Sunday, December 29, 2002

Ping-Pong Table Purchased Google Search It Folks who have known me for quite some time will know how much I enjoy a game of ping-pong.  Well, since my family was coming to stay for Christmas Elisabeth and I decided to purchase a ping-pong table.  We started out with the Ventura from Sears but upon opening up the box at my house we discovered that the table was cracked.  Stink!!  Anyway, we got permission to put it up and use it through Christmas as it was still playable.  One really nice thing about this table was that it was really, really easy to assemble.  Only 4 wing nuts and we were done. While waiting the week for the Ventura to be replaced I came across a Stiga Quick Play 3000 Table Tennis Table table at Gart Sports and decided to purchase that one instead.  The list price is $350 but we got is on sale for $191.  Table seems okay but the setup took over an hour.  Yuck!  Not sure that it is any better than the Ventura but it was available immediately and at the very least, the table was thicker. While buying the table I also purchased a couple Butterfly Derek May Table Tennis Paddles.  They seem sufficient for the family to get some good games in without feeling that they are at a disadvantage. 11:10:36 PM   []    comment []

Tinkertoy Dragster Car Google Search It Today Benjamin and I opened up the Tinkertoy set he got for Christmas and we constructed a dragster as per the supplied diagram for the most part. 10:57:50 PM   []    comment []

Back Dating a Post Google Search It When posting about a trip I have made I would like to back date the post to when I was actually on the trip.  I presume this could be done by editing the XML files but I am uncertain of the exact procedure and I would like to have it be a little more "automated" so as to prevent an error.  I wonder if changing the date on the computer may be a type of hack method. 6:00:51 PM   []    comment []

My Pictures Google Search It I was finally able to get the My Pictures tool working although I am not sure I like it very much.  The problem I was having was that after pasting pictures into the watch folder they were moved to the copy-new-pictures folder but the img URL was not being placed into the system clipboard and neither was my homepage opening up with the pasted items.  It appears the problem was that the full Radio app was not running.  Once I changed to have Radio running (not the one on the right of the task bar but the full app) by selecting the "Open Radio" menu that URL was copied.  Interestingly enough the pictures were still moved even if the full Radio app was not running.  Hmmm.... I am not sure I like the fact that pictures are placed into directories corresponding to the date the file was copied.  Also, I still want to keep pictures in my windows My Pictures directory so I end up copying them and the result is the pictures are in multiple places. 1/6/02: See followup discussion here. 5:40:20 PM   []    comment []

Removing the Radio Userland Logo Google Search It If you want to remove the Radio Userland Logo   from the bottom of each page all you have to do is remove or comment out the <%radioBadge%> tag from the Main Template and Home Page Template.  Changing <%radioBadge%> to <!--<%radioBadge%>--> in other words.  While figuring out how to post this message with the link to the Radio Userland Logo I also realized how to use rudimentary macros.  By simply pasting "<%radioBadge%>" into the source window I was able to display the image. (What is somewhat strange, however, is that the macros don't appear when using the wysiwyg view.  They are completely invisible.) In other words, macros are replaced by the macro definition at time of rendering.  Cool! Next on my list is to create a macro fo images and code, two command things I place within my logs.  In addition I need to figure out how one passes parameters to macros? One last discovery I made was the use of Shortcuts.  From the Shortcuts URL you can add new named shortcuts such that entering the name in quotes will result in the text of the shortcut being used in place of the quoted name when the post is rendered.  For example, I added a shortcut named 'Test' in which I placed 'this is a test' for the test.  The result is that " Test " (remove spaces) is replaced with "This is a test". Neat!  4:17:10 PM   []    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Mark Michaelis.