Anybody Have Some Time I Can Borrow?

So the new job is going well. I'm still trying to wrap my head around ConnectWise, but I'm getting there. The people there are great, the company's philosophies are good, and things are going smoothly. And I actually get home earlier from work, so I can see my kids more (shorter commutes are nice, though I did have to wait at a train crossing three times in the last week).

Meanwhile, since it's the end of the school year, and there are a bunch of concerts, recitals, and other end of the year activities with the kids, including my own mess of stuff. I have rehearsals and/or concerts tonight through next Tuesday, which means I won't be able to come up for air much after work or on the weekends.

In other words, this blog is going to be neglected for a bit more time. I have a ton of fun reading material and videos to share, but I actually need to sleep now and again.

With that being said, good night.

Don't Text and Walk

Bad things happen...

Post Last-Day Reading Material

Since I gave my notice, I've been spending the last few weeks trying to finalize and document a metric ton of projects as well as find replacement(s) for the various work I do. Today was my last day in Sunriver, and it was with a bit of sadness that I left. While I'm looking forward to the new challenges and the people I'll be working with, change is always a bit scary. But change sometimes has to be made, and I'm looking forward to a bit of change in my life. It was a bit weird removing a few e-mail accounts from Thunderbird.

Meanwhile, here's some reading material that I've been sitting on for a while:

• 67 Books every Geek Should Read To Their Kids.
• If your site has a terms of service, making it easy to read like this is a good idea.
• This review for this product is absolutely hilarious.
• Bath image resizing made easy.
• Metafilter now has a "Best Of" blog.
• Zingiri Bookings is a nifty looking little online property booking app.
• The most common cooking mistakes
• Create your own election with the WaPo interactive tool.
• I've never played Monopoly this way, but it's actually the right way to do it.
• Descriptive Camera: point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture and print a text description of the scene.
• Need an essay written? This should help you get a laugh.
• Fake S3 -- Save time, money, and develop offline.
• Filepicker.io is a better upload dialog for the web.
• When you have an employee whose last name is Null, it can screw with programming.
• Parting out a UPS to provide battery backup to a critical sub-panel in your house.
• Fat Dogs are awesome!
• Gmail full? Clear out some big emails.
• Goodbye -9999px: A new CSS image replacement technique.
• The secret meeting that changes rap music and destroyed a generation.
• How computers boot up.
• How to access Gmail when its down.
• How to hack your own Wi-Fi network.
• How we use Trello and Google Docs to make UserVoice better every day.
• The new iPad's screen under the microscope.
• Keeping Instagram up with over a million new users in twelve hours.
• Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews, Here’s How You Fix It.

Time Killer For The Evening

A Super Mario Summary has you play through all the levels of the original Super Mario Bros., but each level is summed up in a single screen. Get all the coins and jump to the top of the flag pole to get three stars for the level. Created in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 23

For the Hitchcock Fans

A great Rear Window Timelapse:

Have a New Job, Looking For My Replacement(s)

I've been a bit quiet about this (and quiet in general, lately), as I wanted to make sure it was a sure-thing, paperwork had been signed, my bosses knew and notice was given before I went public: I'm going to be leaving as the IT/Graphics/Marketing/Bit-o'-everything guy for Sunray Vacation Rentals and Discover Sunriver Vacation Rentals to take a position with Weston Technology Solutions. It was an opportunity I really couldn't pass up, and I look forward to the new challenges and working with the folks at Weston. The folks I've talked to there are all really nice people, and I've heard great things from a couple of their clients, too. I enjoyed my time down here in Sunriver and the people I've had the pleasure to work with, but it's time for a change.

I was in a unique situation in that I grew up knowing the folks who own both of these vacation rental companies, which is why I was able to work at both places, despite them being competitors. They work together on some projects to help cut costs (they built/share a laundry facility together, for example), but they're going after the same customer base, and they each do things a bit differently in general (both from an advertising standpoint as well as a technical standpoint).

What that basically means is that I'm going to need to find two people, one for each company, not a singular person to work for both companies. I'm still talking it over with the folks here to see what the exact job description will be at each company and getting craigslist ads written. We're still working on whether they plan on hiring full-time or part-time, but if you have experience in marketing and advertising (online and in print), graphics design. a-bit-of-everything (and having some web development and technical experience wouldn't hurt), send me a resume and cover letter: jakeortman at gmail dot com. Benefits may be available as well. My current officemate likes cats and Apple products, so keep that in mind when sending me your resume.

