inluminent

I upgraded the photo gallery software that I use to power the photo galleries for englers.org this weekend to the latest beta version of Photostack.
The new gallery is a little more classy, and should be easier to navigate through. Noel Jackson has done a truly wonderful job with this latest version of Photostack.
In the [...]

This comic was in the paper last weekend:
That’s totally my dog! (Yes, I own a 13 pound Bichon.)

When you are listening to iTunes through the headphones on your laptop and you turn down iTunes because it’s too loud, don’t turn it down through the iTunes application, turn it down through the system volume control… do so because the little ping that Mailsmith uses to tell you you have new mail is really [...]

I can now define myself as a geek, all thanks to Kasia:
” • Instead of sitting and eating in an airport, like the rest of the population, you walk around until you can spot a power socket.”
Last night at Chicago Midway while waiting 2 hours for my flight, I walked around the terminal looking for [...]

Today’s been a good day for me (so far) with respect to college football. My boys (Texas A&M) beat Colorado… who’d have thought they’d have a 6 game winning spree this season after last year?
So, then I wanted to listen to the t.u./Texas Tech game after the wife and I walked around the block, [...]

Today, I had the day off, so I played with iPodder, and set it up to download Adam Curry’s DailySourceCode Podcast. Podcasting is cool. It’s like talk radio without the radio…
So, I listened to it while I was out mowing the lawn, and at about 6:57 into the daily podcast, Adam played [...]

Wow!
Wow!
There is nothing like going to see Social Distortion play live on a Monday night, the evening before you have to fly to New York at 5:30 in the morning. Nothing like it.
Social Distortion is one of my favorite bands of all times. When I was about 15 or 16, I [...]

Ah… the joys of working out of a home office. Today marks my first day at the new job… and I forgot how exciting and relaxing at the same time it can be to work from home. Especially when you started two home improvement projects over the weekend, didn’t finish them, and have [...]

Last Friday, I turned in my two week notice to my boss.
It was a tough thing to do, as I’ve been pretty happy at this job. When I say “pretty happy”, I mean happy enough to not want to quit or lose the job because I did something stupid… and I had a smile [...]

I’ve been really slacking with posting new posts to this weblog lately, not because I don’t want to write things, but rather because my life has really gotten busy. That being said, I’d like to point out my linkblog, which I still regularly add content to. Think of my linkblog as my way of [...]

Today, I swung a golf club for the first time in my life.
A buddy of mine, Kevin, and I met at the Hank Hankey Golf Ranch of Austin tonight. Kevin asked me earlier in the day if I golfed, to which I replied “no” and he asked me to hit the driving [...]

I hate having a cold in the summer. This is my second one in a month, and I’m sure it’s some sort of flu: Headaches, body aches, sore throat, fever, congestion, ugh…
One thing I’ve been able to learn while I’ve stayed home the past two days (I want to get better faster and make [...]

Back when I was in the Army, I got a little blue book that was printed by the military for distribution at the U.S. Army Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia. I haven’t read the book in over a year, but, when I was reading it daily (generally when I was in the field), [...]

I was driving home today, listening to Guster on my iPod and I started thinking about how much iTunes, the iTMS and my iPod have changed my music buying habits.
Over the past year, I’ve slowly moved to buying all of my music online through the iTunes Music Store. In fact, in the last 2-3 [...]

The wife and I visited the Grand Opening of the Barton Creek Apple Store today, and while there, we spotted a Fischer FVD-C1 CameraCorder. The CameraCorder is an amazing little piece of engineering and swayed me with it’s tiny form-factor and great specs.
The machine is small (very small). It’s less than 3 inches front [...]

I don’t normally post about Austin (the city I live in) but I had to point to this article in the Sunday Statesman (registration required):
Quarterly economic scorecard: Region is uniquely poised to take advantage of recovery, experts say.
A few choice quotes:
…Austin looks like a hot spot to the editors of Business 2.0 magazine, which recently [...]

