inluminent

According to your answers, your political philosophy is centrist.
Centrist
Centrists favor selective government intervention and emphasize practical solutions to current problems. They tend to keep an open mind on new issues. Many centrists feel that government serves as a check on excessive liberty.
Take the quiz. It’ll take all of a minute.

So, tonight, a buddy of mine asks for some help finding an obscure variable in PHPNuke that controls a small piece of how an article submitted by a reader of a PHPNuke powered website is displayed.
PHPNuke is a great engine, but it’s been written piecemeal by the author over time, and sometimes the places that [...]

On recommendation from Todd Dominey:
Cocktail is a free, simple system utility that should be on every OS X userís machine. Housed in a clean, simple interface, Cocktail replaces most other free system utilities by offering a one-stop solution for many tasks including file prebinding, enabling / disabling of the journal file system, manually running Cron [...]

“If you can give your son or daughter only one gift, let it be enthusiasm.”
     – Bruce Barton

This article by Mike Perla is well worth reading if you’re in management, or close to management, and are interested in how you’re perceived by your employees.
I believe that perception is truth when it comes to how employees perceive their managers, so managers that want their employees to think they’re good managers, need to shift [...]

Jimmy Guterman has posted a long entry on his weblog discussing three management lessons from the dot com era:
1. Things have changed for good. AOL’s current distress notwithstanding, surveys suggest that the number of new people on the Net is increasing every month, most dramatically outside North America. The current bandwidth overcapacity won’t be a [...]

Steve Jobs was born today in 1955.
I figured I’d take time to say Happy Birthday as I play with tabbed browsing in the latest Safary Beta to leak into my hands… my Apple existance is now complete thanks to tabbed browsing. It’s still a little buggy, but it’s pretty slick to see [...]

This weekend was a blast. We needed a weekend of relaxation and decided that we should spend it in a small town:
The wife and I drove down to Sealy to visit my brother and his wife, and let them cook for us. My brother’s got a very big grill in the back yard [...]

Got this in an email from a buddy of mine that is an Army helicopter pilot:
I’m going on a desert safari, see you boys after the parade…
I give it 3 weeks to start.

“In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.”
– Unknown

Today I got a call from my mom towards the end of the day (I was in a meeting and took it because she wouldn’t call during work hours unless it was important).
I answered the phone:
“Mom, I’m in a meeting. Can you make this quick?”
She answered:
“Bob had a heart attack this morning and is [...]

So I read that Joe picked Zora on the FuzzyBlog!
Cool, but Scott doesn’t link to anything, so I google for “Joe Millionaire” and find Fox’s official Joe Millionaire website (which looks like it was pretty under budget, btw) and I find that I’m utterly disappointed.
Fox could really cultivate it’s younger audience with a more interactive [...]

I use BBEdit to write all of my entries for this weblog, as well as to edit the templates remotely, so finding this MT Glossary for BBEdit was quite cool. I’m looking forward to using it soon to update some parts of this site and MarketingFix.
[via PixelCharmer]

I just signed up for the ‘eNewsletter’ from a local advertising firm here in Austin: Tocquigny Advertising, Interactive + Marketing.
The newsletter is great, but I really found an article that Yvonne Tocquigny wrote very useful. It contains these 9 tips:
1. Never Forget the Basics
2. Reconnect
3. Feel Their Pain
4. Talk to the Fear
5. Ask Yourself
6. [...]

Ther are two articles in this month’s FastCompany that are worth reading for marketing information:
Marketing on $0 a Day gives us:
1. Pour what you’ve got into making your product best of breed.
2. Listen twice as much as you speak.
3. Choose your battles.
4. Get out more.
and a sidebar on “Brand Aid” that’s quick and [...]

I saw some really kick ass mouseovers on Phil Ringnalda’s site, and decided I wanted to use them on inluminent/weblog, so… I stole the code, and implemented it here…
The thing is, I think the code only works in Mozilla or at least Gecko based browsers on a Mac (though it sounds like Safari might support [...]

So says Dan, [via Phil]
The buyout is a huge boost to an enormously diverse genre of online publishing that has begun to change the equations of online news and information. Weblogs are frequently updated, with items appearing in reverse chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they include links to other pages on [...]

As I said a bit ago, I ordered Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Alone in IZ World and I love it.
I bought it for one song, but really love the entire album. IZ’s voice is beautiful as he sings his native language songs set to wonderful music.
Order It, if you think you’d like it.

I write maybe one or two checks a month. About a year ago, the wife and I signed up for “Web Bill Pay” from our bank. As soon as I signed up, I spent around an hour setting up all of our bills and started paying them.
It took me a good [...]

Are you annoyed with Windows? I am sometimes… Like, “Why does XP always ask me to report a crash to Microsoft?” or “How do I customize the Start Menu?”… I ask myself these questions a lot it seems.
It’s nice to know about websites like Annoyances.org:
Annoyances.org is the most complete collection of information assembled [...]

[The following is what I typed beginning at 8:30 am on January 31, 2003, the day we lost the Columbia. I debated posting it after seeing so much posted in the blogosphere, but figured I'd post it today, 2 weeks later, for my own retrieval someday.]
The wife and I are in Fort Worth today [...]

