Blog Jones

Yes, folks, I am closing Blog Jones and moving to a new space on the web at JDHarper.com. In all likelihood, this will be the final post for BlogJones.com.

I’ve been working for the past few days on a brand new theme for the blog, so let me know what you think.

Please, don’t forget to update your bookmarks and RSS readers to http://www.JDHarper.com/wordpress/

Edit: When I posted this late last night, I put the wrong link above. It’s fixed now.

I’ve just moved my web hosting plan from Verve Hosting to A2 Web Hosting. Please let me know if you find any weirdness or broken pages.

A2 Web Hosting has (so far) been wicked fast, and they’re very cheap. (The lowest priced plan is less than $3/month). Plus, they had PHP 5, while Verve only had PHP version 4.something, and I needed version 5 for a new program I wanted to play with (activeCollab, a web-based project management program that’s like the open-source version of BaseCamp). I like them very much so far.

A guy from BJU sent me an email telling me about his blog, Living Worship. If you like to read and talk about worshiping God, you’ll probably enjoy the site.

On a completely unrelated note, here’s a video of a Furby in a microwave.

Blogged with Flock

It appears that Parker Brothers has done away with the multi-colored money in their famous Monopoly game and replaced them with debit cards.

Now, if they would just do something about the game being almost entirely luck-driven and boring….

Blogged with Flock

I just added a Flickr Profile Banner to the top of the Blog Jones website. It’s pretty nifty.

The pictures update every hour, as I upload new ones to my Flickr account.

Blogged with Flock

Michael Damsky, a student at the University of Central Florida, had an ingenius plan to meet girls. He decided to set fire to a couch in the women’s dorms, in hopes of meeting the women as their building was evacuated.

The plan was less successful than you might think: Orange County police arrested the man for arson.

So, here’s a question for you: What is the most interesting way that you’ve encountered for meeting people of the opposite sex?

For example, I had a friend who was one of the two male interior design students, and I’m pretty sure his motivation had more to do with his classmates than his coursework.

How about you? I’m looking forward to reading your comments.

Blogged with Flock

By now, you have no doubt heard that President Bush has issued the first veto of his presidency. He decided that first bill important enough to veto was the McCain-Feingold anti-free speech bill the massive, $400 billion drug entitlement program the Patriot Act a bill designed to fund medical research.

So, instead of being used for research that could cure conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, nerve damage, MS, and Parkinson’s Disase, thousands of frozen embryos will instead be flushed down the toilet, destroyed to no one’s benefit. Good going there, Prez. Thanks.

Now, in fairness, all he did was prevent Congress from spending money on the issue. There’s no ban on private embryonic stem cell research.

But still, Bush waited six years to issue a veto, overlooking both major violations of our civil liberties and massive government waste of our tax dollars, and he when he finally does get around the exercising his veto power, he uses it to prevent funding of potentially life-saving research.

That about sums up our President. Better luck next time!

Blogged with Flock

Did you know that the BBC has 3 full time employees who make sure that words are pronounced correctly?

Blogged with Flock

WARNING: Geekiness Ahead.

Well, I finally installed Ubuntu, relatively user-friendly version of linux, on my new desktop. I picked up a new hard drive (found a 160 gig SATA drive for $40 at Circuit City) and popped in the install CD.

Since the last time I installed Ubuntu on an old 600Mhz PC, the developers of Ubuntu have upgraded to a new version which  makes the install process even easier than it was before. After I answered some simple questions (like “What time zone are you in?”), it formatted the new hard drive and installed itself.

When I restarted my computer, instead of booting into Windows directly, a menu popped up asking whether I wanted to load Ubuntu or Windows. Into Ubuntu I went, ready to install the drivers for my wireless network card. I knew from previous experience that the card needed a little bit of driver juju (in the form of the ndiswrapper program) to work with Linux, so I thought I was ready to get things going.

Things went downhill pretty rapidly. First off, ndiswrapper is not installed by default in Ubuntu, so you face the paradox of needing to get onto the internet before you can get onto the internet. So, I popped open my laptop, downloaded the file, and put it onto my USB keychain. But when I plugged it into the desktop, nothing happened. A good hour of attempted diagnosis later, I was ready to give up.

