Digital Identity
Posted by Mike | Filed under Random
In today’s day digital age, your online identity is increasingly becoming as important as your physical identity. If you don’t realize how true this statement is, take a moment and think about how many places online you enter a username and password, rather than your given name. Because of the power of Google, there is going to be a very extensive history of everything you’ve done online, with respects to places that you have signed up for an account and places where you have posted your.
Now, proceed with caution… you may not like the results. If you really want to see an extensive history on your online activities, simply head to your nearest search engine (Google) and type in your username, and hit search. Now, you can see quite a vast history. And if you have posted comments in the past, then take a read over them… they may be amusing. I did a simple Google search on my given name, and it yielded quite a number of results (not all of them actually applied to me, but there were still quite a few). Then I did a Google search of my online username that I use everywhere, and the difference between the two was staggering.
I recently enlightened a colleague to this fact, and the reaction on his face when he saw his online history was quite amusing. What does your history look like?
Tags: Google, identity, IRL, online, online identity
Online Training – Lynda.com
Posted by Mike | Filed under Random
There are so many different pieces of software out there that its hard to keep track. I wanted to get into After Effects to do some neat little tricks, and try my hand at it. I found some great (FREE) tutorials at VideoCopilot.net and they were great! The only problem was, the tutorials were using an older version of After Effects than the one that I have, which is CS5 (latest and greatest, always!). Now, I’m sure that I could’ve gotten my hands on an older copy of After Effects to follow along more easily, but I didn’t really want to do that. I searched a bit online, and I found Lynda.com. These guys have some great tutorials, and they even have some free samples. There are many different tutorials available on how to use After Effects, but not just After Effects there are tutorials for all the different CS5 Applications (Photoshop, Premiere, Flash, etc) so that was awesome. Then there are some on Microsoft Office, 3DS Max, and more. The great thing is, it really doesn’t cost that much. There are plans starting at $25 USD/month ($37.50 USD/month for the reference material, which I think is a little bit of a rip off). They also have a great service department. I tried signing up on Saturday and there was a problem with the Paypal, so I called the 1-800 number and talked to someone almost instantly. The customer service representative tried to help, but admitted that he didn’t know. So he asked me to call back during the week, which I was a little upset with. But before hanging up, he told me that he would give me a free 2 day pass so that I wasn’t waiting for someone. That was awesome. So if you need some training on how to use a specific CS5 application, head on over to lynda.com.
And before anyone says anything, I know that this sounds like a paid advertisement, but I promise you that I’m not getting paid – I was really just that impressed with everything and had to give them a plug.
Tags: Adobe Certified Training, Adobe Training, After Effects, After Effects CS5, CS5, Lynda.com, online training, training, tutorials
Greatest Human Being?
Posted by Mike | Filed under Random
How could you ever truly say there is a singular person that could have this title. What about all the people that you have never even known about? Well in my humble opinion, there is a singular person that I can say is probably the greatest human being of all time. That man is Norman Borlaug. Have you ever heard of him? Probably not, and that makes him an even better person. He is a Nobel laurete who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for something truly substantial, but not really all that exciting – he created genetically engineered high yield crops. Wow… that is boring. He was a humanitarian and an agricultural engineer, and for his creation of the high yield crops he definetly is at the very least in the top 10 greatest people of all time
Tags: food, genetically engineered, high yield crops, hunger, Nobel laureate, Nobel Peace Price, Norman Borlaug
Editing Visual Studio Menus
Posted by Mike | Filed under Programming, Random
I use Visual Assist X every time that I develop because it is one of the most amazing and useful plugins for Visual Studio, ever. However for some reason the context menu shortcut disappeared for some reason and it greatly slowed down my productivity. For a while I searched and tried to find a solution, and I finally did. Here is how to edit menus in Visual Studio:
If you click on main menu Tools -> Customize… The Customize window will open. Click on the Toolbars
tab at the top and select Context Menu by placing a check mark in its box on the left. This will place a ToolBar at the top of The IDE. Select Project and Solution Context Menus drop down list. Select the context menu to edit and then right click on the menu item to remove and select Delete. To Add menu items go to the Commands table of the Customize window Select a Categories and from the Commands section Drag and Drop the command in the same area you just deleted the previous. You will need to play around with it.
Tags: Context Menus, Editing Menus, visual studio
TestDriven.net
Posted by Mike | Filed under Random
I found out about this cool addin for visual studio, TestDriven.Net. If you do unit testing in Visual Studio, check this out (I believe that it works for both .NET langauges and C++).
Tags: Add-in, TDD, Test Driven Development, visual studio, Visual Studio Addin
Chuck Season 3
Posted by Mike | Filed under Random
Last night started off the newest season of Chuck. There were two episodes that aired last night, and this season has started off pretty good. Hopefully we can ensure that Chuck continues by giving our viewership. Not a whole lot of options on Sunday evenings, so hopefully it will do even better this year.
Tags: Chuck, Chuck Bartowski, Season 3
Stranger Danger
Posted by Mike | Filed under Random
One of my the TV shows I enjoy watching is Penn and Teller’s Bullshit. There was an episode regarding Stranger Danger and how parents project their fears regarding strangers onto their children. In this episode there was a story of a child who was allowed, at age 12 (not 100% sure on the age), to ride the New York subway alone. The child was fine, and nothing happened. His mother, the columnist, wrote about what happened and there was such an outcry against this action. Well, there is a website by the same mother called Free Range Kids. It seems interesting, as it advocates allowing children to experience the world instead of being held back. There is some pretty outrageous stories there… check it out for some laughs.
Tags: FreeRangeKids, Lenore Skenazy, Stranger Danger
1000 Ways to Die
Posted by Mike | Filed under Random
Well, there are always interesting things available for entertainment, especially from Spike. Now comes another show that seems to be a little interesting, 1000 ways to die. I haven’t yet watched it, but it seems to be quite interesting. Each episode seems to describe a different way to die. Check it out on Spike.
Tags: 1000 Ways to Die, Spike, SpikeTV
Deadliest Warrior
Posted by Mike | Filed under Random
For those of you interested in history, Spike has a very interesting series called Deadliest Warrior. I recently discovered this show and for those of you wanting to see history’s greatest warriors pitted against each other, with seemingly scientific analysis, check out this show. For those of you who like watching stuff on demand, you should be able to watch it online at Spike.
Tags: Deadliest, Deadliest Warriors, History, Spike, SpikeTV, Warriors
Codeswarm
Posted by Mike | Filed under Random
I have always loved data visualizations, and I’ve come across another. There is a great example of this visualization that can be found on the Subversion website (Click here). This data visualization is simply a commit history of the Subversion repository. For more information, take a look at the project website (Click here).
Tags: data, data visualization, visualization
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