Here’s me as an avatar. What do you think? Did I do a good job?

Avatar Me

The Real Me

Here are a couple of my friends on xbox live. If you know these people personally, how do you think they did (I actually made Natalie’s)?

My Wife, Natalie

Jon Owens

Angel Rios

So, are you on xbox live? Do you have an avatar?

Post a link to your avatar below, or include it in the comments. If you’ve made your avatar on xbox live, just copy and paste the following link into your browser: http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/(yourgamertaggoeshere)/avatar-body.png Remove the parenthesis and drop your gamertag in there and you’re good to go.

These apps and utilities are all free with the exception of Saft.

Drop Box App: Store, Share, and Sync Your Files online

Basically, If you have a laptop, you probably have a desktop or another computer you use somewhere else as well. These applications can help you from having to haul around little jump drives.

Drop Box works by creating a folder on your computer that syncs to Drop Box online, so whatever you add to the box automatically syncs with any other computer you have added a drop box to, or you can use the online site to download a view files. You can share files in you drop box with individuals, and you get up to 2 GBs of space, with the option to add more for a fee.

Features:

• No Complicated interfaces to learn
• Runs in the background
• Syncs automatically
• Easy Sharing

NetNewsWire - The Best Feed Reader for a Mac

Hands down, the best feed reader app out there. I love this app and all my feeds when on my Mac are read through this. I plan on doing a little video demo later, but if you’re on a Mac, you definitely should check out this feed reader. It’s the best out there.

Another nice feature about this free app is it’s integration with newsgator.com. While I don’t normally read feeds at newsgator.com, with the account I have, my feeds are automatically synced so that if I check off a feed as read online, or on NetNewswire, I never to have read it again, because it will be marked as read every where I read my feeds. It even syncs with FeedDemon, which I sometimes use when I’m on my Windows computer at work. If I mark it as read at work, it will be marked as read when I come home on my Mac. Great syncing and offline support. Here are a few other features of NetNewsWire:

• UI update with new toolbar icons.
• Performance and memory enhancements including an improved Combined View which uses multiple pages to display long lists of items.
• HTML Archive feature - saves news items as HTML files on disk. These files are compatible with any web browser.
• Desktop integration – Address Book, iCal, iPhoto, Growl, Twitterrific and more.
• Great new look – improved Combined View, feed “cover art”, full-screen mode, and tabs with thumbnails and animations.
• Synchronized clippings – read your saved articles from the web or another NewsGator reader.
• Microformat detection for contacts and calendar events.
• Automatic checking for newer versions of the software.
• Automatic download of podcasts and transfer to iTunes.
• Smart lists to aggregate news from your feeds based on criteria.

NetNewsWire is also available for the iphone and ipod touch.

Quicksilver - Act Without Doing

A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.

It’s a bit hard to describe quicksilver at first, but the best way to think about it is to consider it a bit like an app launcher. It’s more than that, but that’s the gateway drug into using Quicksilver. The idea is to increase productivity and speed up the process. Download it, and try it for starting apps, then as you get the hang of it other uses will make sense and appear. You can always email me or comment with questions.

Learn more about quicksilver by visiting What is Quicksilver

Chax - An iChat enhancement

Chax is a collection of minor modifications and additions that make using Apple’s iChat more enjoyable.

Features

• Unified contact list shows all contacts from all accounts in one window
• Growl notifications for new messages and users changing status
• Automatically resize the contact list to fit the number of visible users
• Built-in log viewer
• Activity log that displays your contacts’ status changes
• Auto-accept file transfers, AV chats, and screen sharing requests
• Toggle text status visibility of users
• Always on top option for contact list, message windows and AV chats
• Set font of names, status messages, and group separators
• Option to auto-accept text chats, skipping new message notification window
• Show status changes directly in the message window
• Additional unread message notifications in the Dock
• Automatically go away when the screensaver activates
• Properly use ICQ accounts without sending text formatting in messages

Growl - System-wide Notifications

Growl lets Mac OS X applications unintrusively tell you when things happen. It’s a systemwide notification system. Many applications can take advantage of it. For example, if you use ichat with growl, whenever someone IMs you, you get a growl notification that pops up letting you know what that individual said. If you click on the growl notification, you’ll be taken directly to IM window for that individual to continue the conversation. There are many applications that support Growl.

