If you look close I think you can see a hidden message that says “Enjoy Bacon and Beer.”

Give Wordle a try. It’s just a fun little tool to play around with.

WCCO has a great retrospective on the survivors, the responders and others at the scene of the bridge collapse. Especially moving to us is the Coulter family and Paula, whom my wife use to work with.  The doctors didn’t think she’d live, let alone walk and talk.  It really goes to show you that the impossible is possible.

On Dec. 24th, 2008 the new 35W bridge will open.

To all the responders & rescue crews, the doctors & nurses, the thoughts & prayers and the construction workers bringing the bridge back to life, Thank You.

I’ve recently got a few comments from a visitor saying “hurry up and release the f**king theme” and “do your f**king job.”

Now I know that there is bound to be one jerk out of hundreds of users, but it’s comments like these that make me wonder why I continue to spend my time on themes.  It’s not my job and, the more negative comments I get, the slower my progress will be.  These things take hours to build and there is a lot to take into consideration.

On the other hand I’ve gotten a lot of comments recently about people who are so passionate about Miint that they’d switch back to Firefox 2 until it was ready for Firefox 3.  These kind of comments drive me.  They are not yelling at me but encouraging me to spend more time theming.  And the good news is, Miint for Firefox 3 has come along way in just two and a half hours.

What I’m trying to point out here is that when you don’t pay for something, you should not demand updates and start swearing at developers.  We do this because we want to, because we love to, not because we have to.

Give a little respect to those that create free addons, themes and free software in general.

We plan on visiting all Disney parks and hitting up Universal Studios too. Since that’s a lot to do, we are wondering if anyone has any tips to share?

I already have the Disney iPhone maps on my iPod Touch thanks to WDW Pinpoint. Hopefully the land of dreams has free WiFi!

I have been to Disney World a few times growing up, but this is the first time for the wife. She’s in for a real treat!

Any tips or ‘must see’ attractions will help us get the most out of our vacation.

So how’d I do it?  Here are my keys to success.

1. Create folders for topics that best match your email style.  Like Friends, Family, Shopping, Wife.  Think of who you get the most email from or what topics you get a lot of email on.  Then create folders to file all those emails into.
2. Search and delete.  Not all messages need to be saved.  iTunes Tuesday emails for the past six months, Amazon Newsletters, Target ads and so many more emails are just un-necessary.  Find them, and delete them.  Search by sender or by subject to find them all at once.
3. Search and file.  I searched for all the email from my Mom and filed that in my Mom folder.  All my email from my wife when into her folder.  Searched all messages for iTunes receipts and they went into my Shopping folder.  The key here is to search search for email from people, for emails with the same type of subject to get a lot of emails at once.  Filing your email away one at a time will take forever.  By selecting 25 or even 100 at once, you’ll be able to knock out a of of email quickly.  
4. Mark as read.  As you’re filing things away.  Start marking emails as read.  I had a lot of email from last year, or older, that was still marked unread.  Sorry, I’m no longer going to email you back if it was that long ago.
5. Once you start getting down fewer emails, you may find your folders need to become more generic.  I have one folder named Friends for those that send me an email every so often.  I don’t have enough to make an entire folder, so I just drop them all into Friends.
6. If you’re like me and have email from 2004, then create archive folders.  2004, 2005, 2006, 2007.  If you can’t figure out which folder to stick an email in, or you just want to make a lot of progress fast, then go ahead and just archive it by year.  At least it gets out of your inbox.

Eventually  you should have a clean inbox.  It took me an hour or so to get my inbox under control, but it’s much nicer now to see less than 20 messages in my inbox.  Even that number is starting to sound high.

Keep it under control!  This is just as important as cleaning out your inbox.  With new email, don’t file it later or leave it just sitting around, take the time to keep your inbox organized.  I find this extremely easy to do with a combination of labels and filters in Gmail.  The system is setup beautifully.  Heck, I don’t even go back to my desktop application any more.

I think the biggest thing I get out of a clean inbox is the sense of accomplishment.  There are no longer hundreds or thousands of emails sitting there.  There are only a few and they seem really easy to manage.

Take some time and get cleaning.  You’ll be happy you did.

Do you have other tips you’d like to share on how you organized your inbox?  Share in the comments below.