I decided to try Kubuntu, which is another version of Ubuntu. No luck. I had given up on the project entirely, but I decided to try one more thing. When I had first downloaded Ubuntu/Kubuntu, I had downloaded the 64-bit versions of the software, since my AMD Athlon 64 processor can handle that.

Turns out that the 64-bit versions of Ubuntu and Kubuntu aren’t quite capable as the normal 32-bit versions, as there are a number of programs that don’t work properly in that version of the operating system. As soon as I installed the 32-bit version of Ubuntu, my keychain drive worked fine, and everything seems to be in order now.

So, my advice is to avoid the 64-bit version of Ubuntu for now. Maybe when they fix the USB drivers, it’ll be better.

…

On the same lines, there’s been a lot of discussion lately about whether or not Ubuntu is user-friendly enough for “regular users” to use instead of Windows. I think this has a shot at being user-friendly enough, provided that a tech-savvy person installs it.

Right now, there are a lot of little things that most users would not be happy about. For example, MP3’s aren’t supported out of the box due to licensing issues. It’s easy enough to get them supported (using Easy Ubuntu), but most users expect to be able to play MP3’s right away. And if there are any problems (such as the wireless networking not working properly right away), expect to spend a while googling for an answer, especially if you are new to linux.

But, once the system is set up, it should be pretty easy to use. In addition, Linux is every bit as capable as Windows for most applications (with the notable exception of games). It even comes installed with the Open Office suite, which do the same things as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook, as well as with Firefox and a media player. There’s even a dictionary and Solitaire. Based on what you get when you first install the operating system, you actually get more from Linux than you do from Windows.

It’s also virus/spyware-free, so there’s no need to run security software every week.

All in all, there’s a lot of advantages to giving your grandma a computer running Ubuntu. You just tell her “click here to write a letter; click there to go to the Internet” and it will work, and you won’t have to worry about her downloading spyware onto her computer accidentally. You’ll probably still want to warn her about sending your inheritance to those nice people in Nigeria though.

Blogged with Flock

To celebrate Independence Day, my family went out and to the fireworks display in Cowpens tonight. In addition to seeing folks from church and a friend from high school that I hadn’t seen in at least three years, we also saw some really pretty fireworks:

More photos available from my Flickr page.

Blogged with Flock

I got this in my email yesterday:

A cowboy walked into a bar and ordered a whisky. When the bartender delivered the drink, the cowboy asked, “Where is everybody?”

The bartender replied, “They’ve gone to the hanging.”

“Hanging? Who are they hanging?”

“Brown Paper Pete,” the bartender replied.

“What kind of a name is that?” the cowboy asked.

“Well,” said the bartender, “he wears a brown paper hat, brown paper shirt, brown paper trousers, and brown paper shoes.”

“How bizarre,” said the cowboy. “What are they hanging him for?”

Who are you?

An amusing children’s tale.

Blogged with Flock

The thing I least like about shopping in old-fashioned brick and mortar stores is my inability to easily comparison shop like I can online. When I buy a product online, I can go hit Pricegrabber or Amazon and find out if I’m getting the best possible price for what I want. But in the meatspace, I don’t have that ability.

Or at least, I didn’t until now. Yesterday, I discovered TicTap, a nifty service that lets you search Amazon via your cell phone. Just text-message their phone number (763-807-3927) with the UPC code (no dashes or spaces), ISBN number, or keyword that describes the product you want to search for. In a few moments, you’ll receive a response with the price on Amazon, the number of reviews it has received, and the average rating out of five stars that it has received from users.

It’s a free service, except for whatever your cell provider charges you for text messages.

(Via Lifehacker).

Blogged with Flock

I may have just discovered my new favorite browser. Flock, a browser built around blogging and social networking sites like del.icio.us (bookmarks sharing) and flickr (photo sharing), looks like it would make web publishing exceedingly easy. Right now, I’m typing this in Flock’s blog editor window, accessible via a toolbar button. I was able to upload the following photo to Flickr by dragging it from Explorer onto my Photos Toolbar.