Definitely a must have for anyone running OS X. Fore more information visit Growl’s info page.

Saft - a Safari Browser enhancer

Saft is a Safari must have, despite the cost small cost. I’ve used it so much and it’s such an integral part of Safari that I don’t even realize it until I sit on someone else’s computer and they don’t have Saft themselves. Definitely check it out. A demo is available.

Here are a few features of the many that Saft offers:

Features:

• Always open browser window in tab
• Auto hide Downloads window
• Auto save and restore opened browser windows at quitting and start
• Block animation
• Block HTML refreshing in front-most browser
• Block images and plugins
• Bookmark search
• Bookmark this group of tabs
• Consolidate browser windows
• Control-1 to 9 to popup bookmark menu or open bookmark
• Control-drag page
• Crash protection
• Customizable HTTP timeout
• Customized Google search field
• Do not allow scripts to bring tab to front
• Drag tab buttons to add the URL string to other applications
• Full-screen browsing
• Growl support

Twitterific - A Twitter Client

If you’re not on twitter, you probably won’t appreciate this app too much, but you should definitely consider checking twitter out and maybe even following me on it.

Twitterific is a twitter client made by Icon Factory (makers of many other great Mac apps) that interacts with twitter so that you can send and receive tweets, @replies, direct messages without having to have them come to your phone and while you’re sitting at your computer. Twitterific also pulls the last 100 (beta version) or so tweets that were submitted while you were logged out so that you can also catch up on any replies or tweets you may have missed. While purchasing twitterific is an option, you can download it and use it for free and just have to see a few small adverts (displayed once per hour) in your tweet stream. Very non intrusive ads for a great program.

Twitterific is also available for the ipod touch and iphone.

Features:

• Clean, concise UI with small desktop footprint
• Supports multiple Twitter accounts
• Auto refreshing at user defined intervals
• Replies and direct messages are displayed inline
• Number of unread tweets shown in the Dock
• Delete tweets from Twitter quickly and easily
• Auto show / hide when new tweets arrive
• Control over window layering and priority
• Single click access to user profile pages
• Switch between friend and public tweets easily
• Keyboard shortcuts for list navigation and more
• Control Twitterrific with AppleScript
• Audio notification for new tweets
• Hotkey to show / hide tweets

Technorati Tags:
mac apps, free utilities, free software downloads, mac utilities, must have mac apps

Naturally, there will be some mistakes here and there, but this one particular one that I found, it’s seems to be just a little too wrong, if you ask me.

Check out the screen shot below… Anyone notice anything wrong with this photo?

Did you figure it out?

Taking a photo is an in-game feature for a game called Gears of War 2 which released on the xbox 360 and I have decided to take advantage of it.

I’ve tried to take photos from interesting angles and point of views. They seem a little dark, but I think that has to do with tv settings.

For kicks, I created a flickr group called Gears of War 2: in-game pics. If you’re a player out there, definitely check it out, join, and share some of your photos.

Ok, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

So far, I’ve had it one week, and it has been a world of difference. For a little perspective I was running an iMac that I got in January of 2002. It’s a 700 Mhz G4 with 768 MB of RAM. I spent so much time waiting…. ugh. Anyway, that problem is gone now.

This thing is amazing. Stats below.

Anyway, with a new computer comes transferring and installing new software.
I plan on sharing a list of software I have installed on the new computer and recommend you check out. I hope you enjoy it, and If you haven’t checked out the software, click the links and let me know what you think. We’ll start with web browsers.

Safari

Safari is my weapon of choice, and on OS X, it’s the default browser.

What makes Safari special?
Well, it’s fast! It looks great as well. It doesn’t take up a whole lot of real estate on your screen and isn’t a distracting eye sore and lets you surf the web without getting in the way. The way Safari handles bookmarks and the bookmarks bar is very elegant. Let’s say you have a group of websites you like to visit pretty consistently. With Safari, you can create a folder on your Bookmarks Bar, and add all those site there to make a quick drop down of your favorite sites to visit. You can also open all the sites in that one folder in their own individual tab if you’d like. Safari includes an embedded RSS reader, which would be a great way for a beginner to start learning and using RSS feeds.

