Hello, my name is Mr. Malley

I found a site that will turn an uploaded portrait into a Simpson’s character.

All you do is upload a picture of yourself, answer a few questions, and it creates the character.

Even though I was wearing glasses in the picture I used, I had to add them manually. And, it turned my soul patch into a massive goatee, so I had to change that back.

I uploaded two different pictures and it gave me the same guy. If you try it out, email me the resulting picture. I’d be curious to know how many different characters they select from for each go.

… perfectly legitimate way to spend your time.

After fifteen minutes of trouble-shooting why IE6 was rendering this blog incorrectly, I did a search on how long IE6 will remain the scourge of my designs. Apparently, I’ll be fixing my sites for IE6 for a long time to come.

Here are some statistics from my business site, which has received 5,502 unique visitors in the past 30 days:

• 47% of them visited using Internet Explorer
• Of that group, 40% were using Internet Explorer 6

So, if my math is correct, 19% of the visitors to my site are still using IE6 - an obsolete web browser that renders web pages unlike any other, without regard to universal standards.

From now on, if you visit this site using IE6, I have added a script that will present a gentle reminder that your browser sucks, along with a link to Save the Developers - a site devoted to ridding the world of IE6 users.

If you see this reminder in your browser (and are using an operating system newer than Windows 2000), please do me the favor of upgrading now!

After 10 years of owning a computer, I’ve started backing up. It’s silly that I’ve waited this long, especially considering the number of hours I’ve spent amassing the large sum of data on my hard drive. The truth is I’ve been pretty lucky and have never had a complete data loss have only had one complete data loss on a computer that held a bunch of games and college papers.

Here’s what I got:

Iomega 33720 UltraMax 1 TB FireWire 800 Desktop Hard Drive

I bought this drive from Amazon for under $300.00. Its 1 TB is divided over two drives, which I have decided to use independently.

On one drive, I’m backing up using Leopard’s Time Machine. This is my “oh crap, I can’t believe I just saved over that file” backup. Time machine is great for going “back in time” to retrieve a previous version of a file. It keeps hourly backups of the past day, daily backups of the past week, and weekly backups until the drive you’re using it on is full. Then, I presume it just starts deleting the oldest week saved.

On the other drive, I’m backing up the same data using “Shirt Pocket’s” SuperDuper software. This is my “oh crap, my hard drive just completely crashed and I need to boot from an external drive to keep working” backup. This is the catastrophic situation backup I’ve needed for a long time.

Overall, the drive works well. It came pre-formatted in HFS, so I was able to just plug it into my iMac and go. It is somewhat noisy, though. The fan on its backside is about 5 times as loud as my iMac, and every read and write is quite audible. It’s loud enough that I’ll probably move it off of my desktop as soon as I buy a longer Firewire 800 cable. But, even so, it’s buzz is not nearly loud enough to distract me from my work.

You wouldn’t think I’d be so excited about a technology purchase that does nothing for me unless something goes terribly wrong! Even so, it does what it does quite well and it’s a relief to know that I’m covered.

Last weekend, I made a trip up to Grand Rapids to buy one of those fancy new iMac’s that were released last month. All summer, I was saving for a Mac Pro because I wasn’t impressed with the performance of the old iMac, and I wanted something that would really cruise.

Even when the iMac was released, I wasn’t all that convinced. I kept telling myself that I wanted something that I could upgrade in a few years if I needed to, and that the iMac just wasn’t for a “techy” guy like me.

Then, I realized … I have a five year old Dell that I am now using as a print server and jukebox that has never seen an upgrade.

What can I say? I like new stuff. Why spend $3500 on a Mac Pro and Monitor when the iMac does everything I need?

In the end, I bought a 24-inch 2.8 GHz iMac with a full three years of AppleCare. I figure I’ll want a new computer in three years, anyway. And, in truth, this computer is powerful enough that it will still compete in three years anyway. No compromise was necessary.

So, how ’bout some specs:

• 24-inch glossy widescreen LCD (1920×1200px)
• 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme processor
• 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2×1GB
• 500 GB Hard Drive
• SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• TI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB memory
• AirPort Extreme
• Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR

And, of course, here it is:

Ok, so I’m obsessed. So, shoot me. This recent price drop should mean that I can actually afford one now. I would have bought one anyway, just now it feels a little more justifiable (to those of you who do not read to every word spoken by Steve Jobs, the iPhone price was dropped $200 yesterday). This means that the refurbished iPhone price has dropped $250.

Yes friends, in October my Verizon contract runs out and I run to apple.com like a little girl getting her first Barbie. I don’t care if AT&T’s service map says I live in nowhere. I’ll try it anyway!

For anyone who went to college in the late 90s, you know why this is monumental. We played this game way more than we should have. I can’t believe it is 10 years old already.

Can you imagine what college dorm life is like now that Xbox Live allows users to play multiplayer games across entire campuses? Chaos. I bet nothing ever gets done!

So, I basically stole that title from Engadget but I don’t care. It was too cool not to reuse!

It’s true.

Sending your kid off to school these days isn’t what it used to be …”

Still don’t believe me? Watch the news report.

Interested in buying one: Here’s their website.

At the end of last year, my administration asked if I could expand our Moodle installation to include the middle school and sixth grade center. I agreed to do this as long as we created two new installations so that we would have one for each building.

While I still think it was necessary for the sake of user management and security to separate the buildings into their own installations, man is it turning out to be a pain! Everytime I find a bug in one, I have to change it in all three. Every time I add content to the front page of one, I have to judge whether it’s appropriate for the others. Then, on top of all that, how am I qualified to write “howto” instructrions for sixth graders! I tried to write things as simply as I could, but I have no idea!

Anyway. I’ve been working feverishly over the past week or so on these so I might as well show them off. Look at them! If I could, I’d ask my wife to put them on the fridge.

Here they are:

• Sixth Grade Center: http://www.nilesschools.org/omcnet/
• Middle School: http://www.nilesschools.org/jrvikingnet/
• High School: http://www.nilesschools.org/vikingnet/

Back to the grind!

So, the iPhone will officially go on sale at 6:00 this Friday, and already there are people waiting outside the Apple store to buy one.

Then, just a minute ago, I checked Digg one last time before bed, and learned that the first iPhones have reached U.S. soil.

Crazy part:

“Awaiting the freight at each location on Sunday were armored personnel, who were reportedly hired by Apple through its courier’s ground handling agent and then cleared by the Transportation Security Administration. Armed guards are extremely unusual for freight coming out of the Asian sector, those familiar with the matter explained, and are typically reserved for shipments containing riches such as gold and diamonds.”

I know. Who cares, right?

Check out this guy’s response to the above article’s ascension in the ranks of Digg popularity:

Upcoming headlines for the front page:

“iPhone shipments leave shipping dock”
“iPhone shipments on their way to Apple stores”
“iPhone shipments to arrive at Apple stores ‘any minute now’.
“iPhone shipments delayed”
“iPhone delays due to shipper stubbing toe”
“In depth interview with toe stubbing iPhone shipper”
“iPhone finally arrives at Apple Stores”
“Employees bring cases of iPhones into Apple stores”
“Employees unpack cases of iPhones at Apple stores”
“Employees put iPhone’s on shelves, close store”
“Employees of Apple stores, after stocking shelves with iPhones, have smoke break”
“Manager of New York Apple store takes dump before store opening (w/pics)”
“Apple store employees complain about odd smell in NY Apple store”
“Jobs declares, ‘Smell was manager, not iPhone.’ Manager fired.”…

Hilarious and appropriate if you ask me.