Turns out my old iPhone was still under warranty so everything was covered under the original warranty. Still, it makes me wonder what will happen if I have issues with this phone, especially since Apple does not extend the warranty out when the phone is exchanged. Already, it seems that it’s not super-responsive and isn’t pulling my e-mails as seamlessly as before (I have to keep pressing refresh before any mail shows up). Still, I’ll chalk it up to breaking this new iPhone in, but if it doesn’t work perfectly in a week or two I might be taking another trip to the Apple store.

1. This blog now has better up-time than Google!

Check it out, I signed up for a web-site monitoring service called mon.itor.us and received my first weekly report recently:



Yeah! This blog had better up-time than Google last week! My host for this blog is bluehost. So far I’ve had very few to no issues with them and they are always quick to respond to my e-mails. For the low, low price of $6.95 / month it’s tough to beat bluehost. Note, those are affiliate links so if you do choose to purchase some hosting from bluehost it helps me out with paying for the hosting costs of this blog and you get great hosting for a low cost. A win-win situation!

2. This blog now features only one sidebar column.

I’ve increased the post text size and made the post width a little bit wider while combing the two sidebar columns into one. I’m going through a minimalist phase and will look to move or more of the sidebar deals into other places or simply remove them to give this blog a nice clean easy to read look. As always, let me know via a comment here or an e-mail how you feel about the new look.

3. This blog now lists less categories.

There are still way too many categories on this site and in the sidebar to the right but slowly I’m converting some categories to tags to decrease the huge list. Over time the categories list will be broken down to ten or less very high-level areas with the tags being used for specificity.

4. This blog now has a social network page.

Instead of listing the various social networks I’m a part of in my sidebar, I created a page solely to list any social networks I’ve joined so you can keep up with me in my dealings all over the intertubes.

5. This blog now used as a reference for college research papers!

I discovered a curious reference to this site today, the site, cheat house (which I will not link to due to Google Adsense policies), hosted a paper by a student and check out one of his/her references:



It appears this student used my paper comparing U.S. accounting standards to international accounting standards as a reference for his/her paper.

That’s all for today. Hope everyone has a nice relaxing Sunday.

Credit for the iPhone optimization goes to the great team over at contentrobot and their iWPhone plugin and theme.

Here’s a few screenshots of how the blog now looks on an iPhone:

What do you think? If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod Touch, this plugin should make reading this site a lot easier and nicer of an experience. Let me know if you have any suggestions, issues, or any other thoughts!

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

So let’s see if there’s any hidden treasures among my trash!

• Emacs

I prefer Aquamacs, though there is certainly nothing wrong with Emacs.

• Meetro

Meh, AIM, facebook, twitter, and pownce are enough (in fact more than enough).

• Tomato Torrents

I prefer Transmission though Tomato Torrents works fine Transmission seems to be faster and better organized.

• Launchbar

Quicksilver rules. Launchbar just did not seem to be as extensive or as intuitive as Quicksilver and thusly in this household we obey the shortcuts of Quicksilver!

• Joost

Joost is a great idea, but at the moment there is not enough good content to take up my hard drive space and time.

• Vienna

Now that NetNewsWire is free I much, much prefer it to Vienna. While NNW was not free Vienna performed admirably but there’s just no need for it now.

• Aptana

Looks cool but a bit beyond my league at the moment. Might go back and download this later as I learn more but right now it’s just clutter.

• Colloquy

See Meetro above. My geek status will lose points for not having an IRC client installed but I can live with it for now. Besides nearly everyone I know is on AIM or twitter so I won’t be losing touch with anyone.

• Comic Life

Cool but frivolous. In essence this program allowed you to comic bookize your photos by adding speech bubbles and comic book style actions.

• iProcrastinate

I didn’t use this once. I knew I wouldn’t when I downloaded it but I installed it nonetheless. No wonder I struggle to get things done sometimes.

• Keynote

30 day Trial I never deleted from when I got my Macbook Pro a year ago.

• Pages

See Keynote.

• NewsFire

See Vienna.

• Vendetta

This game looked really cool but also time-consuming and I just don’t have oodles of free time (contrary to popular belief, quitting your job does not give you tons of free time) to devote to learning the intricacies of this game.

• RSSOwl

See Newsfire and Vienna.

• q [QEMU]

Yeah, I really just never needed this, see Aptana but much more so.

• ircle

See Colloquy.

• Tofu

Good idea but in the end it’s just another application that rarely gets used adding to my digital clutter.

• Stickies

I use Devonnotes for all my note taking needs. It’s an awesome program btw. Didn’t really use stickies enough to comment on them one way or the other but it seemed functional.

• ecto

Cool program but don’t have the monetary flow to buy it right now. Anyone know any good free open-source alternatives?

Any programs up there that I should give another try?