Some other great features of Safari is that it renders photos the way they are supposed to look natively, allows you to resize text boxes if you need a little more space to type or see, has a web first ’snap-back’ feature and Safari’s Find Features is the best of any browser out there. Check out http://www.apple.com/safari/ for more information.

Camino

Camino is an open source web browser developed with a focus on providing the best possible experience for Mac OS X users.

The Camino Project has worked to create a browser that is as functional and elegant as the computers it runs on (Macs, of course). The Camino web browser is powerful, secure, and ready to meet the needs of all users while remaining simple and elegant in its design.

Camino combines the awesome visual and behavioral experience that has been central to the Macintosh philosophy with the powerful web-browsing capabilities of the Gecko rendering engine.

What makes Camino special?

Camino includes native Ad Blocking that is ridiculously good as well as session saving. If a page has a search feature, such as youtube or Facebook, you have the option of adding that search to Camino’s search bar secion, re-ordering the search engines added or you can delete them. Camino also natively supports Mac OS X keychain, and maintains compatibility with Safari keychain entries so that it’s easy to switch back and forth and like Safari, Camino has a simple elegant look that let’s you browse the internet without getting in your way. Another favorite feature I love is that Camino supports has the ability to block Flash animation from sites. It’s a beautiful thing.

For more information on Camino, visit http://caminobrowser.org/

Opera

Opera started out as a research project in Norway’s largest telecom company, Telenor, in 1994, and branched out into an independent development company named Opera Software ASA in 1995. Opera Software develops the Opera Web browser, a high-quality, multi-platform product for a wide range of platforms, operating systems and embedded Internet products.

What makes Opera special?

Opera has a feature called Speed Dial that allows you to save up to 9 websites that you visit on a regular basis to individual square whenever you open up a new window or tab. You can then quickly click and the select the tab you’re interested in to visit that site quickly without having to type in the address. Opera also includes access to different search engines such as amazon.com, google, and others, and you can perform searches quickly by typing shortcuts in the address bar. Opera has great tab management as well, and if you hover over any tab you have open, you can get a quick preview of the content on that site.

Some other features that Opera provides are customizable skins, widget support, a quick and light mail client, mouse gestures, plug-in blocking and a feed preview (as well as a reader). To get more information on the Opera browser, visit http://www.opera.com/

Opera is fast and actually has a lot of innovative features that were stolen borrowed by Google for their Chrome browser. Google it.

Firefox

Firefox is an open source browser like Camino that is based on the Gecko rendering engine. Most folks have already heard of Firefox in some way shape or form.

What makes Firefox special?

Because of Firefox’s history it is a very customizable browser by having Add-on/plugin support. If there’s a particular feature or item you would like for Firefox to do, you can probably find it by searching their Add-Ons site. Some other features of Firefox include it’s own password manager (as opposed to using Mac OS X’s keychain), a smart location bar that quickly searches through your history of sites for what you are looking for, and 1-click bookmarking of sites. Firefox also allows you to add Searches from sites around the web, and includes a Session Restore feature should Firefox unexepectedly close.

Check out http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ for more information.

These are some of the browsers I downloaded for use on my new computer. There are plenty other browsers out there. What’s your favorite?

In 1996, Peter Davies was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University . On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Peter approached it very carefully.

He got down on one knee, inspected the elephant’s foot, and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Peter worked the wood out with his knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot. The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Peter stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Peter never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.

Twenty years later, Peter was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenage son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Peter and his son Cameron were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Peter lifted its front foot off the ground then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.

Remembering the encounter in 1986, Peter could not help wondering if this was the same elephant. Peter summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing, and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Peter legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.

Probably wasn’t the same elephant.

I hope you have a great day and rest of your week.

Today is the big day. After months and months of he said, she saids, and High School I’ll give you extra 15 minutes of lunch time and coke machines in the cafeteria, it will all come to an end later this evening (hopefully… I live in Florida, we have a history).

In honor of the winner and loser this evening, a little video I’d like to share with you. It’s from Expression 08 and my sister is a dancing in it. I think the title of the song is quite fitting for a day like this.

I hope you like it and enjoy it. My sister is wearing the orangey peach colored garb thing on the right as the video starts… she gets a few close-ups.

