Lexington, Va: moe. at Washington and Lee U.

Fun show at (of all places) the Maintenance Facility building converted in to a concert hall at Washington & Lee U.

My first time seeing the band, and I have to say, I was pretty impressed

It can be very time-consuming to find the right hotel at the best price online.  VibeAgent solves this problem by aggregating rates, availability, and content from over 30 travel sites, and adding a layer of intelligence to match each traveler to the perfect hotel. We do the searching for you, by consolidating rates, availability, and hotel content on over 140,000 hotels, providing you access to the largest hotel selection and best room rates available online. You can use VibeAgent’s real-time price, location, and category filters to determine which hotel best suits their needs, and then see consolidated room rates from all the searched sites.

This saves you from having to visit multiple sites to find the right hotel at the best available rate. In addition, VibeAgent allows registered users to post and share hotel reviews with their own network of friends and colleagues.  We just launched the Hotelier Suite, which allows hotels to post or claim their hotel and manage their content directly on VibeAgent’s search engine.

Read the full press release on TechCrunch.com

And yes. It’s bad to the bone!

When Previews is active, any link that you hover over (based on your settings) will produce a preview icon that will overlay the linked page in an interactive window. This is very useful when making edits to multiple entries in a control panel, previewing search results, or any number of sites that offer a list/detail view.

I recently had to use the Expression Engine maintenance suite to mark 12 entries as ‘not active’. I was able to open each in the Previews window,  set the selection to inactive, and save - all without leaving the list view in the edit screen. This probably saved me 1/2 the time it would have taken to navigate back to the edit screen and finding the next entry.

Still waiting for a Safari 3.x compatible version, but it shouldn’t be too long.

I have had great success with this plugin and the Piclens (though I don’t use it nearly as often) plugin by the same folks.

I’m cruising along at work today, and I receive an email from my mother containing a link to the Wired blog stating that McCain is learning to use the Internet. Now lets be clear - My mother is not a computer genius, nor she does not work in an office with constant access to the Internet. Still, she has the knowledge and skill (partially imparted by yours truly) to get online all by herself, search for articles and news, and communicate instantly with the ones that she loves. Knowledge & skill which Presidential Candidate John McCain apparently lacks.

I’m not generally prone to political commentary - but this is a man that wants my vote to run my country. A country that is woefully in danger of being left behind in the technology arena (despite W’s promise that no child would be). The article even points to a link where his name on twitter has even been taken over by a prankster.

This is just unacceptable.

So, Yes! My Mother is better than Presidential Candidate John McCain at using the Internet. I couldn’t be more proud!

Love you MOM!!!

NOTE: Please reserve the  moma’s boy comments - I’ve heard it all before.

Picture if you will…

People around the world are lined up in anticipation of the upcoming release of the iPhone 3G. Meanwhile, those of us with our second generation phones are fervently clicking the ‘Check for Update” button in iTunes after spending the previous afternoon browsing the AppStore and downloading our favorites.

Finally this morning around 9AM, the 5th click on the update button caused my heart to skip a beat… Version 2.0 is here! It’s finally here!!! Chants of “Huzzah!” ring through the office as all of the have-iPhones prepare to update and rub all of the iPhone-have-not’s noses in the ease of the update and the cool new toys that we’ll all have (in the traditional iPhone smugness reserved for such occasions). A few even throw the gauntlet down in preparation for a Saber Battle.

Then, a dark cloud descends over the crowd as one-by-one, the horror sets in. Through the din of whispered “WTF!” - we all realize that our phones are BRICKED! I felt like Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas watching iPhone-have-nots smugly making phone calls on their plain ‘ol phones.

Way to go Apple… Probably the most highly anticipated software update to-date, and you shoot yourself in the foot… How very Windows Vista of you. Hopefully you’ll figure it out, or at least give us an idea of when we can have our phones back (at the time of this post, this was the top story on Apple’s Hot News.

Sadly, our epic Saber Battle will have to wait.

The app store for the iPhone is online and I already have my favorites ready to go.

• AIM - Check
• Enigmo - Check
• Remote - Check
• PhoneSaber - Oh that’s a BIG Check!
• iPhone 2.0 Update…. DOH!

Well, we’ve waited this long… Whats a few more days.

Oh, and BTW Matt - I’ve had a saber on my MacBook Pro for quite a while now… but the PhoneSaber is way cooler!

Back on June 18th, I received an email from Netflix stating that they were eliminating profiles on September 1, 2008 citing that, “this change will help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.” For those of you who do not use this Netflix service, profiles allow you to set up a separate queue for your account, assign a number of your rentals to that queue, and even set parental control for the queue. This was particularly handy for my girlfriend and I, because we were able to put the movies that we wanted to see the most at the top of our respective queues - leaving only the “which one do you want to watch” question [handled easily by the 'pick a card method'] unanswered.

I’m sure you’re asking yourself, as did I, why in the world would you eliminate functionality from a site? I’m sure there is a viable reason on the programming/site up-keep side of things, or this functionality is making it difficult to implement a new feature… but hell - this was one of my favorite things about Netflix. It was a no hassle way to ensure that everyone got a say, and that everyone [based on the luck of the draw] was happy.

It seems that there were quite a few others that were as perplexed, and bothered by this as I was. Yesterday evening, to my delight, I received another email from Netflix stating that they were keeping profiles.

Kudos to Netflix for listening to their users. I’m quite sure that there’s a programmer out there who’s life just got a little harder, but way to go!