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Weepies eBay auction

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One of my favorite music groups, The Weepies (who I’ve blogged about before), is auctioning a ’63 Fender Vibroverb Reissue amplifier1 they used to record their Say I Am You album and on the road during the subsequent North American concert tour. The cool thing is the proceeds from the auction will go to Free Arts for Abused Children, a charity group that uses the arts to provide healing for abused and at risk kids.

And if this isn’t cool enough, they threw in a little bonus and announced they’ve recorded a new album! I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Say I Am You and Happiness, and can’t wait to hear something new from these fantastic musicians. They haven’t divulged the album’s release date, yet. As far as I’m concerned it can’t come soon enough. End mark

  1. The amplifier wasn’t really made in 1963, hence the word “reissue” in the model name. It was really made somewhere between 1990 and 1995 and is a replica of the classic ’63 model. It’s still a cool amp, though. [↩]

Back

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I’m back from my little internet break. I was talking to a friend just the other day who had no idea I was even gone because he reads the site in his feed reader. I had briefly considered putting up an actual post back in September for that very reason but never got around to it, so I apologize for that.

In case you never saw it, on about September 14 I had placed a notice at the top of the page that said:

I’m going cold turkey from the Internet (other than for work, school, and FellowSites). I’ll be back on November 1. Cheers!

Sorry I didn’t say more about my break, but I really needed to just quit everything and didn’t have time to explain. The scientific community is still up in the air about whether Internet Addiction is actually a classifiable disorder, but if anyone has it, I believe I do. It got so bad a couple months ago that I needed some intervention.

So I did what I had to do. As I said in my site notice, I still used the internet for work, school, and FellowSites. Everything else, though, including my feed reader and all my social networks, I really did quit cold turkey. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an occasional visit to Wikipedia or Answers.com, but for the most part I stayed away from everything else and didn’t touch my feed reader once during the six weeks I was “offline”.

So, here we are in the first week of November, and, as promised, I’ve cautiously returned to the interwebs. I’ve finally approved the handful of MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn friend requests I received during the break (thanks everyone for your patience) and caught up on reading all my close friends’ and family members’ blogs. As soon as I can figure out why Trillian is acting funny I’ll be signing back on to the major instant messaging networks. I’ve set up my feed reader again, but kept it pretty lean this go around. I don’t intend for things to get as bad as they were ever again.

When I was thinking about taking the break, a friend remarked that it can take six weeks to form a new habit. I think I succeeded in developing some new behavior patterns and intend to continue practicing them. In other words, I think my break was successful.

One thing I did miss quite a bit during my break was blogging and sharing things with all of you. I read a few good books and had a few noteworthy experiences during the break, so you can definitely look forward to more updates here in the coming days and weeks. End mark

My setup: YubNub

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YubNub logo

I’ve blogged before (here and there) about keyword searches in Firefox. Keyword searches are great because they allow you to perform searches right from your address bar. Simply type your keyword (e.g. I use g for Google, a for Answers.com, wp for Wikipedia, &c.) followed by search terms and you’ll be magically whisked off to your search results. You can set up your own keyword for any site by right-clicking in any search bar and choosing “Add a keyword for this search” from the context menu. By setting up my own keyword searches, I’ve completely eliminated the need for the little search box to the right of my address bar, and, in fact, have removed it from my browser altogether.

Recently I discovered a service that takes this feature to the next level. YubNub, as the service is called, bills itself as a “(social) command line for the web,” and boy does it deliver. You can try the service out right away by going to the YubNub website, but it really becomes useful if you set it up directly in your address bar. I’ve got my Firefox address bar functioning as a YubNub command line, and I’ll mention later a few ways (and what I think is the best way) to do that. But first let me tell you more about the service.

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Janene’s graduation

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Janene’s graduation

I came to the realization the other day that I never so much as peeped about my wife’s graduation back in May. I have a draft here that looks like I was planning to embed a video, but the video I took wasn’t real great because I started it a split second too late1 and only got Janene’s last name being announced. I think I was waiting to blog about it until I could grab a copy of my mom’s video and then it got lost in the shuffle like so many things seem to do. I’m especially puzzled as to why I didn’t even Twitter anything from the commencement ceremony. That’s the least I could’ve done. Anyway, I’ll quit my rambling and get to the point.

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  1. If you listen carefully at the beginning of my mom’s video, you can hear my dad telling me I should start my video. [↩]

Meme of fours

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I was tagged for this by my lovely wife, so here goes:

Four jobs I’ve had

  1. Pizza deliverer for 5 Buck Pizza
  2. Coffee and danish gopher1 for the Youth Pastor at Southeast Baptist Church
  3. Superhero2 for Western Governors University
  4. Evil junk mailer3 for Centex Home Equity

Four films I could watch over and over

  1. Stranger Than Fiction
  2. Minority Report
  3. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
  4. A toss-up between The Incredibles and Ratatouille

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  1. This is a joke, actually. I can’t recall getting anyone coffee or a danish once during the three months I was there. This was actually a very rewarding internship where I learned boatloads about what it means to work in full-time ministry. [↩]
  2. This is an exaggeration, obviously, but not far from the truth. As an IT Service Desk Technician, I put out a lot of fires and generally save the day on a regular basis. [↩]
  3. This one’s no joke. I maintained a Microsoft Access database full of leads (mostly homeowners gathered from public records) and printed, stuffed, and mailed several hundred mail merge letters per week to people on the list. It was a good paying high school job, but I’ll never do it again, I promise. [↩]

My setup: AutoHotkey and Launchy

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By nature, I’m a lazy person. If there’s a faster way to do something, I will inevitably find it. Continuing the series about my software setup (which kicked off with Windows XP Tablet Edition over a year ago), I’d like to tell you about two programs I use called AutoHotkey and Launchy.

Ever since I discovered Windows key shortcuts I have wanted more of them. I love using Win+E to open Windows Explorer, but have often wondered why there isn’t a hotkey for my default browser and for more of my favorite programs and Control Panel applets. So, naturally, I went looking for something that would let me set up my own hotkeys.

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Elephant jokes

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A friend got me started on elephant jokes today, so here are a few favorites from my own memory and around the web. Enjoy!

Q. How do you shoot a blue elephant?
A. With a blue elephant gun.
Q. How do you shoot a red elephant?
A. Choke him until he turns blue and use a blue elephant gun.
Q. How do you shoot a green elephant?
A. Tell a dirty joke so he’ll blush red, then choke him until he’s blue, then use a blue elephant gun.
Q. How do you shoot a yellow elephant?
A. There aren’t any yellow elephants, silly!

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WordPress upgrade script

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I just upgraded Janene’s and my blog to the latest version of WordPress using a slick bash script created by one of my buddies, Aaron Toponce. If you’ve never upgraded WordPress before, I’d recommend doing it by hand at least once so you understand the process (instructions are here), but if you’re looking for something to automagically upgrade your blog with minimal fuss, check out the script on Aaron’s blog: WordPress Upgrade Script. Worked like a charm for both the blogs I used it on, and I’ll definitely continue using it in the future. Good work, Aaron! :syzygy: