Stephanie's Thoughts » Geeky Stuff

Live Mobile Video!

Stephanie — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:06:28 +0000

I got a new cell phone a week ago – The Motorola Droid. I’m loving it! I still have a lot to learn, but I don’t miss m old Blackberry Curve at all now.

One super cool feature is that I can now stream live video from wherever I am! It drains my battery really quickly, but it will be a lot of fun to play with. You can see it live, and it will also be saved online. I will Twitter every time I post one.

Below is a view of my “channel” on Qik.com, which should show all my recent videos. (Only one so far at the time I am writing this.) Today I have yoga class and them a photoshoot with Michael and Azcra. I will try to send some live video from the shoot!

Follow me in RSS

Stephanie — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:13:12 +0000

Just a quickie:

If you want an easy way to read my blog, you can add my RSS feed to your favorite RSS reader (I like Google Reader).

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iGoogle Benny

Stephanie — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:03:51 +0000

Do you use an iGoogle homepage? The theme I made with their theme generator a million years ago is finally up! It’s silly, but cute!

I Can Haz?

Stephanie — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:57:16 +0000

*drool*

Ohhhh! Pretty blue DSi with cameras built in! You’re buying that for me, right? Cause we all have *SO* much money to throw away right now… Of course we do! So I might as well link my wishlist up while I’m at it!

Almost the weekend! 1.75 more days. Just over a week till the party I’m hosting for Laura.

Quickie

Stephanie — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 02:11:58 +0000

I’m about to head to bed, but I thought I’d write a quickie post first…

The weekend went fast! Saturday dan had a hair cut appointment at 10. I tagged along then we went to Home Depot to get 16 bags of mulch on sale. Dan spent the day working on our biggest planter bed out back, while i cleaned inside. Laura came over that night and we got some dinner (mm, bean tacos!). We did some work on our party decorations and played some Rock Band 2.

On Sunday, I went with Laura to a brunch/jewelry sale party thrown by a coworker in Arlington. I am on a budget and was not allowed to order anything. Laura was awesome and ordered me some pretty silver earrings with a $10 gift card she won. After that, we drove around trying to find gold wrapping paper to decorate the party photo booth with (check!) and stopped for burgers (make mine a veggie) and fries. Back at home, we worked on more party decorations, and I got the photobooth covered in the gold paper while Laura figured out some work scheduling stuff. When she figured out that she wouldn’t be working on her birthday, I gave her the little gift I had made her (see below). Danny had gone to a Caps game with our friend/neighbor Dan, and they came home so we could all play Rock Band 2 together for a bit.

Yesterday was uneventful – a work from home day. We had our tax appointment in the evening. Glad that is over with! Today I was back in my office. My day was unproductive because of computer issues. I use a hand-me-down computer there (as all my desktops have been) and it has strange partitions/hds. OS X is on a 17 gig drive, another 17 gig drive is split in 2 equal parts, and a 40 gig was split unevenly. It was all very strange and with ever OS upgrade the main hd filled up more and more. Now I get “startup disk is full” errors every time I use big programs like Photoshop. It was making work impossible today. So I emptied the 40 gig drive’s partitions and repartitioned them to be 1 again. Then I used a utility to make an exact copy of my OS hd to it. It took a long time, and I was unable to work during it because my startup disk kept getting full still. I was scheduled to help up front in the doggy daycare 5 – 7 pm anyway. It was all done the copying when I got back to my desk. I rebooted to my new startup disk and quickly tested Mail before heading home. It seems like everythign is working perfectly.

Okay, this has gotten long! Big shout-out to the birthday girl, Laura! Look out for a post soon about all the fun decorations we’ve been working on for her party on the 18th. I’ll leave you with some pictures of the present I made for Laura and the practice piece I made for myself.

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Stephanie's Bag

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My finished bag!

(Click here for the photo gallery!)

Happy St Patrick’s Day!

Stephanie — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:22:53 +0000

Happy St Patrick’s Day! It’s also my 8th wedding anniversary. Today was another cute day at work at the doggy day care. We hosted a special red head play group for the holiday. I took pictures and made a cute collage for the parents to take home.

In not so good news, apparently, our brand new FiOS internet is out. I thought I broke my stupid PC laptop’s connection in the morning when I did an update, but it turns out it was the whole network. Boo. I guess a tech has to come out tomorrow. I’m hoping it is early in the day so I can work from home as planned.

(Click here for the photo gallery!)

