Mindful Musings

I apologize for the recent disruption in services of this blog. The problem, as was disavowed by my service provider (that is a post and a rant for another day), was a screwed up MySql installation that made the tables inaccessible to some of my webpages. After being insulted multiple times by their tech support, with them accusing me of being a bad programmer with code that “I had no clue about and would need to debug” in spite of nothing having changed code wise since it was working, I have decided to start-a-looking.
While I am doing some research on my own, I am looking for suggestions from my readers on dedicated server solutions (only). My target solution is the $49 1&1 server but I would like to get the setup charges reduced. I am willing to barter with advertising on all my blogs. So if you are a hosting provider and would like to see your ad on this blog (and a couple of others), please email me at markghosh at gmail dot com.

Thank you all for your patience and your patronage.

It’s my birthday!! I turn 28 on the 28th! I celebrated my birthday yesterday and had a little family get together at Jennifer’s house. Jessica shares her birthday with me and John trails a day behind. So it was one big bunch of gift giving.
I have posted some pictures of the day. I am going to spend most of today getting my feet wet at my new job and getting my lisence plate renewed.
We might go for a nice dinner tonight to the Real Seafood Company for dinner tonight. They have good food, a great atmosphere and free dinner for the birthday boy!

Google Search: allofmp3 reviews I have been looking through many different legal MP3 venues and even tried iTunes for a little. I do have to say that 99c is still a lot of money for me for a single song. I stick to radio and to Internet radio for the most part. However, I have recently managed to stumble upon a very nice service alled allofmp3.com and I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised.

To sum up the procedure, downloads are charged at $0.01 per meg and they have all kinds of music. New, old, charts and everything in between. Payment is with a credit card and I decided to use my PayPal account to counteract the hokiness. The first link lists some articles that discusses the legality of this product. I am on the verge of downloading music legally (barely legal) from the Internet again!

In keeping with an IE centric co-worker, I would like to request my readers to post their browser usage percentages as comments to this post. All I am looking to understand is the overall percentage of IE users versus Mozilla based browsers. There are some caveats.

1. Most statistics fromblog sites are somewhat jaded. I say this with a smiling face because bloggers tend to be more tech savy in most cases and are more prone to using real browsers. For example: this blog has 40% of its hits from Mozilla based browsers.


2. Staistics from sites which attract a lot of International visitors do not count because International users tend to use IE for the most part. (I might be wrong about that assumption)


3. Every peice of statistic has some pecualirities associated with it. If you have one or a couple, please do not forget to mention them. So, I am looking for your sitename, your breakup of Mozilla and IE usage percentages, anything peculiar/different about your site and a little comment about the makeup of your site.
   

All of that being said, please do not hesitate to leave your stats if you run a blog or an International site, any information is good information!

Thank you! I will tally up the information and post the results on WeblogToolsCollection after one week.

I have 5 shining new GMail invites. In keeping with others in the blogging world, the first five people to leave messages on this post will get GMail invites from me. Please do not forget to leave your (valid, please) email address with the comment.

EDIT: All gone! Check back again in the future.

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Things That Are Difficult to Say When You’re Drunk:

• Indubitably
• Innovative
• Preliminary
• Proliferation
• Cinnamon

Things That Are VERY Difficult to Say When You’re Drunk:

• Specificity
• “Cogito ergo sum.”
• British Constitution
• Passive-aggressive disorder
• Loquacious
• Transubstantiate

Things That Are Downright IMPOSSIBLE to Say When You’re Drunk:

• Nope, no more booze for me!
• Sorry, but you’re not really my type.
• Good evening, Officer. Isn’t it lovely out tonight?
• Oh, I just couldn’t—no one wants to hear me sing!

Via: Sarah, a good friend of mine.

I have a request for people from the Toledo area. I am looking to find a relatively large field which can be walked through (and around, not a corn field) is publicly available and can be used as a flying field for relatively small remote control aircraft. Some of the features I am looking for would include no power lines, no highways at the edge of the field, and preferably not one where there are lots of people or kids that I could hurt. High school football fields and metroparks come to mind, but the metroparks are too busy and most football fields are at the edge of either residential areas or large buildings.

I would go so far as to offer a small fee for the use of a field every weekend if you know of someone that could set me up. On the other hand, if you can find me a nice, large public field to fly out of, I have a Gmail invite for you!

I installed Mozilla FireFox 0.9 (well really an RC) recently. After a power outage I realized to my dismay that the browser would not start and would crash with an “access violation”. I traced the problem back to a preference being set (or not set as the case was). So a simple solution for people running Windows XP and Firefox is to browse to the following folder and delete the pref.js file in that folder. Restarting Firefox after the deletion should fix the issue.

Documents and Settings/computer_name/Application Data/Firefox

This weekend was quite fun and it was very welcomed! Jennifer and I went to Wooster for The College of Wooster Alumni Reunion. It was my 5th year out of college and it was a hoot. I met lots of old friends and spent a bunch of time with Craig. Here is the official reunion picture taken on the day.

I met some really old friends including Matt Neely, Francis and Kat, Danny, Dan Hatt, Ingrid Parades, Maggie Odle and many others whose names I cannot remember anymore. Craig and I walked around the College looking through old buildings, finding secretly hidden treasures, gawking at newer buildings and facilities, meeting old friends and coworkers and taking lots of pictures. Jennifer had a good time and though she never quite gets the “Scot Spirit”, she is an awefully good sport about it and tagged along everywhere with us. I would have liked a few more of our friends to have showed up, but a lot of our friends were from later graduation years.

All in all it was a wonderful time! Check out some more pictures at my Wooster Alumni Reunion Gallery.

I have had enough comments and emails on Pictorialis that I feel that I need to clarify what the software is and what it really does.
Pictorialis does not require a prior installation of Wordpress or any prior knowledge of Wordpress. It is a standalone Gallery (like) tool that creates nice looking, well formatted galleries for you without tables or storage in flat files. You do require MySql and PHP on your server to be able to run this program.

Pictorialis II is finally polished enough to be ready for download. The example blog can be found here:
http://mindfulmusings.net/testpict

Some of the features of Pictorialis II:
-Album building from the post interface
-Single photo addition, much like a photoblog
-Upload from FTP, point to the album, suggest an album name and description, type of thumbnail and click on publish album
EXIF support even without PHPEXIF
-GD and NetPBM support with optional NetPBM binaries
-XHTML compliant code
-Lots of custom fields for versatility and future features
-Picture preview on edit
-Picture Descriptions
-Everything is paged
-Look Ma, no tables!
-Count number of visits per picture (optional)
-Comments, trackbacks etc
-Clean simple design and CSS
-All of WP is included, so all the WP features are available!

Credits:
-Photomatt
-Unteins
-Morydd
-Jesuit
-Skippy_
-NuclearMoose
-Michel_v

Download the zip file from here:
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/b2-img/pictorialisII.zip

Please post bugs and requests on the Pictorialis Support Forums