sony. How your company prospers in spite of itself is an enigma for the ages.

Now, the real question is, am I actually enough of a pirate whore that I’ll still pay these people to play the game?

Well, and now you know how Sony is still afloat – idiots like me.

Its a simple fact that most people aren’t smart enough to participate in politics.  That’s not a slam on individuals as much as it is an indictment of our current political process.  I’ve never minded when someone votes differently than I do – it is their national right and responsibility to do so.  What I DO mind greatly is people who vote in near complete ignorance of the facts.  Fortunately, more and more tools are being made available to help everyone be a little more informed.

Take for instance Glassbooth- this site makes it easier to begin to understand where specific candidates stand on some of the issues that may or may not be important to you.  It asks you to weight issues with specific importance to you, and then asks you to agree or disagree with a series of statements.  It compares your answers with the documented statements of various candidates and gives you a percentage rating for the top three candidates that are closest to your positions.  You can also choose any other candidate to see how close (or far) you are from each other’s views and beliefs. 

Here’s a great example of its usefulness – for my answers, much to my surprise, John McCain came back as my best candidate.  While I greatly respect the man, I never would have picked him as my first choice.  Now, I may, because his views were well explained an related to my specific concerns.  Yes, I may disagree with him on certain points, but for my weighted concerns, he was the closest to my viewpoints.  That was a big eye opener for me – and I would consider myself fairly diligent in learning the issues, learning the viewpoints, and knowing who believes in what.  Even still, I was wrong!

Now, to be fair, he was followed fairly closely by Mike Huckabee, who is the candidate that I would have said is closest to my beliefs, but the site outlined exactly why McCain was a “better” choice for my vote if I was voting exclusively based on my beliefs.  Of course, electability has to come into play when deciding who to vote for too – but this site enables you to quickly narrow the pack of candidates to individuals based upon your own criteria, rather than YOU having to wade through THEIR platform to see if you agree with it.  Pretty neat if you ask me!

So, take ten minutes out of your day and visit Glassbooth – at least then when you vote, you’ll really know why you are voting the way you are.  Won’t that be a refreshing feeling?  Yeah, for me too… 

I was shocked and saddened at the news about Heath Ledger.  I knew very little about the real man, but I was a big fan of his work.  He always seemed like a very nice person on screen.  After talking with a gentleman that knew him first hand, I now know that it was an accurate representation.  He was described by this person as “Very kind… A brilliant artist.”

I pray that God grant Heath’s family and friends His Peace, which transcends all understanding, at this extremely tough time…

Just wanted to let you know about a very cool FireFox extension called DownloadThemAll! It is a download manager / accelerator that is built right into FireFox. It has contextual menus so that you can right click a link and immediately start downloading, or you can queue up downloads, etc. While that is neat, the feature that I was looking for was the acceleration. By downloading multiple chunks of a file at the same time, the overall speed of your download is greatly increased.

I started downloading a 1.76GB game demo and I.E. was giving me 50K / sec download. 50K ??? What the heck? So, I looked for an accelerator that would fit in the browser. After installing DownloadThemAll! ? I was getting anywhere from 400 – 1800K / sec. Dang! Pretty nice speed boost. I left mine on the default 5 parts at a time so as to not be too rude to the file server. In fact, check out this screen cap of sustained 1.7 megabytes per second download:

DownloadThemAll rocks!

Of course, your mileage may vary based on your Internet connection, file size, server speed, network congestion, black cat crossing your path or gremlins on the wire. Still, I’m pretty happy with this little piece of software. The price sure was right: FREE!

Engadget just reported a new SanDisk MicroSDHC chip with 12 Gigs!  Read more here.

Wow!  I remember having a 20MB hard drive and thinking I was king of the hill.  Well, actually if the truth is told, I remember using 64K floppy disks, too… 

12 gigs in less than the size of a stamp – that is really impressive.  Makes me wonder how long it will be until there are  Terrabyte iPod Nanos banging around.

The other day, a customer of mine mentioned that they had 167 petabytes of storage for the project that we were working on.  167 petabytes!!!??  That’s 171,008 terrabytes or 175,112,192 gigabytes.  Hmm… maybe 12 gigs on a MicroSD card isn’t so impressive after all.