Intro

I have been typing since 1976. My mother was trained to be a secretary and learned to type on a keyboard without letters drawn on the keycaps. “Old school” trainers knew if you learned to type by looking at the keys you would never become as good as you could be. She made me learn on an old Royal manual typewriter without looking and with proper typing technique as well.

Years later when I graduated college and was having the age-old struggle to find a first job I did work with Manpower temporary services. My typing speed was tested at 98 wpm with 9 errors. I had moved on past electric typewriters and onto computers where errors were not as painful as the days of those little grey eraser pencils and holes in the paper. I was fast. I was in pain and didn’t even realize it at first dismissing it as my hands being tired.

Bring On The Hurt

In 1989 I started my first real job doing database programming and Win-PC support in the local city/county government. At that time I met a great lady named Pat that had endured several operations for Carpal Tunnels Syndrome (CTS) which I knew nothing of. Now I new why my hands and wrists hurt and they were getting worse.

Two years later, 1991, I met and fell for a girl that was deaf. Needless to say that was a whole new world of pain for me as I started using my hands to say everything I wanted to say to her – and that was a lot! It is a beautiful language I wished more people knew but people who are born signing usually have no issues with what is also called Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI) but the rest of us usually have trouble if we become signers as adults – and I had become certified to interpret so I was doing a lot of damage to my wrists.

At The Bottom Looking Up

In 2002 I was no longer using sign language and the only irritant to my wrists was typing, but computers were my job and hobby so I was doing that for the better part of about 12-18 hours a day. My wrists were killing me and I did not want needles full of steroids driven into the bones of my wrists or, worse yet, surgery.

In my research on CTS I read about a new keyboard layout that helped some people. This keyboard layout was created and patented in 1936 by August Dvorak and his brother-in-law Dr. William Dealey after study of the psychology and physiology of typing. It seems the QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to slow a typist’s speed to keep the keys from jamming on the old manual typewriters. This was accomplished by placing the letters far apart and putting often used letters under the weaker fingers that you just can’t go fast. Of course, this only makes RSI worse. The average professional typist’s fingers using QWERTY travel on average from 16 to 20 miles a day! With the “Dvorak Simplified Keyboard” that drops to about 1 mile!

* Fun Fact: The early typewriter salesmen loved to show how awesome the new devices were. The word “typewriter” is typed by selecting keys entirely on the top row in the QWERTY layout. At a time no one had ever seen typing it was quite impressive.

How Does Dvorak Work?

The whole idea behind the Dvorak layout is to make the keyboard work for us and not the other way around. The two men put the most commonly used keys under the fingers on “Home Row” and the others nearby, leaving the least used keys to the most difficult positions and furthest away from the resting position. With the new layout reducing finger travel a person who takes to this layout can actually improve their speed.

In the 1930′s a young Barbara Blackburn received an Inferior-minus grade in her QWERTY typing class in high school. A bit later when she was a freshman in business college the Royal Typewriter Company sent a representative to her school looking for someone to train as a demonstrator with the Dvorak layout. She decided to give it a shot and excelled. Within a few years she was up to 138 WPM and as of 2005 she was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest English language typist in the world. She was typing 150 wpm sustained for 50 minutes! Imagine being able to maintain that speed for that long. She could type 170 wpm for shorter periods and was timed at a peak speed of 212 wpm. All of this with a near 100% accuracy. Granted she was an exception but on average the results are generally favorable.

What Happened to Me?

In 2002 after I became totally fed up with painful typing and had learned about the Dvorak Simplified Layout I decided to “go for it”. I refused to hunt and peck and even stayed with a regular keyboard with the QWERTY lettering to help me not cheat. Since typing was as natural as walking I felt like I was literally losing my mind for about 2 weeks. It was difficult to learn the new layout but by not cheating I was able to do it comfortably in about 3-4 weeks. Amazingly my wrists were better almost immediately! In 1 month there was significant improvement and after about 3 months my hands had stopped hurting almost completely.

Most people lose the ability to type well on QWERTY keyboards when they immerse themselves in Dvorak. In my case it was not that way. I could type well with Dvorak without thinking about it and then if I glanced at the letters on the keys I could switch to QWERTY mode and touchtype in that format almost equally well.

