Solution: The problem was the Logitech Mouse. You just need to unplug the USB receiver and it works fine again. If you have a KVM switch, setting the focus to the other computer and back to the original computer also fixes the issue.

The old thesis theme was just not working for me anymore and seemed to bore me. I’m not sure how a site bores someone, but that’s how I’ll spin it. So I decided to give the blog a new coat of paint (new theme).

The new theme is called Pinboard and is one of the out of box WordPress themes. It offers lots of cool features and great looks.

http://wordpress.org/themes/pinboard

When I get more time, I’ll be adding a post to talk about the plugins I’m using with some setup tips.

Items needed:
1 cup of water
1/4 cup of brown sugar
1 gram of yeast
1 2-liter bottle

HOW:

1. Cut the plastic bottle in half.
2. Mix brown sugar with hot water. Let cool. When cold, pour in the bottom half of the bottle.
3. Add the yeast. No need to mix. It creates carbon dioxide, which attracts mosquitoes.
4. Place the funnel part, upside down, into the other half of the bottle, taping them together if desired.
5. Wrap the bottle with something black, leaving the top uncovered, and place it outside in an area away from your normal gathering area. (Mosquitoes are also drawn to the color black.)

Change the solution every 2 weeks for continuous control.

I wouldn’t recommend using this method since it takes too long to figure out. Just dual-boot windows and install iTunes there to upgrade the firmware.

If you decide to upgrade the firmware using linux, use the Updater Log file to monitor the progress. It can be found here on inside your Windows VM: C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPhone Updater Logs\iPhoneUpdater##.log and look for the most recent file in that folder.

There are about a 1000 lines in my logs and if you think the process is hung, check out the log file to verify. If you use notepad to view the file, you will have to re-open the file each time you want to see the new lines added.

Here is the end of the first log file where the phone was put into Recovery mode and iTunes lost the connection. The phone was on and the screen had went from the plug in image to just black.

2010-02-02 02:41:23.440 iTunes.exe[4020:c94]: : operation 31 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:41:24.440 iTunes.exe[4020:c94]: : Recovery mode succeeded

At this point I killed iTunes and restarted it and clicked on Restore once it recognized the phone again.

The beginning of the second log file after iTunes was restarted…

2010-02-02 02:42:57.604 iTunes.exe[320:4e8]: restore library built Aug 24 2009 11:22:55
2010-02-02 02:42:57.604 iTunes.exe[320:4e8]: iTunes: iTunes 9.0.2.25
2010-02-02 02:42:57.604 iTunes.exe[320:4e8]: iTunes: Software payload version: 7D11

2010-02-02 02:48:24.421 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 14 progress 98
2010-02-02 02:48:25.530 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 14 progress 100
2010-02-02 02:48:25.671 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 15 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:37.155 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 16 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:37.171 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 15 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:37.171 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 16 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:42.702 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 27 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:45.733 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 27 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:47.030 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 17 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:47.249 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 25 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:47.483 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 35 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:48:48.139 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 18 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:49:52.795 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 19 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:52:42.979 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 32 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:52:43.104 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 29 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:52:43.120 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : operation 29 progress -1
2010-02-02 02:52:43.135 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: device returned AMR error 0
2010-02-02 02:52:43.135 iTunes.exe[320:dec]: : Restore succeeded

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Image Credit: This is a cropped image clip from the Mint.com blog post – Mint.com

Check out Charity Navigator for more information on organizations and how they are going to spend your hard earned money. You’ll want to look for organizations that have very high Program Expense numbers. To see just how bad it can get, look at the Top 10 Charities Drowning in Administrative Costs. Another good site to help you check out an organization is the Better Business Bureau and their Charity Review page. All of this detective work may cause analysis paralysis for some people and they might not donate anything. I would hope not - I’m just saying to be careful where you donate.

Program Expenses: This reflects what percent of its total budget a charity spends on the programs and services it exists to deliver. Dividing a charity’s program expenses by its total functional expenses yields this percentage.

Over the years most of our charitable donations have gone to the local church and the donated clothes to a couple of the local organizations. But in the last couple of years I decided to spread our giving around some. PowerFM, a local Christian radio station, received a large gift from us last year and I thought it was for a good cause. My thought was several thousand people listen to the radio everyday and it’s a great way to reach them on their commute or reaching students in other locations since the station streams its broadcast online. So here are some of the other organizations I’m considering giving to this year based on what they do and how they spend the money they are given.