1. Coverflow - It’s a really sweet feature, but the album art seems to only match the song that was playing when Coverflow as activated.  It doesn’t seem to update when the song changes.  Why not?
2. Google Search - Google has a great iPhone friendly versions of Google Search, yet Safari’s built in search doesn’t use it on my iPod.  It sends you to the regular Google Search results instead, which are hard to read.
3. Background - Setting the background is great, however it’s not really the background now is it?  It’d be nice to actually set the background behind my home screen and not just on the unlock screen.  Granted, there may be a few readability issues, but I’d at least like to try.
4. Notes - In MacOSX, the notes application comes along with a to-do list.  Not on the iPod Touch though.  I’d LOVE a checklist application for shopping so I can just check things off as I get them.  Super Target doesn’t have Wi-Fi so a web application isn’t going to work.
5. Sideways - Why can’t everything go sideways?  Safari can do it, and so can music and YouTube, but not the calendar or emal or a few other applications.  When I first got my iPod, I kept turning everything only to be disappointed.  It’d be nice to at least have Mail.app work sideways as it’s much easier to type that way.
6. Shuffle - On my old iPod, I could set it to shuffle, then choose a playlist, and a song, and it’d start with that sone and shuffle everything else in the playlist; regardless of where I started.  Now, I can hit shuffle and it’ll shuffle everything in the playlist, however, if I pick a song, it will only play from that song to the end of the playlist.  No shuffling.
7. Help - There seems to be no help application on the iPod.  Yes, the iPod Touch/iPhone is extremely easy to use, but things did get moved around.  It took me weeks to figure out how to rate a song.  And double clicking on the home button is a great trick, once you figure it out.  What else am I missing?
8. Web Apps Site - Did you know that Apple has a great listing of web apps for the iPod Touch?  Did you also know that it comes automatically bookmarked on your iPod?  And that it’s not optimized for the iPod?!  Wouldn’t it be smart to create an optimized version for those trying to find new apps and browsing directly from the iPod/iPhone?

There are so may things to talk about that I just don’t have time right now to go through them all. From the revamped admin menu to the simplified post screen it’s just so much cleaner. The ability to add media such as video and audio is also a great addition. I just love this!

All my plulgins seem to be working fine, however there are some other plugins with issues. The plugin compatibility list can be seen over at wordpress.org.

So much new to play with, to bad I don’t have the time to sit an play all day.  My one tip though, after upgrading, clear your browsers cache.  That’ll help avoid any odd issues like the ‘add link’ window not opening.

I was worried that it may expire when it hit the 100k mark.  You know, planed obsolesce.  But it didn’t, it just kept cruising down the highway.  Granted, it did leave us stuck on the side of the road over the weekend, but that was a relatively cheap fix.

At this point, I don’t see any reason to get rid of my Focus.  It has one feature that no other car can offer.  No monthly payment. 

Granted our seats weren’t that close, and digital zoom isn’t the best, but I was pretty happy with my pictures.  View them all.

And the concert ROCKED!  Daughtry is awesome and Bon Jovi sings non stop.  His vocal are great yet his dance moves are corny as can be.  Still, one Wild night.

• I’m now running Firefox 3 betas thanks to MultiFireFox.
• MidnightFox was updated the other day with incorrect buttons.  Oops.  That has been re-uploaded and should be made public soon.
• yExplore and GA? have been updated for Firefox 3. Actually, for the beats not the official release.  That’ll happen when the final release comes out.
• Now that I am running Firefox 3, I can start theming it.
• Just started to watch Entourage.  It seems like a pretty cool show.
• Watching the second season of Monk too which is an awesome TV show.
• I’m totally lost on Lost but I love it.
• I’m going to be speaking on SEO and web design next week at the Art Institutes MN.  That’ll be fun since I use to go to school there and I’m not big on public speaking.
• I just bought Delicious Library.  It’s such a great program to keep track of music, movies and games.
• I’m now using MoodBlast to update my Facebook, Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku status’.  I’d love to see this as a web based app much like TwitterFeed so it can automatically post my blog posts too.

That’s what I got at the moment.

Granted, I think that even being dead, he’s got better link love. He’s a Harvard grad that has written eighty scientific papers, two scientific books, had six inventions patented, and published three novels. Yea, well I’ve created like eight Firefox themes.