I'm also looking at getting contacts for freelancers who might do some of this kind of work as well, as I know there has been talking about outsourcing some graphics design and/or technical duties. If you're interested, and don't mind the drive out to Sunriver, send me your information as well so I can add it to my file.

Update: Here's one of the craigslist postings, will link up the other one when/if it gets created.

Everything's Better With Drama

Just push the button...

Time Killer(s) For The Evening

• MapsTD is tower defense on Google Maps.
• Play the piano with random folks online.
• Need help learning to type? TypingClub will help.
• You don't control the cars: You Are The Road.

Reading Material

• Want to relive the glory days of MSIE 6? Here you go.
• How to use the restore partition to break into a Mac running OS X Lion.
• Ridiculously high resolution picture of the Milky Way.
• JPEGmini is a photo compression technology that is compatible with the JPEG format, but does a much better job at making smaller files with out losing quality.
• Did you like the Leisure Suit Larry series of computer games? Folks are trying to bring the game back to life.
• Prince of Persia creator finds lost source code 23 years later.
• Skrivr lets you create a website just by saving textfiles in your Dropbox, and has support for advanced typography.
• Style Tiles allows you to present clients with interface choices without making the investment in multiple photoshop mockups.
• This brilliant idea will take one or more feeds from your Twitter account and turn it into four rolls of toilet paper, delivered straight to your door.
• No news here: Prisoners get better health care than us.
• Hero for the day; 7th grader saves bus from crash after driver has heart attack.
• Elderly couple in fear thanks to Spike Lee tweet.
• Free PNG credit card, debit card, and payment icons (these are going on a couple sites I manage). If you need smaller icons, there are some good ones here, too.
• Fighting sexist jokes the geeky way.
• TIL there are devices built specificially to inject ads into a page that weren't otherwise there.
• How not to sort by average ranking.
• Best apps to keep on your flash drive.
• The reviews for this stupidly-expensive watch are hilarious.
• My dog sends me texts. Yeah, it's weird.
• Use Google Docs to monitor your site's uptime.
• Why $7.99 beats $0.99.
• Create a killer seamless, play-everything media center with XBMC. If XBMC had better TV tuner support, I'd probably ditch Windows 7 Media Center on my HTPC for this, as it's pretty dang slick. Of course, my WDTV box does 90% of what I need, and uses a lot less power.
• The end of pagination.
• dMaintenance is a handy little Windows clean-up tool.
• Can't stop staring at this one: Wind Map of the US.
• Finding Goatse: The Mystery Man Behind the Most Disturbing Internet Meme in History.
• Hillary Clinton embraces the Texts from Hillary tumblr.

Video Dump

Needed to get these off my desk here. Read on to watch...

The 2012 Pick 'em Is Over, and BBall Magic Is Our Winner!

First off, a big thank you to all of the prize providers for this year's pick 'em:

• Mug Revolution
• Paizano's Pizza
• Jake's Diner
• Brother Jon's Ale House
• Home Improvement Services
• Bend Oregon Restaurants Blog

I was one of a few people that picked Kansas to win the tournament while most of the people in the 2012 UtterlyBoring NCAA Pick 'em picked Kentucky. I thought I was going to look like a genius. Not so much after Kentucky smacked the Jayhawks around, causing me to drop from first on Saturday to fourth today. As you can see, quite a few folks picked Kentucky, and I barely held on to fourth place.

But that matters not, as the following folks are in the money, so to speak:

• First Place goes to BBall Magic (Erock): A $25 Gift Certificate for a handmade mug from Mug Revolution Plus a $25 Amazon Gift card (provided by my parents, who run Home Improvement Services) Plus A totally un-used Starter Pack for Arduino Plus two lift tickets to Ski Anthony Lakes, courtesy of Baker City's Best Pizza Place.
  
• Second Place goes to Zen-ish (David): He'll take home a meal (breakfast, lunch, or dinner) for two at Jake's Diner Plus an Alehouse T-Shirt from Brother Jon's Ale House Plus $25 gift certificate to Paizano's in Baker City.
  
• Third Place goes to Larry Legend (LarryK): Larry will take home a copy of Mario Super Sluggers for the Wii Plus a luxurious fuzzy Paizano's Pizza embroidered full-length robe.
  
• Second-to-Last Place goes to GoHogs! (Kyle): He runs off with the fully punched Taco Del Mar punch card for a free burrito, courtesy of Bend Oregon Restaurants Blog.
  
