Sheldon Brown is Gone and Geek Speak

The cycling world lost one of the biggest names you've never heard of last night. Sheldon Brown died of a massive heart attack. Sheldon had quite a presence on the web with a huge base of knowledge which he took the time to document and categorize for others to access and learn from. He will be missed by many.

I'm not much of a football fan but I did manage to watch the last 90 seconds of the Super Bowl...good stuff. Rachel taped the game for the halftime show which Tammy and I watched when I got home from work last night. Yawn. Anyway, we fast-forwarded through the football action to watch some of the commercials. Like I said, I'm not much of a football fan.

I went through my blog tonight looking for dead links. I found a few; mostly video links I've since converted to my YouTube account where I store them at no cost and save myself the storage capacity on my website. I'm currently using 1.2gb of a total 1.5gb available on my site. My blog is getting rather large to do maintenance on the entire thing in one evening. Needless to say, I didn't do that but I did make a dent in it.

Sometimes I'll go along and not realize that there's a better way to do something. I sort of get locked into doing something a particular way and don't think about how I could make it better. I recently noticed that with the links to mp3 files I'll occasionally post. The WMA (windows media audio) files open in a player all their own but not the mp3 files. They were opening in the current window and taking people away from the blog. Not what I'd intended. I found a simple bit of code (target="_blank") to insert in the link which opens the file in its own window. Yeah, I know...real geeky stuff which maybe 3% of people out there might possibly care about.

I actually had a bit of good news with respect to work a few days ago. The 2.5 years I spent working at Flight Service will now count toward my seniority. Woohoo! There will no doubt be a challenge to allowing Flight Service time to count but I'll take what I can get for as long as I can; hopefully another 5 years. I'm now numero-uno in my area of nearly 50 controllers. Tim d has some nickname for me but I can't for the life of me remember what it was—NewYork somethingorother. Tim?

I'm not much into ringtones but my daughter is. She's good about not downloading them and running up the bill but occasionally she'll ask if she can buy one. Usually, it's a song she already has but not something she can upload to her phone. I figured there had to be an easy way to do that and I found a site online (Myxer) which does exactly that. You upload the song file to the site where they have tools which allow you to splice a section of a song and have it converted to a ringtone which is then sent back to your phone where you can save it and use it—plus it's free.

You have to do the typical registration with the site first and I always have a concern that I'm opening myself up to more spam at the email address I use but so far I haven't noticed any increase. The ringtones we get from them are actually better quality than the downloads Rachel has paid for.




Comments

Anonymous said…
You are "A Number One, Duke of New York" from the movie, "Escape From New York"
Kevin Gilmore said…
Oh...you mean I get to be like the guy with the gun?

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