James Moody: Geek in Paradise

I made the call this morning to arrange an installation date for my Roadrunner connection to be activated. After going through the necessary questions on my life history to verify I was who i said I was, I was informed that a technician wouldn’t be available to do the installation until the 16th. 16 days, ugh.

After letting my clients know of the impending cutoff and to reach me by phone for normal requests for 2 weeks, I lugged the Television downstairs to prepare for 2 weeks of watching snow and planning trips to a friend’s house for intermittent net access. With the TV in place, I plugged in the power and cable connection so everything was prepared well in advance. Feeling an impending doom of being cutoff from the net and my favorite shows (huge fan of Adult Swim’s Saturday night lineup, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), I pushed the power button expecting to be greeted with the sound of white noise.

To my surprise, I was greeted with the sounds of cable television. Once the tube switched on, glorious color filled the screen! I immediately called the Cable company back to inform them the cable was still on and to cancel my installation request ($33 just to come and turn cable on…) and swap billing over to the new address.

Sooo happy and couldn’t have been better considering we just went over our cellphone limit. Most of my conversation with clients is done through e-mail or person, and having to conduct 2 weeks of business through the phone would have been fairly painful.

Wanting to add a little something to the site before I get cut off from the net for a bit, I went out looking for some new plugins. I found 1 in particular that I hope will spur some discussion (poor timing I know with me not having access at all times~).

All Passion Marketing has a nifty Wordpress plugin called LinkLove that will disable the rel=nofollow tag on the comments once you have posted 2 comments. The default is 10 comments, but it is configurable via the configuration page. I think that being as new as the site is, 10 is probably pushing it, so I lowered it down to get some comments, good or bad.

So what’s that mean? Removing the nofollow tag will allow your comments to be converted into a linkback to your site automatically. All it takes is posting twice with the same e-mail address. Spam Karma 2 does a fine fine job catching all the spam comments, so I feel pretty safe enabling this plugin to reward meaningful comments. I’ll be watching any comments to ensure it’s legitimate conversation, and not just cleverly worded spam, and deleting offending comments to preserve the integrity of the linkback. “Hi, nice/crappy site” won’t cut it unfortunately.

Hope you enjoy the new plugin!

The Official Microsoft Silverlight site has a blurb at the bottom of their page that it is officially going “Silverlight-enabled” live tomorrow, April 30.

They already have free trials of Expression Studio (contains Expression Web, Expression Design, Expression Blend and Expression Media), Silverlight Samples, IE Developer Toolbar (Beta 3), Visual studio 2005 and the Silverlight SDK up on their Tools and Resources page. New Desktop wallpapers are also available for download as well as the Silverlight CTP on the Downloads page.

They also have a Blog page linking to their Development, Rich Media and Evangelism focuses, as well as forums dedicated to each focus.

It should be quite interesting to see how Silverlight moves into territory once controlled by Adobe’s (previously Macromedia’s) Flash. Rumors have been heard that Microsoft will be Open Sourcing some/all of the Silverlight code to match Adobe’s Flash Open Sourcing plans. That would be a great move on Microsoft’s part to give the Open Source advocates a little less ammo in their tirades against Redmond. We shall see!

The launch of the Silverlight site coincides with the beginning of MIX07 being held in Las Vegas, NV from April 30 to May 2.

UPDATE: The Windows Vista Blog posted some nifty information for Vista Ultimate Users. The Silverlight Team has posted a Silverlight Dreamscene on the Microsoft Download site, which is to be released this week at MIX07. You can grab it early in 16:9 or 4:3 format now, before anyone else.

Ya know, moving is the best time to look upon all the crap you’ve accumulated over the years. God knows why I keep some of the stuff I have. Sentimentalism does have its pitfalls. We’ve only been in the place we’re moving from for 2 years and I’d say we’ve gained just as much crap as we threw out when we moved from the last place. Time to do it all again…

Luckily, we’re only moving down 3 floors into a 2 bedroom condo instead of the current 1 we’re in now. I can’t imagine all the junk we’re going to build up to fill all the extra space we’re moving into. The next move will be realllly painful I guess.

This need to move happened extremely fast. 1 week roughly from the time our old landlord told us she was going to sell where we’re at now, to finding the new place and going through all the rigmarole to acquire the new place. As such, I may be without Internet for a bit until I can get someone out to hook up the new place. BTW, anyone else think it’s screwy that the brokers charge YOU for them doing a credit check on you. It’s like, I’m giving you a few thousand for the new place, why do you feel the need to add on to that to verify we have great credit? Crooks!

As with every time I move, my computer will be the absolute last thing to leave.  Anyone else do the same thing, or am I screwy that way?

I’ll try to get a hold of some ‘net time while I wait for Roadrunner to schedule me in, so things don’t stagnate here. I know you can time stamp posts in Wordpress to post later on, but I haven’t had time to write anything due to a big client project taking all my time. All should be well!