Monthly Archive for July, 2009

A Look Back… Disaster or Triumph?

Published
by
Sam
on July 27, 2009
in 930posts
. 2 Comments

Guess what guys? Sector930.com is almost 1 year old. That’s right, we’ve reached that age where we get to shove our fists into a big cake, while all the adults (a.k.a, better blogs) take pictures and note how adorable we are. Let’s take a look back on the year to rediscover and admire our accomplishments.

We started out in my tiny, one bedroom apartment on July 29 of last year with an immature duel of posts between Edwin and me. Then, we introduced ourselves in turn before we started our famous journey through sex, back-stabbing, and money grabbing.

I started, and never finished, a series of SQL tutorials. Joel went on about a bunch of math stuff that the rest of us don’t understand. Charlie contributed -5 posts. Edwin wrote our most popular post about OpenDNS. And Joe wrote a ridiculous post about energy drinks. We also (barely) managed to move our hosting and develop a high availability solution.

I had quite a blast rereading old entries.  I noticed how we started out with a lot of excitement and ambition, posting often. Lately, though, posts have dribbled out every few weeks. That sounds like most IT careers. But everyone has been quite busy. Here’s the score:

  • Weddings: 1
  • Home purchases: 3
  • Relocations: at least 5
  • Job changes: at least 3
  • iPhones: 4
  • BlackBerries: 1

Overall, it’s been a good year. Thanks to all 3 of the readers, and thanks to the other authors. Sector 930 has been one of the most important things in my life for the past couple of years, and sector930.com has been doubly important for the past year. Here’s to another year of posts about boring jobs, math gobbelty gook, ham radios, and ADD.

We better enjoy this birthday while it lasts because we’ll never get to eat cake with our bare hands again.  Was our infancy worth all the diapers, vomit, and breast feeding? We might find out when we hit puberty. In the meantime, it’s time to start growing up.

The Secret Garden is always open now…

Published
by
Joel
on July 24, 2009
in 930posts, Fun Stuff and Tips and Tutorials
. 1 Comment

During my normal lunchtime gleaning of the internet of everything news and technology related, I discovered that I had access to a fair amount of Google’s applications. This may sound strange to any denizen of the corporate or education sectors, but I work for THE MAN© and as such am fairly limited in things I can do whilst on the web. So, what applications does THE MAN© allow me to use you ask. Originally, I could only access Reader (which vastly facilitates my lunchtime reading). Now it seems that the gates have been opened and I can use iGoogle (a very Apple-esque name if you ask me), Docs, Voice, Calendar and Tasks (but only through Calendar). But what of Google’s first and in my opinion premier app, GMail? Well it too is available albeit through a widget in iGoogle. The one caveat to its use is that you can’t use it and the ‘Always https’ option at the same time. Thus I’m bereft of GMail until I choose to disable this option and even then the widget provides very rudimentary access at best.

Another thing I’ve noticed (and which may differ for other employees of THE MAN©) is that my access to wordpress is spotty at best. I may read all the blogs I choose, but logging in to perform any administrative tasks or writing and editing posts is fickle. A lot of times, I’ll find myself reading an article or two and stringing them together with an idea for a great post, but have no way to share it on the Sector. By the time I’ve returned home, I’ll have lost the creative spark and replaced it with tv, books or regular old drudgery about the house. “So why don’t you just write it up and email it to yourself for posting later?” Well frankly, I’m just too damned lazy to do that. A) it requires foresight of which I have very little and B) I have to log in and then copy/paste and reformat because THE MAN© mandates text only email and it always fucks up endlines and pagination. </rant>

Enter Google Docs. I was cleaning out some old documents and discovered that there was a publish option inside the right click menu as well as the “More Actions” drop down. It does exactly what it states, it either publishes that item or posts it straight to a blog. The only problem now was deciphering the ‘post to blog’ settings since there didn’t seem to be an inherent Wordpress option. I found a solution courtesy of the Reverend (aka Jim Groom, a friend of the Sector and the brain behind Bavatuesdays). His quick little explanation can be found here. After that everything was up and running with this post as proof of concept. Now if I can only figure out how to get tags to work…