27
2011

They Just Bark (a poem)

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It’s gotten to the point where everything is political, everyone is more important than you, everything they think, do, or feel is what you should think, do, or feel. You can’t walk down the street without someone explaining why you cant do that or how to do it differently. You can’t work without battles or maintain a private personal life. There are numerous political groups disguised as services. In the end they’re populated by a few people who wanted to feel important. The information age has removed compassion from relationships. [...]

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27
2011

Angry Birds: The Movie (Trailer)

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Ok, it’s not really a movie…yet. But it could be! Perhaps this will actually inspire Michael Bay to direct his next Blockbuster — Angry Birds: The Movie ;-)

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24
2011

Ticketmaster, how isn’t this illegal? Or is it…

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Today I attempted to purchase 2 tickets to The Addams Family on Broadway through Ticketmaster. As I always do with Broadway shows I went to broadwaybox.com to look for discount codes and then proceeded to look for tickets using this code (BB2011). For this show at the selected time the discounted tickets after fees cost $86.75 each vs $144.75 each at full price. Quite a savings (though still not cheap). The fine print for this discount is as follows: BroadwayBox Special Discount ticket offer for The Addams Family Save up [...]

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22
2011

Simple PHP iOS detection

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This article has been superseded by the page located at: http://www.schiffner.com/index.php/programming-php-classes/php-mobile-device-detection/. This article will no longer be maintained.

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11
2011

How to solve the Windows 7 SP1 800F0A12 / 0x800F0A12 Update Error

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Roughly two weeks ago Microsoft released Windows 7 Service Pack 1 to the general public. As is standard practice for most IT departments I held off on rolling out Windows 7 SP1 until any issues with the update had been identified. Since no issues have been identified that would affect the systems I manage I began rolling out the update this week. Unlike many of Microsoft’s previous operating system service packs, Windows 7 SP1 serves primarily as a roll-up of previous security updates. Still, there are a few updates [...]

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9
2011

Newegg Price Parser – Realtime Pricing Information

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If you’re anything like me you want lots of information readily accessible and easily integrated within websites. This desire recently became a point of frustration when dealing with pricing information. I was publishing an article discussing computer components and I wanted to provide real-time pricing/availability information within the article. Amazon.com makes obtaining this information easy enough but the site I really wanted to grab information from was Newegg.com. Unfortunately the only way to obtain pricing information from Newegg is to sign up for their affiliates program, create a list of [...]

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26
2011

Windows Live Sync replaced by Live Mesh beta replaced by…

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Windows Live Mesh — It all started with a little company by the name of ByteTaxi and a service known as FolderShare. FolderShare was one of the first consumer level multi-computer online folder synchronization services. After installing the FolderShare software on each computer, sharing and synchronization was configured through the FolderShare website. Each client computer would then contact the FolderShare servers, retrieve a list of folders to synchronize, and then with assistance from the FolderShare servers a peer to peer connection was established between each client computer to perform folder [...]

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18
2011

New Kayaking Section Launched

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Revamped, Revised, and Rejuvenated, the new Kayaking section of my website is now live. The Trip Maps everyone knows and loves are still available (and will be expanded in 2011). The posts on schiffner.com vary greatly in subject matter so I have added a Paddling Blog which aggregates only posts related to kayaking and the waterfront into a single location. Are you interested in subscribing to my Paddling Blog but not the other posts on schiffner.com? You can use the [...]

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17
2011

PIXELS

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Life would be much more interesting in an 8-bit world. Let’s just hope the MTA doesnt figure out how to unleash Pacman as a way to cut back service ;-) Video credit: Patrick Jean via Cathy Clarke

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8
2011

Hell Gate in the 1600′s

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New York: The Novel by Edward Rutherfurd is book which follows fictional characters through historically accurate time periods. I found this particular passage about Hell Gate in the 1600′s quite interesting. “For at the top of the East River, the waterway forked. On the left, a narrow channel led around the northern tip of Manhattan. On the right, a broader channel led eastward to the huge sound whose placid waters, sheltered from the ocean by the long island, stretched for nearly a hundred miles. The danger lay [...]

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