After four months of using my HP MediaServer I’m sold that the little hunk of junk is the best backup system/methodology one can have without the hum of servers in your basement.  Here’s my quick list to justify the label of ‘Easiest home backup system.’

• Backups and Notification of backup status
• User Account Consolidation
• Remote Administration
• Free SSL certificate to secure remote administration
• Central location for file storage, both public and private
• Photo sharing web site
• Easily add more storage to your unit

Sometimes you think of people when you least expect it.  Rue Porter passed away a month ago and today I experience a flashback of the plumbing training he passed along to me.  For the last 2 weekends my intentions were to replace a cracked toilet in the master bathroom, but batch processing failures at my employer and lots of overtime had prevented the chore be accomplished until today. 

I went to the good ole’ Home Depot with the family and set out to select our new toilet.  Fortunately, for us this weekend was the big Bathroom Savings event.  There was a choice of about 40 different commodes and I could see a glazed look in my wife’s eyes.  Suddenly, I remembered the words of Rue… you can’t go wrong with American Standard. This narrowed our selection down to two models.  We ended up going with one with the biggest flush capacity.  With the industry’s largest flush valve and trapway, we are going to have a very fast and powerful flush…I can’t wait until the kids stress test out the flushing capabilities…ability to flush 200 sheets of toilet paper is what American Standard touts.

In my category scheme, this post falls under Management.

Unless you work for a web development company your decision on how or where to setup a web site just got a lot harder.  The core factors at the heart of the build or buy choices lie in what features are required to do business and range from the necessities to ultimate luxuries.  In my conversation with a non-profit organization their concerns rely in the realms of communication, social networking and branding.  In today’s Internet world some of the easiest and cheapest freebie web applications address all of these concerns.  Here’s a list of items discussed during that conversation that I will elaborate on in the upcoming weeks.

• MySpace, FaceBook and Yahoo Groups
• Updateable web site without programming and uploading
• Cost
• Technology that you know versus that which you don’t
• Email capabilities
• Use an out of the box solution or develop custom software
• Custom URL or use location shared via a parent organization

I look forward to doing a deep dive into each of the topics and meeting people who are interested in these topics.  Please, leave your insight in the comments of this web site.

My brother-in-law, Bryan Orr, is a great nature observer.  A week ago he was driving some clients to the KCI airport when he noticed a Bald Eagle near the river.  He was so excited he started checking everywhere near the Missouri River to see if he could find a nest or just a plain old good spot to sit and watch.  It didn’t take long until he found a really nice spot in downtown Kansas City, Missouri near the Broadway bridge to kick back and watch his Bald Eagles.  Funny thing, the first time he saw an eagle downtown it was walking around near the river and he thought it was a turkey…seriously a turkey, come on.  Before Bryan started telling other family members about the incident he went down on December 31st around 9:00 AM with his Mom’s camera to get some prints as proof that Bald Eagles really do inhabit the city.  But he couldn’t wait until they were developed (yeah, he still shoots film) and spilled his guts at the family New Year’s Eve party…truthfully, I wouldn’t been able to contain the secret either! As Bryan’s telling me about the whole series of events, I had to get in on that action, even if there was only a remote chance to see an eagle in the wild.  After begging his wife, Kim, to let us go on a New Years morning photo shoot, I was just hoping we’d get to see at least one eagle.  We arrived at our location (see below) about 10 minutes after 8:00 AM and I shot my first Bald Eagle at 8:17 AM according to the metadata in my first photo and continued to shoot until 8:55.  There were a total of 4 eagles present in less than an hour; two adults and two juveniles.  Bryan speculates the group is a family, but I’m not so sure of eagle habits to jump on board with the concept, yet.

The entire time I was shooting I kept thinking, “how lucky am I to live near Kansas City and able to see Bald Eagles.”  In fact I work within a few blocks away from the exact site I shot at. After the guys at work see these pics, we’ll be headed over to the bridge for a few more breaks!

