Renewable Power Source: Windmill

Ok, as you may know, I’ve been really interested in my shed project this year. One thing that’s been on my mind (well, at least I’ve been thinking about it) is electricity, more specifically, how do I get electricity out to my shed. I do have a 220 outlet already routed outside from an old hot tub (cue SNL’s hot tub skit – classic), installed by the previous owner. But where’s the fun in that, for me that involves more digging, which isn’t exactly what I would call a good time.

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Mustache

Ok, my brother (supplier (for coffee, that is)(twitter user @todewitt)) stopped by work and dropped off, from a vending machine, a fake mustache (SaWeeeet!!!!). So, it’s friday at work and I decided that it would be a good day to sport it around the office. Here are a few pic’s of activities i participated in – but with the mustache!!!
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Whaaaatt, that made it through QA ?!?!?!?!?!?!

This last month has seemed to be themed “Whaaaatt, that made it through QA?!?!?!?!” And by QA I mean Quality Assurance. Currently at work, I’m writing up a bunch of verbal QA scripts, later to be ran through either by a QA tester and/or handled automatically through some scripts. Continue reading

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Changing your WordPress feed to show 2 (two) or more categories

Ok, I’ve run into this problem a few times and keep forgetting what the solution is, so here’s a good reference post for myself and the rest of you wondering.

Let’s say you have in your WordPress install 5 or more categories, but to the general public, there’s only two categories you want to show (such as the case with http://www.midmarketinnovators.com/). In this blog there’s multipule categories, some of them for a public post / Q&A section and the other for the author blog posts and still, some more for the sidebar featured products section. Well, to the general public, they don’t need to see the Featured Products or the Q&A section in the general feed, but rather just the blog posts, from the various authors partisipating. So let’s say they post to the category ID’s 22 & 23, well in your link tag in the header place the following tag.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed"
href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>?cat=22,23" />

Which outputs in html as

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="Mid Market Innovators RSS Feed"
href="http://www.midmarketinnovators.com/feed/?cat=22,23" />

In the case of Mid Market Innovators, the feed was placed into a feedburner plugin, which redirects the http://www.midmarketinnovators.com/feed to the feedburner link. But, this should still work if you’re not using feedburner. If you run into any troubles, post a comment.

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Display only One Single View Post in WordPress

Hey everyone,

I’ve come across a problem when building out a template where we need to display one post one the home page, but it needs to be a single view (so that it displays comments on that post) but cannot impact the query that shows a list of blog posts below. So, here’s a solution: Continue reading

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Windows Virus for Mac

Ok, for all of you that like to laugh, here’s a new scam (or an old one, repackaged). As many of you know, I’m all mac now, at home and at work. I also set up Google Alerts for my work and church (and a few other things too). Well, spammers (or a new breed) are now setting up plain sites that have business names in it, there’s no text, just a really long title, with all of the business names. Continue reading

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The pains of designing your own site

So i’ve taken a fairly big brake from the internet (a whole 3 days) by going up to my family’s cabin in the Black Hills (pictures and video yet to be posted). There’s no internet, and well, when your up in the mountain, there’s not much else, except for a few other cabins. I arrived on a Wednesday, only to find myself waking up on Thursday to 10 inches (and then some) of snow.

It was the perfect mini-vacation (except for the fact that I could still receive text on my phone and everyone decided it would be a good idea to check up on me EVERY day to see how i was doing – you know, if I’m alive, breathing, or dead). Our families cabin is a 2 bedroom, one full bath, with kitchen, dinning, wrap around porch, sleeping cabin (sleeps 4ish), and a huge slate fireplace. The carpet is a short green shag carpet, the kind you can feel the carpet fibers slip in between your toes when you’re not wearing socks).

It was a good time, complete with 2 channels on the tv, and a dvd / vcr player. I watched, Crocodile Dundee I & II, Die Hard I, George of the Jungle, Young Guns and a few other movies, all on vcr tapes, all of them in bad shape. There were Tonka Toasters you could make yourself some toasted desert pies – but you have to be careful, the toasters themselves melt if you leave them in the fire too long (a whole storry right there that i won’t go into). And I brought my MacBook Pro along & managed to get the majority of new mock done for this blog site.

The one problem I’ve noticed when you’re doing something for your own site is that you are your own worst critic. This isn’t anything new, but this past week, it really hit home. Especially since my photoshop skills are not up to par and my creativity doesn’t like to be stretched (unless i’m playing guitar).

So, in just a week or two SilentGap will be sporting it’s new skin & the new platform will be WordPress instead of Blogger (sorry Blogger, not a fan of your features – you just not my type and you don’t do it for me. It was a good time while it lasted, but I must break it off w/ you. Take care), which I’m quite supprised that a producted owned by Google isn’t done up better, but oh well, they can’t be perfect either.

Tim Schoffelman of SilentGap

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Fire the webmaster

I can’t believe this is on Walmart’s website. Hurry up and check it out before Walmart finds out about it. http://tinyurl.com/3ja5xw

If they do take it down, below is a screenshot.



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