With the release of WP 2.5 last week my admin design plugin’s were all messed up.  Luckily someone picked up the ball and edited the last version of the Tiger Admin interface I was fond of and made it work with WP 2.5.  The latest release of Fluency addressed some issues with layout and overlapping that were in NextGen Gallery that kept me from using the plugin.  The only extra change I made is changing all the fonts and shrinking the size of the font as I was not very happy with what he chose.  Other than that minor change to the CSS file this plugin is great and makes WP 2.5 a powerful upgrade.  As I do all my publishing from Windows Live Writer, I am not in the admin interface that often but when I am this makes it a much better experience.

As with Google Reader there is a plugin for making Gmail look better and function better as well.  It is called Better Gmail 2.  Today I also found an application called Gmail Redesigned which gives you a nice skin to throw onto Gmail.  I don’t use Gmail a lot as I usually use Yahoo to do my web mailing but one thing Gmail does do is it allows me to spoof the email I am sending from so I can email from my school email account straight from Google.  This is a lot easier then logging into my school email account.  Lifehacker says that they are going to update Better Gmail soon so that it has skins but until then using Stylish and this script Gmail is much prettier now!

So glad to see that someone else has some of the wiring skills that I have behind our TV.  These are some pictures from a few non-disclosed data centers.  Some of these pictures are really amazing and the others are kinda scary.

Link 1
Link 2 
Link 3

This website is amazing.  It is a bunch of urban explorers that go through and find old abandon projects.  The picture to the left is a picture of some tunnels that are more than 10 stories below Niagara Falls that used to be part of a hydroelectric project that they abandoned.  The walls are made of red brick and make for some great shots.  This site has a bunch of underground as well as above ground projects that are just mesmerizing to look at.  As the domain leads you to believe it looks like most of these projects are up in Canada.  Pretty interesting stuff…

The Vanishing Point

There are very few pages that do not have RSS feeds available but every once and a while I come across one.  This handy little website turns any web page into a live RSS feed.  All you have to do is enter in the URL and it creates an RSS feed for you to subscribe to.

MorningStar is a website that I have never heard about that one of my teammates in my accounting class turned me to.  We used the site to pull down financial statements for some companies for a paper we had to write.  This site is great for pulling and comparing financial statements and does a lot of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to some of the accounting ratios.

Looks like Mozilla has gone through with their promise and spun off Thunderbird to its own development team.  I think this is a good thing so that Thunderbird can get the attention it needs to become its own awesome application.  I also noted Spicebird is a fork of Thunderbird’s code as well.  Looks like they just released another beta version a few days ago so I will have to keep an eye on that one as well.  I use Thunderbird mainly as an email archiving application and use Yahoo Web Mail for most of my emails.

So today thanks to the help of a gift card from my girlfriend for Valentines Day I made my first purchases of MP3’s from Amazon’s site.  I must say it was a great experience.  After a short download of their download app (very very small) I was up and running and downloading MP3’s.  Amazon grabbed my attention a while ago as the first ones to sell non-DRM MP3’s and for a cheaper price than iTunes.  Everything about that last sentence should tell you why I love the service. 

You can download full CD’s for $9.99.  After download you can go out and grab the MP3 files and do whatever you want with them like move them to your external hard drive or put them on your MP3 player.  You can also setup the application to automatically add the files to your iTunes Library but I turned that feature off because I store all my MP3’s on a separate hard drive and wanted to do a little tag modification before adding it to my collection.

It is safe to say that this is where all my music will be purchased because it was such an easy and good experience.  The files quickly downloaded and were already setup with album art as well as all the ID3 tag information.  Plus the fact that there is no DRM on them makes them actually worth something to me! 

This is how downloading music should be…

Grubhub has a great idea to be a central repository for take out menus for many restaurants.  I think this makes a great idea as it helps also give you a selection of what you could eat for dinner.

As of right now it is only centralized around Chicago but I think the website has a promising idea and I would expect that its regions will grow as time goes on.  Or maybe the site will fail before it has a chance to expand…who knows these days

I had to look around today for a Hex color code to change the default color of a hyperlink on my blog today and ran across this sight and thought it was worth noting.  It makes finding a hex color super easy!

Hexcolor Generator