Outlook trick for picking a conference room for a meeting

If you’re like me, when creating a meeting, you hate trying to remember each conference room’s name, selelcting it in Outlook, and then trying to figure out a time and room for the meeting. Most of the time, I’m sure I’m forgetting a room. Of course, if the names of the rooms all started the same (eg, Conference Room – Manhattan), it would be easier.

Outlook trick for picking a conference room for a meetingSo, I created a distribution list for conference rooms in my local contacts list. Just click on New->Distribution list, and then add each conference room to the list. This will be the only time that you have to remember and find each conference room’s name. From here on out, you can just use the list.

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Better support for international addresses

From reading the logs for my mapping site, I noticed that the application was blowing for many addresses outside the United States. I did a little more research, and discovered that the bug was in handling some special characters, like “ø, á, í, é, È, ž, ù, ý”.

As a test case, I created a map of points from around the world that I found in the logs. Each of these queries caused an error.

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Posted in gmaps.kaeding.name | Tagged , | 17 Comments

Improvements to Google Mapping Site

This past weekend, I made several improvements to my site that allows you to map multiple locations on Google Maps. These improvements were mostly suggested by users of the site, and there were a couple that I came up with after seeing the usage patterns of the site, and trying to improve performance.

Read on to see the listing of new/improved features:

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Posted in gmaps.kaeding.name | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Migrating URLs with Apache

I recently migrated this blog from Blogger, which was posting via SFTP to a shared hosting provider, to a self-managed Typo installation. One of the biggest reasons I didn’t do this sooner was that I didn’t want all of my old URLs (and the links that point to them) to stop working. After all, what is the point of a permalink if it stops working one day? It isn’t that I have such high page rank with Google or anything, but I didn’t want to have to start over from scratch.

I wanted to be sure that if someone either typed in a URL that used to work, or followed a link from an outside page, they would end viewing the content that they expected to land on. I thought some about having some kind of logging, so I can be aware of when people use these old links, and where they are coming from. I also thought about having some mechanism for alerting the user that the link they followed is old.

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draggables coexisting with sortables

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WikiHow– How to visit a brewery ?!?!

So, I saw this article this morning on WikiHow, that tells you how to visit a brewery. Now, maybe I’m just old hat at this, but I would have thought this was a pretty basic thing that you didn’t need to be told how to do. You know, kind of like, “How to go grocery shopping”. But maybe I’m off base here.

In any case, I think it is good to give non-beer-geeks the idea to visit breweries. I imagine some people would never have thought of it. I really don’t mean to sound as sarcastic as I probably do in that last paragraph; it just struck me as funny. Also, this article does a good job of showing how to visit a brewery that doesn’t really do tours or visitors. These small breweries are the most interesting, at least in my opinion. They seem to be the closest to homebrewing, and I would love to someday be able to sell my own beer. I would be sure to advertise tours, though…. I think tours are a great way to build a loyal base of fans. And they are so much fun!

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Double Happiness Gruit Recipe

Double Happiness Gruit Ale label

In the first of (what I hope to be) many postings of my homebrew recipes, here is one of my favorites. It is my take on a traditional gruit-style ale. I am starting with this recipe partly because it turned out very well, even winning 3rd place in the 2007 Greater Huntington Homebrewers Association Mountain Brewers Open. Also, I imagine that a lot of people will be wanting to explore the gruit style, since it doesn’t use any hops (or, at least, my recipe doesn’t use any hops), and with the hops shortage, I know a lot of brewers are looking for alternatives.

I know what you might be thinking: “What self-respecting beer geek wants a beer with no hops?” Well, if that’s what you are thinking, then you really need to open your mind, and try this beer. I can’t stand the more-hops-is-always-better attitude, but thats a rant for another day. Lets get back on track.

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Posted in homebrewing/beer | Tagged , , | 18 Comments