automaticable

Yesterday I found myself at the Chicago Auto Show. I can’t say that I am extremely interested in cars, or the up and coming technology when it comes to them, but the auto show is definitely an experience. Car fanatics and people who just like to look can find themselves loving the experience.

For me, the coolest part of the auto show was probably the concept cars. Concept cars show me which car company has vision, and which one I should be looking at for my new dream car. The three cars that popped out at me were the Toyota A-BAT, the Jeep Renegade, and the Saab Aero X. Now, Toyota, Jeep, and Saab have never really meant anything special to me, but their concept cars showed me they are thinking in the right direction.

Let me get one thing straight, I’ve never been much of a fanatic for trucks. The Toyota A-BAT changes everything. It fits all the functionality of having that truck bed on the back, yet dosen’t make it appear as if the cab and the truck bed are two separate entities. I’m all about sleek looking cars, and if Toyota can make that happen while still giving me the storage space of a truck bed, they get my vote this year.

A main theme of the auto show this year was how to make every car environmentally fit. The Jeep Renegade is one of the best examples of doing this, while still making a very functional car. The Jeep Renegade boasts of 110 mpg, and it still holds all of jeep’s awesome perks. The Renegade’s lightweight design, matched with large tires make it very easy for all of your off-road adventures.

The Saab Aero gets my award for being the by-far best looking car in the auto show. The lack of windshield pillars gives the Aero a very smooth look, and at the same time gives the driver a full uninterrupted 180 degree view. The Saab Aero’s revolutionary design is sure to get second glances when seen cruising down the street.

Unfortunately, the Chicago Auto Show is now finished. If you still want to see what all of the concept cars, or any of the other cars, look like you can check out the website.

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I know this is my second post about beef in a month, I’ll try to limit myself in the future. But, I was just reading an article from CBS about an ongoing recall of beef distributed out of Southern California, because they used “sick, or ‘downer’ cows.” Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is a cheap jab at the “happy cows from California” ad campaign that has been ongoing– I think they’re going to have to reconsider their slogan.

But all jokes aside, this is a big deal. 143 million pounds of meat were recalled. That’s over half-a-billion quarter pounders (thank you college math) deemed unfit for consumption. That’s enough meat to feed every child at a school of 2000 kids for a little over 783 years! So this is a big deal.

And that’s just what the meat was being used for– to feed school children. According to the article, around 120,000 pounds of the meat had been distributed to schools in Tennessee. 30 school districts across the state won’t be serving meat until further notice.

The question on my mind when I read the article, was whether it was really necessary to recall all that meat, just because the cows were a little depressed. However, they mention that these ‘downer’ cows are prone to “wallow in feces,” and thus have a much higher rate of disease. Most shocking was watching this video of workers jabbing the cows with forklifts to get them into their pen, along side the CEO trying to justify the treatment.

So, here we are now with the largest beef recall in the United States as a result. I hope that the press that this generates will expose more cases like this, and ultimately shape up the industry. I suppose this is why organizations like PETA exist, and why the vegan movement exists in general.

Well, I guess I can take ahold of this new place in line as the “New Guy.” Let me introduce myself, My name is Doctor Fraiser Kraine, professional radio psychologist. No, actually, I kid. My name is Brian Wegner, brother to all three of these other crazy bloggers that you have met so far. I reside in a cold cabin that I like to call, a bedroom in my parents house located in Downers Grove, IL. I’m currently attending College of DuPage, the local community college going for a general AA (Associates of Arts) degree and hopefully transferring off to one of the cardinal colleges to obtain a bachelors degree in Recreation Management. I, much like Scott (because he is my twin), am 21 years old. Let me talk about this a little bit actually.

Warning ahead of time, there are mention of underage indulgences ahead, so if you disagree with this, then stop reading now and please visit www.disney.com they’ve been waiting for you.

When I turned 21, I feel as if I changed a full deal more than I ever have before. When I first started college, attending Southern Illinois University Carbondale, I did as most freshmen did on their first weekend of college; I went out to find the best party in town and drink the night away. Needless to say I succeeded and was glad that I picked the college that I did. As time went on, and the weekends kept coming up quicker and quicker, and the parties got rowdier and rowdier; I realized that I loved the party atmosphere, but I didn’t like the skunk beer. So I started to have my friends buy me my own beer. I would make sure that I indulged in enough of my better, non-skunk beer to where when we went to a party, I was unable to taste the bitter beer. This went on for about two semesters, and when I came back in the fall of my sophomore year, I had my own apartment, my own fridge, and my own beer crisper (vegi-tray). I had also turned 20 that semester and decided I was against the house parties, and more for the bars, so that’s what I did. I frequented more bars than house parties. I enjoyed this new setting, it gave me a new sense of belonging and the atmosphere was amazing, but best of all, I didn’t have to drink skunk beer if I didn’t want to. I kept frequenting bars, and enjoyed every minute of it. After my sophomore year, I moved back home to finish up my AA. I turned 21 on a weekend and spent the majority of it with my girlfriend (Lindsay), my twin (Scott), his girlfriend (Stacy), and the rest of his roommates down at UIUC (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). The rest of the weekend is obviously a blur, but it was definitely one of the most memorable weekends of my life (ironic huh?). Now that you have the background and lead-up story, I can now explain the change.

