Vacay

Disneyland was faboo. We also went to the beach, the tar pits, Olvera street. Lots of driving - portable DVD player saves the day for our little pre-reader.

Family photos in this post, additional photos later.

reveal-your-inner-geek

Time for another reveal-your-inner-geek post.

Desktop Modding

• TaskBar Shuffle (http://nerdcave.webs.com/). A free, lightweight app that lets you group, drag, and center-click-close your applications in the task bar. Love it. Fabulous way to make Windows more like a modern browser. I run XP, so I'm not sure if this feature has made it into newer operating systems. Highly recommended. I mostly use it for closing apps by center-clicking, which is delightful.
• StrokeIt (http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/). A free, lightweight mouse gesture interpreter. Ever since I discovered mouse gestures in firefox I've been in love with the idea. For lots of web use, I end up keeping a hand on / near my mouse for scrolling and selecting. Being able to do additional actions that keep your hand on the mouse removes the need to swap back and forth between keyboard and mouse all the time, which is great. I use this frequently to semi-automate my workflow at work. I rely heavily on the type-to-find functionality in firefox, but there are other options as well. Here are some of the ones I use all the time. For each of these, you would hold down the right mouse button during the gesture, then let go.
• >> "right" then "down" = new tab in Firefox or in SciTE. Creates a new email in Outlook.
• >> "C" drawn bottom to top = close a tab in Firefox or in SciTE.
• >> "right" = move to next tab (to the right) or next older email in Outlook
• >> "left" = move to the previous tab (to the left) or the newer email in Outlook
• >> "up" = move to the parent email folder in Outlook
• >> "slash down to the left" = minimize all of your windows. "slash up to the right" = restore them all
• >> "M" from the desktop = start up Outlook, Firefox, SciTE, and iTunes (the list is customizable of course)
• >> "down" then "right" = select next item in the list and go to it (type-to-find "Next >>" then [ENTER] in JIRA). "down" then "left" goes to the previous entry.
• >> "left" then "up" = go to the parent list in JIRA or the Dashboard in Confluence
• >> "C" = email this in the NYTimes (type-to-find "email this link", then [ENTER])
• >> "A" (no need for the crossbar) = fill in my email address and click send (type to find "email to", then [TAB], then type out my email, then [ENTER])
• >> "P" = select the custom "prioritize" workflow in JIRA
• >> "v" = scroll to and select the prioritize button in JIRA
• >> Hold any gesture past the 250 millisecond gesture timeout value and the standard gmail mouse gestures will work. I could probably work around building my own, but it would be a pain since I don't enable keyboard shortcuts.
• Next time I have donation cash, I'm totally donating to these developers.

Firefox modding

• I'm running Firefox 3.5.2
• >> about:config extensions.checkCompatibility = false so a couple of these will work with the latest.
• >> Options > Advanced > check 'Search for text when I start typing'
• Addblock plus (removes most ads from your browsing experience)
• Add-art (replaces adds that get through with contemporary art = love it)
• Auto Dial (visual list of recently visited pages - chrome-ish)
• >> Home page = chrome://autodial/content/autodial.xul
• AutoPager (no need to click "Page 2" or any subsequent page link. I pretty much only use this for NYTimes.com, but there I love it).
• DisableMenu (auto-hides the menu bar. Reveals it when you mouse over it). More screen real-estate!
• Download Statusbar (your files download and display in the statusbar rather than in a separate window. Very chrome-ish).
• Email yourself (gmail myself a link to any webpage with the click of a button). Any selected text from the page gets sent in the email body.
• GoogleGears (for offline gmail only at this point)
• Hide Caption Titlebar (removes the blue bar at the top of firefox, moves the icons down and subtly displays them on the address bar)
• Personas for Firefox (I'm using a Hokusai 'Waves' theme at the moment. Love that picture).
• Risizeable Textarea (drag your input text boxes to any size you want. Lovely when you're writing up a decent sized post or especially when editing a populated text area)
• TabWheel Scroll (whenever your mouse is in the tab area, scrolling the mouse wheel moves through your list of tabs).

Overall, I'm in total geek heaven. Finally, my apps do what I have for so long so desperately want them to do.

Monday Masons

Dinner and games with Kem, Michelle, and West yday at our place.

French fries, onion rings, corn on the cob, raspberries, strawberries, homemade chicken nuggets, apricot cobbler, brownies, and ice-cream. Yum yum! We played Last Word, a game of naming objects in categories based on the first letter. We chatted. C entertained us all. BBQ remix later this week at Kem's place. Doing stuff with people who are cool turns out to be surprisingly life-ful.

Early August 09

I know, such ingenious titles. I've been wanting to get some photos from our camera and upload them as an excuse to add a few entries, but haven't.

Last week: J finished her big WGU editing project!
We went to bear lake, ate raspberry shakes, swam (surprisingly warm for bear lake). C slid on one of the giant 20 foot inflatable slides and absolutely adored it.
Saturday we had a bbq with neighbors in the early afternoon. Then an MPP party in the afternoon.

Who: Stays and Chandlers plus their adorable kids
Food: We had tortilla basil wraps with tasty filling, home-made bread, cheese fondue, chocolate pudding pie with chocolate-dipped cherries, and brownies.
Other: We talked tons and played Taboo for a while. Ainslee and Coriel played together / near each other and seemed to have a good time.

I'm trying to put another party together where more people can come. We'll see.

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I'm feeling techy. Resurrected my google reader and added it to my iGoogle homepage (which I actually look at). Added some friends and fams blogs. Blogging. Tweeting. Mad modding for firefox. I'll rave about that later.