ROBERT OWEN — Technology Leader & Musician
Technology leadership, music, and the space where they overlap

Month: June 2009

History Lesson

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Continuing on the Theme of  “Posts eaten” , we have this beauty below. It truly is a dandy, must be because, WordPress ate it up like a plate of Chocolate covered bacon… mmmm, bacon!

A friend of mine sent me a bit of information about our Presidential line that I did not know so, I thought I would share.

Who was the first President?
I’m sure that George Washington was your best guess. After all, no one else comes to mind.

But think back to your history books – The United States declared its independence in 1776, yet Washington did not take office until April 30, 1789.

So who was running the country during these initial years of this young country?

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Remote Desktop

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Here is another Post that must have tasted good because, WordPress ate it when I converted. It should still be useful to someone out there…

When Windows XP came out, we were introduced to the new and improved remote desktop. It’s Great! Believe me, I use it regularly.

Well, when you use it to connect to XP workstations you get to connect to the console session. However, when trying to connect to a Server 2000 or Server 2003 machine you get connected to a “Remote Desktop” not ever to the console. Well, this really kind of bugged me but not enough to worry about. Until now. Now, I use a couple of programs that run as a service but only interact with the console session. So, when you log in remotely it trys to start another instance of the program causing errors. Well, I finally got off my butt and found a way to connect to the console session using Remote Desktop.

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To Clean? or Not To Clean?!?

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This is another post that got lost in the WordPress conversion.

A good friend of mine called me a few weeks back having trouble with his modem….. I know, that title and first line probably remind you of one of those jokes…    A horse, Rabbit, and Turtle went into a bar… Anyway, we had just had a large set of storms here in town and this was really of no surprise as I had been playing fix-it already that day. Turns out that lightning had come in on his phone line and fried his modem…

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CSS – Long URL

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This is an older post that did not make it through to the new site when I converted to WordPress. Hopefully this will still be relevant to someone out there.

CSS and the Long URL:

I was working on a webmail client a while back and had been having a few design problems. Sometimes when you subscribe to a blog, forum or usergroup the e-mails from those respective subscriptions will include an “unsubscribe url”. This Blog does. Now this URL can be really long and, in a normal email client (Outlook, Thunderbird etc) this is a non issue. But, writing a webmail client this became an issue.

In Firefox, if the url is longer than the width of the div area it would break my layout. In IE the long url would wrap to the next line as expected. The only Fix I could find for this was

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WordPress and Smileys

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I don’t know about you but, sometimes on the web (twitter especially) the humor or sarcasm meant in a statement can be lost. So, I always try to add a little smiley so people know I’m not such a big jerk.  On a similar front, WordPress will convert text smileys into their graphic equivalent . The problem is, I can’t … Read more

Welcome Readers!

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Hello all, I was planning a post for today… have a couple in mind actually but, like everyday I got distracted. I thought… Hey!… I’ve set up that Google Analytics thing but never actually looked at it’s VERY detailed reports. I wonder what people are already reading. Well, to my surprise… (and to yours, I’m sure 😉 ) I actually … Read more

The First Microsoft Bing Ad

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I ran across this a little while ago. Microsoft has launched it’s first Bing commercial and, it’s not terrible. Nothing Earth Shattering but it’s a pretty good commercial. I’ve used “Bing” a few times and I’ll say one thing, it is quite fast returning results. I’ve not put it head to head with Google yet to see what it does … Read more