July 21st, 2009 by Andrew

Computer_Flyer_SmallI’m hang­ing a shin­gle for myself: I fix com­put­ers, and I’d like to fix yours.

I’m going back to school in August and I need to start cre­at­ing a more flex­i­ble line of work for myself, some­thing that I can mold  and make work around my 16-hour aca­d­e­mic cal­en­dar. I’ve got 10 years expe­ri­ence fix­ing com­put­ers for peo­ple, and I’m not being a brag­gart when I say: I’m good. I enjoy mak­ing com­put­ers work bet­ter, and I explain what I’m doing in friendly terms.  I usu­ally work in your home, but if I can do a bet­ter job by tak­ing your com­puter back to my work­bench, I’ll offer that. I’m good at dis­cern­ing whether the com­puter is the prob­lem — or whether you’re try­ing to do some­thing you shouldn’t (Doh!). If you want my advice while  buy­ing a com­puter you can bring me to the store. I may be able to save you money even after my fee, and you’ll get the right com­puter for your needs.

Also, I design busi­ness cards and fly­ers and such, like the ones you see here.

You can even call me and leave a mes­sage from right here, with this wid­get. Try it!

July 21st, 2009 by Andrew

Check out this CNN.com poll I found recently. 40 Years on and this is how Amer­ica per­ceives the great­est achieve­ment of mankind. I really couldn’t believe this when I saw it. (CNN also ran an arti­cle on the per­sis­tence of the hoax moon land­ing conspiracy.)

MoonLandingsFakedPoll

14%? REALLY? More than one out of eight people?

If there really is a moon land­ing con­spir­acy and thou­sands of peo­ple are in on it as well as some of our nations most bloated bureau­cra­cies, you really believe that Buzz Aldrin punched that guy in the face (see CNN clip below at the 2:45 mark) for noth­ing then by the tran­si­tive prop­erty one must also believe that NASA is could be so very clever that they actu­ally flew a cou­ple guys up there to plant some evi­dence and brought them home.

Ever won­dered what would have hap­pened if they didn’t make it home? The Smok­ing Gun is there.

Snopes has the skinny on this footage, but I added it for good measure.

June 17th, 2009 by Andrew

I really hate awful ring­tones. The ones that come with your phone I believe are ter­ri­ble, and I think they are pur­posely bad to make you spend money on the provider’s tones. And then, you pay $3–5 for 30 sec­onds or less of music when you can get the same song for 99 cents on iTunes — and have the entire song! So for­get about all that mess.

http://www.makeownringtone.com/

Ok, I know the web­site is really cheesy and there are lots of ads, but the inter­face works very well and even though they directly e-mailed the mp3 to my phone, they haven’t spammed me. Here’s my new ringtone:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

So get rid of that stu­pid “Ver­i­zon Moods” fac­tory ring­tone and get a one that won’t embarass you. It’s free.

October 10th, 2008 by Andrew

GOOG 411

Impress your friends! neigh­bors! col­leagues! strangers!

1–800-GOOG-411 is my favorite Google prod­uct you’ve never heard of. It’s awe­some… instead of shelling out $1 to Ver­i­zon or AT&T to get 411 infor­ma­tion, Google pro­vides it for free, and con­nects you. It will even send you a text mes­sage with the address and phone num­ber of the busi­ness you’re call­ing about, also for free. I’ve prob­a­bly used it a dozen times, and it’s been accu­rate every time.

Being good at Google has turned into a mar­ketable skill for me. I’m work­ing on some­thing big right now, so stay tuned…

October 6th, 2008 by Andrew

I think I’ve dis­cov­ered a bug in the Picasa 3 beta. I was work­ing with some pho­tos that I wanted to import only tem­porar­ily so I named the folder to be cre­ated ‘temp’. The pho­tos never showed up. They existed on the hard drive but never appeared in the Picasa library. I imported them a cou­ple more times, nam­ing them temp 2 and temp 3. These showed up nor­mally. When I renamed the orig­i­nal ‘temp’ folder, it imme­di­ately was found by Picasa and then scanned. I can’t find a ref­er­ence to this anywhere.

Undoc­u­mented fea­ture”, or bug?