Taken 12.19.2007

If you are looking for a good place to get some last second gifts for that gadget guy in your life, check out Restoration Hardware’s Stocking Stuffer page. It is chock-full of products that I would love to receive.

Take for instance this lighted water hose… I have no idea why, but yet I am compelled to say “Why not?” You never know when you might want to water your plants at night.

I still can’t wait for Christmas!

Ok, I saw this for the first time two years ago, or was it three… anyway, it is still one of the coolest things I have ever seen…

I did some investigation on the intertubes and found out that this light display was first put together by an electrical engineer named Carson Williams in 2004. Here is more about him on Snopes.com. The posts also includes some of his other creations as well as a 2005 Miller Lite Commercial based on this video.

Miller Lite has another Christmas commercial in heavy rotation this year that made me remember this video.

You can see Carson and his family in an interview with the Today Show.

The reason I migrated my site to a new provider is the need to have access to the server settings that allowed me to set up the Gmail functionality on my site.  The migration went fairly well.  Although, I keep finding little things that needed quick repairs.  (Not the least of which was my RSS feed was broken for a while.)  I hope I have everything fixed and working.

In a post yesterday I lamented not having Gmail functionality, well that is over it is now working beautifully.  My new email address is murraywilliams[enter and 'AT' sign here]murdog[enter a dot or point or period or what ever you call it here]com. (I entered it in that convoluted way to hopefully thwart people from scraping my email address from this entry…spammers can go to ….)

My other email addresses will still work, I have them forwarded to that account. Hooray!!!

Wow, that wasn’t that bad. WordPress has an option in its ‘Manage’ tab that allows you to export your entire blog. I did that on the old hosted site, and then did the import on the new hosted site, and unless you happened to go to my site between midnight and 7:00 AM last night, you won’t see a thing.

Hooray… now to get Google Apps Email working. Then, we will really have something.

I hope this goes well… I am switching my hosting over to GoDaddy. I hope everything goes well. I would hate to lose 3 years of blogging. I backed everything up… but I am still nervous…

Just waiting for DNS to catch up… If you are seeing this, it hasn’t. This post will disappear forever once the change is done.

That makes this a collectors item…kinda

I have started using the new service from Google that allows you to “host” Google Apps on your domain. I started the process of getting it all hooked up on Thursday of this week and so far it has been pretty cool. It was pretty simple. I went to the Google Apps page and signed up. I filled out the online form and that was pretty much it. I had to post some HTML in a specific folder on my site, but doing that was trivially easy. The HTML let Google know with certainty that I was the owner of the domain.

The Killer Apps

Once you have Google Apps set up on your domain,iIt allows you to share a family calendar, or a shared calendar with all those using your domain which, right now, seems like the killer app. Keeping up with all the things your family is up to is a real chore, and having a simple powerful calendar that everyone shares for free is incredibly handy.

I set Megan up with an account, and she immediately filled the calendar up with all our family’s upcoming plans. Super handy.

In addition to a family calendar Google Apps also gives you Google docs. I haven’t found a killer use for this yet, but it allows you to create documents that are available for everyone in your family. I can see where this could be very handy for a business domain, but in the family world, it seems to be fairly limited in usefulness.

If that weren’t enough, it also includes a built in start page based on iGoogle. It lets you set up a personal start page with a ton of different widgets that connect you to the information you need. I don’t use a start page much now that I have started using Google reader to keep up with the news that I am interested in, but I still like it. All the users on your domain that you set up with Google Apps also get a start page of their own.

I was hoping that there would be the option of having a common iGoogle start page that everyone on the domain could use. It could be a great place to communicate, but so far I haven’t found that option if it exists.

My Email Dilemma

It also comes with integrated email which means that my MurDog.com email addresses can go through Google’s Gmail interface which is incredibly handy. Right now however, I can’t get that running. In order for it to work, you have to update the MX records on the DNS server to point towards Google’s mail servers. I know that is pretty technical, but it should be a pretty simple thing if you can get access to it. The Google site has great instructions that make it pretty simple to make the changes.

I have a problem. My hosting service provider, www.thehostgroup.com doesn’t give me access to the MX settings. Or, if it does, I can’t find them. It is enough for me to start thinking about finding better hosting for this site. Having a personal email address that leverages the power of Gmail is an exciting prospect. I have sent a message to my provider in hopes of getting this resolved, but so far I haven’t heard anything from them.

One of the bad parts of having a personal email address that I have to manage is spam. It is a huge problem. I turned off my personal email address years ago because of spam. If I could get this Google apps thing to work then I would have Google’s horsepower behind spam control. It would be a huge help.

If I can’t get the email thing resolved, I might have to look at another provider for my web site hosting.

MurDog.com is just a personal site, and I don’t get any revenue from it so low-cost hosting is a necessity. If I can find a provider that is inexpensive, and allows me to host this WordPress blog I might be interested in switching.

For now, I will wait and see what The Host Group does.

Other than that, it is a pretty cool option from Google that should only get better.

I have been able to do it for over two or three weeks now, but I am able to solve the Rubik’s cube.  What a deal.  I remember fooling around with these things as a child convinced that I would never be able to do it.  But, now I can.

I don’t know what spurred it, but sometime last year, I bought a Rubik’s cube on a whim.  They still sell them at Wal-Mart, believe it or not. Anyway, now they come with instructions. Fantastic.  The problem is that it takes a spatial genius to follow the instructions.  Even with the instructions, it took me around a month of noodling with it to finally do it once.

Once I had done it, I left it alone for over a year.  In the meantime, I received the 80’s edition of Trivial Pursuit.  That came packaged with another Rubik’s cube.  Now I had two, the one I had conquered finally and this one.  I got the second one out of its packaging feeling safe that I had at least one cube standing as a tribute to my Rubik’s prowess. My safety cube allowed me to play with the second one with reckless abandon.

The second cube also came with the instructions.  With those instructions, I set out to beat the cube for a second time.  After about a week of hard core twisting and turning, I finally got to the point where I could finish the cube as long as I had a copy of the instructions around…hardly impressive.

I found that I could memorize one of the steps each day.  The way I do it there are 6 steps, each of which get more complicated than the last. After roughly a week, I had all the steps mastered and now I can do it.

A co-worker of mine also go the bug and purchased a cube at the Walgreens one morning as he was checking out.  He watched the videos on www.rubiks.com to learn how to solve the cube.  You can go there and watch the videos, they are dizzying to say the least.  Now he can do the cube and he does it differently than me.  The next step is to learn his way of doing it.  From the looks of it, it is faster.