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Archives for November 2008

Synchronizing Tasks with the iPhone

November 30, 2008 by admin

 

Before I continue, I’ll disclaim that I use a hosted Microsoft Exchange provider (http://www.exchangemymail.com) to handle my e-mail as I am not a fan of POP3 nor IMAP.  Exchange Server allows me to keep the data in Outlook instantaneously updated with my iPhone’s Calendar, Contacts, and E-mail.

It lacks in one area though.  Tasks.  I have not figured out how to synchronize my tasks without using a third-party application in the $10.00 range from the iTunes App store.  So, I thought I’d use a free workaround that you also can use.

In Outlook 2007, when you create a task it shows up on your calendar at the bottom of the screen where you can manage it.  It is not displayed in your calendar on the iPhone.  Although you won’t have the fancy features of task management, you can do one simple thing to keep track of your list of To Do’s on both your iPhone and Outlook.

  • Create an all-day appointment in Outlook.
  • In the notes field, type a bulleted list of your tasks that need to be completed on that day.

That’s it.  Big surprise.  Make it simple and save yourself $10.00.  Sure, you won’t be able to check them off or move them around, nor will the unfinished tasks roll over to the following day, but this solution is working for me and I think it will work for you too.

Filed Under: Featured, Tips and Tricks Tagged With: exchange, IMAP, iPhone, Outlook, POP, save, Synchronizing, Synchronizing Tasks, Tasks, workaround

Road Trippin’

November 28, 2008 by admin

About 3 hours into it the road began to look long and narrow, like peeking through a rolled up piece of paper to focus in on something of perceived importance. The eyes grew heavy and all I could do to remain awake was scratch my head and rub my face, wishing I had something to munch on to keep my brain occupied. She offered to drive, but I said I was okay.  I knew that it would be a short while before I’d be back on track and alert as I remembered that there was a bag of sun flower seeds waiting for me. But, without a cup, sun flower seeds get messy, so I set my sights on a cup of coffee. On long road trips sleep begins to manifest at about the 2 hour mark, but a few tools have been put into place to prevent disaster. I don’t know why it happens, but it does. Perhaps it has something to do with the dashes. Dash, dash, dash. Endless painted lines streaming through the center of my way, flashing, dashing, blinking, over and over again. And the power lines, suspended by giant toothpicks that manage to survive the elements for years and years, one after another, all the same…

…New Mexico. Not my idea of one of the most beautiful places on earth, but hey, you can buy fireworks there. Oh, and you can find aliens, so I’ve heard. Hogwash. The better parts of New Mexico are as the better parts of Arizona. High mountain country with pines and cool weather, clouds that wash the heavens and are so close you can reach up and grab them, like fluffy cotton candy. Roads aren’t laid out like they are in Phoenix with perpendicularized intersections and easy to figure addresses. They roll and bend and turn, every once in a while stretching out for a long climb or swiftly swooping up and around the edge of a mountain. Don’t drive off the edge however.  It’s a long way down…

Coffee, food, sun-flower seeds, and good company make for what one would consider an agonizing drive much more pleasant, and upon reflection, rather quick.  Here we are Ruidoso!

Filed Under: On the Road Tagged With: Arizona, cool weather, drive, driving, Mexico, New Mexico, Ruidoso, track

WordPress Visual Editor Problems

November 28, 2008 by admin

Plagued.  That’s how I’ve felt today.  But I finally solved the problem, and it had nothing to do with installing any plug-ins or uninstalling any plug-ins or the server, or anything like that.  However, for good measure, I’ll lay out the basic steps that I took before I actually solved the problem.

The problem at hand deals with using the visual editor to write your posts in WordPress.  It’s a feature that allows for quick formatting using a toolbar above your composition area.  If you are unable to switch between Visual and HTML editing modes (tabs in the post editor) then you’ve got the same problem I had.  Your mouse may appear to recognize that there is a link when you roll over Visual or HTML, but nothing happens when you click.  It’s a very annoying problem.

Sometimes solving this problem requires Safely Reinstalling WordPress to ensure the latest files are uploaded to your server.  If you aren’t familiar with this process, please read my article on how to do this.

If you don’t want to do this, then I can’t guarantee that you will solve your problem.  After all was said and done, I actually didn’t need a complete re-installation.  I narrowed the problem down to one simple silly problem.

There was a space between php?> and <?php somewhere in one of my files.  It turned out that my custom_functions.php file ( I use Thesis as my theme ) had a few empty spaces after the end php tag ( php?> ) in a few different spots.  Once I found those and removed them, the problem was gone.  It helped to have installed a fresh copy of everything, but it was more time consuming.

If you aren’t using Thesis, the culprit may in fact be another file in your blog folder structure, most likely a plug-in.  You should deactivate all of your plug-ins in order to troubleshoot this issue.  Deactivating all of them is okay now because they’ll all be lumped in a “recently active” heading which enables you to bulk activate them when you’ve found the problem.

Of all of the solutions that have been offered, the only one that I have found to fix the problem is removing blank spaces from within php code.  If you suck at code surfing, you may have trouble with this, but I would bet that if you’re self-hosting your WordPress blog, you have probably picked through your php files to figure out some things here and there and will be able to figure it out.

