Bret Phillips » Technology Topics

Speaking: Connecting WordPress with the Business Community

bretwp — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:36:35 +0000

This evening I will be speaking for a WordPress meetup on Connecting WordPress with the Business Community.

You can find the Meetup information here:

http://www.meetup.com/wordpress-atlanta/calendar/13854311/

We will be discussion the following:

What is WordPress?

WP is a Content Management System.

I’ve got the whole world, in my hand…

bretwp — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:20:42 +0000

At this years Oct-Stu-Beer-Fest, I was having a conversation with my mother and a few others about a conversation that I had with my mother the previous year.

Let me preface with this, my mother is not the most technically savvy person on the planet. In fact, I have been trying to teach her the basics of computing for over 10 years, and while she is finally starting to make progress, she has a long way to go.

That being said, I often talk to her about new technology when I begin using it and tend to get excited talking about technology.

Now back to the story. At last years fest, I was all hyped up about the power of my Blackberry. During our conversation about that, I said something along the lines of “you see, I have the whole world right here in my hands!”.

This is what I really wanted to post about today. The truth behind that phrase.

When I started on the internet, mobile phones were hardly available, hardly mobile, and hardly useful. Sure you could carry around a briefcase sized unit with a gigantic phone attached to it, but what was the point? They were mostly satellite phones with bad signals and VERY expensive. Plus, all you could do is make phone calls.

Today my cell phone is about the size of my wallet and has almost as much functionality as my desktop computer. Sure my desktop is more powerful and allows me to run some massive applications like Photoshop and Sonar, but while I am afk, I do not really need that much power.

What I do need, or want at least, is immediate access to my email, chat, internet search, and a GPS…oh, and to be able to make phone calls.

While that may seem like I am asking a lot, that is hardly the full capability of current phones. For instance, the other day at Blimpie, my sandwich technician handed me his iPhone and told me to try out the new Madden 2009…on his iPhone! I played it for a while and it was a fantastic experience. The graphics and game play are just as good as any console version that I have ever played, and I did it all while standing in line waiting on my sandwich.

Back to the whole world. Not long ago, as some of you readers might remember, I decided to move all my of e-lifestyle over to google so that I could streamline everything. One account giving me access to a host of applications that I use daily, and available entirely online so that I could access them from any computer any time. What a fantastic idea that was. Little did I know that I would get my hands on a cell phone that would also allow me access to thesse online applications.

Currently, my blackberry proudly sports the Google Suite. I use gmail, google cal, gchat, docs and spreadsheets, search, and googlemaps on both my PC and my phone, sometimes at the same time.

With access to my email, at any given time, most importantly when I am afk and remember something that I was supposed to send to someone…I can send that message to anyone in the world.

Most of my good friends and family also use gmail and therefor have access to gchat, allowing me instant access to them without even having to call them. Not only that, but gchat supports AIM so all of my old chat contacts show up as well.

Before googlemaps on my cell phone, I would have to do all of my travel documenting on my pc, print out the pages, and run with that. While that is still better than old schooling it with a regular paper map, it is not as effective for me if I am already out on the town. While on tour this past year, we hit up a few cities that I had never been to. With ease we were able to navigate the cities, find the places we were looking for, and never once having to hit up a PC or a printer.

Top that off with the ability to search google for anything anywhere and I have access to the whole world, in my hands.

I am very excited to see where cell phones aka tiny personal computers are going to end up in the next 5-10 years. I think we are at the very begining stages of some great leaps in technology and will be seeing some very promising innovations in the very very near future.

Testing, testing, can you hear me?

bretwp — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:07:15 +0000

Today I decided to spend a couple of minutes trying to tie together several of my e-applications, namely Wordpress blog(this site), my Twitter account, and my Facebook. As well, I would like to tie them into my Blackberry for ultimate content flow.

