Recently in TechnoSquatch Category

After reaching the Flickr limit of 200 pics online, they start hiding--but not deleting--our old pics. We really wanted to be able to get at least 366 of them up there so we could view our "Year in the Life" project as a whole.  So, we decided the best course of action (since we really like using the service) is for us to become Flickr pros.  Why am I telling you this?  So that you can go see our latest Project 366 Pics, of course.  

FINALLY, our blog is up and running again.  We switched over to a new server and that caused problems on the backend and then we decided to upgrade to the latest Movable Type which caused even more problems.  Now that it's Spring Break, I have a little more time to work on this thing, so hopefully, you'll start seeing this thing turn from this default template into something a little snazzier.  It's good to be back and we've really missed this thing.  We love you blog.  :)  Expect some big updates soon!

Mom and I have been working on a little side project. We just got it off the ground. It's a blog! We plan on using it as a kind of family history book where we ask her questions about our family, the "good old days," recipes or anything else we want to know and she answers them on her blog. It's kind of like a cross between Ann Landers and BoingBoing. If you have any posting ideas, give me (or even Techno-Granny) a head's up.

We kicked it off with Mom's favorite recipe. Hop on over to find out what it was.

BTW - Lemme know if you have any problems with the site. It's still a little experimental :)

Most of you know that Chris and I absolutely love the show Scrubs. If you haven't seen it, then you've been living in a cave the last few years--especially since it just went into syndication. I ran across this Holiday tidbit that seems to be a few years old, but it was new to me. It's the cast of Scrubs dubbing over a Charlie Brown Christmas and it....is....GREAT!!!! Just watch it and thank me later.

Yesterday I gave my Google lesson to the kids. We played with a bunch of the features of the website like the advanced search, news search, translate, and so on. At the end of class, we played with Google Maps, which I found out that they LOVED. I'll admit, I enjoy looking at the "satellite" photos of familiar places as well as famous landmarks and such. Well today's plan was to show them the Google SightSeeing Blog which is a cool site that has a bunch of links to neat things that people have come across on Google Maps. Yesterday afternoon, they had a cool picture of a hill that looked like an Indian listening to an iPod. Very benign, pretty cool, and a perfect site for my class. Fast Forward to 2nd Period this morning. I have the kids fire up the internet and head to the site and THIS is what they are confronted with! Needless to say, I hurried the kids off of the site and straight over to the next task as fast as I could. Later I was relating the story to my principal and he laughed and told me about how he'd done the same thing years ago at Bos. I was pretty embarassed, but the kids didn't even seem to notice. Go figure.

I just finished teaching my classes about GIMP last week. It's a free image manipulation software package for Linux and it's also available on Windows. Kinda like Photoshop, just not quite as powerful or nowhere near as expensive. I was real impressed at how many of the kids actually went out and got the program. About 10-15 kids went and downloaded the program all by themselves and I've burned about 5 install CD's and given to others who don't have a high speed connection. They learned real basic stuff like cutting themselves out of a picture and adding text to things. Their big assignment was to recreate a magazine cover. In their free time, I showed them some tricks like making black and white photos with a splash of color and stuff like that. Anyway, yesterday a girl brought me an old picture of her grandmother and wanted to learn how to restore it. I got started showing her how to do it and the next thing you know I got really into it and finished it off for her. I've never had one look so good. Now I think I'm going to have to try this out with some of our old photos.

WOW! I just noticed that the blog turned two years oldthis month! The time seems to fly. I remember back in the day when I was hard coding php through a BUNCH of trial and error to get things on the blog just right. For you people that didn't understand that sentence, lemme translate: I was doing a whole bunch of staring at letters, number, and symbols in an effort to arrange them into some secret sequence that would make a blog happen. Eventually, it did happen and we've been using the web to help create our own family history book. I hope the kids get to look back on this blog 10 or 20 years from now and see what it was like when they were little. Well, I guess that means I better get to backing this thing up! I got some work to do people, so leave me alone!

Somebody's Watching ME....

If you remember the old Rockwell song (with Michael Jackson singing backup), you should run that song through your head while you read this post. With the release of Google Earth, virtual sightseeing has become a reality. You can visit Niagra Falls or the Grand Canyon from the comfort of your desk, and that's a good thing. Because those places are far away and full of tourists. You can get a similar experience--although not quite as cool--using Google Maps. I'll admit, I've wasted an hour or two checking out areial photos of downtown Manhatten, the Golden Gate Bridge and of course any cool Air Force Bases I could find.

