New Design

Many of you have probably noticed the new design by now. I have essentially embedded my Shared Google Reader up above. This is the easiest way for me to post new blogs posts here with my comments above each post in blue. So, to actually see my latest posts, you'll have to use the smaller embedded scroll bar. I found this to be better than just making the Google Reader Share page my blog because I can't customize it with sidebar content or anything like Blogger lets me do. If you want to subscribe, you should see the Atom Feed link underneath all of my Google profile information.

So, don't think that I haven't updated since my last post in July of 2007. I have just been using the embedded Google Reader page to share interesting technology tidbits!

Aaron

Personally Using Technology

This tech blog site is all about technology and I felt it appropriate to use one of my favorite Google apps (Google maps) for a practical and cool use. We have heard from people all over the world that say that they are praying for our son Eli to win his battle with Neuroblastoma. I thought it would be fun to get a visual representation of that, so below you will find a map full of pushpins where people have said they are praying for our family. If you would like to add yourself or someone else that you know of to the list, just click the Add button and fill in as much or as little information as you want (city and state would be a good minimum). You do have to hit "Submit" twice as it verifies the city you entered to pick the right latitude and longitude and you might have to refresh the page after clicking close to see your pushpin appear. Also, if it happens to ask for a password, use EliRHorn and that should work. Otherwise, enjoy moving the map around and zooming into and around to see the growing network of people supporting Eli. And as always, thanks for the prayers!

Time Off

So you've probably noticed this blog hasn't been updated in a long time. There's actually a reason for that. My 3 year old son was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a cancerous tumor that is very large. We are battling that, and obviously I haven't been "blogging" lately because of it. In my "down time", I do still read up on my sources, so thanks to the ease of the Google Reader, I'll still be sharing things in my "commentaryless i.t. quickies" section of to the right hand side of the screen. If you don't want to keep coming here, you can access that page directly here. Or, you can subscribe to that as a separate RSS feed here. My "commentaryfull" blogging should resume once life starts to resemble normalcy again (no idea on when that will happen).

Freebies Round-Up: Icons, Buttons and Templates

Freebies Round-Up: Icons, Buttons and Templates | Smashing Magazine

For those that do any kind of web designing or have graphics needs where you want cool looking icons and buttons, but don't want to break any copyright laws...

Mystery of tiny faces on Vista DVDs solved

Mystery of tiny faces on Vista DVDs solved

So there is an actual microsopic photo of three guys in the hologram of the Windows Vista DVD. Cool Easter egg, but really there to make it harder to pirate the DVD. :-)

IE7Pro - The Ultimate Add-On for Internet Explorer 7

IE7Pro - The Ultimate Add-On for Internet Explorer 7

IE7Pro is a must have add-on for Internet Explorer, which includes a lot of features and tweaks to make your IE friendlier, more useful, secure and customizable. IE7Pro includes Tabbed Browsing Management, Spell Check, Inline Search, Super Drag Drop, Crash Recovery, Proxy Switcher, Mouse Gesture, Tab History Browser, Web Accelerator, User Agent Switcher, Webpage Capturer, AD Blocker, Flash Block, Greasemonkey like User Scripts platform, User Plug-ins and many more power packed features. You can customize not just Internet Explorer, but even your favorite website according to your need and taste using IE7Pro.

Safari 3 Public Beta for WINDOWS

Apple - Safari 3 Public Beta

So to me, not being a Mac person, the only notable news from the Keynote speech from Steve Jobs at WWDC 2007 was that they have released a public beta of Safari (the web browser for Macs) for Windows. It's supposedly faster. Safari has 5% of the browser market share. IE has 78% and Firefox has 15%. I'll give it a shot and see how well it works. Can't see getting away from IE, but should be fun to try a new browser for a few days...

Windows based iPhone

HTC Touch

Microsoft says they don't want to get into hardware of phones, they'll keep pushing out Mobile OSs and let the hardware vendors like Motorola and HTC do the work. So here's the first response to the iPhone by a Windows based device. The HTC Touch.

My Outlook Calendar Published Online

So maybe people have known about this for a while, but today while playing in the Outlook Calendar view, I found a way to publish my calendar online. I can also e-mail itineraries from a day/week/month, etc. The online publishing is really cool because I can have it auto update with just my availability without showing what the appointments are. So if someone wants to see whether I'm free or busy, they can check this website that just synchs with my Outlook. If they have Outlook, they can subscribe to my calendar and have it in their Outlook without going to the website. Pretty cool for when you want to share your availability with those outside your company, especially with those not using Outlook!

There are a lot more features like being able to have people contribute to it and only show it to people you invite and giving access based on whether they are Office Live users or not. I just thought generic availability to everyone was a pretty cool feature...

Jobs and Gates Interview Highlights

Highlights from the Steve Jobs (Apple) and Bill Gates (Microsoft) interview where they were on the stage at the same time for the D5 conference.