For the month of June this blog had:

• 329,576 hits
• 98,242 page-views
• 18,556 visits
• 13,707 unique visitors

The above list does not include 51,120 hits and 50,231 page-views from robots, crawlers, worms and other similar traffic sources. In other words, the above list is human only; that’s a lot of eyeballs! Here is the same information in a bar graph:

My highest trafficked day was June 18th with 43,827 page-views spread over 7,570 visits. Yup, that was the day I was listed on fark.com for this post about the similarity between John McCain and Colonel Tigh from Battlestar Galactica.

This blog is also syndicated via RSS to an average of twenty readers, with a high of 76 readers on June 18th. My facebook profile also pulls a short excerpt of each post and broadcasts it via RSS to my 397 friends.

The five most viewed posts on this blog for the month of June were:

1. Battlestar Politica – 9308 page-views
2. Casting Call for New Bruce Willis Film, The Surrogates – 739 page-views
3. Centralization vs. Decentralization – 655 page-views
4. Kevin Garnett a Celtic: We’re Baaaack! – 563 page-views
5. U.S. GAAP vs. International GAAP vs. Unified GAAP – 440 page-views

Finally, the five most used search keyphrases that brought visitors here were:

1. pieniazek
2. anova test
3. photo
4. ronald jenkees
5. finite population correction factor

If there are any other statistics anyone would like to see let me know and I’ll add them (if possible). Thanks to everyone for making June my best month yet! You all rock!

• Justin from LifeofJustin writes about a random adventure on the USC campus in Parking Lot Drinking at USC. Justin is spot on in describing USC as a movie-esque experience,
  

  What I concluded from this experience, is that I should of went to college at USC. The place is amazing and reminds you of all the movies you see that take place on college campuses.

Really makes me wonder why I transferred from USC…something about new experiences and getting out of the grime of downtown Los Angeles?

• Long time readers here know of my appreciation for the skills of Jay from Scribbles & Words but for you newbies, check out this great, quick tutorial from Jay about how to highlight text using only CSS.

Rather than a quote, here’s how a grey highlight looks.

• Random breaks occur on this blog as I tend to life first but I’ve learned to warn users, or at least put a quick message letting you know I’m still here. Jarko’s tips over at North x East gives a few reasons for taking a break from blogging and how to correctly do so. One of the tips is to save posts for a rainy day, which I already do (perhaps a bit too much with nearly 70 draft-posts). Jarko is right on about why to take a break when he states:
  

  …most importantly, the time away refuels your passion. After a few week’s break you are filled with new energy to pursue your goals with new determination and power.

  Each time I’m away from this blog tons of ideas come flowing to me that otherwise I don’t think of. Some of these ideas get implemented and some don’t but letting myself get away from a schedule and allowing my mind to wander certainly makes writing here much more enjoyable.

• All of us have a fight or flight instinct that controls many of our basic functions. This instinct derives from our ancestors having to quickly decide whether they could realistically succeed in a fight or if they should flee and fight another day. Marc from MarcandAngel discusses how to flee like a Bushido Samurai warrior.

There’s some great tips in Marc’s list, my favorite among them is:

Trust only those who have earned it. Be wary of those who have not.

Though it seems like common-sense, many of us throw our trust around to anyone and everyone within range. I tell this to people all the time, before you trust someone you should ask why you should trust them. Are they trying to sell you something or persuade you in some way? If so, most likely they should not be immediately trusted.

• Finally, Daniel from Daily Blog Tips wrote about Larry Page, one of Google’s founders, and Larry’s advice on how to change the world, a theme here this week. Daniel sums up Larry’s advice quite well:
  

  If you want to succeed on the web, you will need to let your fear of failure go away, and to try new and innovative things.

  Though Daniel frames it in terms of a web business, his advice applies to life in general. If you fear life, then sadly you’re already nearly dead. In the end, I’d rather die young but doing something I enjoy rather than dying of old age having successfully run away from anything that might be dangerous.

  I’m sure many of you have had similar thoughts but fear is a powerful emotion. Grasping that emotion and facing it head on is a thrill and can be used as energy to pursue any goal you have. Once you conquer your fears, they will go away and you’ll become more free.

  Related Posts:

  • Web Quotes and Counterpoints VI
  • Saturday Shout-outs: WQAC X
  • Web Quotes & Counterpoints XII
  • 3 From Every Tree: My Favorite Blog Project Entries
  • 3 Useful Del.icio.us Tags, Life Quotes, & Traffic Generators
  ]]> http://adamp.com/college/web-quotes-and-counterpoints-v/feed/ 6 http://adamp.com/technology/back-up-and-running/ http://adamp.com/technology/back-up-and-running/#comments Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:27:02 +0000 Adam http://adamp.wp42.com/technology/back-up-and-running/ Something happened overnight to my site and it was not accessible this morning. If you tried visiting here this morning and were denied, sorry.

