I’m FINALLY in NC! The closing on my house got pushed back a bit, but it’s pretty much a go. I tossed the power of attorney over to my father and he’s gonna go to closing to do the signing for me. It should happen in about 3 weeks. Apparently, trying to sell a house in a month where lenders laid off 18,000 employees is difficult. The buyer had to get a different lender right at crunch time and we had to go through another appraisal and yada yada. What a mess…but it’s all just about over.

It took me just about 13 hours to get up here…with a few stops here and there. All in all a pretty pleasant drive.

Last night my wife and I went to a ‘Champps’ restaurant. There’s one down in Ft. Laud., so when I found out there was one up here, I had to go ‘cuz I love their food. I’m glad we did too. Somehow the conversation with the waiter came to me just getting into town from the South Florida area. As it turns out 3 of the people at this Chammps restaurant came from the Ft. Lauderdale store I’ve been to. So one at a time throughout my meal, each one came to welcome me to the state and say hello. They even gave me their phone number if we needed anything. How great is that? I had to move to North Carolina to meet nice people from Florida, heheh.

The music here is great too. You’d think that there’d be a bunch o’ piddly country bands coming into town and it’d be miserable for a non-country boy like myself, but I forget that this is a HUGE college town. Tonght, G-love is playing up the street and next month my wife and I are going to see Del the Funkee Homosapien.

So far the people here are very friendly. Every person we came in contact with at a store or in the neighborhood where we live have been polite and accommodating. I know it’s early still in my stay here, but so far I can’t wait to just meet people because of how friendly the people I’ve already met are.

Well, busy day today. My wife took off of work and we’re going to…

-Get our drivers license
-Get our passport
-Register to vote
-Change our banks
-Get a new cell phone service (Alltel is big here, we’re going with them)
-Fax info for the house closing
-Go to the post office
-Go to one of the HUNDREDS of privately-owned coffee shops in the area. (I’m in freakin’ heaven)
-Go to a ping-pong Meetup event at 6pm. (Meetup.com) We’re both ping pong…I mean TABLE TENNIS players…don’t tell, but that’s why I married her.

We’re off!

I was asked because of this post what the big deal about Quicksilver for the Mac. Well-heh-heh-ell…let me learn you a little sumthin’….

I figured I might as well do a little quickie tutorial to get people started. You can do some searching on your own to find out little things here and there you’re trying to do.

Let’s do this thing….

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A little known ‘feature’ of Apple’s Universal Access is the ability to switch to ‘black on white’ with this keystroke command. Basically it switches everything viewable on the screen to something like a photo negative. Pretty neat.

I like to use it as a night-time mode when there isn’t much light around because it makes it easier to read what’s on the screen without the blinding back light frying your retinas.

I was reminded of this feature via 43 Folders who reports of a Blacktree app called Nocturne that gives you the ability to tweak the settings of this feature. Pretty cool stuff if you use this often.

You might have heard of Blacktree as they’re the people that brought Mac users the ‘hands-down-most-useful-awesome-wonderful-best-coolest-app-EVAR-for-the-Mac’, Quicksilver.

I try my best to lock down my home network as best I can. I’m not a security guru by any stretch of the imagination, but I know what I want from my router and if it’s not provided to me straight out of the box, then I have to find an inexpensive (read: free) way to fix it.

I’m one of the bajillions of people that own a Linksys WRT54G 4 port wireless router. I had found out that it is quite the popular model because it had its firmware released to satisfy the GPL. This means anyone can go in and manhandle the firmware and make changes to it to enhance it and tailor it to their liking.

One of the key features for me was the ability to modify QoS. I tend to have a lot of things going on in the background of my machine…Skype…P2P (legal stuff, thank you. ), so when I use it for basic web browsing, it gets pretty sluggish. QoS gives you the ability to set priority for data flows. Now, I can give my web traffic the highest priority while setting the P2P in the background.

Another feature I really liked about this firmware was its realtime bandwidth monitoring:

I’m able to view each machine and see how much bandwidth I’m using per machine / overall. A great feature if you share with a number of users or if your ISP caps your monthly bandwidth limit.

There are a ton of other features I love about this firmware, but you be the judge. The selling point for this one over the others that are made for this brand of router is the bandwidth monitoring. Others like DD-WRT don’t have that, but have other features that might suit your needs.

Have a look at Tomato here.

I’ve always been impressed by those sites out there that have image overlays when you click on the thumbnails…and I’ve always wondered how it was done. I just assumed it was some kind of crazy Flash plugin or something. Nope.

To know what the Lightbox plugin is, I suppose you need to know what Lightbox is first. Lightbox uses Javascript to overlay images on your current site when you click on ‘em. Basically, you click on a picture and the site fades to the background and brings the focus to the picture. No need to load a new page, it’s all done via Javascript and CSS. Here’s an example using a pic I took in Vegas of New York New York:

LJ’ers - gotta make the jump over to see it. I’m sure you can do this via LJ somehow too, but I haven’t really looked into it.

You can also use it for image sets as well. Check out the author’s site. Pretty nifty.

Lightbox Image Overlay Script Homepage

For the users of WordPress, here’s a link to the plugin. No crazy trick to make it work. There are some minor changes you’ll have to make to some paths if you don’t have WordPress loaded in your root in both the .js and .php files, but you’ll figure it out. I’ll be happy to answer some questions if you need some help setting it up.

Link to WordPress plugin

So far, I’m seeing an issue when using this along with ‘Viper’s Video plugin’ which lets you view a variety of multimedia from sites like YouTube and MySpace via Wordpress. If you see the SNL skit below through your browser, that means I got it working! Otherwise, I hope to find a fix soon.

Ultra was a blast this year!!! The one downside was the INSANE amount of rain that came down during the entire show. There were a few places to take cover, but not enough to help ALL the masses. We decided to just roll with whatever mother nature hit us with and we battled through it. We were soaked through for the entire day and night. It would have been ok if it was a warm rain, but there was a pretty kickin’ breeze and that kinda ruined it for us for the rest of the day. (more…)