I’m sick to my stomach. Yes, I just watched the Nick Berg video. I now feel sick to my stomach and terribly dirty. My small apologies to the Berg family.
I can’t describe the feeling.
I have several friends in the military that are in Iraq right now. I wanted us to get out [...]

I’m researching digital video cameras. I’m in the market for one for the wife and I, and I’m finding that figuring out which one to buy is tough. The big publisher’s guides to camcorders are useless to me, either not providing enough information, or not providing enough facts on which they base their [...]

The wife and I were watching Frida, which is quite a good movie, when we decided to cancel our Netflix subscription.
We’ve been subscribers of Netflix since December of 1999. We bought our first DVD player then when we were living in Dupont, Washington. It was a Sony (still have it and it works [...]

I went in to the office today at noon, because I’m way behind on work. Way behind.
I started cleaning out my in-box. It had 998 emails in it, some dating as far back as January. (I don’t file or delete emails until I’ve had a chance to act on them, if they require [...]

I absolutely can’t stand people that don’t take the time to learn the answer to the question being asked of them.
If people don’t know the answer to the question being asked, I’d much rather hear “you know, that’s a great question, and while I don’t know the answer to that question, I’ll find [...]

Wow, this icon set is a must have for anyone that might be considered an Apple nut. My first real Apple was a IIgs, Woz Edition (icon from this set at right):
This gargantuan set contains over 250 icons, covering every single piece of Apple hardware ever made. From the original Apples to the latest [...]

The trouble in corporate America is that too many people with too much power live in a box (their home), then travel the same road every day to another box (their office).
– Faith Popcorn, The Popcorn Report, 1991
Has much changed since 1991?

This post is a follow up to my original Some lessons for the Job Seeker post from August of 2003.
I’ve been interviewing to fill a vacant position in my sales organization over the past few months. The position has been advertised for about two months now. I’ve received about 100 resumes and have [...]

Douglas Bowman’s comparison of Dialup vs. Broadband is quite enlightening. It’s been about 5 years since I went broadband, and I have to agree… without it the web sucks. I really just don’t surf the net at all, if I’m forced to use dial-up… I find something else todo, which, makes Bush’s Broadband by [...]

This week, I noticed one thing that shows a difference between my daddy and me. (I noticed these things while getting my belongings ready for a move from one house to another).
My dad collected things, and I collect things, but we collect different things…
I have a room full of computer stuff. I collect [...]

Found this list:
Free Wireless Internet Access Points in Austin, Texas
… and I figured everyone I knew needed to know where all the free wi-fi spots were in Austin too.

Tonight is my second night in an Embassy Suites with Passym Wireless internet access, and I have to say that Passym really sucks.
Connectivity is just horrible. I don’t know why the service sucks so badly… it might be because I’m in a corner room (they’re larger at the Embassy Suites) or it might be [...]

San Diego is a beautiful town to fly into. Wow! And it’s gorgeous to walk through the touristy area close to the harbor too!
I spent the first day at NAA’s Connections today. It was fun… but it was also a long day (nothing like boarding a plane early in the morning, then [...]

If more people followed this advice (myself included), I bet our debt problems wouldn’t be what they are today:
“Never spend your money before you have it.”
– Thomas Jefferson

For the past year or so, we’ve been searching for “the perfect” house (for us) in Austin. And, two months ago we found it with the help of our realtor.
Today at 10:00 am, we’re signing all of the final closing paperwork, and the house shall be ours.
I’ve debated putting up a “how [...]

This may seem a bit silly, but this is my list of stuff I got for Christmas. I’m by no means bragging, just saving it for myself (it’s my blog).

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen DVD
Raiders, Temple, etc. DVD Box Set
Bunch of black, brown, and other colored dress socks
Set of 3 black “Gold-toe” brand black socks
8 [...]

Our family Christmas was a lot of fun this year. It always is, but this year, it was better than normal.
You see, each year, we trade names for Christmas gifts and stocking stuffer duty, so that each of us will get a good gift or two, and it won’t cost each of us $5,000 [...]