Since turning 21, I’ve noticed that drinking just to get drunk is really immature. The parties, the beer bongs, the drinking games, they all seem so…childish. Yeah, it’s fun to indulge in your young side every once in a while and do these things, but I have no real motivation or wanting to do this on a regular basis anymore. Instead of drinking every weekend of the semester, like I did freshman and sophomore year, I now only indulge in a tasty beverage every once in a while and haven’t been to a bar since my 21st (which was in October). I don’t drink to get drunk, I drink to socialize. Basically what I’m trying to say is I’ve lost my desire to be a “party animal” and now love just drinking on occasion, and this is by no means, a bad thing.

I hope this first blog doesn’t make me seem out to be an alcoholic, because I’m not. I’m just another 21 year old, living life day by day, and changing with the world around me. Enjoy the rest of your day, because I know I will.

-Brian

Ever wondered what you could do with all the hundreds of digital pictures that you’ve accumulated? Why not make a mosaic?

Wosaic is a software project that I started working on as part of a programming class. My partner and I enjoyed making it so much, that we continued working on it, and today we had our first “public” release. From the project webpage:

Wosaic is an open source project that allows you to recreate an existing image by using many smaller images, as shown above. It was started as a project for CS 242 - Programming Studio at UIUC, and will be continuing on to Engineering Open House in the Spring of 2008.

Wosaic is not the only program of its kind. Several other solutions already exist, however Wosaic aims to be free, easy to use, fast, and accessible. These qualities are yet to be found in any single existing solution. We’re also aiming to make use of interesting sources for images. Currently, we support Flickr, Facebook, and local sources, but we hope to expand this to possibly include images from Picassa, and hopefully other sources as well.

Features

• Easily create a mosaic out of an image on your disk
• Utilizes Flickr, Facebook, and local directories for images
• Supports concurrency to provide fast results
• Shows progress by constructing the mosaic right before your eyes!
• Programmed in Java
• It is FREE and released under the GNU GPL v2.

We’re really excited about the release. It’s a beta version, so it’s not quite as polished as we expect future releases to be. But, give it a try– we’d love to hear your feedback. Binaries for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux can be found on the downloads page, and documentation for installing and using Wosaic is available in the wiki.

Even though I work in an advertising agency, personally I do everything I can to keep unwanted advertising out of my life. I have Adblock Plus for Firefox, I subscribe to the National Do Not Call registry, and I filter out as much unwanted junk mail as I can. Because of this, I have only seen a handful of the ads we have created at work out in the wild.

Because of this, I was quite surprised to see one of our ads for the March for Babies, a non-profit affiliated with the March of Dimes that was previously called WalkAmerica, show up in multiple Google Reader feeds today. I forgot that as part of our campaign we had decided to host RSS feed ads through Pheedo, meaning all of my traditional ad-blocking techniques would not filter out this message. This made me realize just how powerful RSS feed ads can really be; they are targeted to a specific audience, can be served in many banner sizes, and will reach people who generally block those types of ads. I’m sure there are RSS readers that block these ads, but Google Reader, as one of the most popular available, does not.

I guess more than anything I am happy to see one of our non-profits being hosted successfully through Pheedo and reaching a large, captive audience. I am glad I haven’t taken steps to completely cut advertising out of my personal life, as I wouldn’t have been able to see the results of what I work so hard on while on the job!

We are very excited about our new look and feel here at automaticable and hope you are too. Along with a new URL, theme, and author (welcome Brian!), we have also started spreading the message of automaticable throughout different web sources in hopes of driving traffic to the site. Many of you are coming in through facebook feeds (and I’d guess some of you are just reading the posts within facebook), people have found us through technorati, and there is also a ton of random traffic being shot our way. Welcome everyone!

As much as we love you all reading what we have to say here on automaticable, we would really love to hear what YOU have to say! To let us know what you are thinking, start participating in the comments. Tell us what you like, how you’ve used some of our tips, or what you suggest instead. Let’s make this a conversation that we can all have fun with.

Hope to hear from you all soon!

I recently discovered via the Ubuntu Geek blog, a simple tool for customizing your GRUB boot menu. If you’re not familiar, the GRUB menu is the screen you see shortly before your Linux OS starts up. In a dual-boot setup, it is particularly important, because this is where you choose which operating system to boot to. Generally the setup is done via editing the file /boot/grub/menu.lst, but using the program makes it much easier. Continue reading “Customize Your Dual-boot: GUI Frontend to GRUB”

A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to be a connoisseur of three things when I grow up: wine, cheese, and apples. My interest in apples was spurred by a short article I read as part of an ACT prep, about a blind apple-tasting competition. It seemed silly that there would be a competition to correctly identify apples from one-another, yet elegant that these people were so into their apples.

