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August 31, 2005

Katrina's Ripple Effect

And unfortunately this is just the beginning.

Posted by jachong at 08:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Wisdom Teeth

Yesterday Jiho got 2 of his wisdom teeth out...that's why he has that chipmunk look.

Jiho insisted on publishing a picture of his now-on-a-baggie teeth, I refused to it, way to gross for the general public, but feel free to ask him a copy of the picture directly.

Posted by jachong at 08:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 30, 2005

Candy Tasting

Today with non apparent reason we had candy tasting...

Sample 1

Sample 2

Sample 3

Sample 4

Sample 5

Sample 6

"Almond Joy" took my thumbs up! (now I need some coffee)

Posted by jachong at 04:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 28, 2005

Jiho DO cook

Friday night we're invited to witness Jiho and Chungwon cooking skills at Matthew and Robbi's kitchen. Great food and great company!

We should organize an Iron Chef tournament, I'm sure that my guacamole will kick some Asian butt.

Posted by jachong at 12:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 26, 2005

Our Discovery Channel Series

This entry is a milestone for us. I will be dropping pictures of the whole "series" here.

(For those who doesn't know what's going on, we're pregnant and NO, the Discovery Channel is not chasing us with a camera)

Posted by jachong at 11:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Dog's Spa

Yesterday Luciana took Bert-O for his first "professional" wash/groom. No doubt that they do really know their job.

Posted by jachong at 11:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 25, 2005

$378 For BWI - MEX - BWI

When Webcrawler was launched almost 10 years ago, I loved it because you could search on one site and get results from multiple search engines. Now, Sidestep is doing the same, it searches for the best deals (according to their PR department) across the different travel sites so you can have the results in ONE page.

Hey, that's priceless if you have a 15" monitor!

Posted by jachong at 02:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Happy B-day Whatley!

27 is her the magic number this year. ;)

Posted by jachong at 01:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Invitation Only?

When Google launched their beta email service a little bit over a year, you could only get an account by invitation only...

Now there are some websites that gather those "unwanted" invitations and are being distributed to people who really wants a gmail account. I decided to give it a try and 45 minutes later, voilá! Now I have a gmail account.

See Google? Someone figure out how how to knock down your email bouncer!

Posted by jachong at 01:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 24, 2005

Poor Mouse

This is just the wrong way to die.

This is a follow-up from another type of bug we found at the office.

Posted by jachong at 10:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Happy B-day Bert-O!

8 months will be.

Posted by jachong at 06:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 23, 2005

Horny Pups

That's right, someone came up with this.

I loved one of their FAQs:

- Can I Train My Dog To Put It On Himself?

No, the dog will require human intervention each time he wishes to put on or take off a condom.

Oh, they already have a recall.

Posted by jachong at 02:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Remembering Old "Switch Ads"

Today Jiho brought to my attention Ellen Feiss' fan site. If you remember, Ellen's ad became Apple's funniest "switcher" ad. You can see the entire collection of ads here.

BTW, don't forget to watch Dave Chapelle's spoof ad.

Posted by jachong at 10:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Not So Though

Well, TS (Tropical Storm) Jose never made it as a hurricane, I had bigger expectations for this storm, something like Andrew or Hugo (but without all the loss).

Oh well, that was my failed attempt to make it to the headlines...

Posted by jachong at 10:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 22, 2005

Anal Sacs

Today we have to take Bert-O to have his anal sacks emptied, a very painful and stinky process. If you want to see the in/outs of this process, you can do it by clicking here.

Now, $75 after and several rounds of air freshener Bert-O is fine.

Posted by jachong at 11:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 16, 2005

We're Pregnant

Yes we are. Luciana is almost 12 weeks...wow.

Have you noticed that tiny button on the right that says "Make a Donation"?

I should change it for "College Fund" now.

Posted by jachong at 10:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 14, 2005

Jennifer's Arrival

Today we helped Jenny with her move. Jenny is a very old friend from Mexico that is going to start working on Baltimore, is funny indeed how fate works. Welcome to Baltimore "Hon".

Posted by jachong at 09:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 13, 2005

A Big Fly (Cicada)

This is a scary bug. Kinda remind me the ones we got last year but these ones are bigger and louder.

Another monster to the list...

Posted by jachong at 11:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 11, 2005

The "Now Playing" Mistery (Repost)

The reason I'm posting this entry again is because I haven't found an "official" (or a more simplified method yet) on how to integrate iTunes with MovableType on a Macintosh running OS X (10.4.2). Hope this time Technorati can ping it accordingly so this can pass along.

==============
For several weeks I wanted to implement a section into my blog of what tracks are being played on the server's iTunes. It was not an easy task due to the lack of a plugin that can run on a OS X environment. On the PC side though, you can find a great plugin that can do all this written by Brandon Fuller.

Brace yourself...

What you need:

- OS X (10.4.2) I have it running from 10.3.8
- iTunes 4.9 (version 4.71 worked well)
- Tracks WITH artwork, if you don't have the artwork of your tracks, a blank image will be displayed.
- The now defunct Kung-Tunes v2.2
- Holocore's OnDeck v.1.7

Putting the pieces together:

Launch Kung-Tunes, this will launch iTunes automatically:

- Prefences Menu/Upload window --> Set Kung-Tunes to save the extracted information locally into a whatevername.html file inside your webserver's documents folder.