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Benjamin

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iPhoto Faces Recognizes Dogs!

Stephanie — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 23:45:17 +0000

My iPhoto actually recognizes dogs sometimes!

iTunes Meme take 2

Stephanie — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 01:19:47 +0000

I did this meme a year ago, so I thought I’d see how things have changed. I use iTunes a lot! I was born and raised on Apple/Mac and always feel more at home on their software.

How many songs total: 640
How many hours or days of music: 1 day 21 hours 47 minutes 52 seconds
Most recently played: Passive by A Perfect Circle
Most played: Roxanne by The Police
Most recently added: Life is Beautiful by Sixx:A.M.

Sort by song title:
First Song: Aces of Spades by Motorhead
Last Song: 10001110101 by Clutch

Sort by time:
Shortest Song: 1:41 Hello There by Cheap Trick
Longest Song: 17:32 Shine On You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd

Sort by album:
First album: Abbey Road by The Beatles
Last album: 5150 by Van Halen

First song that comes up on Shuffle: Every Rose Has It’s Thorn by Poison

Search the following and state how many songs come up:

Death – 0
Dead – 4
Life – 9
Live – 7
Love – 40
Hate – 6
You – 75
Sex – 1

Ready to be inspired…

Stephanie — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:54:38 +0000

I’ve been “blogging” since early 2000 (though I had an online diary of sorts since 1998) when I modified a guestbook script to let me make quick little posts throughout the day. It was much like Twitter, being mini journal entries, but I had little mood icons and photos in each post. When LiveJournal was starting up, I decided to join because of the commenting feature. I was user 2111 to join. I imported all my mini-blogs and went from there. At some point (maybe 2003?) I decided to code my own journal. I started from a simple diary script online and learned a lot about php and mysql while making the script my own. Over the years I added a lot to the script… Cute smilies, polls, a captcha for spam comments. I also continued to keep my LiveJournal updated by posting in both places every time.

Fast forward through 9 years of blogging! I’d begun weighing the pros and cons of changing to WordPress:

Pros:

Finally getting to post via my cell phone!
Having my posts automatically copied to LiveJournal
More features, more secure, more frequent updates to the interface
Easy posting interface that should inspire me to post more often

Cons:

9 years of blogging to import!
Loosing some of my custom features and being unfamiliar with the code
Did I mention I had 9 years of posts to import??

Well, the pros won, and Danny kindly updated the install I did so that he could use the new LJ import system to get everything into my shiny, new WordPress. It took no time to get the default template looking like my old blog. I’ve had to edit WP for work, so I am getting familiar with the templates and css they use. I have 3,000+ entries to tag and categorize, but I can pick away at that.

Not related, but my cell phone is cute!

The very first thing I did after the entries were imported was delete all the Twitter daily digests. I’d been having them posted to LiveJournal so there were be entries there and people wouldn’t think I’d died. I realize that that is something of a journal faux pas nowadays – I certainly wouldn’t have had them posted to my real journal. So they are gone, and I’ve deactivated them for good. I’m hoping that having a new blog to play with keeps me posting.

I did set my LiveJournal to send commentors to my site to comment. This is something I’d done for a while by hand until I got tired of having to type in links since nothing was automated. I realize this may keep some people from commenting, but that is fine for the time being. I’ve never felt a drive to get as many comments/visitors/hits as possible. It’s always really nice when I *do* get a lot, but there are more important things in the world!

So, what do you think of my new “home”? I’m sure I have a ton of “rearranging” to do still – I’ve only just begun.

iPhoto?

Stephanie — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:30:00 +0000

iPhoto, originally uploaded by punquin.

Yes, I’ve been an Apple user since I was teenie-tiny. We’d never had anything else in my house. But, I’ve somehow never used iPhoto. I’d had version 2.0 that came on my desktop computer (a hand-me-down from my dad, as are all my desktops of the past) and had been annoyed when it would launch if I plugged in a camera. I had turned off that auto-launch and forgotten about it.

Fast forward to now… I have tons of photos all over my computer and I am a Flickr user as well. I don’t know much about iPhoto ’09 yet, but I have version 8 from my refurbished laptop, so I copied that over to try out.

So far I have about 4000 photos added. I like that it is organizing them to one spot, but I do feel it is lacking features. Can anyone who has iLife ’09 tell me all the wonderful reasons why I need to spend $80 I don’t have to upgrade? Will it be worth my while?