Multi-Thread Chatting

It’s not uncommon for people to chat online with multiple people simultaneously and keep it all straight.  Sometimes I really wish you could open up multiple chat windows with the same person so we can talk about different topics simultaneously.  I don’t think it’d be any more complicated to keep straight than chatting with multiple people.

I do think two (or more) chat windows with the same person would come in really useful pretty often.  But you can’t do it.  I tried.  Maybe someday Google will realize how limiting it is to only have one conversation with a person at a time.

Amen, Brother

Oh Very Funny

I saw this on CNN a little while ago.  Today I had to do some hunting to find it again.  Probably one of the funniest commercials ever.

I’ve watched this a whole bunch of times; I laugh every time.

Halloween

For Halloween this year I spent the evening at my Grandma’s 70th birthday party.  Unfortunately, pictures often don’t really do things justice.

I mostly did the tattoos myself—they were individual 1 × 1 inch square temporary tattoos, so it took a little while.  My mother tailored my shirt (though she had no idea what costume it was for); my friend Shelli did my makeup.

I typically get a little carried away with costumes on Halloween.  I’ve had a lot of people who have heard rumors ask me about my previous costumes, so here are a couple more of them.  As always, you can click to enlarge.

My Other Half (2006)
My mother helped a lot in constructing this costume.  We cut two sets of clothes in half and she stitched them together into one.  Notice the tie that’s cut down the middle—including the knot.  The zipper on the pants even worked (being half jeans and half slacks).  My friend Nick was my tattoo artist.

Ax Murderer (2007)
I did the bloodying myself.  The stuff I bought to do it was cheap and really realistic.  It was pretty cool, though kinda messy.  And yes, the ax is real and so is the hair matted to the blade (it was kindly donated to the cause).

Earwig Clusters (2006)
Finally, I have to mention the dessert I made for a Halloween dessert making contest a couple years ago.  Made with real earwigs harvested in my parents’ backyard.  I got the recipe from my mother, who’s made them before (though I did modify it a little).

Can’t wait till next year.  As has been customary, I’ll probably wait until about two days before Halloween before I have a great idea for a costume.

Microsoft Windows Live Writer

Several posts ago I mentioned I discovered that Microsoft Word had the ability to publish blog posts.  I said I was going to experiment with it and see how it worked.  Now I’ve done so and am ready to release my findings.

Using Word to publish posts worked great initially.  Finally, I had a good table editor, spell check, and great formatting capability.  But very quickly I discovered a serious drawback: images.  Word has the ability to publish images to a server.  But it is apparently not compatible with the methods that Blogger uses to upload images.  There may be a way to do it, but I haven’t been able to find anyone online that knows how.  Everyone that has an interest in doing it is referred by other people to using Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer instead.  So I tried it out.

Windows Live Writer is a free program by Microsoft specifically designed to edit and upload blog posts.  It has a number of pretty cool features compared with Blogger:

• It was really easy to setup with Blogger and can handle multiple blogs
• It has more powerful formatting and font capability
• It has a table editor
• The edit mode shows your blog with the formatting it will have on the blog—including the width of the blog post
• The preview shows your blog as it will look with your blog’s theme
• The spellchecker checks spelling as you type, and gives suggestions in the context menu
• It has a word count
• It replaces -- with — and uses smart quotes: “ and ”
• Undo and redo work right and remembers lots of actions
• It handles pictures nicely, particularly justification and margins; you can also edit the picture right from the post
• The source code editor is hierarchal
• You can install plug-ins for additional functionality
• It reminds you if you haven’t put a title or categories
• Hyperlinks have more options, like opening links in a new window and automatically linking to previous posts
• It has paste special

Some of the enhancements are not quite as cool as Word’s: like the table editor and how it handles pictures (before the failed upload process).  Word is far more powerful.  But Windows Liver Writer is a lightweight program certainly superior to Blogger.

I really like the way Windows Live Writer displays the post while editing.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to post, repost, and repost the same blog post to get a picture or something to look right.  Now I can see exactly how it is going to look formatting-wise while editing and then go to the preview and see it with the background pictures and theme. 

Tables is something I’ve been wanting for a long time.  If you recall my post Easter Eggs from Outer Space, the way I formatted that so nicely was with tables.  But I had to do it manually in the source code, which took forever.

Uploading is really quick.  And it opens it in your browser when it’s done.  It can also access your blog and download previous posts to edit and republish.  When saving drafts you can save them on your computer or to your blog.

The only thing I find slightly bothersome is that it adds a paragraph tag before every paragraph.  That’s fine most of the time, but it also means that there is an extra space between the title and the first paragraph.  I just have to remove the paragraph tag from that paragraph when posting.  Well worth it for the extra features I’m getting in return.  And there might be a way to fix that I haven’t discovered yet.

You can download Windows Live Writer here.  It downloads the whole Windows Live suite, so I recommend only installing the stuff you want (in my case that is only Windows Live Writer).

So in sum, I use Windows Live Writer now for blogging.  I’ve used it for this post and I think every post since my Microsoft Word post.  But when I move away from Blogger I will likely switch to Microsoft Word.

Webforms, Webforms, Webforms

I think I’ve mentioned that my job is typically not very challenging.  A lot of the time it is quite boring, though fortunately I get extra projects every so often that are interesting enough to keep things tolerable.  But this week’s extra project has been the worst stuff I’ve had to do there yet.

The company I work for is doing a study on other companies’ response time for webforms: you fill out the webform for a company and then track when and how the responses come from that company.  The concept is good, and the technology to track the responses is pretty cool.  Here’s the really bad part: all the webforms have to be filled out manually.  Thousands of them.  And of course I was one of the lucky people that got the assignment to do it.  So in the past week I have filled out literally hundreds upon hundreds of webforms.  The monotony has been nearly unbearable.  My fingers have started getting stiff from being in the same position for so long copying and pasting, and copying and pasting, and copying and pasting data into the forms.  Fortunately we only have a few hundred to go, so sometime midday tomorrow I’ll be able to stop (I hope).

It turns out that filling these out is starting to warp me.  Today during lunch I needed to fill out a webform for something.  I can’t remember now what it was.  But I realized then that I have developed a pretty strong abhorrence for filling them out.  As soon as I saw the webform I thought, “Nope.  Changed my mind.  It isn’t worth it.  I’m not filling it out.”  And I didn’t.  I might not be able to fill out another webform for months.