1UP Mushroom at ThinkGeek.com

This is just… I have no words.  Scary and cute and nostalgic all at once!

Grow Your Own 1up Mushroom

Exercise Your 8-Bit Green Thumb

Ever feel like you might get more respect from your co-workers if they knew you had an extra life up your sleeve? How about a handy 1up mushroom growing on your desk to let everyone around you know that you could simply re-spawn the next time someone tries to backstab you in front of the boss? Straight out of Mario’s garden, the ThinkGeek Grow Your Own 1up Mushroom gives the illusion that you grew a real 1up mushroom in a pipe shaped pot. Simply add soil to the pot and push the mushroom into the center. This fully licensed Nintendo collectible will fool your co-workers and get you way more respect than a ficus plant.

The Brave One, Indeed

Watching Jodie Foster tear through the underbelly of NY in The Brave One gave me chills in a good and bad way simultaniously.  A good way akin to watching The Boondock Saints.  A bad way because there really are people out there like that, the ones getting shot, that really prove that we, the law abiding citizens, need our guns.

For protection.

Period.

I also like the eye for an eye method.  Aren’t we supposed to be some kind of Christian-loving society?  Isn’t that what people want other people to be like?  Have they forgotten the golden rule and the other rules in the Bible?  Oh, wait, that’s violence, and violence never solves anything.  Violence begets violence.

Absolutely, it does.  Someone shoots an innocent, they should be solved.  All if begotten and forgotten in a matter of weeks, days or hours depending on the low-life scum who died in the first place.

But honestly, what do people expect when enough of us get together in some area?  No matter what, there will always be discord.  It’s human nature, whatever part of it you want to look at.

Personally, I’d rather be a survivor than a victim anyday.  If I have to die, I’m taking down some of them with me so the next person has at least one less psychopath to deal with.  Of course, i would love to die of old age in some memorable way - skydiving or something daring.  Big family to remember me, good life led, the whole nine.

Just have to get there, first.

Creating RSS Feeds in Dreamweaver

Stumbling through the web, everyone will, at one point or another, see an RSS feed. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way of keeping your users connected and informed of any changes you make on your site. Some the I frequent are from PDSTuts.com, NetTuts.com, and Waiterrant.net. Up until this afternoon, I had no real way of creating a feed from scratch. Now that has changed.

Enter RSS DreamFeeder, an extension for Adobe Dreamweaver. I can safely say that this extension even works with the Beta CS4 release of Dreamweaver. The menus are very intuitive, and you can add multiple directories on your site to watch when you update your feed. Here is an example.

My company, the Elizabethton Star, is in need of an RSS feed of the current news on the site. Our newspaper puts out a daily edition, which is shown in part online at 6pm on the publication date. Our print time is about 11am, so this broadens the margin between people who want to wait for free, limited news, and people who want their news hot off the press. We have sections, like any other newspaper - news, sports, obits, letters to the editor, etc. I only need to post what is going on for news and sports. So, load up the DreamFeeder, add those two folders to the list, and hit the update button.

Voila! It makes the required xml file for me based on the information in our files. Better yet, this extension goes into detail of the raw HTML code, asking what defines a headline, byline, and article body.

Here’s the catch. The extension costs $59. For a company, this does what it’s supposed to and saves a lot of man hours, man hours I do not want to put in every single day. The updating took about 40 seconds on 63 news files today. Well worth it.

From here, all you have to do is upload your feed.rss, or whatever you named it, and link it to a button on your front page.

DONE! Now people can follow you through Outlook, Firefox, Google RSS Reader, or any other reader they want to use.

However, there are probably other ways of doing this, maybe ways that do not cost any money. If you know of any other resources, please feel free to post them. I will look into all of them and do a post later on, giving credit to those who contributed (can anyone say free back linking?)

When is it too much?

I’ve always been of the mind that when you leave work, you leave work.  At the end of the day, the only work that follows me home is a remnant feeling of something that I’m either proud of or something that is bothering me.

Today, it’s bothering me.  To the point of anger.

As I am about to do my workout routine, this is a good thing.  It will help fuel my workout and I’ll sleep really well tonight.  The fact remains that one of my coworkers inadvertantly pissed me off.

We are nearing the point at which we will be adding online video to our website.  We’ve also heard from one of our competitors that their e-Edition, the $40,000 investment, isn’t doing a damn bit of good.  In light of this, we are concentrating more on our free online news, and getting the new design is priority 1 right now.

I’m fine with that.  I’m actually more than fine.  I’ll be glad to get it up and running and done with.  What I’m not fine with is how my coworker has said that all three of us will be pulling hours we won’t be paid for, at night, rendering and editing videos for the site.

Excuse me?  I don’t get paid enough to do that on my own time.  That’s why it’s my own time.  Think about it, who wants to leave work and go home to work some more, only to go to bed, get up, and go to work again.

Fuck that.

While he may not have much of a life outside of his work, I do.  And I’ll be damned if I’m going to put that much time into it.  If I get a company computer to work from home, sure, I’ll render some while I’m doing something else, but it will be during the day.  At the end of the day, I’m on my time, and you’d better be paying me double for my troubles.

Maybe you’re thinking, but Jim, it’s for the betterment of the company.  You should be willing to do whatever it takes to get this project together.  One of the many things I learned from my management courses in college, and on the job, is that you have to maintain a healthy balance between work and pleasure.  People are so overworked in this country because they take their work with them.

Guess what.  It’ll be there in the morning! If I take it home, and work all night long, I don’t get a break in the morning.  I don’t get a compensatory day off.  No, I need to go back to work.  Fuck. That.

If, by chance, you are reading this and you are the one I’m talking about, then good.  Now you know exactly how I feel about it.  You want to get me booted because of it?  Fine.  You want to raise some hell about it?  Go ahead.  Get them to double my salary and then we’ll talk.