This is so incredibly funny! “I have to tell you something. I love Jesus, but I drink a little” and “2 flakes of snow….the local news showed a picture of an ice sickle”. Very entertaining.

YouTube Link

I run across people all the time who simply aren’t aware of what great software is available for making your instant messaging experience so much better. So, I’ve taken some notes and I’m ready to share a wealth of knowledge with you.

Chat Transcript Manager

This is a cool application which lets you organize, search, and manage your saved conversations from popular IM clients such as iChat, Fire, and Adium. Very useful for looking up stuff from previous conversations and works across all of the clients, so doesn’t matter in which one you last talked to the person in.

Chax

This is a very important addon to iChat. Talk about features you didn’t know you were missing!

Tabbed conversations, disabling picture-in-picture for video conversations, dock icon settings, Growl support and so much more. You have to get this to see everything that Chax adds to iChat.

CallWave SMS Widget

Small widget that lets you send text messages to mobile phones, for free. And you don’t even need a phone yourself. You can have all replies be sent to your phone or to an email address. Very nice little widget, and it’s free!

Links from the Show

I mentioned several links for this episode, so here they are:
I Love My Mac Giveaway from macCompanion
Download Chax
Read the article I wrote about Growl - useful for using Chax
Download Chat Transcript Manager
Download CallWave SMS Widget

 

 Enhanced Podcast [22:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1912)

I love the Joy of Tech comics and had to publish this one here because it’s so good.

Get more awesome comics like this one here.

It has been over a year since WordPress has seen anything except “dot” releases. So, 2.1 brings in several new features. I’m extremely scared of updating WordPress. So scared, in fact, that I haven’t since I switched to WordPress several months ago. Therefore I’m still running a 2.0.2 release. If I do decide to make the jump to 2.1, I’ll let everyone in on my experiences. For those that have upgraded their installation before, any past experiences or tips would be greatly appreciated. I’m so scared that something will go wrong and poof!, my blog will be gone. The feature set is just too strong to pass up though, so I hope to make the upgrade when I have some free time in a few weeks.

Learn More about WordPress 2.1

Apple likes to patent things, that much is evident by now. Any little thing they come up with, patent it! So, it comes as no surprise that Apple has patented a new place for the optical drive on a laptop. Simply put, as laptops get increasingly smaller in size, one of the biggest components is the optical drive and where to mount it becomes a major problem. Apple has seemed to fix that issue with this patent by placing the drive on the bottom of the device.

This design reminds me a lot of a simple CD player. The lid pops up and you push the disc on, then close it. I know that Apple is just toying with this idea and trying to find a solution to the problem, but I don’t care much for this fix. I love the simple elegance of my slot-load drive. Face it, it’s just freaking cool. You don’t get that with other laptop manufacturers. I wouldn’t want to have to flip the unit over to pop in a disk, and then there is now a part to break off. Just not a good design path, but I’m sure there are people at Apple well aware of all the issues. A point for innovation, but no cigar.

(Sketch taken from Macsimum News)

You can read more about the patent with a lot more description, here.

This is pretty awesome news for everyone who is even remotely excited about the iPhone. Basically, Cingular will supposedly give 18 months of free service to users who purchase an iPhone when they become available. From the article, it sounds like Apple won’t let Cingular do a mad discount on the phone, so Cingular is going to try and lure new customers by giving away service, you just have to buy the phone. Sounds like a pretty cool deal to me. We’ll have to see how this pans out later though.

Read Original Article

The awesome TV show Heroes returns with new episodes tonight on NBC. If you haven’t been watching this show, you need to find some reruns and watch the beginning episodes. I believe that they play on the Sci-Fi channel on Friday nights sometime. This show has an awesome plot line with tons of shrouded motives and mystery, always keeping you on the edge of your seat and waiting for next week.

Read more about this awesome show at NBC here.

I just wanted to show off a bit more work that I put in this evening. When I first went with the redesign for the site I had grand thoughts of the big banner images changing themselves out on the page, as a showcase of my best articles. However, I rushed to get the design live to work out a few bugs before this semester started, so now that I have worked a bit this evening, it’s alive!

Basically, the images in the “Hall of Fame” (that’s what the div container is called, for the stylesheet people out there) now move around a bit, so I can show a lot more articles and let the content grow more. It’s an easy way to see what I’ve been working on and I’ll try to keep it trimmed down, so you don’t have to sit and stare at the images for a whole minute to see all of the entries. It looks pretty cool and I’ve tested it in a few different Mac browsers, so I feel like I have all the bugs out and everything should run pretty smoothly. If you do encounter a bug or have a suggestion, feel free to email me or talk with me on iChat.

You can grab the code, with nice comments, here. Great start for those unsure of JavaScript. Uses arrays, element IDs, custom objects, and setInterval().

This episode is a bit different from the others in the fact that I talk about some hardware.  Listen in for latest news this week with reviews on the Griffin iFire with Apple Pro Speakers, Apple Lanyard Headphones for iPod Nano, and Casio Exilim EX-Z60 Camera.

Music this week is “Animal I Have Become” by Three Days Grace

 

 Enhanced Podcast [17:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1270)

I was just watching the evening news and Hillary Clinton has made an official announcement stating that she will indeed be running in the Presidential primaries on the Democrat ticket. Very big news! I’m not sure that she’ll win, but she is making history and paving the way for more women in the future, all the same.
Hillary’s Presidential Website