I'd heard that Microsoft had a similar service called Windows Live Local but I was sure it couldn't be as good as Google's. So I checked it out today and for the most part I was right, Google is better, except there is one REALLY cool feature on the MS site. It's called Bird's Eye View and it's not availabe in all areas but it IS available directly above my house! Where Google uses old images from before we moved into our current house, the birds eye view feature on Live Local uses a fairly recent oblique angle shot of our neighborhood.

It's spooky how much you can see in this picture. It was probably taken while I was at work one morning, because you can see only the black Saturn in the drive and the lighting is pretty soft. Down the street is the street sweeper which comes by before noon. I'm guessing it was in the last 8-10 months because I can see the white gravel I added to the end of the drive less than a year ago. My bet is that is from early fall of last year because I can see brown patches where the St Augustine grass grows but green on the Bermuda. The bluish-grey truck in the street near the house is the neighbor's Ford Ranger, and if you dig around in some of the other nearby bird's eye pics, you can see why it is parked going the wrong way. They are backing it out to allow their big, ugly brown suburban out of the car port. In our back yard, I am baffled by the white specks, but the blue speck in the middle of the yard is the kids' slide. You can even see my grill directly behind the back door.

I'm astounded by the detail in that picture. As the years go by, I know that the picture quality will just get better and better. I guess this means I won't be able to run around naked in the backyard anymore. Too bad.

I ran across a sweet Greasemonkey script this morning that made me want to stand up and scream Hallelujah. It got me to thinking about how if I were still using Microsoft Internet Explorer, I'd still be stuck cursing the crappy interface that Netflix calls a movie cue. Right then and there, I decided to tell all of you--yes, even you, Granny--about the greatest program ever written: Firefox. I know what you're saying, "What makes Firefox so great?" I'm glad you asked.

1. It has a great name. Firefox. Fire....Fox....Oh yeah! This name is so cool, Clint Eastwood made a movie about it. It involved a stolen Soviet fighter jet that you could control with your mind. Dirty Harry and a super bad-ass mind controllable jet, how cool is that? That's right. Very cool.

2. Tabbed browsing. The ability to organize and browse multiple web pages through the use of tabs is the greatest web innovation since......Google (you thought I was gonna say porn, eh?) This idea is so great that Microsoft has decided to include it in their newest version of Explorer which, by the way, will still suck. Once you try tabbed browsing, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.

3. Security. There's no arguing that Internet Explorer is a less sescure browser than Firefox. How much less secure is a subject of debate on the web. Let's just say that Firefox doesn't allow websites near as many ways to install really bad stuff on your computer like spyware, trojans, or even Spice Girls midi files.

4. Extensions, extensions, extensions!!!! This is, without a doubt, my favorite feature of Firefox. Extensions are those cool little add-ons that make Internet Explorer users turn green with envy. There are extensions for EVERYTHING. I'm really fond of AdBlock which makes the internet a far less cluttered place by blocking all sorts of ads from text to images and even flash. It's very customizable. I also love me some Forecastfox. It gives you constant updates on the weather wherever you live. There are literally hundreds of extensions that do all kinds of things. I know you'll find a ton that you love. Which brings me to my last reason to love Firefox:

5. Greasemonkey. This is the MacGyver of all extensions. It can do ANYTHING. I once saw Greasemonkey cobble together a rocket launcher out of a roll of toilet paper, an underwear waistband, and a half-eaten Chick-o-Stick. OK, so maybe it can't do THAT, but it can get awful close! There are hundreds of Greasemonkey scripts which will format webpages exactly how YOU want them. Hate reading stories that are 2 inches wide on your favorite news site? Change 'em! Only care about the negative feedback on eBay? Your wish is my command. Are you frustrated by the way Netflix movie cue works? Me too! Not anymore! I got this script that allows you to make your Netflix cue drag-and-droppable. This is super cool because if you've ever tried to re-arrange your cue when something new comes out, you may have found it a bit of a pain.

So, what have we learned today, class? "Firefox is the bomb!" That's right. Class dissmissed. Have a great Spring Break!

Doh! Looks like I messed up the stylesheet for this blog while working on the experimental one. I backed up all except one file and that happens to be the one that I needed! Oh well. We'll have to do with this default style for a little bit. At least I didn't lose any entries!