One of the greatest pieces of third-party software was updated today and I must say, this app is sexy! At least that is the first comment that came out of my mouth when the SnagIt Editor started up.
(Oh what irony when I have to use Paint and Windows Print Screen to take a screenshot of SnagIt because it auto-hides the application to take a shot of something else. They must be bashful :D)
Some of the new features you can expect are:
- Sequential Captures
- Multi-image capabilities
- Quick Styles
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- Ribbon-based Menus
- Auto-store Images
- Image Tray
- Quick Access Toolbar
- Automatic tagging
- Custom tagging as one image or batch
- Quick Flags
- Visual Search Pane
- Visual Bookmarking
But like I said earlier, the new UI is awesome. If you already own a copy of SnagIt, check this link to see how much the upgrade is. The core product is only $49.95 and the upgrade from 8.x looks like it is $19.95. This tool is essential for writing blogs, articles, or books.
[Update: I originally had the pricing at $24.95, it is actually $49.95]
We are making a large effort to get rid of the SPAM coming through the comments on this site. To help me out (for now) can you forward your SPAM comments to support@geekswithblogs.com. This will then let me see the spammer's style and create a blocking technique.
D'Arcy is definitely killing the Speaker Idol presentation. Start booking your tickets for #teched09 to hear D'Arcy keynote the event.
Some of you have probably seen the new logo on our shirts that we gave out at the MVP Summit or on a few of my posts and wondered what is going on. We we are in the process of redesigning the community portal (currently just a homepage) of the site to allow readers and visitors of the site to learn more about who our bloggers are and what topics are of interest. With this redesign comes the a new look. This means we are killing the Green Monster. Sad day for me when we go live, but it had to be done. However, while I am on the subject of go live, it will happen soon. Michelle and I are expecting in late June/early July so I want to get everything done before them. Wish me luck.
The main purpose of this post is to give you a look at what we are working on and tell us what you think. This page was a fun one and many people are shocked at the size of the blogger cloud, but try it out and let me know what you think. Also, try it on the other browsers you have and take a screen shot if you have problems. The sort order is based on recent posting and the size is on the amount of posts total.
John, Jerod, and myself are here at teched 2008 | Developer Edition in Orlando, FL, however we have no clue of who else is here from Geekswithblogs.net. Please leave a comment or come find us at the Party With Palermo event tonight. GWB is definitely a proud sponsor of that event and we want to encourage others to join us for a good time tonight.
This year we arrived a day early on accident as most teched events kickoff on Monday. So to pass the time we played a roaring good game of putt-putt golf where I shot 5 under on the advanced course. Oh yeah...
Again, leave a comment or come say hi tonight!
You guys blog too much :D FullControl.net just pinged me and let me know that we have ran out of bandwidth on our account and will be filling it in with overage charges (don't worry about those). That is 1 Terabyte of traffic this month or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.
Good job and keep the content coming!
Recently, we started testing SmarterTools' SmartTrack application to replace our current support system. We were definitely using a early BETA and it had issues, but we knew the product would be in full release soon enough. So if you have tried to use the web interface lately, sorry it was broken.
But today is a new day and we have updated the system to the full version of SmartTrack and everything is active and ready to roll. There are tons of new features, but the big one is Online Chat. Please feel free to ping us whenever you have an issue via Chat or Ticket. We are more than happy to get you the information you need. Also, we will be implementing the Knowledge Base portion into the main site (that is undergoing a redesign as well right now). Stay Tuned.
This is a photo taken of me using my new Nikon D60 I received for my birthday and I couldn't be happier (as stated in the photo). I am by no means a Digital Camera Expert or DCE, but I do enjoy taking photos, especially when they turn out good.
My Review
- Good Price
- Good Photos
- Good Beginner's SLR
- Great Prices this weekend (Wolf Camera)
My Samples
My wife was kind enough to make me another cake for the office this year for my birthday (May 3rd). This year I wanted to use the new logo we had created for the new version of the site we will hopefully be releasing later this month. Here is a
link to last years cake.
Over the past 3 months, I have really been getting into playing the guitar. This was never easy for me because to get into playing the guitar, I would first have to own a guitar. I can't just go out and borrow a buddy's guitar because I don't know any Left-Handed players. So I had to drop a couple hundred dollars to see if I could play music.
The Squier Stratocaster
I started with a Squier Stratocaster from Musician's Friend (warehouse located in Kansas City) and began my music career :D. Jerod was gracious enough to start me down a path of learning and I will always be grateful for his teaching. The day I got the guitar we were going to meet in the office for our Thursday night meeting and Jerod was at home, up north in Kansas City for most of the day. I some how convinced him that he needed to stop by Musician's Friend and pick me and my wife up matching guitars for Valentines Day and he was willing. Michelle's guitar was red and mine was black and very much resembles the Rock Band Stratocaster.