Here’s the performance I did of Clouds at Expression 08. I hope you like it.
The rough weird recorded version can be found at this post if you’d like a reference, but I’ll just say I like the acoustic version better.

I’d also like to send a shout out to my friend Debra Wilcox out in San Antonio, Texas who helped me write this song. She tweak some lyrical things and just made the song better. Thank you Debo!

So, what do you think?

(btw, I love my wife’s funny little laugh after Jon introduces me. Cracks me up… that and her amazning camera skills in keeping my head out of the video in the beginning. J/K… love you babe!)

technorati tags:live music, acoustic, songwriting, performance,

No Video Responses have been posted yet.

Click here to post a video response.

The free music is listed below.

I’ve been fiending for a laptop for quite a while now. After getting most of my pennies saved up, I finally decided to purchase the type of laptop I wanted, one of the new Macbooks recently released by Apple.

In the morning decided to check Bestbuy.com to see if my local store had gotten any in stock, and according to the site they did not. I carried on with my work day as usual but I thought to check again in the afternoon before going home to see if anything had changed.

Around 5pm, I checked Bestbuy.com again, and the information had changed and I was told that my local store had Macbooks in stock for purchase.

I raced off to Best Buy immediately.

Once I got there, I went to the computer department and tried to find someone to help me. There was no one available. I waited for about 10 minutes or so and then decided to ask a Geek Squad rep for assistance. The Geek Squad girl pointed me to two associates who were talking to each other and said, ‘they should be able to assist you and they don’t appear too busy at the moment.’

I headed on over to them and asked if one of them could possibly assist me. They asked what I needed and I said I wanted to buy a computer, to which they replied that they were busy assisting other customers but as soon as they were finished they would help me.

The customers they were assisting were on the phone talking to someone, and the other was apparently having a discussion with their daughter about a laptop.

So I patiently waited. And waited. And waited. No less than 30 minutes went by before I was finally approached for assistance. I kindly asked for a Macbook.

The associate quickly replied, I’m sorry we’re out of them.

WHAT!?

I told her, I just checked online before coming here, you have them in stock according to the website.

She said that she had looked all over for them in the morning and couldn’t find any and that sometimes the computer or online website messes up with the information. She also said to try calling in to make sure they’re in stock.

I was flabbergasted. No effort was made to look for them, and my previous experiences trying to call in had proved quite futile.

I waited for at least half an hour and wasted over an hour of my time, for no reason. Had someone just taken the time to find out what I was looking for earlier, I could have saved my time.

That was my horrible Best Buy shopping experience. I STILL cannot get a hold of anyone trying to call in. Their website as of today says they have no Macbooks in stock. Too bad I can’t make sure by calling in.

This is why buying a computer at Best Buy sucks.

This is my local Best Buy store:

Tallahassee FL 1400 Apalachee Pkwy, Tallahassee, FL 32301
Their phone # is:850 942 2300, option 3 to speak to someone… which doesn’t work. IF someone does answer and you ask for the computer department, it will ring until it eventually hangs up. Horrible.

Last Sunday Pastor Ron gave what could only be called a Smack Down on the ‘redistribution of wealth’ philosophy at ENT. I don’t doubt at all that there were probably a few toes that were crushed.

Well, my buddy Clayton Bell will be preaching this Sunday and he apparently might be a little at odds with Pastor Ron. I’m looking forward to what he has to say on Sunday.

If you’re a Tallaheezian, you should definitely come check it out.

I’ve actually previously shared a very rough sounding recording of the song on this blog, and I’ll include it below but the performance of it on Friday won’t sound anything like the recording below, from an instrumental point of view. I was trying to experiment with synth sounds and stuff like that, but Friday it will just be me and an acoustic guitar, so you’ll get to hear what it sounded like when I actually sat down to write the song.

[RSS Readers, visit the site to listen to the song]
 

I’d love for anyone who reads this to come out and hear the song and also check out some of the other songwriters that have entered the competition as well. I’ve heard through the grape vine that ENT’s Jon Owens will be emceeing the event.

Finishing up your trick or treating with a little music doesn’t too bad, does it?

Here’s a video with some more information about the Expression Florida Conference: a gathering of the arts.