Filed Under: Tips and Tricks Tagged With: Deactivate, Editor, HTML, php, Reinstalling, Safely Reinstalling Wordpress, server, troubleshoot, Wordpress

How to Reinstall WordPress Safely

November 28, 2008 by admin

There may be a time when you need to re-install WordPress on your server due to some sort of compatibility error, or server change…you name it.  It’s a good idea to practice this process if you’re running multiple blogs and/or managing blogs for other people.  If you have one blog, and you don’t use the self-hosted version of WordPress, then you might just want to stick to using WordPress.com to host your blog.  There are advantages and disadvantages to using the hosted vs. self-hosted versions.  For this tutorial, you’ll need to be one of the self-hosted adventuresome bloggers.

When WordPress releases new versions, sometimes things go wrong with older plugins.  Prior to upgrading, just to be safe, I backup everything. How you backup is up to you, but the basics of backing up WordPress involve saving a copy of your wp-config.php file in the root of your blog, and the wp-content folder (and all sub-folders) which contains your plug-ins, themes, uploads, and any other special files that are specific to your blog.  In addition to backing up your WordPress files, you also need to backup the database that WordPress is reading and writing to and from.

If you don’t backup your data, you are at risk of screwing everything up.  I’ve done this many times, unfortunately, but will never have this problem again.

Basic Steps to Reinstallation

Stage 1: Backup and Deactivate

  • Backup your WordPress files, themes, plugins…basically everything in the wp-content folder AND the wp-config.php file in the blog root.
  • Backup your Data.  I use SQLyog to export my data in a long SQL statement to a text file on my desktop.
  • If you don’t have the original version of your blog stored on your computer, download your entire blog root and sub-folders and keep them safe just in case you need to revert to the old version.
  • Deactivate all of your plug-ins just to be safe.

Stage 2:  Delete The old Crap

  • Delete the entire blog root, except for wp-config.php (yes, you backed it up, but why add a step later?)
  • Delete the entire wp-admin folder and the entire wp-includes folder.
  • Rename wp-content to wp-content_old (for extra redundancy)

You now have a dead blog, but you’ve preserved your important configuration and data.

Stage 3:  Upload WordPress

You’ve already “installed” wordpress (which involves creating a new database) so all you’re doing at this point is uploading the newest files in place of where your old blog was.  Upload everything you unpack from either version 2.6RC1 or the latest version to your blog root.  Overwrite everything.

Stage 4:  Restore Your Theme and Plugins

  • From the folder you renamed to wp-content_old, using your favorite FTP client if you’re remote, or windows exploder (explorer) if you’re on the server itself, drag all of the folders under wp-content_old to the new wp-content folder that you just uploaded to your blog’s root.
  • Your wp-config.php file should have remained where it was in the blog root through this entire process.

Stage 5:  Run the Upgrade Script

  • This is easy and always will be.  Point your browser to www.yourblog.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php and follow the instructions.  This is why you backed up your data.  If this process fails, you have a backup.

That’s it.  You should now have a completely backed up prior version, a completely backed up data set as of the date of your upgrade, and a brand new installation, ensuring all new files are uploaded and no overwrite errors occurred.  It’s always possible for there to be a problem when you upload a new version over an old version which is why I always do a fresh upload of the entire structure.

Filed Under: Tips and Tricks Tagged With: configuration, Deactivate, Delete, download, overwrite, php, server, unpack, Upgrade, Wordpress

For Those Who Don’t Know About History

November 27, 2008 by admin

The following was sent in an email from an unknown author. If you know the author of this post, please let me know so I can site this entry properly

For those who don’t know about history … here is a condensed version:

Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:

1. Liberals
2. Conservatives

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiti ng for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That’s how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to  B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement.

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the Conservatives by showing up for the nightly B-B-Q’s and doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement.

Some of these Liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as girlie-men. Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy, group hugs, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that conservatives provided.&n bsp;

Over the years conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass.

Modern liberals like imported beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare. Another interesting evolutionary side note: most of their women have higher testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn’t fair to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink domestic beer, mostly Bud. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, athletes, Marines, airline pilots and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained in Europe when conservatives were coming to America . They crept in after the Wild West was tamed and created a business of trying to get more for nothing.

Here ends today’s lesson in world history:

It should be note d that a Liberal may have a momentary urge to angrily respond to the above before forwarding it.

A Conservative will simply laugh and be so convinced of the absolute  truth of this history that it will be forwarded immediately to other true believers and to more liberals just to tick them off.

And there you have it. Let your next action reveal your true self…

Filed Under: Hardy Har Har Tagged With: eat, Europe, history, how to, Wild West, women

Ford Arizona Ironman 2009

November 24, 2008 by admin

Word has it that Brandon Stark and Steve Poirot have both made a committment to compete in next year’s Ford Arizona Ironman 2009.  The most recent concluded yesterday, Sunday November 23rd, where Steve spent the day volunteering.  Unfortunately I was unable to volunteer even though it was my intention.  Alas, I had to hold an open house for my new listing in Phoenix.  The open house was successful.

Prior to this year, the Ironman took place in April, which proved to be very hot and very windy.  This was the first year in which two events were held in order to recalibrate.  The event will continue every year now in November rather than April.  Last april I shot a video of my friend Brandon Stark competing.  It was quite an event.  You can view the Amateur Start on this page as well as Brandon’s Video posted to Facebook.

So, another 364 days from now, Steve and Brandon will embark on yet another torturous day of cardiovascular mayhem, and the great part about it is that somehow I have been recruited to be a training partner!  Yeesh.  Onward to good health I suppose.

Filed Under: Triathlon Stuff Tagged With: Amateur Start, Arizona, Arizona Ironman, Brandon Stark, Brandon Video, Ford Arizona Ironman, Sunday November

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