• Last Place goes to Drentastic!: Dren is a three-time loser and gets a t-shirt from the UtterlyBoring.com shop. I'll have to add a few design elements to the shirt to make it extra special

I'll be getting in touch with all the winners later this week once I get all the prizes rounded up. Per the rules, you have two weeks to get back to me from when I send the email, otherwise the prizes go to the next person on the list. Make sure your email address it visible on the tournament member page otherwise I have no idea how to verify you are who you say you are (or contact me at utterlyboring {at} gmail {dot} com and I'll give you another way to verify, involving the tournament member page).

Thanks again for playing!

Trying To Get In Touch With Me?

If anybody tried to e-mail me on my personal email (jake {at} orty {dot} com) the last 24 hours or so, you might want to e-mail me at jakeortman {at} gmail {dot} com instead. E-mails are disappearing off into neverland since I moved my domain between servers last night (part of the move I mentioned yesterday), so I don't know if the emails are lost or not. Looking into it, but meanwhile, that Gmail account is probably the best way to get in touch of me right now.

Update: After looking at all sorts of logs and such, it appears my e-mail was never making it to this server. It was making it to my old server, but was getting rejected for unknown reasons (probably because the MX records pointed here, as they should have). They were temporary rejects, but for some reason something kept trying to send email to that old server. So I just said screw it and did what I've been meaning to do and move my personal e-mail domain to Google Apps and changed the MX records all around to reflect that. As soon as I did that, e-mail started to trickle in from last night, so SMTP servers were doing their jobs and retrying. This will probably give me a better e-mail infrastructure than I could ever build myself anyway. Still do wish i knew what the heck was going on.

Anybody Need Toner or a Copier? And Some Personal Notes...

First off, happy Internet JackAss day. I'm too busy to really browse around and find the good stuff, so post a comment with your favorites.

We're moving offices here in a month or so, so I've been cleaning out closets here at the office. I have a truckload of laser printer toner (mostly for HPs) that I have on Craiglist and also have a good Canon copier for sale. I also have a few twinky flatbed scanners and a few other parts I'm still going through, so let me know if you are looking for something specific and I'll see what we have.

The rest gets a bit technical here, so you can read on if you'd like...

Holy Cow, I'm Actually Winning My Pick 'em

The Final Four is over, and I'm actually winning the 2012 UtterlyBoring.com Pick 'em, but it's still going to come down to the final game. If Kansas wins, I'm the bragging-rights champ (since I'm not claiming any prizes), but if Kentucky wins, I'm going to drop down to fourth, as several folks are really close to me, and have Kentucky winning the final game. The final game is worth a bunch of points (13 to be exact) so things could really get interesting. The updated scores for the day are here.

Reading Material

• Whoops...Kazakhstan's shooting team has been left stunned after a comedy national anthem from the film Borat was played at a medal ceremony at championships in Kuwait instead of the real one.
• Block your friends' Facebook apps from accessing your private info.
• Welcome to the post-PC era.
• Need a legal document? Docracy is a social repository of contracts, legal agreements and other legal documents.
• Easily manage all your social network settings in one place.
• Somebody really knows their conspiracy theories.
• Font Awesome is an iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap.
• iPhone people have all the fun: This iPhone case combines all your credit cards into one. The Kickstarter project has long met its goal, and it's too bad that this will probably never make it to Android (too many devices in different shapes -- developing accessories for iStuff is far simpler).
• If you're transferring cPanel accounts between servers (like I was a few weeks ago), some of these command will be useful.
• How we decreased sign up confirmation email bounces by 50%. Now I just need to implement this code on some sign-up forms I deal with.
• Similarly, the Open Domain Directory idea proposed here is a good idea, as is Humans TXT.
• The movie Inception explained in a nice little web site.
• Instead of "amazing," why not say....
• Sometimes product reviews on sites are just plain worthless.
• Add a bit of water color to your Open Street Maps.
• Because I can never seem to find it via a Google search: the new Federal Student Loan Servicing page where you can log in and deal with your federal student loan account without having to remember a PIN.
• Why James Whittaker left Google.
• It was hard being a jazz performer during Nazi rule. They had pretty strict rules.
• One drug to shrink all tumors.
• Open plan offices must die.
• Post Office 2.0 Plugin for Movable Type allows you to e-mail to post to your MovableType blog.
• The regu.la blog network is a collection of simple daily information: Daily facts, quotes and numbers.
• What if modern photo editing techniques used in magazines were applied to classic artwork? It might look like this.
• Need to connect Lincoln Logs to Legos to K'Nex to Tinkertoys? Now you can.
• Interesting look at how testing and development is done on the Netflix app for Android.
• The time is...
• 10 Essential DIY Skills that Aren't as Hard as You Think.
• Bradley Manning, the U.S. serviceman who leaked info to Wikileaks, is nominated for Nobel Peace Prize.
• RT Se7en Lite allows you to easily create Windows 7 Slipstream disks, like nLite and vLite did for XP and Vista.
• After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica has stopped publishing. Wikipedia has a collection of errors in Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia.
• The Weinstein company is done dealing with the MPAA: Bully to be Release Unrated.

