Archive for December 2008
Another Quick Poll
A quick poll
How to Undelete a WordPress.com Blog Post
Yet another reason to love Google Reader…
Like any self-absorbed blogger, I subscribe to my own website’s RSS feed (and RSS feed for comments)
Through an error on my part, I deleted the most recent 15 posts on this blog. I was wanting to clean up category 2781 (the delicious links) and potentially quit posting them.
Google Reader to the rescue. I found my site’s feed in Reader, and did some Firefox Voodoo and pasted my entries back in and appropriately datestamped them in WordPress.

It’s really too bad you can’t schedule an export with WordPress.com, but that’s one of the few downsides of having it hosted elsewhere.
Essentials, Late 2008 Edition
Another draft I saw lying around. Here goes nothing…
An homage to Dive Into Mark’s Linux Essentials list (2006, 2008) and My WebDev Essentials (2007) here’s the update on cool software that I am using.
Note: All webapps/software on this list is FOG (Free or GTFO) and for Windows…which, ironically, is not FOG:
- VLC – essential for playing video files
- TweetDeck – it’s where I post to twitter
- FoxIt Reader – my work life has be reading tons of PDFs – Adobe Reader is too large and slow, FoxIt is great and has Firefox integration — did I mention it does tabs? and doesn’t suck?
- Firefox
- GMail
- Web Developer Toolbar – most of the time I have this hidden, but it comes in handy on random occaisions
- delicious toolbar – my work life also has me bookmarking an unbelievable amount of material and having to keep it organized; across many machines… delicious and delicious toolbar are the way to go
- Stack Overflow and Ask Metafilter are great question and answer sites for random geek and nongeek questions
- Mint.com provides great personal financial data gathering from multiple sources (savings account, checking account, credit card) and aggregates them all, essential budgeting tool
- Seahorse – Linux only, but great GPG/PGP key management software – couldn’t ever get WinGPG to work
- Google Reader the obvious RSS reader choice
- VMware Player
- Pidgin – instant messaging
- mIRC
- mRemote – gracefully handles multiple remote administration sessions in tabs (SSH, RDP, VNC)
- Winamp – classic mode only
- Google Toolbar – I am a very serious Google searcher and the toolbar provides a lot of killer functionality while on result pages (find being the #1 with the “up a level” at #2)
- Nagios – system notifications for our boxes here at work (Linux)
- CNN and Reddit for nongeek and geek news.
- KeePass – password vault
- PuTTY oh PuTTY, where would I be without your quick SSH goodness?
- Hulu – watch Family Guy, Arrested Development and Firefly online
- Paint .NET – still without a doubt the best lightweight image cropping/low level editing app
- Facebook – obvious
- AdBlock Plus – ads are annoying
No longer using (absolutely refuse to run):
- iTunes
- Quicktime
- Safari for Windows
- Anything Apple
- Myspace
- Digg
The Apple apps running on Windows were awful. I am sure they are great on Mac OS and hardware, but their products on Windows are sluggish at best. I felt dumber after each visit to Digg or Myspace, so no more.
Gone, but not forgotten:
- Last.FM – just stopped being practical, and stopped working in Winamp
- Eclipse – no longer doing development…
- OpenOffice – Use Google Docs for docs that I share, and Office 2007 for everything else. Office 2007 is too nice.
- RescueTime – stopped caring about the fact I’m on the web most days writing email or in Excel
- Greasemonkey – I either don’t visit the sites that I used Greasemonkey on anymore or the sites have changed
- Filezilla – for the few times I’ve got to FTP
5 Questions
This was in my drafts. I finally found some time tonight.
1. Where was I 10 years ago?
Owensboro, KY. Sophomore year of high school. Doing the nerd thing. =)
2. What was on my to-do list today?
NFL. Help the GF study. Have dinner with a friend. Do some studying for a final exam.
3. What would I do if I were a billionaire?
Help a lot of people. With that much money, I’d be more than set for life and I could positively impact others.
4. Five places I’ve lived:
- Owensboro, KY
- Murray, KY
- Kuttawa, KY
- Overland Park, KS
While I’ve moved several times, I have only really lived in 4 cities. Yikes, that’s an old post.
5. Bad Habits
- Knowing when to say when – this is my ultimate weakness. Excess is my #1 bad habit.
- Pessimism – I tend to hide this under the veil of ‘realism’, but I’m not as optimistic as I should be… I’m too young to be jaded.
- McSkillet Burrito – nuff said.