The Les Paul
Well here she is, my new guitar. I must say I really enjoy the sound of this guitar. No this is not a Gibson, it is an Epiphone, but I am a beginner and don't want to go from a $200 guitar to a $2000 guitar.
The main issue I had with the Squier is it sounded very very tinny. It was missing that rich sound a better made guitar has. That sound where you don't even need an amp to be able to recognize a song because the sound is coming right out of the guitar. The Squier did not have anywhere near that sound, but the Les Paul definitely does.
The Les Paul is also a lot more comfortable to play for me. It could be the shape or the fact that the pickup switch is no longer there where on the Squier it was right at the base of my hand and I often hit it causing a different sound. I am sure many of you have done this on Rock Band. Instead the Les Paul has a tone switch to go between Rhythm and Treble. It works by ... well I don't know, it just works. Rob, will you please fill us in on that.
Guitar Center Experience
As you can see from this link, you don't have a lot of selection when it comes to Left-Handed Les Paul guitars. There are a few more than the ones shown, but they are in the $2000-5000 range and I will get one of those when I play the Sprint Arena or record my first gold record (not anytime soon).
For our anniversary, we decided to give each other money for a big gift since we haven't done that in a long time, so Michelle decided to keep hers around for after the baby is born and I decided to spend all of mine, but $21 dollars in about 2 hours. I forget who's idea it was to give money to each other, but it was a brilliant idea :D.
I walked in to Guitar Center and one of the kids there just looked at me and thought I was not going to buy anything, and walked off. The older gentleman next to him saw the sparkle in my eyes and knew I wanted a guitar today. I ask him, in a room that was Wall-To-Wall guitars, where are your left-handed guitars. He said, "You're a lefty, we have a bunch of those over here, let me show you." So we walked over to a support beam turned into a product display with 6 guitars on it. This was the left-handed selection. Ahhh the joys of being left-handed. Standing there with at least 200 guitars around me and I get six to pick from and that wasn't due to my budget, but rather, this is all the had. If you want to experience what it is like to be a left-handed person, go into your sporting goods store and ask to see the left-handed baseball gloves. If they have any, you should be able to pick from 2-4 while being surrounded by 50 different types of right-handed gloves.
So there she sat, the Les Paul I was looking for! I asked if I could play and he said of course and took me over to an amplifier. They must not get a lot of guitar sales because at first he was just selling me on the amp. I wanted the guitar. So I began to play with no pick and I never do that and could barely get a note out of it while sitting there, but the ones I could sounded just like I wanted them to in a guitar. So he asked, "Do you want to really hear this guitar? I have played for 20 years and can't play a note left-handed, but I can get the same guitar in the right-handed model and play it for you." I said, "Ahhh, yes please."
So the gentleman begins to school me in the ways of rock and made that guitar scream. I was sold after the first 10 seconds, but he was nice enough to give me a 10 minute demonstration playing different styles to show me what it could do.
Needless to say, this is my guitar now and I am really enjoying having it as a new member of the family :D.
Next Steps
- Must learn more chords.
- Need to master bar chords.
- Need to callus my fingers so have to play more.
- Need to get professional weekly lessons.
- A better strap would be nice
That is my journey with the guitar. Is it hard to pick up a guitar and play, absolutely. Can you make baby steps and learn as an adult, oh yeah! If you are interested (and not left-handed) you have many avenues to get a guitar cheaply and start playing. If you are a lefty like me, then sit on eBay, Craigslist, or somewhere else waiting to find one or do what I did and start with a nice cheap guitar to see if you like the craft.
Coders 4 Charities is kicking off and it has been far more successful than we expected. Doug and I both asked if we thought anyone would show up as we have had registration open for 2 months. We have 29 people here who have given up their weekend and 5 charities that are getting excellent software that will help them run their organizations better after the weekend
The Crew Early In The Morning
Rock Band Rooms (208 & 207)
Tonight is the Rock Band contest at 11:00pm, I will definitely have video for that on YouTube!
I decided to clean off my Zune and resync the files with my computer. I do this from time to time as my Zune seems to keep albums on it that I don't have on my host. When clicked sync now, I received the following issues.
And each item shows this message
I have been listening to this album for a few months now on a regular rotation. In my high school/college years I was really big into the band Superdrag. I have however started listening to Christian music for the past 6 months and I recently found that John Davis, the lead singer of Superdrag, has created some independent albums that are Christian. So needless to say, my excitement was off the charts when I discovered this fact.
