Categories
Arts

The DaVinci Code

Finally got around to reading the The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. It was a pretty intriguing novel. The history, facts and figures in the book are very interesting and were almost all things I had never heard of. The Priory of Sion, Opus Dei, the concept of Sacred Feminine, some interesting observations on the The Last Supper by Leonardo DaVinci to name a few.

While the history and facts in the book are interesting, and it’s a page-turner , I found it a little lacking in the areas of character development, plot and dialog. Despite these things, I’d recommend The DaVinci Code to anyone who has a little time to devote to reading because of the aforementioned well researched facts and information.

Read on to see what else I’m reading at the moment.

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Categories
Software

XML Part II

Success! After reading the Macromedia article linked to in the previous entry, I was able to successfully create a VERY basic weblog viewer in Flash reading an XML file generated by Movable Type with a slightly customized template. It wasn’t too bad at all.

See the results here.

Categories
Software

XML

The time has come. I’m being pulled from more than one direction to learn to integrate Flash MX 2004 and XML… The journey begins tonight and it begins right here.

Categories
Software

Color Scheming Online

Today I found a decent online tool for creating color schemes. It’s different from others available in that it almost forces you to use a “good” color scheme. Many color scheme programs will let you do just about anything. While the flexibility has it’s advantages, if you’re color scheme challeneged, it almost defeats the purpose of the software.

Anyway, I installed it here… http://marcusvorwaller.com/colormatch/ . Check it out.

Also… while I was configuring the database, I found a site I did awhile back that started out as a portfolio site. It’s here: http://marcus.vorwaller.cc. I figure it’s not linked anywhere else, why not put one to it here 🙂

Categories
Money

The Money Pit

Before we bought this home, one of the home insurance reps we talked to on the phone mentioned the movie “Money Pit” and said “why did you buy an old house?” Well… there are a lot of reasons we bought an old house, the charm, the neighborhood that actually has TREES in it (imagine that), not every house on the block is the same as ours, we could afford more buying old–there are dozens of reasons. I’ve also discovered right away (and I knew this to an extent in the beginning) that we will definitely be putting money into the home.

At this point, I’m still excited to learn about home improvement and I feel that any amount of money that goes into this house will likely come out–it’s an investment. If the housing market continues on its current trend around here, it should be a very good investment. In any case, I feel the home is a great investment, and being a homeowner feels great.

Categories
Family

Homeowners

Finally! We’re first time homeowners. After finding a house we really liked the last day of last year, one month later, we’re ready to move in. It was a pretty crazy process–the way lenders pry into every detail of your life; one I’m not looking forward tor repeating anytime in the future, but hopefully that will all be forgotten with the new home. We move in tomorrow. Pictures here.

It’s an old home–built in 1938 and needs work, but is very livable in it’s current condition. We’re love the neighborhood and all the character in the home. Tomorrow is going to be a very… very busy day 🙂

Categories
Entertainment

Marketability of Online-Only Talk Radio

I’m listening to Your Mac Life, a live radio show that is (as far as I know) only broadcast online. The show quality is great–it’s entertaining, the audio is clear and crisp, and really, it’s comparable if not better than a lot of what you hear on talk radio, both AM stations and morning shows. (Here in the US).

I’m not aware of any similar, web only, talk radio shows, but from all I can tell, they are probably making a profit on this. It seems like a feasible business model–they are targeting a very specific, tech-savvy group of listeners who most likely fall into a high income bracket. They appear to have quite a few sponsors on their site, and the commercials (there aren’t many at this point) seem to be professionally done.

Lots of people are looking for a way to make money online, and I think that this is one of the few content delivery areas that has yet to be saturated.

I found their site from a link to the Pepsi iTunes giveaway superbowl ad. You can see it in it’s entirety on their site now. Check out the ad. It’s cool (Quicktime, a few Mb).

Categories
Software

Best Tool for Online Genealogy

If you’re interested in putting your family tree online, there’s only one way to go–PhpGedView. Most genealogy programs will export to the common GEDCOM format and aside from a webserver that supports PHP, that’s all you need. In fact, if you.re just getting started, you don’t even need a GEDCOM file, you can create it from the web interface phpGedView provides.

The project is Open Source and has an active team of friendly developers headed by John Finlay. After the research I’ve done, it.s the only good way to graphically display your family tree online in a usable, dynamic format.

Categories
Software

Complete OS X Application List

osxapps.jpg
Ok, so this isn’t the most exciting thing you might have seen this year, but here they are, all the programs in my applications folder on my G5 at work. I really think you can tell quite a bit about what type of computer user someone is by their applications, if not about what type of person they are in general. If you haven’t figured it out already, click the image to see it full size.

Just today I found Iconverter and Pic2Icon, two very cool free programs for creating Icons from existing files. Another cool one to check out is ColorDesigner, a program for creating color schemes.

Categories
Software

Best Open Source Content Management System

In keeping with the “best of” theme of this site, this entry is about the Open Source Content Management System that I believe to be the best all-around. WebGUI.

WebGUI is almost 100% template driven. When you go to a WebGUI site, you won’t know it right away because it looks just like every other WebGUI site. It is easy to make the site look how you want without breaking the content engine or tweaking source code. There are other solutions available that are also template driven, but I have yet to find one that maintains the ease of use and customizability of WebGUI.

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