Beginnercode.com

I’ve recently found a story that has touched me.

In a nutshell it’s a story of a little girl in Russia who had an accident that maimed her face. The Russian hospitals are either corrupt, or rediculously expensive. I’ve spoken personally with Mert and Katya who are undertaking the task of getting her assistance.

They have already brought the girl to the states once for plastic surgery donated by a local doctor here in my home state of WI. She needs to have more. I set up a page on this site dedicated to helping her. If you are interested, Angel’s page is here.

I haven’t done any donation or charity campaigns except for when I went to help Katrina victims a few years ago. I’m actually a bit curious how much I can help through this. It’s worth a try because I believe it’s a worthwhile cause!

Via googlfied:

According to Blogger Buzz Google is looking for user experience research blogging with google blogger. As mentioned in the FAQ you first need to sign up. After you have signed up you may or may not be selected depending on what they are looking for:

For each study, we need to make sure that we invite people who match our target user profile for the product we are researching. We also want to get a good balance of ages, backgrounds, and levels of experience, so please be honest with your answers. It’s easier for us to match you to a suitable study when we have more information about you, so if you fill in as much of our sign-up form as you can, it’s more likely that you will be invited to participate.

There are different experience sessions where you will work with a google researcher 1 on 1, on the phone, or in a group. It looks like some of the research will be done in person at google. Except you have to find your own way there. The pay looks pretty decent too.. “typically we pay $75 for each hour that you spend with a Google researcher”. The FAQ also mentions the average time commitment is in the range of 1-1.5 hours during business hours.

I think this is great customer service. It seems they want to see how users view and work with their goods. It also gives an opportunity for users in the test to request features, changes to existing features, as well as having features removed. I wonder if this is a result of googlecanyouhear me?

All in all I think this is a smart move and I’m quite curious what will come out of this.

google, blogger, blog

I went for it. I upgraded (finally) from WP v1.2 to v2.1. Along with it I chose a new theme for beginner code. I really like that its very symmetrical. I didn’t want to change partly because it’s something different. But why not.

Upgrading Word Press was fairly easy. Just follow the steps outlined at the WP blog.

Then I chose this simple-tech theme from the Word Press Theme viewer. I chose it because it looks easier to tweak for the adsense heat map. It was hard to find themes that I liked visually, that also had a left column out of the box.

I ran into this little problem last month while running windows update on several workstations. You know that little yellow shield down by your clock in the taskbar ? For some reason, a few workstations seemed to have locked up. When I peeked into the task manager->Processes, one of the “svchost.exe” processes were consuming 100% CPU. Coincidently, these workstations also had a fresh install of Office 2003 professional.

After MANY hours of monkeying around, I found a ‘remedy’ for this. I use that term loosely because it did work, though I don’t know if there’s a better or more proper fix. This should be performed if you have errands to run or are going to bed…. A watched pot never boils.

This can get you by and operational if you don’t have time to perform the updates:

1. Go to start->run.
2. Type in services.msc and hit return.
3. When the services window pops up highlight the Automatic Updates service.
4. Double click it.
5. Change the startup type to manual, and click the stop button.

Performing the updates:

1. Go to Microsoft Update.
2. Run it.
3. At this point the yellow update icon will show up in your taskbar again and doing any task will seem painfully slow.
4. Go get coffee, or watch a movie.
5. Come back and click to install any updates recommended.
6. Here is where you go to bed, or go shopping.
7. After a few hours the updates will complete and you will be good to go.

*If you disabled the updates as above you’ll want to return them to their original state. If you don’t you will not receive automatic updates in the future.
You can do this by opening the services window, changing the startup type back to Automatic, and clicking the start button.

svchost.exe, cpu, Windows Update

From Inside Microsoft:

The most interesting info centers on web standards. According to Mary Jo Foley’s report of the session, IE8 will encourage web designers to create websites that adhere to web standards, and allow them to opt-in to a standards mode if they meet that criteria.

“IE8 will encourage web designers to create websites that adhere to web standards”

*Cough* I mean really?

M$ pushing for designers to stick to standards?? How long. How long, has Internet Explorer had ‘quirks’ and workarounds for the box model as well as all the other bugs it’s had? Specifically in CSS. Seriously.

On top of all this, the browser is so integrated into the operating systems in such a way that if it becomes corrupt, it can slow down your OS, and make some files and operations down right break. Unfortunately IE still has a large portion of users out there. As of this writing still about 78% of the population(via Marketshare). I’d personally be willing to say I’ll bet they are corporate users, or the small portion of home consumers who are unaware of other options out there.

On the other hand I will say it’s taken much too long. If this IS true, THANK YOU Microsoft! But I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m sticking to my firefox.

Microsoft, Internet Explorer, browser, css, standards