If you’d like to help me beat out Thomas McMahon (Harvard guy) in Google searches, link back to this post (or www.twistermc.com) with ‘Thomas McMahon’ as your link text. If you want to vote for the other guy, well that’s just rude.

Yes, it’s true, I could probably go and re-optimize my website for ‘Thomas McMahon’ but I don’t really want to go that far. I’m hoping just a few links help. If not, oh well.

What do I get if I become #1? Nothing. Except the satisfaction that if someone searches for my name, it doesn’t immediately pop up and tell them I’m dead.

Now I know this is strange. I opened up Dashboard the other day and there was a missing key on the calculator widget. Where could it have gone? It can’t just pop off. Can it?

Maybe Steve will announce Calculator 2 at MacWorld tomorrow. No buttons, just answers.

Check out the screen shot I took from wordpress.org. >

See how bold words are showing up in a weird font? I checked my appearance settings in Safari’s preferences and that looks OK. I’ve also used OnyX to run all maintenance scripts and that didn’t help either.

Firefox doesn’t have this issue and it doesn’t seem to happen on 10.4.x either. Wordpress.org isn’t the only site that I’ve seen the problem, yet it doesn’t happen on all sites.

Thoughts? Ideas? Help?

The more virtual friends I have, maybe my stories will get Dugg more or my Oregon Trail wagon will survive the trip!

This year for Christmas, my wife got me an iPod Touch! This little device is extremely cool and I’m completely addicted.

I now have an iPod that plays videos and Handbrake will become my new friend. It also has a calendar built in with two way syncing with iCal. Cool!

And lets not forget Safari. I sit at home on it and surf the net. I’ve already spend hours looking up iPod Touch (or iPhone) web apps. I just wish there was a way to download them and use them offline. I guess I’ll have to wait until February when Apple should start letting developers build offline apps for the iPod Touch.

I’ve also been looking for work arounds. I wanted a text application and found a great tip where I can create an address book entry and use that. So I now have A List in my address book and it just contains one notes field where I put my shopping list or whatever else I need.

I also tried jumping on other people/companies wireless networks. As my wife drove through town, I asked her to slow down when the iPod started picking up an open wireless network. I do have to say that many more people password protect their networks than I thought. I guess that’s a good thing though.

Christmas was very good to me this year and I’m extremely happy with all gifts. I hope yours was too.

However, I just wanted to take a moment and thank all the readers and visitors to Blog on a Stick. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and all that jazz!

Mario is back in all his glory. The worlds are amazing. You are on round levels that you can literally run all the way around. Fall in a hole and you’ll pop out the other side. Bridges are not always straight across, sometimes they curve around to the underside of the level. Mario walks up, down, left, right and all over the place. Some areas you just feel as if you make one wrong step, you’ll fall into space. However, you merely walk onto the side of the object and it’s very cool!

Another cool thing is that Super Mario Galaxy is not just one player. A friend can help you pick up star pieces and shoot enemies. One Mario, but to people working together to keep him alive. It’s like a 1.5 player game.

Our 90 minutes went very fast. However, we got three stars and about 25 lives. It’s nice to see that getting more lives is easy. Even when you do run out, you just start back up at the beginning of the level.

Now I just have to convince my wife to let us play it all weekend. Or may be call in sick. *cough* *cough*

This is one of the best Wii games we’ve played and if you love the other Mario games, you’ll love Super Mario Galaxy!

We are back up and running now but not out of the woods. I sincerely apologize to anyone who feels that I spammed them.  I didn’t.  I don’t really know what happened but I HOPE it’s all better now.

If we go down again, that’s probably why. I’m working to fix any issues I can and as soon as I can. However, without knowing how they did it, I can’t for sure say that I fix it.

Thanks

I tried burning it to a DVD and it yelled at me as I didn’t have enough permissions for some files. So I tried to compress it and again I was yelled at for not enough permissions. Umm… Apple, I own the computer and OS. How am I not allowed access?

I did find out that I could copy it to another hard drive though.

A quick Google search and I ended up at the Apple support site where a lot of people were having the same issue. According to people on there I can just trash the ‘Previous Systems’ folder and re-claim my precious hard drive space. I’m making a copy or two first just in case though.

If you did an upgrade or an archive and install to Leopard, check to see if you have a ‘Previous Systems’ folder taking up a boat load of your hard drive too. It’d be located right next to your System folder if you had one.