So last week when I went shopping I bought a few Jonathan apples. To describe it physically, it’s a red, small- to medium-sized apple, with noticeable imperfections on its rough outer skin. Many of the ones I bought were missing the stem, although I’m not sure what that might imply. Anyway, on to the taste.

The skin was rough, and perhaps thicker than the average apple skin. The fleshy inside was a bit tart, which is unlike most red apples I’ve tasted. I wouldn’t compare it to a Granny Smith, but it was definitely a distinguishing feature. It wasn’t too tart to be undesirable, but instead it gave it a distinctive flavor. All apples are juicy, but I think this brand may have been a bit juicier than most. Of the ones I’ve tried so far, they have free of bruises, and delicious all the way through.

At this point I’ve only tried the Jonathan apple by itself, but I can image many possible pairings. For starters, this seems like more than a caramel-and-nut apple than peanut butter apple. Also, it would be very tasty to cook them down for baked apples or jam. If you find yourself with more apples than you can eat before their go bad, you might even consider using these in a warm, seasonal apple cider.

Overall, I would recommend this apple to anyone ready to break away from the traditional red delicious, or if you just wanted to try something new. I wouldn’t say this is my favorite apple, but I would definitely give it two thumbs up.

As promised earlier, here is my first post regarding my new position in the interactive media department at my job. I am specifically learning search engine optimization (SEO) and social marketing, so it is a hip new department to be a part of.

One of the problems with being part of emerging media is people often hear very little about the subject but have been told they NEED to be a part of this new and exciting marketing technique. The problem here is that social marketing does not work for everyone. The basic idea of social marketing is that you let your message spread virally through social networks, blogs, etc. That only works if you have something people want to talk about, and not every product or service is exciting enough to be considered newsworthy.

The hard part is convincing a client that their product or service, which they are generally passionate about, is not “cool” enough to spread socially. Nobody wants to hear that, and if you say it the wrong way you may lose their business altogether. This is even harder to deal with because of the mantra “The client is always right!”. As an agency our job is to please the client with the results they want to see, so if they specifically say they want to move into social media then darn it we better get them into every blog and network we can possibly find! While that would be an easy short term solution and would bring in more money to the agency up front, when (not if) the campaign fails, we as an agency will not look good and will have a hard time picking up repeat business. I am proud to say I work at an agency that prides themselves on their honesty about these types of things and hope all of our clients see the value in such honesty.

So we recently made the switch from Blogger, and it’s been quite the trip. It feels good to break free from the proprietary grips of Blogger, and into a clean, polished interface that is Wordpress. But with every new Wordpress installation, it becomes necessary to choose: which plugins will make the cut?

With such an active community that supports the Wordpress project, there are literally hundreds of plugins to choose from. It’s simple to customize every aspect of your blog, without writing any of your own code. So without further adieu, here are the ones that I’ve chosen to stick with:

Akismet

This one is pre-installed on every fresh Wordpress blog, and thank goodness for it. Akismet has become the de facto standard for catching comment spam in blogs. From their website, they say that 91% of all blog comments are spam. It works quietly behind the scenes so you never have to worry about it.

Overall Rating: 9.1 / 10

wp-cache

This is one of those plugins that you don’t realize you’ll need until it’s too late. Essentially it’s an extra layer of server-side caching, which saves bandwidth and speeds loading time under heavy traffic. It’s gotten some recent hype with sites like Digg and slashdot that bring in lots of traffic all at once. I haven’t noticed any difference yet, but this is another plugin that you can simply setup and forget about, and sleep a little easier at night.

Overall Rating: 8.5 / 10

All In One SEO Pack

Everyone knows that with having a blog now-a-days, it’s all about SEO. Although Wordpress already does a fairly good job of organizing your content, this plugin promises to optimize even further by automatically setting title tags and optimizing other meta data. This is a good start to get your page noticed by search engines like Google, but it’s by no means an end-all solution either. One of the other little features I enjoy about this plugin is its “One Click Upgrade” option– no more fussing with FTP every time there’s a new version out.

Overall Rating: 6.7 / 10

Google XML Sitemaps

This is another little charm that will help with getting your blog listed, and keeping those listing up-to-date. A sitemap is a file that lives in the top directory of your blog (generally “sitemap.xml”) that Google’s crawler uses as a cheat-sheet for indexing your page. Using a sitemap is highly stressed in Google’s Webmaster Tools. Not only will this plugin keep your sitemap prioritized and up-to-date automatically, but it’ll also notify Google and other search engines every time you post new content.

Overall Rating: 7.1 / 10

Flexible Upload

One aspect of Wordpress’ interface that I feel is lacking is their options for upload images for posts. They do have a simple box that will let you upload and insert, but your options from there are limited at best. With this plugin, you also have the ability to automatically create a smaller thumbnail image and resize the original while you upload. This is better than simply specifying a smaller size in the HTML, because it can reduce load times. Also, if you have an image-viewer plugin installed, such as LightBox, it integrates with those as well. The scope of this plugin is pretty narrow, but I feel it patches an important whole in the Wordpress editor.

Overall Rating: 7.6 / 10