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In: Wordpress
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My long-time friend Bryan recently described me as “a person who will spend a lot of money on some new electronic gadget and then take it apart before he even uses it.” He’s right; I can’t help myself. I want to make everything “better.” This has extended into the use WordPress Plugins on my site. I’m always looking to add something new and my plugin count has increased to nearly 40. But the list has grown large and I’ve started to debate the usefulness of several of them. I then receive an e-mail from a native Dutch speaker by the name of Ilse, who reverse-translatedRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 11 Comments

THX just announced a new specification for home theater: THX Loudless Plus. My initial thought was, “I bet this means yet another new THX equipment specification.” Well, yes, it does. The benchmark specification for all future receivers will now be THX Ultra2 Plus and THX Select2 Plus. But this is not a bad thing; this specification addresses a real need in home theater: consistent surround sound levels regardless of the listening volume.     Currently, the best way to reproduce a movie sound track is to calibrate your speakers to a certain reference volume level and make sure the volume knob is always at thisRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 15 Comments

A few weeks ago, I received a review sample of the RocketFish Universal Wireless Rear Speaker Kit. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with it; here are my thoughts. For those of you not familiar with the Rocketfish, it is a new brand that is exclusive BestBuy. The products range from cables to computer accessories to flash cards. The term “wireless rear speaker kit” is somewhat of a misnomer as it does not include rear speakers, but this is obvious at first glance of the packaging or description. The kit consists of two components: a small transmitter unit that is located at the sourceRead More →

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In: Entertainment
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I’m not going to write a comprehensive review of the movie, I’m just going to sum it up like this: The Bourne Ultimatum is the best movie of the summer. The plot is smart, the action scenes are intimate and intense, and the time line is ingeniously tied to the previous movie. Casino Royale was the best James Bond movie ever and The Bourne Ultimatum is better. My entertainment advise for the weekend is to immediately pop The Bourne Supremacy into your DVD player for a 2-hour refresher because you don’t want to miss the ties between the two movies. Then head to movie theaterRead More →

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In: Life Reflections
With: 4 Comments

10 years ago today was my first day of work at Cummins. I just received my company logo tie tack with an emerald, to go next to my 5-year sapphire version. During this time I’ve: had 5 different jobs had 8 different bosses had jobs where I spent more time in the field than at my desk had jobs where I spent had jobs where I spent 100% of my time at my desk gained experience in engine performance and design, control systems, product validation. new product launches, project management with small/large suppliers, interaction with small/large customer, IT project manage/specification/validation/launch, and financial reporting/forecasting switched fromRead More →

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In: Reviews
With: 85 Comments

I’m gleefully excited to have just completed my order for a brand new Lenovo Thinkpad T61 laptop. I’ve been a huge fan since my first Thinkpad 600 in 1999, followed by a T20 in 2001, and a T30 in 2003. They are extremely solid, well supported premium notebooks and are well worth the extra investment versus lesser hardware. Better yet, they were provided by work, so I didn’t have to buy one. Unfortunately, my employer switched to Dell and I’ve been stuck with the mandated Dell D620 for the past year. I’ve gotten used to it, but it’s no Thinkpad. I re-tasked my current desktopRead More →

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In: Wordpress
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I finally got around to updating my website to version 2.2.1. The feature I was most looking forward to built-in tagging. I was a previous user of Ultimate Tag Warrior, but I had to stop using it because it broke the WordPress search feature (posts with no tags were not included in search results.) To my surprise, I couldn’t find the tag feature or the Ultimate Tag Warrior importer. After a great deal of Google searching, I found that tagging was removed at the last minute from WordPress 2.2.x and will be delayed until 2.3. Additionally, I found that Christine Davis release a new (actuallyRead More →

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In: Web
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After reading an informative post by Paul Stamatiou on blog traffic, I decided to join Technorati and see what it has to offer. Truthfully, I didn’t even know that it offered user accounts and statistics, but it apparently it does. Anyway, to get things started, here is a link to my Technorati Profile.Read More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 1 Comment

I just posted a revised version of my home theater calculator.  The new revision adds the following enhancements: Added feature to allow calculation of Visual Acuity Viewing Distance based on eyesight of the viewer. (The default is 20/20 vision; changing the input to 20/10 vision with show that the viewer will be able to spot resolution deficiencies at much greater distances due to more acute eyesight.) Fixed bug in the aspect ratio input that caused international users to have problems (problem was related to using “,” as decimal delimiter instead of “.”) Added cells to the far right of the spreadsheet to allow changing andRead More →

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In: Concerts
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Seating Location: First row, 2 seats right of center Show Rating: 4/5 Crowd Rating: 3/5 I was fortunate enough to get some pre-sale, front row tickets to O.A.R. and, after zero effort, convinced my friend Luke Shiver to join me. We left Columbus after work and headed south to Louisville. With a couple of hours to kill, I suggested we give Browing’s Brew Pub a try. The place was packed because the Riverbats had a game, but it quickly cleared-out. I had two different beers (one was average, the other quite tasety, but I don’t remember the names) but it was the Hot Brown IRead More →