In case you care to know, I shoot a Canon 40D and in this situation I shot an 85-300 telephoto, mostly on the 300 side.  I was so darn excited about seeing wild Bald Eagles that I didn’t feel comfortable using a manual mode, so I dialed in the ‘Sports’ mode and acted like a wild man snapping away.  One interesting note about the exposure time.  On most of the pictures the time is 1/400 though an about a third of the pictures I see the exposure time as 1/395.  The 40D is new so I’ll work on understanding the differences between the two times.  ISO was set low on most pictures at ISO 100. My 40D is still set on the auto ISO mode so this was selected automatically by the camera.  As I *learn* this camera more, I have 200 clicks on it after this shoot, I’ll find out the nuances, similar to my experience on Canon’s 10D.  The big difference is the amount of pixels as these photos were taken about 500 feet away and I still had enough pixels to generate nice web images, though I’d hate to try to get prints off of these pics as they are highly cropped.

If you’re interested in shooting the Eagles yourself, here’s the exact spot (see map below) that I snapped the photos in this post.  We parked in the lot and stood about 5 feet from the car to get these pics.  We’ve seen Bald Eagles in this exact location three out of three times around 8:00 to 10:00 AM.  Post in the comments when you plan on going and maybe you’ll see either Bryan or I there! 

Broadway Bridge, Kansas City, Missouri

Thanks for sharing your Eagle knowledge, Bryan… U R da’ man!

As the eyes of the world turn to the dazzling lights and new year anticipation here’s a set of techlinks that you’ll never regret aggregating. 

• If you want energy and enthusiasm in software development and a bit of everything else the man is…  Scott Hanselman.  Now, if I can just get him to accept my LinkedIn.com invitation.
• Now, when you broke the web site and the CFO threatens to call the CEO kind of situation, there’s really only one alternative… ‘If broken it is, fix it you should’  Tess Ferrandez in her series of posts on .NET debugging is a virtual, bug finding rock star.
• How many developers could write a meaningful post each and every day for 17 months?  Only one that I know of… Sara Ford.  Unfortunately, nothing lasts for ever and maybe I embellished the each and every day part… there are only 382 posts on how to improve your Visual Studio skills.  The posts eventually culminated in a book, Microsoft Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity.

With so many new high quality bloggers the list could go on, but like the last day of 2008 it’s here and this article is done.  Drop the ball and enjoy your party.

My six (soon to be seven and thus the title of this post was generated) year old son wants to build, build and build some more.   We decided that a good from scratch project would be a bird feeder and started to research plans on the internet for bird feeders.  My wife ended up with two bird feeders as Christmas gifts (OK, I bought them for her :)

Here’s a list of mediocre plans

• http://mdc.mo.gov/nathis/woodwork/ww1/
• http://www.aces.edu/pubs/docs/Y/YANR-0008/
• http://www.freebirdfeederplans.com/Assembly_1.htm
• http://www.blackanddecker.com/ProjectCenter/ProjectDetail.aspx?DOC_ID=p_2_99_23589_23593.html
• http://www.northern.edu/natsource/DAKOTA1/Birdfe1.htm
• http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=howTo&p=Build/ScrapsForTheBirds.html

Here’s the short list

• http://www.am-wood.com/nov97/bird.html – Bird feeder table
• http://www.fiddlecreekfarms.com/store/scripts/prodView.asp?idproduct=2145  - This is what I want and wish I could find plans for…

In our random searches we found a very interesting site that has Nest web cams from Cornell

http://watch.birds.cornell.edu/nest/home/index

If I were going to build my own Purple Martin house, I would use this web site ( http://www.mdc.mo.gov/nathis/woodwork/ww6/ )

Wow, lots of links in this post…I don’t know if I found the one we’ll build but I hope that this post helps out.

-Mike

As of this very day, December 20, 2008 the top two searches on http://www.Google.com for creating DVDs from a PowerPoint presentation involve the following two products:

E.M. PowerPoint Video Converter – The completely free way to make a DVD, but it has one serious flaw in most of my conversions.  Hold onto your hats for this one!  It overrides all of transitions and only has the capacity to set them to a single value.  If all your transitions are consistent then no worries.  But if you’ve spent a lot of time on customizing slide to slide transitions then look to the solution below…

Acoolsoft’s PPT2DVD -  This software package effectively handles custom animations and slide to slide transitions preserving them nicely in DVD format.  After designing the DVD layout it’s quite literally one step to put your existing PowerPoint Presentation into the PPT2DVD interface and another click to directly burn a DVD that’s playable in most of today’s DVD players.  The downside is that this solution is not free… I paid $79 for my copy via the vendors' web site, though I’ve seen it listed for as much as $129.

