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!

For those of you out of town here are some more pictures of the ring because a lot of people keep asking about it.

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Well if you haven’t heard the news already Laura and I are engaged after our trip to Mexico.  And who would have guessed she even said yes!  We are planning on having our wedding in Mexico next spring

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Mixed reviews come out for this game.  I thought that the idea was very original and had a good strong story line.  My issues lie in the actual game play.  As many reviews out there will tell you this game has a ton of ‘investigation’ missions.  This missions cause you to walk all the way across a town to listen into someone’s conversation then walk all the way back across town and report what you have heard.  This made a few of the missions kinda boring.  Also I feel that the world is just too huge.  This is definitely an issue when you play a lot one day and don’t play the game for 2 weeks and start back up it is hard to remember what direction you were going and what you were going to do next.

The fighting was a little difficult as well because you want to do the Mortal Kombat approach and just mash the controller and expect it to respond.  In Assassins Creed you have to slow down your reaction times by about 40% to get the combos correct.

On a positive note the graphics and basic story line of the game is very well developed.  I just felt like the game wasn’t progressing fast enough to keep my interests in the game high.  Also running across the entire map as fast as I can was a little mesmerizing and boring especially after playing Resistance Fall of Man all weekend and not being able to walk 10 feet without someone shooting at me.  In Assassin’s Creed all I have is someone yell at me as I run them over with my horse.

After finding out that this game is done by the same people who developed Ratchet and Clank (Insomniac) I bumped it up to the front of my queue.  There was a lot of Ratchet and Clank influence on the game but it was pretty well disguised because of the sepia tones used while Ratchet and Clank is very bright and colorful.

When I started this game I was a little worried, I was having a lot of issues trying to kill people and couldn’t find health and kept dying.  I couldn’t figure out how to use the weapons correctly and therefore my reactions were not quick enough.  After going online to GameFly and checking out the user manual and some FAQ’s for the game I quickly found all my answers and I was up and away beating the game in no time.

Total time to complete the game was about 3 days spread out over a few weeks thanks to school and the crazy social life I lead!  I liked the game a lot but one thing I would change is probably more videos versus still pictures with narration, I just think its easier to follow the story with video rather than pictures.  The storyline was well thought out and the game play was a lot of fun and challenging in different parts of the game.  The online multiplayer is a lot of fun but as usual unless you are insanely good it is pretty hard to play.  Also the combined player mode of first and second player is very nice except the fact my girlfriend isn’t very good at these types of games and didn’t want to play with me but at least you could play with people that are in the same room as you are.

With PDF Creator you can make any printable document into a PDF, but what happens when you need to combine many PDF’s into just one file.  It seems that PortableApps is on a mission to convert a whole lot of new applications into their suite and this is their latest addition.  With PDFTK you can combine, split, watermark, and rotate your PDF’s with one simple tool.  I had found something similar to this before but it wasn’t open source and it wasn’t free and it was pretty large.  This is a great little app that you can run on your pen drive or install it to your computer.  A must have for anyone who deals with PDF’s a lot.

PDFTK Website

PDFTK PortableApps website

The highways that connects Abu Dhabi with Dubai had a little bit of a fender bender this morning.  Looks like an accident involving 200 cars including 25 cars that caught fire and six buses were involved.  Hundreds were injured and so far 6 people have passed away.  It seems that the fog is to blame.  Well hopefully everyone is alright and I am sure that most of them can afford to get a new car anyway’s seeing as how 1 out of 3 Bugatti’s are being sent to Dubai!

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
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Link 3

This application has some great uses.  It allows you to compare many fonts side by side without having to view them one by one.  This makes it very convenient if your girlfriend has a font obsession and you have 100’s of different free fonts