It’s been too long since I’ve had a good dinner or lunch of good old fashioned, german made Schnitzel. Ummm… I can taste it in my head already.
This post on aprendiz de todo made me think of the last time I had schnitzel, and made me want to get in the car and drive [...]

The public posting by Noel from a few days ago about Nick Denton ’stealing’ his work has taught me some great lessons, and might teach the rest of us a few too. I’ll try to list a few of them here:
1. Free never means free.
It’s become apparent that Noel did some work for free [...]

Amazing: We Got Him
Without firing a shot, American forces captured a bearded and haggard-looking Saddam Hussein in an underground hide-out on a farm near his hometown of Tikrit, ending one of the most intensive manhunts in history. The arrest was a huge victory for U.S. forces battling an insurgency by the ousted dictator’s followers.
“Ladies [...]

Thanksgiving in Texas brings one thing: Aggie Football against t.u.
That’s what we did this year after spending Thanksgiving day with family in Houston, we drove up to College Station. It’s been about 5 years since we’ve attended a t.u. game against the Aggies, and this weekend’s game was pretty decent. Sure, the Ags lost, [...]

Shit happens to me. Tonight, my best friend and I were driving out to Tae Kwon Do class (I started taking it for the first time in my life a few weeks ago). Right after the sun went down and as I was driving 50 mph or so, a deer darted out in [...]

The Time Warner service guys finally showed up today. After a full week, he showed up at 9:30 (right in the middle of ER) and fixed our cable connection… ugh… over 1,000 backlogged emails (700 of which Apple’s Mail thinks are spam) and 2400+ new items to read in NetNewsWire. I already [...]

I came home yesterday from a full weekend out of town with family to find my RoadRunner connection was dead. No amount of resettine the modem would kick it into gear. I finally called the service folks after realizing I wasn’t getting anything fixed.
So, they dispatched a service man today to fix it. [...]

I’m up at 3:30 in the morning, because my poor dog hasn’t been able to sleep very well for the past few hours… you see, I own a Bichon Frise, and he has terribly sensitive skin.
The poor guy has been waking himself up for the past few hours with violent shakes (all [...]

The Wife and I went to our first Halloween party in Austin on Friday night with a bunch of friends. We took a bunch of photos and you can see them all here (the clean ones at least — yes, it got a little raunchy). It was a fun night…

Now that everyone has commented on iTunes for Windows and Microsoft’s reactionary statements, I figured I’d take a stab at sharing my own comments.
The WSJ published an article [sub. req.] that talked about the iTunes profit margins:
Consider the economics of the iTunes store. Apple charges 99 cents per song that is downloaded by a consumer. [...]

I cleaned up my blogroll today. I also cleaned up the right sidebar of the home page of this weblog… I did this for a few reasons, most of all to get the page-load time down on this page (blogrolling.com returns the blogroll feed slowly sometimes) and to cut down on the referrer spam [...]

“Opportunity is missed by most people, because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
– Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
Don’t miss out on an opportunity because it looks like work.

The wife and I took a few minutes this past weekend to drop into the local CompUSA to check out the new G5 and look at the Powerbook options available to us today. I really liked the G5, as it’s a very clean design sitting next to a big Apple flatscreen monitor, but what [...]

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been interviewing candidates for an open position in my organization. I’ve learned a lot as this is my first time to really hire someone into an organization. Here are a few thoughts and suggestions for those looking for a job and interviewing right now:
1. Make sure [...]

I just hate getting sick in the middle of summer, but invariably, I seem to always get sick mid-way though each summer. I almost never have a cold in the winter, but for the past three or four years I can could on getting the flu in late July or early August, when the [...]

“Slow down and enjoy life. It’s not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.”
– Eddie Cantor

What a weblog from a non-native Texas might look like:
May 30th: Just moved to Houston. Now this is a city that knows how to live!! Beautiful sunny days and warm balmy evenings. What a place! I watched the sunset from a park lying on a blanket. It was beautiful. I’ve finally found my home. I [...]