Oh, and while we’re talking history, did you know that Bill Clinton was aquitted on Feb 12th, 1999? BTW, Clinton was in Austin today speaking to a packed Erwin Center audience (coverage here).
On February 12, 1999, the five-week impeachment trial of Bill Clinton comes to an end, with the Senate voting to acquit the [...]

A bit of history for you:
The first advertising-sponsored radio program debuted on February 12, 1924. The show, “The Eveready Hour,” was sponsored by the National Carbon Company. Sponsored programs, which would later give way to spot advertising, provided much of the economic impetus behind the growth of radio and television. Although sponsored programs had virtually [...]

Steven Heyer, president and COO of Coca-cola, probably the world most known advertising brand, has thrown down a gauntlet:
So how does Madison meet Vine? What’s the intersection?
It’s not the property, the TV show, the movie, the music or the brand. It’s why, where, and how we bring them together. And it is, as ever, [...]

I just purchased my copy. Go get yours.

This quote came out of a leadership training class I sat in today:
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
   — Carl Jung

I’ve downloaded and have installed MOJO Mail for possible use with MarketingFix. Steve Hall (the co-founder behind AdRants) recommended it as a quick easy free way to host a mailing list (we’re looking for a good commercial solution, but haven’t decided who to go with yet). It looks pretty good, but also is [...]

Took them long enough… I wonder if they’re finally releasing this because if they don’t Apple will take all of their marketshare away with .Mac enabled Office-type software sometime in the near future possibly?

Apple updated the XServe is finally shipping the XServe RAID. I’m honestly thinking my next home computer purchase will be an XServe.

Jimmy hits the nail on the head with “The Ten Commandments of Online Media”:
1. Thou shalt not rely on press releases.
2. Thou shalt check facts.
3. Thou shalt seek out new stories not being covered elsewhere.
4. Thou shalt speak frequently to a wide variety of informed sources who aren’t the usual suspects.
5. Thou shalt search out [...]

Mmmmm…
A former client of mine just sent me an email talking about a new client of his:
Ganache Chocolate
Go to that website and tell me if their chocolate’s don’t look amazing!
I just ordered some for my wife for Valentine’s… you should too.
(Smart marketing tactic for the ad agency that I used to [...]

Wow.
Last night the wife and I went out on a celebratory dinner… just us. She’d mentioned that she wanted to have a good dinner. A Special Dinner. So, I turned to a list of the best restaurants in town and picked one that sounded like it would be special/romantic, and that had [...]

John Gruber’s done it again. He posted a great little article on why it doesn’t matter that Opera is thinking about stopping development on the Macintosh platform. Here are two snippets:
…the Mac’s primary purpose is to be better. Windows’s primary purpose is to be ubiquitous. Both platforms have been successful in achieving these [...]

Wow, I didn’t realize how much cash we’d be able to save with a Renter’s insurance policy over a Home Owner’s policy.
The wife and I’ve been paying for a Home Owner’s Insurance policy into an Escrow account for the past 2 years. Now that we sold our house yesterday (whoopee!) I [...]

Man, this has been one helluva week.
Last weekend, we moved out of our old house that we’ve sold. All week I’ve been dealing with last minute things like disconnecting the utilities and such, as well as looking for a new home here in Austin. Today the couple buying our house is [...]

Aubrey Daniels answers a question about slipping deadlines asked by a manager with some great points about management:
“People are doing the best they can today, given the way they are being managed.” While it’s often satisfying to look to employees as the source of your problem, it will rarely lead you to a satisfying solution. [...]

Throwing a hearty thanks back to XPLANE for the thanks they gave to MarketingFix (have you gotten your FIX today?) in the latest update to their bblog, I’d like to point out this article:
The Internal Impact of External Branding
for two reasons:
1) it’s a great read for anyone looking at the idea of ‘branding’ and
2) it’s [...]

I read about the new Rural Broadband Coalition (RBC) today, and it looks pretty cool. I was an agriculture major in college, and I always thought it was sad how far behind the rural community was behind the rest of the world (yes, I grew up in a small Texas town before college). [...]

I haven’t had time to read it, but in this post on MarketingFix, one of my colleagues links to an interview that should help explain Google’s PageRank a little. Again, I haven’t read it, but it looks like it would be worth reading.

“There is a rank due to the United States, among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it [...]

Taking a cue from others in the RSS weblogging world, Brent is going to rid the Ranchero.com referrer listing in the next revision of NetNewsWire.
Good for him. I wrote about this back in September oddly enough.

If you’re looking for a new iMac, I’d recommend holding your cash for a few days… something new should be coming out soon… most likely tomorrow.
That’s about all I can say at this point.

You know that great rendition of “Somewhere over the rainbow” that you hear in commercials now (and that was on ER once)? I heard it in full this weekend on a radio station, and decided I wanted it, but didn’t know who sang it, or where to buy it… so I jumped on over [...]

Here’s a blast from my past…
Makin’ Believe from Social Distortion’s “Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell” album.
… used to drive like a bat out of hell between Houston and my home town in my 1972 Volkswagon Beetle (with an aftermarket stereo — I think it was a Jensen POCrap with a set of two 12″ Kicker’s [...]