In summary when it comes to ease of use, a nice feature set and pure speed of solution, there’s only one way to go…spend the money on PPT2DVD and your project is well on it’s way to completion.

UPDATE:  I was asked why I needed this software... well, my Grandfather died and on short notice I created a nice memorial PowerPoint presentation, all the while thinking I'd be able to burn to a CD and disperse to fellow family members.  Oh, what a surprise, I worked about 7 hours and realized this option didn't exist and many of the family members most interested in viewing my creation do not have computers!  Frantic, I searched for a solution that could get what I needed done in less than 3 hours.  I tried the video converter listed first, but was disappointed that it blew away all my transition settings.  Next, was a free trial of the PPT2DVD software, which ultimately led to it's purchase.

In my current role as a team manager, I’ve paid particular attention to consistency across our application.  This currently means having consistent navigation and when you see a grid on one module that grid basically functions the same as other modules.  Another example occurring frequently in large web sites is multiple calendar controls each with slightly different look and feel.  In developing these applications over the years, I’ve noticed that applications that maintain a consistent look and feel are often perceived to be more user friendly (no one has to read the manual to use them), while having multiple features that are just a little bit different often creates a “clunky” feel.

With all of today’s various browsers the concept of consistency across browsers comes into play (pay attention, the real meat of the article starts now).  Shouldn’t someone using Internet Explorer have the same experience as a Firefox user?  I maintain that the experience shouldn’t be painful for one browser user while enjoyable for another.   One caveat, if you control the browser and version that users will be viewing the site (like an Line of Business intranet application) then all bets off.

What raised my ire to this cause?  Take a look at Today’s MSNBC site in the screen shots below.  I was wanting to look at the worst names in history (Harry Pitts seems to be winning).

Here’s a nice IE experience.  The only gotcha’ on this design is the scroll bar within scrollbars at some resolutions

The less than stellar FireFox experience involves minor overlapping of the navigation with the background DIV and makes the web site appear less than A1 quality.

The big ticket experience earned here?  It’s all in the quality… at the personal blog level, people tolerate lots of flaws, at the MSNBC.com level expectations are much higher.

Happy Programming.

I’m completely out of character today.  It’s been months since I’ve bought a Star Wars action figure and even more earth shattering is I cleared off a section of my shelves for my art materials.  My close friends know that this is completely out of character…maybe even a bit unbelievable.  For four years my budget for action figures has rivaled the budget for gas in the car.  Now, I’ve taken on an freebie Art project and volunteer Web Site.  This really started with the Strobist blogging about working for free…best inspiration I’ve had in awhile.

The winds of change have hit the Reynolds household and I’m back to focusing on Web Development and Art.  In the highest and lowest moments of my life Art has gotten me through, and when I needed to go a step farther the Web took me there.  Wow, I really love technology.  I knew I’d be back, just didn’t know when.  I’m glad it happened…thanks for waiting.

My first go around with blogging was quite an experience.  My gung-ho intentions and “doer” attitude led to the creation of my own blogging software.  I wouldn’t trade that experience for two Rubik’s cubes, but WOW it was a lot of work and I didn’t have near the features implemented that I truly needed.

Here’s a list of the three best features and why I picked them.

1.  Integration with Windows Live Writer.  This single feature mentioned by Scott Hanselman drove me away from maintaining my own code base and installing dasBlog.  Writing my own RSS feeds and aggregating data was fun, but tweaking that code into the API useable by Windows Live Writer was just daunting.  Frankly, I’d rather be exploring code and other concepts here on my Site Construx blog than conforming to an API that dozens of other platforms already use.  My next statement may be hard to believe, so hold onto your hat… Live Writer is a free download!

2.  Emailed daily summary of statics.  That’s right, every day I get a list of referrers and search engine stats emailed to me.  I created a rule to put them into a folder and at the end of each week I review what the views of Site Construx are really looking at and how they arrived here.  When the powers that be (user searches) and my desires to write coincide with a single topic a smile comes to my face, cause one day, I know I’m going to have an advertiser!

3.  Ease of upgrades.  I was worried that the upgrades would be painful.  In my limited experience (I’ve only done one upgrade) it was seamless.  Just drop the files into the main folder and Viola. 

dasBlog fits really well into my ASP.NET skill set and just gets me excited about all my blogging potential.  If you’re interested in installing dasBlog, the downloads can be found on CodePlex