Greyhawk68

If you are interested in buying two XM Receivers, and two Boom Boxes along with a home kit, you can check out the auction here.

I’ve been lobbying for a MacBook Pro at work lately, so my Network Administrator took it upon himself to get me an Apple. It just happens to be an Apple G4 BC!!!

Shaun Alexander has a broken foot and is out indefinitely at this point. As soon as I heard the news last night, I said to myself. Yup, the Madden Curse has struck again. Basically everyone who has appeared on the cover of the Madden football game for like this past decade has had something horrible happen to them. Injuries and really bad seasons mainly, sometimes both, sometimes their career ended shortly thereafter.

When it came time for my fantasy football draft, I had the first pick. Shaun Alexander was considered by many to be the best overall player on the board. I skipped him solely based on the Madden Curse. I know it sounds nuts, but anyone who graces that cover will never be drated by me that season… no way.

Wow, three years already. Hard to believe! For all of you folks who read this, and are wondering if you should start a blog. DO IT! These three years of blogging have given me a ton of benefits. A lot of friends in the Notes community, a paid writing gig, people to party with at Lotusphere, and a place to stay creative. The blog’s been a really great addition to my creative process and now I really can’t imagine NOT doing it.

Anyway, thanks to all 2500 or so readers for coming back. I couldn’t have imagined more than two or three people would have read this with any regularity. I’m thrilled that you keep finding reasons to come back.

Looks like the reality TV supergroup called Supernova will not be able to use that name due to losing a trademark infringement suit against a band who originally used that moniker. So, they are changing their name to Rock Star Supernova. I do think it’s cheesy, but I know why they have to do it.

In other R.S.S. news, I found the release of their singles on Yahoo Music Unlimited yesterday. They have studio recordings of “It’s All Love” and “Be Yourself and 5 Other Cliches” out there now and they actually sound terrific. I don’t think either will be big radio hits per se, but I think they are actually good songs. I know some people were underwhelmed when they did them live, but they sound great on record. Lukas sings VERY clearly and you can understand everything he’s saying, which was something people criticized him for not doing. Well it’s not an issue on the tracks. He fits perfectly.

Really looking forward to the album now!

As promised, here is Part 2 of my article on adding domBulletin to your Intranet. Enjoy!

Over the last year I’ve become a really big fan of subscription music services. Basically, you pay a monthly fee to have access to millions of songs. You can stream or download the songs, and they can be transferred to compatible devices. The downside is once you stop paying, you can no longer access your music.

Now I use Yahoo Music Unlimited. I download tracks and can transfer them to my Creative Zen Vision. The songs can play on one of three authorized computers (using Yahoo Music Jukebox) and I can also stream the songs to my XBox 360. So I can listen to them on my stereo (through the xbox), on the go (with my Zen Vision), or on one of three different computers. The other nice thing about the computers is that if I bookmark or download a track on one machine, it bookmarks or downloads to all three machines. So that means all three machines keep in sync automatically which is very nice.

I’m really not a fan of DRM, but this subscription model is working very nicely for me. Last Wednesday I downloaded 15 albums. At least 10 of them were recent releases that I was interested in. In the past I would have to limit what I could buy, now it’s all I can eat.

Now, the reason this is really good in my opinion right now, is that if you subscribe to Yahoo Music Unlimited and pay the yearly fee up front with a Mastercard, they will give you the second year free. So, for $119.88, that is $4.99 a month for all that access! And if you don’t need to transfer to a portable device, you could get it for $59.88 (or $2.50 a month.) The promotion with Mastercard goes through October 4th, so to get this great price, sign up before then.

Part 1 of my latest article for Intranet Journal is up now! It details adding the open-source web discussion template, domBulletin to your intranet. I’ll finish up with Part 2 on Wednesday!

Since I’m an admin, I don’t dabble in development that often. But when I do, it’s normally making an app that needs to look good on the web. I’ve done it for a long time and I used to use certain conventions.

One of those was determining height and width on text fields to present them to the web. It was always fairly easy. I learned to enter the information in the field’s style field on the properties tab. So for example, if I wanted a text field to present itself as 700 pixels wide by 120 pixels tall, I would put the following in the style field.

width=700; height=120

It worked great, my field would look perfect…in Internet Explorer. As I’m now a Firefox user, it’s important to me that my presentation is the same in both browsers. Firefox ignored my entries though, so I had to figure out the RIGHT way to enter that info.

Well, it was so simple that I feel like a real “dummy.” In order to help some of you new developers avoid the dummy tag, I’m here to show you how to easily get it to work as well in Firefox. And trust me, it is easy. A colon instead of an equal sign.

width:700; height:120

Yup, that. is. it. Now I know that pretty much every developer worth their weight KNEW this, but hey, I’m an admin.

Now, I can hear the Mac faithful saying “WHAT ABOUT SAFARI?” Well guess what, the above technique doesn’t work. Safari looks for a “textarea” which is not what Notes serves up by default when it does a text field on the web. But, there is another workaround that’s kind of kludgy, but will work.

All you do is make the text field a multi-value field. Not elegant, I know. But once you make it a multi-value field it makes it a “textarea” on the web, and then the height and width attributes take hold. So, doing it that way allowed my form to look the same in IE, Firefox and Safari.

I also know that you can do this with real style sheets too, and that’s probably preferrable, but for those times you need to make a quick change, this will do it. Any real developers want to post a a preferred method of doing this on their own SnTT posts?