Ken Mitchell

I’ve seen alot of jabber about OpenID the last couple of days so I thought I’d share this tidbit of info.

If you are a blogger, you can claim your blog with your OpenID pretty easily. What this means is, for instance, you (a provider supporting OpenID) can verify that www.ken-mitchell.com is owned by ken-mitchell.myopenid.com . Add the following lines to your page:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://openidservice.com/server/" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://you.openidservice.com/" />

where "openidservice" is your OpenID provider, and "you.openidservice.com" is your OpenID.

For example, my URI is www.ken-mitchell.com. My OpenID is ken-mitchell.myopenid.com. Take a look at my source.

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://myopenid.com/server/" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://ken-mitchell.myopenid.com/" />

Check out http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-SuperUsers for more detailed info.

Introduction

In light of the new tracks available for Rock Band, I thought I’d share some of the tips and tricks I have learned while playing “Rock Band”. For now, I have been concentrating on guitar only. Other instruments may follow soon.

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Introduction

I have attended the school of “Google” for almost 12 years now. What do I mean by that? Google is such a powerful tool, they made it into a verb. Don’t know how to configure tool-x to do function-x? Google it! Don’t know how to hack the universe? Google it!

But Google is not the only tool useful for powerful searches. Read the rest of this entry »

This is an old chain email I received and had posted on Myspace. I thought I’d repost it here. Maybe it will cheer you up.

• The only jokes you receive are through e-mail
• At Christmas, it goes without saying that you will be the one to find the burnt-out bulb in the string
• Buying flowers for your girlfriend or spending the money to upgrade your RAM is a moral dilemma
• Everyone else on the Alaskan cruise is on deck peering at the scenery, and you are still on a personal tour of the engine room
• In college you thought Spring Break was a metal fatigue failure
• The salespeople at Circuit City can’t answer any of your questions
• You are always late to meetings
• You are at an air show and know how fast the skydivers are falling
• You bought your wife a new CD ROM for her birthday
• You can quote scenes from any Monty Python movie
• You can type 70 words a minute but can’t read your own handwriting
• You can’t write unless the paper has both horizontal and vertical lines.
• You comment to your wife that her straight hair is nice and parallel.
• You forgot to get a haircut … for 6 months
• You go on the rides at Disneyland and sit backwards in the chairs to see how they do the special effects
• You have Dilbert comics displayed anywhere in your work area
• You have ever saved the power cord from a broken appliance
• You have more friends on the Internet than in real life
• You have never bought any new underwear or socks for yourself since you got married
• You have used coat hangers and duct tape for something other than hanging coats and taping ducts
• You know what http:// actually stands for
• You look forward to Christmas only to put together the kids’ toys
• You own one or more white short-sleeve dress shirts
• You see a good design and still have to change it
• You spent more on your calculator than on your wedding ring
• You still own a slide rule and you know how to work it
• You think that when people around you yawn, it’s because they didn’t get enough sleep
• You wear black socks with white tennis shoes (or vice versa)
• You window shop at Radio Shack
• You’re in the back seat of your car, she’s looking wistfully at the moon, and you’re trying to locate a geosynchronous satellite
• You know what the geosynchronous satellite function is
• Your checkbook always balances
• Your laptop computer costs more than your car
• Your wife hasn’t the foggiest idea what you do at work
• Your wrist watch has more computing power than a 300 MHz Pentium
• You’ve already calculated how much you make per second
• You’ve ever tried to repair a $5 radio
• Your computer is worth more than your vehicles.

  I have my high school football games on DVD and I wanted to put them on my Media Center.  Since the video stream for DVDs is MPEG2 and the audio stream for these DVDs were ac3, I should be able to compress them nicely with a newer codec.  The tool I use is open source and is called MEncoder.  It can be found here.

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Introduction

In this HowTo I will explain how to create website templates in Gimp that can be easily colored by adding a color layer and using the “Addition” blend mode. This is helpful when you want multiple color schemes for the template.
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Kiltak and his clan at [GAS] are offering more that $1300 worth of prizes for 6 random “How To” blogs. My entry is here.

So a friend and I stood in line for a couple of hours waiting for the Halo 3 midnight release. It was quite entertaining. One guy actually was playing the Halo 2 soundtrack on electric guitar. Another young lady I met, Starlight, was a member of the well known PMS clan.

The anticipation was killing us. As soon as we got home, we popped that baby in and got to it. We were expecting to play until around 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. But, before we knew it, 1:00 p.m. rolled around. Yes that’s 1300 hrs. We had played Halo 3 for almost 12 hours straight. At that point, we had all but the final chapter completed. I dropped the ball and decided to go to bed. Here is what I have learned so far, at least on Legendary mode.
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Verizon announced that it will be following the GSM evolution path to 4G instead of the CDMA path. You can read details of the release at Engadget and RCRNews. Now why would Verizon dump CDMA technology, and how does this affect Verizon customers?
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FYI: I am submitting this post to the “Geeks Are Sexy Ultimate Howto Contest”.

Note: Some shortcut keys have changed in new versions. For instance, Ctrl-K should now be Delete.

Introduction

I done this for a friend the other day. He asked if I could do a quick Halo 3 logo with his number inside instead of the “3″. The hardest thing is getting the texture. I still don’t think it is quite right, but it’s as close as I could get it.

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