If for some odd reason you only read this blog, and don’t follow my “real” sites, you might not have heard about this: on Saturday night I launched my $5000 HP laptop giveaway contest ($5500 once you factor in the bundled software). Go check out this post on Digital Home Thoughts for all the details.
Yeah, ye old Thoughts Media sites are down – we were in the midst of moving to a new server, and something went a bit wrong. Doesn’t it always? I hate going to bed knowing that my sites aren’t up and there’s nothing I can do about it. It sucks. Hopefully by the time I wake up tomorrow, they’ll be back up. I swear, it’s a miracle that Google hasn’t punished us for all our down-time…guess their crawlers are more patient than I am.
All the details are found here, but if you have a Digg account, please do me a favour and Digg this entry. I really want to see this thing explode!
I continue to have fun with getting nicely isolated objects that would have previously been hard to extract without using the green-screen scanning method. Even coins are turning out quite nice…now I just need to finish editing all the rest of my Japan photos.
Note to self: do not, repeat, do not run strenuous MySQL queries on the database that runs all of your sites in the middle of the day. That’s just plain dumb. 🙁
Emails like this make all the work on my album art project (completed with lots of help from Ashley) worthwhile:
“I just stumbled upon your album page this morning, and I felt compelled to tell you how awesome you are. I have an obsession with album art too, and when I put my iPod on Cover Flowand something is missing, I die a little inside. I have been searching the internet for months [for] a couple [of] fairly random album covers (Big Shiny Tunes 7 and Now 4) and finding them both at the same time, in supreme quality, was the best the [thing] that happened to me all week. Uploading all those covers must have been a killer project, but because of it my iTunes library is nearer to perfection. Thank you, oh random internet stranger, for helping me on my quest to a
flawless Cover Flow.”
And that reminds me, I have to update it – I haven’t uploaded new images in almost a year now and I’ve added quite a few more CDs to my collection since then. I loves the music!
Does anyone know what the laws are in Canada surrounding charging a customer’s credit card when you don’t actually have the product to sell them? Back at the beginning of March I ordered a Trendnet KVM switch from NCIX. They had the product I wanted listed, so I placed my order and they charged my credit card. A few weeks passed, and I emailed them to find out where my product was – and I was informed that the product was on order. I was a bit perturbed because there was no indication that the product would take 2+ weeks to arrive, but I needed that one specific product so I waited. It was just today, nearly six weeks later, that I decided to contact them again, and this is what I was told:
“We had been on backorder for this item, and we had yet to receive any stock since you placed your order. However, after checking with our suppliers, it appears that this item has been unexpectedly discontinued. Unfortunately, this means we will be unable to get this item in for your order. At this point you have the option to either change your order to another item, or have the item cancelled for a full refund. Please contact us back to let us know how you wish to proceed with this order.”
Products get discontinued – that’s no NCIX’s fault. But why on earth would they charge my credit card if they weren’t buying the product from the supplier? There was no indication that this was a special order – the kind where you pay in advance and they order the product in – so it seems ethically dubious for them to take $50 or so from me, hold on to it for six weeks, then inform me that the product actually can’t be ordered.
I think I’ll be avoiding NCIX for a while… 🙁
[The following is re-published from Digital Home Thoughts – if you’re going to link to this, please link there instead – thank you!]
I’m working on my first book project – one where I’m creating a vacation scrapbook on 13″ x 11″ pages inside FotoFusion and will export the JPEGs then get them printed up as full-bleed pages in a Blurb hardcover book. This is my first attempt at this type of a project, but I have high hopes it will turn out really nicely.
One challenge I had was trying to scan the little pieces of paper we brought back that weren’t perfectly rectangular, or things I wanted to layer over each other – plane tickets, train tickets, etc. When I scanned them, it was typically off-white on off-white (the background of my scanner). Even using Photoshop Elements’ Magic Extractor, I was unable to properly extract the objects – I tried tweaking the settings, tried masking it myself with the magic wand, etc. Nothing worked because the background colour of my scanner lid was just too close to the colour of my objects. I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to be able to accomplish the visual design I wanted. Continue reading Green-Screen Scanning Makes For Easier Object Extraction
On one hand, Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail client is a surprisingly good email client. On the other hand it’s completely baffling how/why they put Windows Mail in Windows Vista to replace Outlook Express, then stopped developing it (there haven’t been any improvements in over a year) and put out Windows Live Mail instead. Regardless, if you’re using Windows Mail, you should probably switch to Windows Live Mail – it’s a much better email program. I use it for my personal email – I have Outlook configured on my main dual-monitor workstation for my day to day work email, but on the weekends or evenings I like to check my personal email without having to fire up Outlook.
Windows Live Mail is great for that – except that it has an irritating limitation regarding spell checking. In short, it only spell-checks in US English – even if you have Word installed and Canadian English is selected as the default language. Silly! I asked if there was a way to change this in the Windows Live Mail newsgroup, and a helpful fellow named Ronald Sommer responded with the solution:
“Just for the record, it’s not an ‘errant file number’ – 1033 is Microsoft’s code for US English. 2057 is the equivalent for British English. If you’d prefer Canadian to British, change 1033 to 4105.
2. Close down WLMail.
3. Use Windows Explorer (or My Computer) to find a folder called Windows
Live\Mail\Proof\prf0009\2 in your Program files folder.
4. In there should be a file called spell.ini.
In XP, right-click on it and select Open with. Find Notepad in the list of
options, click on it and then on OK. The file will open; change 1033 to
2057, then File > Exit. When you are asked whether you want to save the
changes, click Yes.
In Vista, click start and type notepad. When the list opens, right-click
notepad and select “Run As Administrator”. Then select File > Open, find the
spell.ini file as above and amend it.
5. Restart WLMail and see if your spell check is working.”
No, I don’t know why he started at the #2 – but his solution works so I don’t care. 😉
On so many levels, Outlook 2007 is a superb product – I spent more time in Outlook than any other piece of software, including the Web browse, and for the most part it’s an excellent product. But in other ways, it’s just plain stupid. Take the “Search Address Book” feature. I use it all the time, but sometimes I only know a bit about the contact I’m looking for. Maybe his first name, or, more likely, the company he works for. Take the above screen shot: I’m searching for someone I know who’s in my contact list who works for Epson – so I type in Epson and hit enter. No contacts found. Yet look at the contact for Andrew – it says Epson in the business field. Why shouldn’t it find the contact? No good reason I can think of. Who coded this stuff? They can do better.
