trying to believe

I’ve decided to turn my current design into a distributable theme for Wordpress. It’ll be available over the weekend after I clean up some of the rough edges. Here are some of the things you can look forward to in the release of Effercio Blue 1.0:

• Support for Wordpress Tags (a new feature in Wordpress 2.3)
• Support for Dynamic Sidebar and Widgets
• Custom Link and Archive Page Styles
• and more?

If there’s interest in it, I might make some colored variations of it… Leave a comment if you’d like to be notified of it’s release.

NBC Universal has chosen not renew iTunes contract. Are they high? I bought every episode of Heroes last season, and it was one of the most bought shows last year. That’s $40+ they won’t be getting from me this year.

Every now and then, your computer - in my case, a Dell Inspiron E510 - will need some TLC. Freeing up disk space and running defrag can go a long way to keeping your system running better. I spent an hour or so yesterday doing some housekeeping and ended up deleting over 45+ gigabytes of old videos, unused applications and more. Today, my system feels zippier and more responsive. All of my core applications - Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver - are running better than usual. Consider this a friendly nudge to do the same on your own computer, if you’re not already doing it.

Well, I am nearly two weeks into my walking challenge and so far so good. I’ve walked a total of 7 times since August 17th, for a total of 8.59 miles and 3,291 calories burned. Considering my lack of activity prior to the 17th, I’d say I’m off to a pretty good start. Walking with the Nike+ sensor and being able to track my progress has made walking fun for me. It’s exercise meets video game in a way…

My only beef with Nike+ so far is the website. The all-Flash interface is certainly nice on the eyes, but it doesn’t offer the functionality I’ve come to expect from sites that offer “social” features. It should be easy to direct people to your profile page, but it isn’t. You should be able to see how your friends are doing, but you can’t.

1. If you want to share your progress, you have to do it via Nike-provided Flash widgets. You cannot link directly to your profile on the Nike+ website.
2. The only way you can keep track of friends is through challenges (or via widgets - IF they happen to display them somewhere). Then and only then can you click on your friends’ name … and see their last run, and total run time and distance.

Neither of these are deal-breakers for me, but they’re annoying. That’s why I am excited about RunnerPlus.com. It’s everything that Nike+ isn’t. It has profile pages. It has friends. It has better visualizations of run/walk data. And it works with or with Nike+. (You can set up your profile to sync up with your Nike+ account if you like. Otherwise, they offer a software solution that allows you to sync your runs/walks without having to bother with iTunes or NikePlus.com.)

RunnerPlus has:

• Better, more accurate visualizations.
• Calendar-view … so you can see which days you walked and how far.
• Profile pages with easy to remember URLs! Here’s mine: http://cdharrison.runnerplus.com/
• Friends! You can see how they are doing and they can see how you’re doing.

In short, it has more to offer than the official NikePlus website, and that’s a good thing. If you’re using Nike+, do yourself a favor and check our RunnerPlus.com. You’ll be glad you did.

Thanks for sharing this site with me, Patrick!

For only the second time ever in my life, I’m playing in a Fantasy Football league. 10 of us here at PowerServe thought it’d be fun to see how we’d stack up against each other. We held our Live Draft today, and here’s who I ended up with:

I guess I did alright… I’m honestly not sure, because I don’t follow sports, especially football, like I used to when I was younger.See Also: Wyatt’s picks

My son is going to be a geek. All the signs are there. He loves playing on the computer. He loves stealing my iPod video to listen to music and watch cartoons… The boy loves gadgets. What can I say? I’m a proud papa.

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. I never would have thought they would make another AVP movie. The first AVP wasn’t great, but the idea of Predators hunting Aliens is just too darn fun…

So, a new developmental version of Wordpress was released last night. Being the sucker that I am, I went ahead and upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 Beta1, and to my surprise, everything installed without any problems at all.

I haven’t seen a full list of all that’s been changed in this version, but based on my limited usage of it in the past half hour I can tell you about two of the updates that will make the most impact:

1. Tags. Posts now support tags without the use of a third-party plugin.
2. Plugin Version checking. When you’re managing your plugins, you’ll now be able to see if a newer version of it is available (assuming it supports update checking).

According to the announcement, this version also include “faster JavaScript” and “SEO-friendly URL redirection”.

All in all, it seems pretty stable so far. So, if you do decide to upgrade, know that it’s not a full release, and you’re bound to run into problems. Make sure you backup any Wordpress-related site files and database beforehand. Deactivate all plugins. Then upgrade. Reactivate your plugins one by one checking to make sure none of them break your site…

Maps for Us. You too can help save the children and the Iraq and Asian Countries.

Chubby? A virus might be to blame. And here I thought I was fat because of my addiction to Jolt and Pringles. How foolish of me…