As a paying Zune pass member since the day I got my Zune, I wondered why I couldn't sync. I visited the Zune Marketplace and saw this!
WHAT?!?! NOT AVAILABLE?! Did I mention this is my favorite album right now and it is gone?
I don't really know what the next steps are, the album was once there and now it is gone. I guess I will have to buy a real disc and rip it in to have this music again. Annoyed!
D'Arcy and Chris are now closely competing for King of the Mountain on Geekswithblogs.net. Because I am interested in this fight, I created some charts to demonstrate the battle over the time these guys have been blogging. Enjoy.
Total Blogging Over Time
Post Frequency Per Month
Cory Smith was nice enough to give me a lift to the campus this morning. Why is he my hero? The picture says it all.
As some of you may have seen from our Newsletter Announcement or from your blog that we have had a spammer loose on the site while I am travel in Seattle. Normally, I could do a better job of stopping this, but I don't have the tools I need to do more than remove the comments.
Please bear with me while I try to stop these messages that some might come through, but they will be removed. Thanks.
Just wanted to chime in a to say Jerod and I are on the road, had to stop to get some gas, Taco Bell, and surf the web with my bluetooth and MacBook. I love technology. We will be in St. Louis in about 2 hours.
Join us this year at the Party with Palermo, MVP Summit Edition. A newsletter went out last week announcing our sponsorship and requesting the names of our bloggers who are going to be there. We will be making up some shirts for you guys and need to know your size.
We are excited to see everyone again!
Looks like I will have the pleasure of speaking at the St. Louis MOSS Camp in April. The event looks awesome, and I wish we could draw a large enough crowd of speakers and attendees in Kansas City, but I don't think we are there yet. I will hopefully be presenting on WCM, but I left to options open to the organizers. If you are in the area, I would highly suggest this event.
List of Current Topics:
- MOSS UX Customization Best Practices
- SharePoint 2007 Custom Workflow
- SharePoint 2007 Custom Web Parts
- Introducing the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit
- Custom Authentication Providers for SharePoint 2007
- Data Integration Toolset
Due to some issues with the ISP of Community-Credit, we turned off the integration for a few days. This morning I received an IM from David stating the issues had been resolved so the CC integration is back online. If you are in the running for a prize, please manually post the entries that didn't make it up over the past two days.
Sorry for the time that has passed since I have been able to work on this bug. Many have reported the categories on their blog were the same for Galleries, Posts, etc. Please review your blog if your reported this issue to ensure it has been fixed.
Technorati Tags:
Geekswithblogs
I want to first off thank the 45 members of the Kansas City .NET User Group who attended the presentation held last night. Myself, John, and Doug appreciate the dialog and questions about the topic of ASP.NET MVC Framework and hope to see more interest in the topic as it furthers in development at Microsoft.
For those of you who couldn't make it or just want to see what the MVC Framework is all about, check out the samples and presentation located at the end of this post.
Recap of A Model View Controller Story:
Once Upon A Time there was a pizza parlor ran by Jeff, Doug, and John. Jeff was the manager, Doug was the cook, and John was the delivery guy. One day a customer called up the pizza parlor and placed an order with Jeff (the Controller). Jeff is really a "people person" and hands off the information needed to create the pizza to Doug. As the cook, Doug (the Model) uses the ingredients he needs to create pizza and when it is finished he gives it back to Jeff. Jeff then determines who would be the best delivery guy for this pizza based on the request and he picks John. John (the View) then places the pizza in a store branded box, decorates it with coupons, and gets on his motor bike and gives the pizza to the customer.
The next day, the owner of the pizza parlor wants to ensure the quality control of the pizza parlor is up to par so he fakes and order with Jeff and Jeff then asks Doug to create the pizza based on the order. Jeff and Doug have no idea this quality control test is going on so performance does not change in their actions to make the boss happy. After Doug gives the pizza back to Jeff, Jeff tries to find the best delivery guy and notices the owner's name is on the ticket so he hands the pizza to the owner where the owner dissects the pizza to ensure all the ingredients were properly assembled. At a later time the owner may want to ensure the entire process work by allowing John to delivery the pizza to ensure it was presented correctly and nothing was lost in the transportation process, but now he was to ensure their product at its core is correct.
The End.
Materials from the presentation:
Tonight, the minds will gather at AJI Software HQ and discuss the death of the "Green Monster". We have found someone we like that might work on the graphics side of the site, but tonight we are mapping out the layouts and features that will be in Geekswithblogs.net 3.0, the Wrath of Khan. If you have any pressing thoughts or needs for the Geekswithblogs.net Community Portal, please voice them here or forever hold your peace.
Also, congrats to Chris Williams on 900 posts.