KPAO by Dave Cortright

Pretty Loaded: a gallery of Flash loading animations

This is a nice, passive way to view a variety of creative ways to show progress when loading large flash files. I liked it so much, I installed the screensaver.

Pretty Loaded

Send an SMS text message via email

Here's another post that I'm doing to publicly remember information that I need occasionally.

All cell phone carriers have an email gateway that allows you to send an email to any phone number, and it will get converted into a text message. Here is a list of the email gateways for the major cell providers in the US.

Alltel	1234567890@message.alltel.com
AT&T	1234567890@txt.att.net
Boost	1234567890@myboostmobile.com
Metro PCS	1234567890@MyMetroPcs.com
Sprint	1234567890@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile	1234567890@tmomail.net
Verizon	1234567890@vtext.com
Virgin Mobile	1234567890@vmobl.com
US Cellular	1234567890@email.uscc.net

Just replace 1234567890 with the phone number you want to send the text message to.

Song of the day: Space Doggity by Jonathan Coulton

If I can't get a 5-star song out of my head, then it's the song of the day.

The back story:

Song Fu Challenge #3 was to do an homage to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” that hit the main plot points and referenced the original song subtly at least once. Yes you’re right, I almost went with the first monkey in space, but I didn’t want to be accused of going overboard with the monkeys. So I went with the first dog in space instead.

I love the Pink Floyd/Comfortably Numb homage in the guitar solo.

Now I’m floating free
And the moon’s with me
And it’s bright enough
To light the dark

And it’s so high up here
And the stars—so clear
Are they close enough?
Will they hear me bark from here?

Buy the song here.

Song of the day: New Mistake by Jellyfish

It's not exactly new, but it's a fantastic song. Don't much care for the "repeat and fade" ending, but it's still a 5-star song in my book.

Love is blind, deaf and dumb, but never mind
You better catch me when I fall
I'm on my roller skates
'Cause any ol' way that I fall
I land in your arms, even though it's wrong
'Cause I love my new mistake

Regarding the mosque / world trade center issue

First, this is not a "Ground Zero mosque". People are using this phrase disingenuously to imply that the mosque is going to be in the lobby of the freedom tower. We're talking about 2 city blocks away. It would be more apt to call this the "City Hall mosque", as it's closer to city hall and the courthouse than it is to the WTC site.

There is already a mosque (aka masjid) within 2 blocks of the World Trade Center site in NYC. According to the Masjid Manhattan web site, it has been there since 1970. Source: Wonkette

The neighborhood surround the World Trade Center is hardly hallowed ground. It is home to a "Gentleman's Club" (sex), Off-Track Betting (gambling), as well as many fast food restaurants, (which have undoubtedly contributed many more American deaths than terrorists ever have, as one commenter wryly noted). Source: Daryl Lang

The bible has just as much incendiary language encouraging followers to wipe out heretics. For example:

If thou shalt hear say in one of thy cities “Let us go and serve other gods,” which ye have not known... Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword. And thou shalt gather all the spoil of it into the midst of the street thereof, and shalt burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit, for the Lord thy God: and it shall be an heap for ever; it shall not be built again. Deuteronomy 13

More on The American Muslim.

Can we now move back to discussing issues that matter a hell of a lot more to this country, like the economy, taxes, and the deficit?

My styles for use with Stylish

Ugh. Caught a pretty bad cold on the trip out to Michigan to see my dad. I had to stay home from work today. Too sick to really concentrate on anything of import, but not sick enough to just stare at the walls. So I took the opportunity to convert most of my GreaseMonkey scripts over to Stylish.

If you're interested, here are my Stylish scripts. I'm most proud of the AllMusic clean up style; that one took a while to pull together. The RTM style took a bit of crafting as well. The others are generally just a few elements that have been hidden.

Web site owners, if I've created a style for your site, that's a good indication that you need to take a close look at the design goals and how well you are delivering value to your customers. There are a lot of bad sites out there that I merely tolerate. It takes a special sort of design for me to fire up the text editor and start poking around in Firebug.

Best of the worst of stock art

I made the sucker mistake last year of buying credit on iStockPhoto. I now have a couple of months to find some stock art to buy. So here I go, looking for some awful, cheesy shots.

Here's a pretty good one (with associated soundtrack). But I'm sure you all can do better. Post a comment with a link to a truly awful stock photo and I'll buy it and put it up here.

Windows Vista Home Premium Product Key

I bought a Dell Studio Hybrid many months ago to use as a Windows Media Center PC. It's hooked up to my HDTV, and we use to to record over-the-air HD, play back DVDs, and stream movies from Netflix.

I immediately  upgraded it to Windows7. Thus I had no need for the Windows Vista Home Premium license that came with it. I found the Certificate of Authority this past weekend as I was cleaning off my desk. Sadly the COA says I cannot sell it separately. So instead I've decided to give it away. Enjoy!

P3WXC-JD4K3-3BVWP-CCY73-WMDVW

Stylish is better than GreaseMonkey for CSS tweaks

I previously posted about using GreaseMonkey to change the appearance of a web page. I got tired of watching my pages restyle every time I visit them. So I took  Avindra Goolcharan and tried out Stylish.

It really makes a huge difference that custom styles are applied before the page loads. It's a much more seamless experience

As a bonus, I find it easier to code and debug than GreaseMonkey.

Of course the downside is there's no way to re-format content on the page as one can using GreaseMonkey. While CSS does provide a lot of flexibility, you still cannot do a find/replace of content.

I spent the morning porting my AllMusic clean up script to Stylish. The only thing I miss is the title bar reformatting. So I kept that around as a separate GreaseMonkey script: AllMusic - clean up TITLE text.

Home solar = no incentive to conserve electricity

2½ years ago we put solar panels on our roof. When I wrote about it at the time, I mentioned that while you can push power back into the grid when you're generating more power than you are consuming, you cannot be an energy producer. That is, you cannot generate more power than you consume. Well you can; it's just that you get no financial incentive to do so.

Sites like Microsoft Hohm are popping up to help home owners track their energy consumption and make their homes more efficient. The problem is, I have no incentive to do this anymore. Any gains I make will either need to be offset by additional energy use in my house somewhere else (I suppose we could finally put in A/C), or they will simple get absorbed by PG&E.

I suppose it's freeing in a way. This is one less thing I need to worry about around the house. I can focus on other home project like ripping out our non-native grass and plants and replacing it with native, drought-tolerant foliage. We could certainly use a reduction in our water bill.