My ultimate goal here is to be able to use them all seamlessly together, instead of trying to manage them all separately. Fortunately for me, many other people had this same idea, and some of those people were developers themselves. All I had to do was a quick Google search and click a few links.

Done and done.

What exactly did you do Bret?

What I’ve done is set up my Facebook account to accept my Twitter posts as status udates. This was real easy using the Facebook Twitter application found here: http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/

Next I’ve set up my Wordpress to display my most recent Twitter posts using a friendly Wordpress widget Twitter Tools, also very easy. Search it in your Wordpress..

So now all I need to do is post to Twitter and that message shows up for anyone watching this site, but more importantly Facebook.

Next up was using Twitter from my Blackberry. Using http://m.twitter.com is actually really nice. It is fast and simple, but does not have too many options, and I like options. After consulting with The O, I downloaded Ubertwitter: http://www.ubertwitter.com/

UberTwitter streams your followed friends on your BB. It also allows you to post tweets of your own, and most of all, allows you to attach an image to those tweets. While this functionality is pretty limited at this time, it looks to be the only app out right now that has it, so I’ll take it.

What I would like to see is a way for me to upload pictures to my Facebook account from my Blackberry with an option to tweet. I already am able to send the pics directly to FB, add a comment to the pics, tag the pics, etc. The tweet could be the comment with a link back to the photo on FB. If there is already something like this please let me know

Atmosphere

bretwp — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 18:10:00 +0000

The more and more I think about it, the more strange it seems. I am not sure if I really like having too much of an understanding of certain things. At first I was thinking about how it would be really cool to play a show on the moon, then I started thinking about how sound travels and how much louder it would need to be on the moon to get the same audible effect as blasting a venue here on Earth.

From there my mind takes me to how this atmosphere here keeps us humans alive. The trees and plants work off of certain elements to produce another element, one of which we create and breath out after breathing in what it has created, and the cycle continues over and over.

Then as I am driving I see some traffic, hundreds of cars slowly creeping forward in line…in line like ants are in line while working. We are just another set of molecules, like ants, that has adapted to use elements around us to help us reproduce and make more of ourselves. We have also developed a mind smart enough to realize that this is exactly what is happening.

Or have we?

Do dehumidifiers really work?

bretwp — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 13:34:00 +0000

So I’ve been thinking, do dehumidifiers really work?

My house is a Ranch layout with a basement. For years before we arrived there had been some water issues.

The gutters were all broken, water was not being routed away from the house but instead puddling up in the front and seeping down into the concrete and dirt in front of the house. There is a wannabe French Drain installed inside the house along the walls of the basement, but it has been rusted out for years.

You can actually see dirt/mud down in them, which I fear might mean that the foundation has some very weak support up under it, but I can not be sure w/o tearing it up.

We have temporarily fixed the gutters and routed all the water runoff from the yard and roof away from the house. We noticed an immediate difference not only outside but inside as well. The basement still has a very damp feel and some what mildew-ish smell to it so I snatched two dehumidifiers from my parents and have been letting them run in 1 of the two 20×25 rooms in the basement for the past few weeks.

Every morning, the water tubs in the dehumidifiers are full of water, and every afternoon when I get home the tubs for the dehumidifiers are again full with water. But how do I know this is water that was in the air, that these things really work? I did some research to figure it out, and it’s really a very basic concept.

Cool the air somehow, the moisture will condense, capture condensed moisture in a tub.

One of the dehumidifiers froze over when we were running them in the winter time. I guess the air + cooling unit was just too cold, it turned into a big block of ice on the machine.

The other one however did not, but it was unable to pull any moisture from the air. Now that its hot neither of them have any problems filling up the tubs.

After only a few weeks, it’s hard to tell if the dehumidifiers are making a big difference in the basement rooms as far as humidity goes. I am hopeful that over time all the efforts put together will really work.

Anyway, I hope to answer the question do dehumidifiers really work? I think the dehumidifiers help but I have a feeling that all this effort may be in vein unless I continue this project for a very long time.