- Preferences Menu/runtime:

- Timer: 0
- Check "Auto-start timer" and "Produce info file..."
- The number of extracted tracks is up to you, in my case I have just one.
- Check also the option to "Upload inactivity message..."

- Format Menu --> Prior to modify the default values of this section, I strongly suggest to build the page from "html" until "/html" that is going to display the art and track information, is more simple to visualize it in this way. A simple 4-row 1-column table will do the trick.

Row 1 --> **Insert here a "img src="album.jpg" width="130" height="130" border="1""
Row 2 --> Current Track Tag
Row 3 --> Blank (optional)
Row 4 --> Last Played Tag

**The artwork is going to be provided by Holocore's OnDeck.

Also, don't forget to include this tag:

"meta http-equiv="refresh" content="60""

This will refresh the content of the page every 60 seconds.

- Once you have built your page, insert the Kung-tunes tags into the proper cells of your table. Keep a close look on the usage of these, they can be a little bit confussing.

- When you're done, chop you html page and paste it into the proper sections of Kung-Tunes' Format windows, the header and footer sections are very straight forward. My Header ends with the "body" tag and my footer section starts with the "/body" tag, you know what's above and below them. The Playing, Recent and Inactivity window is filled with my now chopped table.

-Save your template and test it by pointing your browser to the page you told Kung-Tunes to save the extracted information. You should see the current track information if iTunes is running or the "inactivity message" if iTunes is paused.

Artwork, launch OnDeck and check the following

Preferences/Artwork

- Check "Look for embedded artwork"

Preferences/Information

- You don't need to modify anything here.

Preferences/Servers

- Scale to "130" (remember the tag on Kung-Tunes)
- Method --> Local
- Server Path -> to your webserver's documents folder ending with "album.jpg" (same location where kung-tunes is saving the .html file)
- The rest of the fields leave them as-is

Preferences/Behavior

- Idle sleep for 60

Function Menu

- Check just "Upload Artwork"

That's it, play a song in iTunes (preferable with artwork) and give some seconds to OnDeck to pull the image and to Kung-Tunes to generate the html. Point your browser again into the html file that Kung-Tunes generated and you should see this time the artwork being displayed along with the track information. Simple no?

This simple page can now be placed into Movable Type with a simple "iframe" tag.

As a note. OnDeck has the ability of display the track information but on my tests, OnDeck will sometimes crash when generating a html-based document.

More Extras:

If you want to have full remote control of what is being played, you can control iTunes through your browser by using DeadEnd Software's "WebRemote".

If you want also to stream what is being played, you can use Rogue Amoeba's NiceCast.

All the above software works in conjunction very well and gives you full access and control of your iTunes library...inside Movable Type.

Posted by jachong at 10:57 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

My First .07 Cents

Just 24 hours after implementing Google's ads into this blog, I got my first 7 cents! (or 212 clicks) Yeah!

Now, if I drop those values into a simple math operation...

3,070 clicks = $1 dollar
30,700,000 clicks = $10,000 dollars

At this pace, it will take me:

144,811 days or 396 years to reach my $10,000 goal. Sad, indeed.

Posted by jachong at 10:00 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 10, 2005

Show Me The Money!

Due to the lack of monetary response from our "Flood Watch" project. I decided to give it a try to Google's Adsense program. So far it works great (from the technologically point of view) hope I can say the same when I start cashing Google's checks. (LOL!)

So now you know kids, click on those banners and let this site drive you through the unexplored side of the Super Highway Of Information.

Posted by jachong at 02:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 09, 2005

Give Me Back My Updates!

When Microsoft announced a few months ago their "Windows Genuine Advantage" strategy, several people rolled their eyes...

Well, as expected. It was cracked.

Posted by jachong at 04:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 07, 2005

August's Gallery Is Up

We'll be dropping photos here if something out of ordinary happen.

Posted by jachong at 12:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 06, 2005

Leo's Mosquitoes

This is what you get if you hang around without "Off". Thanks to Karen for the Benadryl.

Posted by jachong at 10:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 05, 2005

Giulia & Laura

I'm sure Giulia and Laura are going to ask me for a "hard print" of this photo...

Maybe also from this one:

Posted by jachong at 11:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Shattering Windows Vista

The first virus for the still-beta version of Microsoft's Windows Vista is out...

**sigh** Oh well...

Posted by jachong at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 04, 2005

The 102 Mark

I'm starting to get tired of this "heat wave", this was the temperature at 6:00PM

Posted by jachong at 06:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 03, 2005

Pasta Is Good!

Funny to hear that this past Sunday Atkins Nutritionals fell into Chapter 11. It somewhat remind me when the dot-com bubble bursted. Humans are driven by hype, we can't resist it (like a slice of full-carb'd-pizza).

I'm not the right person to judge if the Atkins program was worth the effort to sacrifice those yummy carbs, but at the same time, I don't recall seeing any Italian-pasta-eater overweight, nor a french-croissant/baguette-power-consumer overweight. I guess just American people is looking on the wrong place when it comes to weight loss...or again, we just crave for the hype, without moving a finger.

Posted by jachong at 02:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 02, 2005

Finally!

For years Macintosh have been criticized for their single-button mouse, this critic became more annoying for the guys at Cupertino when hardware companies started to invade the market with really complex (and most of the time ugly) mice, these mice where full of buttons and with a big scrolling wheel, having the impression that you're controlling the Enterprise.

Well, Apple came up with this. No more "buttons" at all.

Posted by jachong at 09:46 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack