OCDProgrammer.com

In my effort to migrate to my more professional domain I needed to setup a new profile in my email client of choice, Thunderbird.  Many other clients have this built in, but unbelievably Thunderbird does not. 

Thankfully there is a plug-in to make it happen.

After you install the plug-in you will see the following menu option:

Now what is great about all of this is you can actually have multiple identities open at once.  When you select a new identity to open up you get the following dialog box:

So why do this and not just have all my emails checked from one profile?  To make 100% sure that when I want to email somebody from OCDProgrammer.com with my OCDProgrammer.com signature, I do.

One of the purposes of the recent site design was to give my actual identity a bit more publicity.  One of the things I noticed is that you can customize your LinkedIn URL.

So instead of some auto-generated text at the end of the URL you can have  your custom text, or in my case my name.

You can do the same to your profile by logging in, clicking 'Edit My Profile' and then scrolling down to the section that has a link to your public profile:

Then at the top of the page you'll see the option to change your URL.

So looking at my stats I see I get a lot of visitors from my site.  Many more than I am aware of (and I'm aware of enough...).  But did you know you can save yourself some time and still get to read my blog?  There are two ways, one more technical than the other. 

1. Get emailed my post.  Everyday about 7AM there is a service I use that will email you the previous day's post. Its that easy.  Just click this link and fill out the information.  You'll start getting the post tomorrow.

2. RSS Feeds.  This is a bit technical in nature, but there are programs out there that will allow you to follow any site that supports RSS (like this one, or any podcast, or virtually any blog).  If you fall into this category (ie you read several blogs contact me and I'll walk you through the process. Just ask my buddy Brian Richard about how much time it saves you to use an RSS reader. Now one added benefit to this in regard to my site is that not only can you get notified of the new post, but also the comments on each post.  My two RSS feeds are:

Post Feed.
Comment Feed.

So as you can see there is really no need for you to come to my site most of the time.  The only time you need to come is when you want to read the comments (if you choose option 1) or when you want to make a comment.

One feature that I use to increase my productivity is an application called AlwaysOnTop.  Basically it adds a menu to the right click on the title bar to make a window 'always on top'.

This allows me to open up one document (lets say a tutorial on how to do something in Visual Studio) and make it 'on top' while I have my IDE open to walk through the tutorial.

There are a lot of similar applications out there, but none of them that I've found are are good as this one.

I've had two interesting things happen to friends computers over the past few months.

First I got an email from my friends at Tin Roof (by the way, if you want to support a great charity... this is it) telling me that she needed to file an extension on her taxes before she leaves for Nicaragua on Tuesday. However when she started Turbo Tax she was getting an error.

Further investigation by me (via a VNC connection I set up with her a while ago) realized that this was a .NET error.

Turbo Tax spit out the following error: 20888 39915.  A Quick search of their site gave this article.  Basically blaming .NET and their solution has a link to a program that totally wipes out .NET from your system so you can start over.  I downloaded the program, ran it and then reinstalled .NET and her problem was fixed (well after I ran a reboot.bat file that was in the Turbo Tax installation folder, but that's another issue all together).

Then I have another buddy who had been using a program I wrote for my church to transfer files between members of the multimedia team.  Several months ago a basic Windows component of it stopped working right.  I was at a total loss for a solution (as a simple uninstall and reinstall of .NET didn't help).  I let it drop... but I emailed him today with this fix and my hunch is, that this will get him up and running again.

What frustrates me the most about this, is that Microsoft's .NET uninstall doesn't fully uninstall itself.  Many years ago I did some work for Lexmark's All in One printers and one of the BIG things they did was make sure that their uninstall completely wipes out any record of the machine being on your system.  And really there is no excuse for any other behavior.

If you are a .NET developer you've faced the issues I've faced when using a major search engine... results that don't really fit your problem.

But Google has an interesting feature that allows you to create a custom search engine.  You define the sites it searches. 

Dan Appleman has put together a site www.searchdotnet.com that searches his list of .NET sites and overall the results I get from this site are pretty good.

I recently ran across this post and loved it!  I do some image creation stuff and the hardest part of my task is picking a font.  Now I can print out my installed fonts and quickly pick one out.

Now here is the guys code, but slightly edited.  As his had a few syntax errors in it. 

try

{

    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

    foreach (FontFamily family in FontFamily.Families)

    {

    sb.Append("<h2 style='color:blue;font-family:Arial;'>" + family.Name + "</h2>");

    sb.Append("<font face='" + family.Name + "' size='6'>");

    sb.Append("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890");

    sb.Append("</font><hr/>");

    sb.Append(Environment.NewLine);

    }

    lblFontList.Text = sb.ToString();

}

catch (Exception ex)

{

    lblErrorMessage.Text = ex.ToString();

}

I'm on vacation and the wireless internet access I have is restricted by MAC address.  I initially signed up on my personal PC (not knowing it was MAC address restricted) but needed access on my work PC.

So I went looking for information on masking my MAC address on my work PC to match my personal PC.  Led me to look into the advanced properties of the wireless card, and I found the answer.

As an FYI I have a Dell Wireless 1490 Dual Band WLAN Mini-Card installed.

Step 1:  Go to the device manager (if you don't know how to do this, you don't need to be doing any of this).

Step 2: Expand Network Adapters, Right click your wireless card and click properties.

Step 3: At the next window go to the Advanced Tab and select the "Locally Administered MAC Address"

Step 4: Enter in the value field your custom MAC address, and there is how you do it.

Was pretty happy to find it this easy.

So I am in the process of transferring my church 's website from www.bataviachurch.org to www.lifestreamcc.org since we changed our name on June 1st.

Along with this change it was required of me to get a new FeedBurner link for our sermons since I had 'BataviaChurchOfChristSermons' originally.

I figured I'd give a few simple names a try first.... and you won't believe what worked.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/streamingsermons

Thats it!  I was stunned that out of 1.7 million feeds that this wasn't already taken.  But it wasn't!

Very cool.

Previously I posted about Window Clippings. It is a great piece of software for grabbing screen shots.  Window's Vista has a built in application similar to Window clippings, but not XP.

Kenny Kerr, recently released version 2.1.  There are many new features to it, even one that I requested.

He has a version that is free, but it puts a WindowClippings.com water mark on the image. 

So check it out!