The Holidays

For those of you who might not know, recently - in the last couple months - it was towards the end of November, that my parents and 3 of us boys went in and got a family plan for cell phones.

I am just getting used to thinking about using the little camera and video on my phone to capture some memories.

So in this post I will show you a little about the recent holidays using some of the images and such from my phone.

Unfortunately I don't have any images or vids from Christmas...

The closest thing to after that is a surprise birthday party for my cousin Rhett VanScoter... who I've done some work for on his website (http://www.vanscoterinsurance.com).

Rhett

This was just such a good picture I just had to post it here: (From my cousin's surprise birthday party)

My Uncle Ron (my Dad's brother-in-law)

New Year's:

Now we move on to New Year's eve, which I spent partially at the Van der Jagt's house and left there at 10:30 PM to be at work at 11:00 PM.

I got this photo of Dan Van der Jagt, but wasn't quick enough...

Dan Van der Jagt

Apparently he didn't want his picture taken.

For New Year's day we spent the evening - dinner and such - at my brother's house with his wife Becky:

Becky VanScoter (My brother Joe's wife)

Yes, Becky is eloquently displaying for us the appetizer of her choice before dinner.

Jon VanScoter (Chewing no his appetizer)

He tried to put his hand in front of the camera but was too slow - probably why there's such a dumb look on his face! (or it might be from chewing)

Sam VanScoter (Reaching for his appetizer)

Ever wonder what a post New Year's day after-dinner would look like at the VanScoter's....

Sam VanScoter (Playing with his phone)
[ I got him first! ]

... It doesn't look like much!

(I was testing the image and video quality of various settings which is why the last one doesn't look so great.)

From there we just went on to watch a movie - The Pursuit of Happyness

And if you're wondering about how Christmas was, it wasn't a whole lot different I got almost a week off of work to do nothing much, help with preparations, and hang out with family.

Click Here To Read The Full Article By Itself.

OK: Qumana = Bad Idea

So I was checking out some of the posts I had flagged on The Unofficial Apple Weblog's feed through NetNewsWire... and I came across this post about the Qumana blog editor -- that I wanted to try out and take a look at.

Because I have MarsEdit and like it a lot, but why not see what other things are out there and see what they meant by:

It's not as Mac-like as MarsEdit by a long shot, but if you'd like to try a free editor that works easily with a variety of blogging platforms then Qumana is worth a look.

Which from first glance I thought... well that's because it's a Java App.

So I downloaded Qumana - though without entering my email I just clicked on the download button for the Mac Version.

Then I unzipped the download, and moved the Application into my Applications folder.

Launched the program, and followed the prompts to load and give Qumana access to my weblogs I have under one of my accounts in Blogger.

Then I get to the main screen where it lists the Blogs I have available....

And wanting to see the posts in my blogs I click on the "Refresh Posts", which it should have been able to get the posts on my blog(s) relatively easily...

But not everything works out as you would like!

I'm greeted by a happy error message with a big bold red stop-sign with an exclamation mark in it saying:

java.lang.Exception: RPC handler object "blogger2" not found and no default handler registered

Whatever that is supposed to mean!

Isn't one of the things to do before releasing any software is to test your software under a bunch of various environments or make sure it's dead easy for people to tell if it won't work with whatever environment they might be using?

In either case....

Goodbye Qumana

You Stink!!!!

MarsEdit... You ROCK!!!

So don't mess around with Qumana unless you're willing to have bugs like that!

By the way I'm still operating in Mac OSX 10.4 - maybe they designed it for Mac OSX 10.5 - I dunno.

I didn't upgrade, yet -- but you will hear about my upgrade experience soon.

In either case... MarsEdit is still probably the best blog editor for me - since HTML doesn't scare me and I love all the keyboard shortcuts!

I've even just opened a new MarsEdit post just to write up some long lists to do the markup faster than I would just typing it all regularly in a text editor and just copy and paste all the HTML into my page.

However, I have yet to purchase an upgrade to MarsEdit 2.x -- but I know I will be doing that soon!

Click Here To Read The Full Article By Itself.