  The issue seems to be fixed at the moment (knock on wood). I’m not sure if the issue was from wordpress or my theme or something else but I solved it by disabling the wp-cache plugin in my wp-config.php file (e.g. commented out the first line that referenced wp-cache), then loaded my blog, went into the dashboard and de-activated the wp-cache plugin, and cleared the cache. That solved the issue of my blog not loading, but it was reset to a basic installation of my theme without any customizations.

  So then I scrolled through my plugins and noticed that the “Deactivate wordpress widgets” plugin had mysteriously been deactivated. Once I turned that plugin back on, the K2 sidebar manager returned and all my theme customizations were back. It was quite strange and I’m glad it’s fixed and hopefully stays fixed.

  If you experience any issues feel free to send me an e-mail or leave a comment on this post.

  Related Posts:

  • Updates Galore
  • Use CommentLuv? Show Andy Ur Luv!
  • Yes, A New Theme!
  • A Few Changes
  • Thesis Theme Comes to Prose of a Pol
  ]]> http://adamp.com/technology/back-up-and-running/feed/ 0 http://adamp.com/technology/quick-apple-safari-tips/ http://adamp.com/technology/quick-apple-safari-tips/#comments Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:23:14 +0000 Adam http://adamp.wp42.com/technology/quick-apple-safari-tips/ Did you know holding the control, alt/option, or command/apple keys while hovering over links in Apple’s Safari browser on Mac OS X brings up new options?

  For instance, holding control will bring up a menu (the ‘right click menu’) when you click on a link.

  Holding the alt/option key while hovering will download the linked file once you click.

  And finally, holding the command/Apple key while clicking a link will open it in a new tab. If you didn’t know these tips before, welcome to the club as I just accidentally discovered them and thought I’d share them here with you.

  Know of any good Apple/Safari keyboard shortcuts? If so share them below.

  Related Posts:

  • ClickToFlash: A Must Have Safari Plugin
  • Apple Gave Me a New iPhone!
  • Tweetdeck on the iPhone
  • 45 Free Applications for Your New Mac
  • Start iTunes & Last.fm Simultaneously
  ]]> http://adamp.com/technology/quick-apple-safari-tips/feed/ 2 http://adamp.com/technology/quick-note-to-my-feed-readers/ http://adamp.com/technology/quick-note-to-my-feed-readers/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:06:44 +0000 Adam http://adamp.wp42.com/technology/quick-note-to-my-feed-readers/ Welcome to my new subscribers, I see quite a few of you made your way here from my recent Battlestar Galactica Top Ten list. Welcome and feel free to contact me with suggestions, complaints or advice. If you haven’t signed up for my feed, it’s a few seconds away at this link.

  To all my subscribers, you’ll notice either today or tomorrow that I’ve reversed the course am no longer splicing my del.icio.us bookmarks into my daily posts feed. I was looking at my feed last night in NetNewsWire and it seems very cluttered with all the daily links and daily posts. If you don’t like this decision, leave a comment or send me an e-mail. You can still subscribe to my daily del.icio.us bookmarks feed separately. And if you haven’t yet, subscribe to my daily post feed to ensure you don’t miss any posts.

  Related Posts:

  • Dear Feed Readers
  • RSS Resync
  • Site Updates
  • My Content Syndication Policy
  • Help Me Win $3,000 – Blogging Idol Contest
  ]]> http://adamp.com/technology/quick-note-to-my-feed-readers/feed/ 2 http://adamp.com/technology/my-redirects-to-www-work/ http://adamp.com/technology/my-redirects-to-www-work/#comments Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:50:32 +0000 Adam http://adamp.wp42.com/technology/my-redirects-to-www-work/ Yes!

  A long time ago (in this galaxy, not one far away), after reading Daniel’s WWW or no-WWW? post I implemented an Apache redirect in my .htaccess file to redirect my non-www address to www.adampieniazek.com/. It worked, but all non-www addresses would redirect to my homepage instead of to each individual page (for instance, adampieniazek.com/about/ would go to www.adampieniazek.com instead of to www.adampieniazek.com/about/). Well, it kept bugging me and bugging me and I kept trying alternate ways to get this to work properly and today it finally works right!

  Here’s the piece of code that finally sorted out the kinks:

  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^\.adampieniazek\.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://adamp.wp42.com/$1 [R=301,L]

  Credit goes to the good people at no-www for putting the code in their FAQ (though switched to redirect the www address to the non-www address).

  If anyone experiences any issues, please drop me a quick line.

  Related Posts:

  • My Last Name = tl;dt
  • My Content Syndication Policy
  • My Facebook Vanity URL / Username
  • Oh Crap: I Deleted the Wrong del.icio.us Account!
  • Entrecard turns on the faucet to pour comments into your blog
  ]]> http://adamp.com/technology/my-redirects-to-www-work/feed/ 0