We’re hosting Alaina’s 6th birthday party here at our house today. We’re surprisingly ahead of schedule, as far as cleaning and decorating are concerned. As usual, my office is the last to go.
There should be a nice crowd to fill the house, and we’re really looking forward to it.
I spent some time this week updating my media center so that should make a nice contribution to the party, as well. Not that we’ll use this part today, but I can now access YouTube from my television.
Category: Tech Stuff
Stuff dealing with the site or anything else technical
Does Vista Represent the New Year?
I’ve been toying with the idea of an upgrade. I’m testing it out right now and am impressed beyond my expectations. I’ve only been testing with the final release for a few days, but everything’s good so far.
I am enjoying the widgets and the neat little extra features. I’m still toying with it, but I’ll let you know if there’s any unexpected hiccups along the way.
Another Long Weekend Ahead
It seems like only a few days ago that we were having a long weekend and we’re already having another one. I guess I better enjoy it because I’m not due for another one for a few months.
I’m really looking forward to the next year. I’m not exactly sure why, but I’m looking forward to it anyway.
I got a new website for free. I thought up the URL while listening to TWIT. Let me know what you think I could do with www.FunnyLookingURL.com.
Back to Work
Well, I have to admit that I told Christle around noon yesterday that I didn’t have to return to work until tomorrow, and she took it better than I had expected. We had a nice weekend. People came over, I smoked my first turkey (it took forever to get it lit), ate a big Christmas dinner, and played a few new games. Having company over this weekend was a pleasure.
That being said, I must return to work tomorrow morning, and I already know that my plate is full. Only three days in this week, and I’m fairly sure that I will not have much down time. I actually spent some time today placing some orders for work online.
I’m listening to a few new podcasts recently, and I’m planning to post a few of my suggestions soon. If you’re new to podcasting or interested in finding out what they’re all about, I’ll try to explain the process a little more in the future. The one thing I’d like to make clear up front is that you don’t have to own an Apple iPod to be a podcast subscriber.
I know I’m not the only person returning to work tomorrow or sometime soon, so good luck getting over the break and getting back into the swing of things.
Registration
I have disabled the option to let anyone register on here. I have gotten a few registrants who turned out to just be people who were trying to figure out ways around security and spam filters recently, and I don’t want to have to deal with someone new trying to get junk in here.
If you’d like to register, just shoot me an email with your desired username and I’ll respond probably within a day with a password for you. You can change the password when you log in again.
You don’t have to be registered in order to leave comments, though. So I’m not really losing any functionality on the site. I just wish there weren’t so many people out there trying to abuse the system.
Photo Printing
I have tried multiple times with several types of printers and have never been able to print photos that had the same quality of film cameras that I had developed. Laser printers, inkjet printers, photosmart printers… none of them measured up.
I was browsing go2web20.net for Web 2.0 sites and stumbled on Cardvio.com. I was hoping that it would work, but when we got the test card back from them, it looked worse than some of the others I had done myself.
Last night, Christle said something to me about giving photos to family members this weekend at the Christmas party. I thought that there had to be a way of getting our digital photos printed quickly, easily, and hopefully cheaply.
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| From Family Portraits |
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I went to Walmart.com and went to the services section where I found a service to print digital photos. I created an account, had 30 copies of our portrait printed in 4×6 in one hour for 19 cents each plus tax. Just over 6 dollars and we would hopefully have something worth sharing.
Christle picked them up and the quality definitely measures up to my standards. I wouldn’t be able to tell you if I didn’t already know that I had submitted these digitally instead of dropping off film.
I went online to order some of the ones that were of the girls and when I selected one hour photo, they said they’d be ready at 5:02pm today. I’ll change my post if there are complications with this order, but I just had to write about my surprise in the quality of this product.
New Homepage Style
I changed my homepage to look just like the blog. It took a bit of work, but I think it turned out just the way I had envisioned it. It’s so difficult to find a template that I like that I had to jump on this one once I found it. Â
Let me know what you think of the new look.
Picasa
I have a new place to share my pictures. Picasa is a program that Google created to organize photos and create little albums on your desktop. They’ve expanded it and given 250MB of free storage for photos to anyone holding a Google account.
http://picasaweb.google.com/bkunefke
If you are a member of the family and would like a google account that is in the Kunefke.US domain, just shoot me a quick email letting me know how you’d like your email address to look. For instance, mine is brandon@kunefke.us while Christle’s is christle@kunefke.us.
Disclosure Policy
I have built a disclosure policy for the site at DisclosurePolicy.org and wanted to let you know how to find it. If you want to see it at any time, there is a link to it at the bottom of the page called, you guessed it, “Disclosure Policy“.
The concept of having a disclosure policy is good because having one maintains a level of credibility.  If my readers see that I have a disclosure policy and read it, they will understand that I am honest and up front with them. When people visit my site and see that I fully disclose my influences, they will be more likely to trust my posted opinions, sponsored or not.
I haven’t used paid advertisers very much on this blog, but it has been enough to keep up with the cost of the site. I don’t take advantage of just any advertiser either. I will always be honest and will not review or lie about a product that I have no trust in.
If you have your own site or blog, please check out DisclosurePolicy.org.
I’m Sticking to My Promise
I am dropping MySpace by December 1st. I have only had a few responses to my posts and I’ve already created a mailing list for those people. It already feels liberating to know that I’m dropping it.
I now have to deal with my commitment and follow through as well. It’s a little different for a few people though. I have just found two people from my past that I haven’t seen in a while. Just now adding them as friends and then vowing to leave MySpace feels kinda weird.
I’m going to limit myself to logging in only once at the end of every day. The best way to do that is to delete the bookmark I have for the site. Making it harder (like typing myspace ctrl+Enter is really that hard) has been proven in scientific studies to lower the amount of time doing it.