The boss wants us to leave early today since we worked A LOT in the past week.  Told the wife and we're GOIN TO SEATTLE!

WOO HOO!

Double-U.  Why is the letter W the only letter in the alphabet with more than one syllable?  Why?  For some reason, this is one of those things that I think about and have thought about for some time now.  It keeps me up at night.  I’m not joking.  Ask my wife.

To rectify, I’ve come up with a solution.  My proposal is simple.  Rename the letter W from double-u to just dub.  Dub.  Rolls off the tongue doesn’t it?  This one syllable wonder is just what our alphabet needs to bump it up to alphabet 2.0.  It’s not that far off the mark currently either.  In today’s 2.0 world, programmers and web saavy users already refer to W as dub.  It is much easier to say dub dub dub dot google dot com, than it is to say double-u double-u double-u dot google dot com.  So who’s with me?  Let’s get rid of the double-u that our grandparents grew up with and change it so that it fits the technology world our children will inherit.

And with this new change, can we please STOP teaching our kids the alphabet as a song.   To this fucking day, I cannot say the letters of the alphabet without singing them to a nursery rhyme!  And what the fuck is “ell-a-menno”?  How intelligent does that come across?  But that’s another rant altogether that I just do not have time for today.

So remember, it’s now dub, NOT double-u.  

Just came across this site this morning, www.imgred.com. They have a very interesting take on hot linking images from other sites. Yes, we all know that hot linking images is BAD with a capital B, A, and D but to download the image and upload it to the host (myspace or individual blog) can be tedious.

The way ImgRed solves this is to download the image once and serve it up from their site. The ease of use is also perfect in my book. To use ImgRed, just append the image url with http://imgred.com/ so the resulting image source would look like this:

<img src="http://imgred.com/http://www.mozilla.com/img/firefox/main-feature2.jpg" />

(this example was taken straight from their site)

It's that easy! No saving. No uploading. Fast and very intuitive.

On top of taking and serving the original, they also create a thumbnail of the image and serve that up as well. To view that just change the appended source from http://imgred.com/ to http://imgred.com/tn/

This is one of those "why didn't I think of that" solutions.

It's been about 6 weeks but we're back.  With work and the move, setting up the server has been on the back burner but I was able to set it up this weekend.

After installing Vista I found that IE7 would not show Flash content.  Instead, the page I was trying to view would tell me that I needed to install the latest Flash Player (example sites: Google Finance & YouTube).  Clicking on the given link, I found myself at Adobe's site where I would successfully install the latest player.  After successfully installing, I would navigate back to the original page where that had Flash content but I would still see the error message stating that I did not have the latest Flash Player.  Even after rebooting, the error message would not go away nor would the page display the Flash content.

Googling for this problem at first turned up nothing.  People who complained about this were shot down by other users stating things such as "you need to enable Flash content" or "you need to enable javascript" as fixes, which I'm sure was followed by a big "DUH" and ignored from there on out.  Like myself, people having these problems checked all of these settings and indeed all were correct but embedded Flash content would still not play.  These statements usually fell on deaf ears.  That is until I ran across this post on Channel 9.   

The post claimed that to fix the problem all that was needed was to run the following:

C:\windows\system32\Macromed\Flash\FlashUtil9b.exe

Yes, this solved the problem but the poster (joem83) did not elaborate as to why this works but stated simply that "Flash for Vista is still in Beta".  So, if you are currently having Flash problems with IE7 on Vista, run FlashUtil9b.exe to correct the problem.  It works.