I lurv TF2 like nobody’s business. This video is great (probably NSFW, but if you are surfing the internet at work, do you really care about some crass language?):

(via Kotaku)

These days, there are more and more online identities that we have to manage. We have business identities and personal/social identities. Mynameise.com gives you the tools necessary to manage many of your online identities, and the ability to filter these identities based on which circles you are in (business, social, etc). To me, the service is great. I am able to set up multiple profiles, one for business contacts, one for social contacts, and I can make new cards as needed. Each of these cards contain contact info that I chose for that profile. For example, my business card contains my phone number, my portfolio url, my email, and my Twitter, linkedin, and flickr accounts. My social profile contains my blog url, email, twitter, last.fm, xbox live, and many other social accounts.

The one downside to the service is that it only works if others are using it. To this date, I have yet to find another person in Cincinnati that uses the service. I had tried to give away beta keys back when they were in closed beta to no avail. Just today, the service has moved in to an open state (not sure if they are technically in open beta or in a full launch stage). One of the benefits of the new upgrade in service is the inclusion of many new online services that can be tied to your E account. As you can see, there are probably more options than services you use:

The following video gives a brief overview of what the service is and how it works.

E Promo – MyNameIsE.com from My Name is E on Vimeo.

Check them out. If you have the need to manage online accounts and want an easier way to exchange contact info, E is the solution you are looking for.

One of my biggest issues with the way I constructed this blog was the necessity to define the header and thumbnail image for each post. I knew that there were easier ways to get it done, but I was not able to get the code written before I put the site live.

Before the change, I would have to add the url to the images in to custom fields of each post. If I forgot to add the image or linked to the wrong one, it was quite possible that the world would stop spinning (or it would break the layout, which is just as bad).

The Old Way

I decided to update the php to include a bunch of if statements, which are probably not the best way to solve my issue but it works. The new code basically tells wordpress which image to display based on which category the post is in. This allows me to define the image once and it will replicate for every post. The nice thing about this is that there is one block of code that handles all of the header and thumbnail images. If I need to update the images or tweak the categories, I just have one place to look.

The New Way

I had first used this method when setting up the backend code for Matt Lewis’s Blogfolio. He had needed static images to display based on which page you were on, and I realized I could modify the code to be included inside my loop and it would cut out the hassle of having to define images every time.

I am sure there are very few people that are actually interested in code updates, but if that isn’t geekdom, what it?

I almost fell over laughing the other day. For some reason an image of a Jewish gangsta popped in to my head, and I thought of challah. (For those that don’t know, challah is pretty much pronounced “holla”)

After a quick google search, I found an image that fit what I saw in my mind’s eye and made a quick motivational poster.