• International Children’s Fund
• American Red Cross
• Homes for Our Troops
• Thru the Bible Radio

Sharon and I shared the Chiles Rellenos with chicken and the Chicken Tortilla soup. Both were excellent with lots of smoked chicken and roasted vegetables. My only regret was not having enough room “in my belly” to order dessert.

Go ahead and give Thesis a try.

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And there are some others who had the same idea: Migrating blog from GraffitiCMS to WordPress and Now Running on Behistun and ASP.NET MVC

Here are some of the problems I ran across since my site runs under IIS 6.0:

• 403 errors when logging in – my ISP needed to make a change to allow script execution
• permalinks needed to be setup so the links would be formatted like this: http://domain.com/category/postname – see below for details.

How to setup Pretty WordPress Permalinks on IIS

• create a file named wp-404-handler.php in the root of the WP folder with the following code:

<?php
$qs = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
$pos = strrpos($qs, '://');
$pos = strpos($qs, '/', $pos + 4);
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = substr($qs, $pos);
$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
include('index.php');
?>

• Go to Options -> Permalinks in your WordPress admin page, and choose an appropriate structure for your links. I chose Custom with this pattern: /%cateory%/%postname%/

I did find some pages online where people were asking how to make this work or why Gmail doesn’t offer this feature. So I looked at the Keyboard Shortcuts in the Gmail Lab for a solution, but you can only do one command at a time there. So the key sequence is #o (pound sign and then the letter “o”) to move the current message to the trash and then open the next message.

Sidenote: Even if I wanted to use the delete key and then the letter “o”, I couldn’t put in \127 for the ascii code for Delete in the Keyboard Shortcuts Lab feature. It seems that the textbox only allows 3 characters.

So I cooked up this solution to make the delete key do it all – #o.

First, you need AutoHotKey installed. Then you need to create a new AutoHotKey file or just edit the AutoHotkey.ahk that gets installed by default. You can have multiple AHK files loaded at the same time if you want. I just keep using the same one for all my shortcuts.

Edit the AHK file with notepad or your favorite text editor and copy/paste the following lines. I prefer to use Notepad++ but it really doesn’t matter.

SetTitleMatchMode 1
#IfWinActive Gmail -
Delete::
; Delete the current message and
Send #
;read the next message
Send o
return
#IfWinActive

Double-click on your newly edited and saved AHK file. This will load it and you will see AHK running in the system tray as a green square with an “H”.

Now open Gmail and go to your inbox or spam folder where you have messages you want to delete. Then click on the first one to read it and hit the delete key.

In order for this to work after you reboot your computer, you need to add a shortcut to this AHK file to your startup folder so it loads automatically after a reboot.

There are a couple of things that could go wrong where this solution will not work:

• If you changed the Keyboard Shortcut in Gmail for Open conversation from a “o” to something else or you changed the Move to trash from “#” to something else, you need to change the AHK file to match. Look at the lines that start with Send in the AHK file and change the characters as needed, save the file, right-click on in the system tray so you can click on Reload This Script. Then see if the delete key works like you want it to.
• If you enable the Title Tweaks in Gmail Lab to show the folder name followed by “- Gmail” in the title of the browser, you will need to change line 2 in the AHK file to

#IfWinActive - Gmail

Here are some notes about the AHK commands used here:

• Since AHK can map keys in any application I needed to specify the title or window name of the application and SetTitleMatchMode 1 describes how AHK will look for the title. From the AutoHotKey documentation: A window’s title must start with the specified WinTitle to be a match
• To make AHK only take over keys in a particular application, use IfWinActive see the AutoHotKey documentation for more details.

I had a wood fired pizza called Rosemary’s Chicken – Chicken, white wine, rosemary, roasted mushrooms, caramelized onions, Marinated fresh mozzarella, garlic.

And Sharon had the Texas Pecan & Fig salad – Organic field greens, peppered sweet Texas pecans, bleu cheese, pears, house made Black Mission fig dressing.

http://www.trufirerestaurants.com/ – Dinner menu, Brunch menu, Lunch menu