The Final Four Is Set!

In all the years I've been running the pick 'em on this site, never have I been in contention to win the thing this late in the game. As it stands right now, I manage to pick 3 of the 4 Final Four teams and stand in second place behind "Zen-ish,", who has been close to the lead for more of the tournament. If Kansas and Kentucky win next weekend, it would come down to me and "BBall Magic" for the championship, as he picked Kentucky to win, I picked Kansas.

That being said, it doesn't really matter, other than for bragging rights. I've said all along, I'm not eligible for any prizes, so should I manage to win, the prizes will be given away starting with the second place person. But you dang-well better believe that that I'm going to make sure everybody knows that I picked it right.

Of course, knowing my luck, all this might be for naught as Louisville and Ohio State might win and I won't get any more points anyway, so it might end up being a moot point.

The Elite Eight Is Set

The last few games of the Sweet 16 have been played, and we have a new leader in the 2012 Pick 'em. "Zen-ish" regained the lead he had last week with several folks right on his taile (scores are here). I managed to pick six of the eight teams that are still left standing, so I'm sitting tied for ninth (which is the highest place I think I've ever sat in this late in the tournament).

Scores for the next round will be posted after the Final Four is set on Sunday. Good luck everybody!

Half Of The Elite Eight Has Been Set

The second weekend of the 2012 Pick 'em kicked off today with four of the elite eight teams being decided tonight. Which naturally means two of the four teams I had picked lost, pretty much killing my bracket.

"MGoBlue" still has a single-point lead over "Zen-ish" heading into the second day of the Sweet 16, if you see the scores. "Zen-ish" still has more points sitting out there to score, so the tournament is far from over.

It's A Lot Less Scary When It's Not Dark

Limbo is a pretty popular little indie game (been meaning to try it out). The setting is very dark, and all you primarily see is shadows and silhouettes, which adds to the game's tension. Life in Limbo would be a lot less scary if you had a flashlight;

The First Weekend of the Pick 'em Is Over, and We Have our Losers!

The first weekend in the pick 'em is over, and we have our losers. By a single point, "Drentastic!" will be getting the loser t-shirt (again) and "GoHogs!" will be getting the burrito. Neither one of them have teams left to score points with, so the bottom two shall remain the same. Congrats, gentlemen! I'll contact you later this week to arrange for prize delivery. Dren's managed to lose this thing a few times now, so I'll have to make his t-shirt extra special this time around.

As for those of us who are actually trying to win something by picking winners, "MGoBlue" took the lead today, scoring 10 points and holding onto a slim, single-point lead going into next week (where the games are worth more points). Spreadsheet and pretty graphs are posted here for your viewing pleasure.

Day Three of the Pick 'em Is Over

Things went mostly as predicted today in the 2012 Pick 'em, with the top seeds winning and folks who picked them getting two points each for their trouble. Things will get interesting tomorrow as the low-seeded teams that won yesterday will get a shot at further screwing up everybody's brackets.

After half of the Sweet 16 has been set, we have a tie on top with "Bodacious Bracket" and "Zen-ish" tied for first with five brackets only a single point behind. The day's scores have been posted with "Go Hogs!" and "Drentastic" bringing up the rear. Tomorrow's games will probably solidify which person with get the burrito and which person will get the shirt. We'll see how things turn out. I'm currently tied for 21st place with the like's of Jack and my brother, but I still have more potential points to score than all of them (and even "Canadian Invaders" could make a serious run from 28th place, as that bracket still has 115 potential points sitting out there).

A Heap of Upsets Makes For A Bunch of Screwed Up Brackets

With two different #2 seeds losing to #15 seeds and a #11, #12 and #13 seed all winning today, there are a load of screwed up brackets after the first round of the 2012 pick 'em. Perpetual loser Dren scored more points than I think he has in a while, and has some competition for last place. Thankfully, after it was all said and done, my Elite Eight teams are still alive, so I still have a lot of potential points, but I'm still near the end of the group, tied for 35th place.

