Still trying to sell my house

By Josh Highland in comic, funny, Josh's Rambling

why waste money on rent?
I love this cartoon from toothpastefordinner.com, but i think its wrong. The housing market is down…the BEST time to buy a house!

I am trying to sell my house right now, you can see it at 2061Redlands.com. Its a great place. You should go there, fall in love with it, and then buy it. It would be a win-win situation! You would be getting an awesome place.

UPDATE:
The Fed has decreased the rate by 3/4 a point! Here are a few articles on it:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080122/ap_on_bi_ge/fed_interest_rates
http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/fed/main-jan2008.asp
(thanks Christian!)

2061Redlands.com

A man and his devices

By Josh Highland in comic, funny, hardware, Josh's Rambling, semi-legal

I have known about the tv-b-gone for some time now. If you don’t, its basically a small device that will turn off any tv in a matter of seconds, from over 200 feet away.

Earlier this week I saw one of the coolest/most screwed up things I have seen in a while. One of the guys form gizmodo took a tv-b-gone device into CES (consumer electronics show in las vegas)and wrecked the place. Here is the video http://youtube.com/watch?v=ICpM3ItIhI0

After seeing it, I had to build one for myself. $20 and 4 days later I had the kit in hand. It took me a bit to make it, as I have never soldered anything this small. I got it put together, and it works. All the TVs die the second i press the on button and aim this thing.

I have a feeling that this is going to be one of my new best friends. Just holding it makes me want to go play some pranks! I will be posting some pictures and videos later on for sure.

UPDATE!
My favorite web comic, toothpaste for dinner recently ran this…
turnitoff-tv-device_resized.gif

The GmailThis! bookmarklet

By Josh Highland in internet, javascript, software, web 2.0

I use GMail as my main email client. Often I’m at work and I see something online that I think is useful, and I want to remind myself of it. I have tried righting down URLS on scraps of paper in the past, but sending an email to myself works as a good reminder for me. As a bonus, I can pick up my GMail form anywhere, including my iPhone.

I’m a programmer, so I am lazy by nature. It’s kind of a pain to open a new browser, and navigate to GMail.com and then copy and paste the URL of the site, and text into GMail and then send it.

Enter the GmailThis! bookmarklet by Doug Ward. Bookmarklets are bits of javascript that you save as bookmarks in your browser. When you click that bookmark the javascript runs. Basically bookmarklets are little javascript plugins that work in almost any browser.

The GmailThis! bookmarklet will open up a new Gmail window in a little popup. The body will have the URL of the page you are currently on, and any text you happen to have highlighted at the moment. All you have to do is enter the recipients name.

You can get the GmailThis! bookmarklet from Doug Wards site, http://contrapants.org/blog/2005/07/gmailthis.html

Doug also made a cool video showing how simple the bookmarklet is to use.

If you are a heavy GMail user like I am, this is a must have.

“twice as likely” to wear heavy metal t-shirt as other people

By Josh Highland in funny, Josh's Rambling

I found an interesting article from a while back. I guess people who work in the IT industry are twice as likely to wear a heavy metal t-shirt as their non-IT counterparts.

If I was to be given the survey, i would have answered yes to it. I wear heavy metal/hardcore shirts EVERY DAY to work, I just wear them under a button up shirt. I’m undercover I guess.

The study also showed that black jeans are 63% more popular among IT types than other workers (yes i wear black jeans some times), and IT people are 34% more likely to sport a ponytail (I cut mine off a few months ago!)

I wonder what the statistics on tattoos and piercings are?

Either way, a mildly interesting read that I thought was funny
http://www.intermedia.net/about-us/news/2006/IT-people-are-different.asp

“CodeIgniter lets you write kick ass PHP programs”

By Josh Highland in coldfusion, internet, php, software

At work, I have been lucky enough to work directly with Luis Majano, the author of an awesome Object Oriented Framework for ColdFusuion, ColdBox (I have blogged about it before)

Using the Coldbox Frame work really took my CF coding to the next level.

At home, I am not lucky enough to have access to a Coldfusion server. I run everything off of a dedicated PHP machine that I have had for some time now. Mostly due to the cost of the CF licenses, and the investments I have already made in the running so many sites in PHP.

After using ColdBox, I wanted to find something similar that would really help me write better code, and do it more quickly. I first looked at cake and wasn’t that excited about it, it seemed more complicated then it should be.

After doing some more research, I came across Code Igniter. Code Igniter has turned my PHP world upside down. Its easy to use, straight forward, and has a lot of build in functionality that would take me forever to achieve on my own.

Working in an object oriented frame work just makes me feel like a more effective programmer for some reason. Maybe its because I feel more organized and can really see how fast I can put applications together using it.

The user guide, video tutorials, wiki, and forums for code igniter all rock. There is a wealth of information in there that I can draw off of.

I am re-working notpopular.com 2.0 once again (at this point maybe i should call it notpop 2.5), and I am using Code Igniter to do it. Lets hope that my newly peaked interest in object oriented PHP development will carry me though the development and launch of notpop 2.0 (2.5?!)