The cool thing was that it popped up a window asking for description information (title, tags, description) and asked me if I wanted to resize it so that it wouldn’t take up so much of my 20MB/month upload limit. (The $25/year “premium” upgrade to Flickr is definitely going on the birthday list.)

It also integrates Flock’s bookmarks with the del.icio.us, which I’ve begun to use as my primary bookmarking site anyways. Flock even has pretty good integrated RSS reader that I need to play with for a while.

Perhaps best of all, it’s based on Firefox originally, so it’s got the security you can’t get from IE and extensibility that you can’t get from Opera (although Opera 9.0 is pretty neat with the integrated bittorrent).

I had played around with Flock a while ago when the first alpha versions were coming out, and it has come a long way since then. This is Beta 0.7, so it may still have some bugs, but it’s definitely worth a look when you have some time to play with it.

technorati tags:flock, review

Blogged with Flock

I am not normally a fan of car shows. I’m content with the car that I have, so long as it’s working, and I’ve never really gotten much of a thrill out of looking at other people’s cars. That said, I do have some appreciation for a well-cared for antique car.

So, I did enjoy visiting the Wings and Wheels airshow/antique car show in at the Spartanburg Memorial Airport this week. I took a number of pictures and added the best ones to flickr.

The most interesting part of the show for me wasn’t a car or plane at all. It was the street vendor who was selling fried Oreos. He dipped the Oreos in batter, fried them in oil, and sprinkled powdered sugar on top. It’s all warm and gooey on the inside when he’s done.

Because what the world needs is a less healthy Oreo.

Check out the rest of the photos in the set here

I’ve just uploaded a new bit of javascript that might make it easier for me to write. You should see some notes off to the side of this paragraph. The idea is that I can keep following my original point here and point out something of relevance that goes off in a different direction over there.

Yay! No more parentheses!The script comes from arc90 labs, via Brainwagon.

It’s 6/6/6 today, much to the delight of the superstitious. Enjoy whatever odd signs you may see today–pentagrams in goat’s blood on your front lawn, old hippies parading down the streets shouting “The End is Near!,” or what have you. It won’t happen again for another hundred years!

• Democratic Peace: Ten Heuristics of Life and Learning
  Ten basic rules of thumb for life
  (tags: life reference lifehacks jobhunting)
• Get Rich Slowly » Healthy Food on an Unhealthy Budget
  They say that poor people are obese because they can’t afford heathy food. But that’s not true–take a look at this collection of healthy, cheap food.
  (tags: food health money cooking home recipes reference)
• MAKE: Blog: Zasterisk - Play Zork over the phone!
  Play Zork on your phone with voice commands!
  (tags: text interactivefiction game fun phone asterisk)
• DigsMagazine.com | for the post-college, pre-parenthood, quasi-adult generation
  “DigsMagazine is an online home and living magazine aimed at the post-college, pre-parenthood quasi-adult set. Understanding both the excitement of setting up house in your first real home, and the frustration of trying to live in style on oftentimes smal
  (tags: home diy design food lifehacks shopping decorating)

• alexking.org: Software > WordPress Themes
  A large collection of themes for WordPress
  (tags: blog wordpress customization design webdesign free)
• EepyBird.com–Coke + Mentos = Fun!
  These guys made a video of what happens when you combine 200 liters of coke with 500 mentos candies: hilarity.
  (tags: fun video humor)
• PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer
  Make a little booklet out of a single sheet of paper. Pretty neat little toy.
  (tags: lifehacks gtd tool diy paper utilities free pocketmod)
• Bicycam - A simple camera mount for bikes
  Mount a camera on your bicycle–could make for some interesting photography/videography
  (tags: camera photography diy bicycle)
• The New Yorker: The Critics: A Critic At Large
  A long and interesting essay about C.S. Lewis, both his writing and his faith
  (tags: C.S.Lewis books christianity fiction religion people culture)
• RPS - 25
  Play rock-paper-scissors with 25 different hand signs, including dynamite, alien, wolf, devil, man, woman, and sponge.
  (tags: fun games humor cool gestures)