Scoring sheet has been updated. Good luck this weekend, everybody!

Day One Of The Pick 'em Is Over

A few upsets today made it so we didn't have any body pick all the winners in the first round of the pick 'em today (unlike last year), but we did end up with two nearly-perfect brackets. Picking 15 of the 16 games correctly today were "Lost Cause" and "Zen-ish". Both were thrown off by different upsets.

As usual, I'm towards the bottom, tied for 28 out of 41.

Scores for the day are posted here. Good luck tomorrow!

March Madness Is Here!

We have 42 folks playing in this year's pick 'em. Good luck everybody, and I'll be posting scores here late tonight after the first day of games has concluded.

Time To Fill Out Your Brackets!

The teams have been picked (with very little love for the Pac 12) and you can start filling out your brackets in the UtterlyBoring.com 2012 Bracket Pick 'em. It's free to play and there are some nifty prizes. Share with all your friends and be sure to Sign up today! Brackets have to be filled before tip-off on Thursday morning so get crackin'!

Reading Material and Updates

Been slammed the last couple weeks working on personal projects, moving clients around from server to server (had one die last weekend), and doing the whole "attend every one of your kids function that you can" dad thing, and I've collected quite a few links here. On the bright side, I'm typing this all up on my new Sager 8150, still trying to get everything copied and setup from my other system, but boy is this thing fast.

Selection Sunday is today. Have you signed up for the NCAA Pick 'em? Why not?

OK, loads of links this time...

• TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless by Blog -- How Anyone Can Get Anything Past The Scanners.
• normalize.css is a good alternative to a traditional CSS reset file.
• Splash Screens == sloth.
• Spider silk spun into violin strings. I'm sure those are nice and strong, as well as nice and expensive.
• A Texas Hold 'em Experiment: Ice Cold Decks.
• California removes all state funding for CA libraries (read the comment that's highlighted, as that's really what's worth the read).
• Call of Apathy: Violent Young Men and Our Place in War.
• The Camera Obscura project mapped the journey of a disposable camera that was left in the middle of a park with a note to take a picture, relocate, and leave it for the next person. The picture map is pretty fun.
• If you need to test in old versions of MSIE, Microsoft has virtual images that should make it easier.
• If you're looking to pretty-up your Facebook timeline, there are some great ideas here.
• Screw emoticons, Emojicons are so much better.
• Ideal City Design: Optimized by Transportation Layout.
• Social buttons done in CSS.
• This is why you should Google something.
• Awesome! YouTube and NBC Will Livestream the Entire Summer 2012 Olympics For Free.
• PHP vs Perl vs Python vs Ruby reference sheet.
• The world is ending, here's what you need to pack.
• Hacking Hacker News.
• Frightening mashup of Toy Story and the Shining: Toy Shining.
• Making a fast website. Google takes this stuff into consideration now, so it's important.
• NPR's goal is the truth in reporting, not the "he said, she said" crap.
• phpVirtualBox is a VirtualBox interface written in PHP.
• Postcards Then and Now has a bunch of old postcards from the early 20th century compared to Google Street View today.
• Redesigning the Windows logo.
• The US is spending $120 billion per year to hunt down 50-75 terrorists.
• For the Zelda fans: Saving Zelda.
• Square is just a slick product, especially now that it has cash register functionality.
• Stop paying the jQuery tax.
• Best tips for speeding up your Windows PC.
• Star Wars saga suggested viewing order (note: Episode 1 isn't even included, which I agree with).
• Apparently we don't even need SOPA if the government can pull crap like this.
• WTF QR Codes.
• HP releases iLO app for Android and iPhone (that's for the server geeks like me who have iLO on a couple servers).
• Ikea launches $86,000 flat-pack DIY home.
• Is antivirus software a waste of money?
• How OpenStreetMap handled Apple's unattributed switch.

More Prizes Added to NCAA Bracket Pick 'em

Have you signed up yet? I just added some more prizes to the prize list (thanks Kina!), so get signed up today!

Join The 2012 UtterlyBoring.com NCAA Tournament Pick 'em

Video Dump

You didn't need to get anything done, and I need to get these off my plate...

Time Killer For The Day

You thought QWOP was frustrating? Try the two player version if you and a friend want to share the anger.