Trouble in Paradise

Here in Key West I used the Dvorak layout for a couple of years but then switched back to the IT department where I rarely worked at my own computer. It was just not worth the mental effort to maintain both layouts in my mind so I reluctantly switched back to QWERTY. I was fearful that the horrible pain would return soon after the switchv

End Results

After about 4 years I still have no pain in my wrists! I don’t know if my wrists adapted during that “off time” or if the break just gave them time to heal and my level of use is not making it bad again, but I type all day programming web pages now and have no pain from it.

My typing speed suffered a bit – I’m down to 71 wpm now, but that is more than enough for writing blog articles and programming where my mind is the bottleneck in speed. I can surely live with 71 and no pain!

I wondered if I remembered the Dvorak layout. The last 1/3 of this article was typed in that style and by now my mind has almost remembered it all. I make a mistake about every 2 words but haven’t had to look up where a key is – just remind myself to not use the habitual position. I am confident that should I start suffering again from RSI I could easily slide back into Dvorak competency in a day or two.

It seemed like a big mistake toward the end of the first week of trying to switch to Dvorak, but I honestly think it allowed me to avoid surgery and debilitating pain so it was well worth it! If you find yourself in a similar situation I would highly recommend you to consider it. Macs, Windows, and Linux have the layout built into the operating system so it’s easy to switch. If you are a hunt and peck typist I’m not sure how much help it would be. If you are not a touch typist or want help learning the new layout they do make keyboards with the keys printed in the Dvorak layout and even ones with a switch to go back and forth. I do suggest, however, that if you want to make the switch commit to one way only. Don’t do them both at the same time or you’ll never learn it!

If you have any questions or (respectful) comments I’d love to hear them!
Jim

I love photography even though I’m a rank amateur at it. I enjoy everything about it… composing the shot, learning the equipment, seeing how different things affect the shot, and post production.

It’s easy to get in a hurry and take a photo that’s somewhat less than great but guess what? Sometimes you don’t need an expensive polarizing filter to save an otherwise awful picture. Take this one for example:

It was a cloudy day but there was plenty of light to create enough glare to make this a terrible shot. In Photoshop (or other similar programs) you can check the Levels and you would see something like this:

This shows us that all of the luminance information in this picture is entirely in the neighborhood of bland. No lights and no darks to speak of make it a plain and boring picture.

By adjusting the levels using the indicators directly under the histogram you can make it much better. Here’s my adjustment:

As you can see, I brought the lower slider up closer to the darkest part of the photo and the lights down to the brightest parts. This means that the darkest part of the picture under the rock edges will now be almost black and the brightest part of the picture that’s in the bubbles/seafoam will be almost white. This in essence stretches the limited information in the picture over a wider spread of luminance.

Here’s the final result with only the Layer adjustments shown above:

Obviously taking the best picture possible in the camera is our goal but a wide array of mistakes can be covered by a bit of patience in your favorite photo editing program. At least now we can see the turtle I intended to shoot and not so much of the seemingly murky water which was really clouds and glare.

If you would like to see how to fix a picture you took feel free to send it to me and I’ll see what I can do! I’m no professional but I have learned a lot from some great instructors so we’ll work it together.

Send your image to jim-at-Jimscomputing_dot_com with the title “Photo Touchup” and I’ll let you know if I choose it to post about here!

I didn’t write this. It was an email a friend sent me that sends me these kinds of emails… kinda ironic.

Subject: Cheer
As we end the year 2010, I want to thank all of you for your educational e-mails over the past year. I am totally screwed up now and have little chance of recovery.

I no longer open a bathroom door without using a paper towel, or have the waitress put lemon slices in my ice water without worrying about the bacteria on the lemon peel.

I can’t sit down on the hotel bedspread because I can only imagine what has happened on it since it was last washed.

I have trouble shaking hands with someone who has been driving because the number one pastime while driving alone is picking one’s nose.

Eating a little snack sends me on a guilt trip because I can only imagine how many gallons of trans fats I have consumed over the years.

I can’t touch any woman’s purse for fear she has placed it on the floor of a public restroom.

I MUST SEND MY SPECIAL THANKS to whoever sent me the one about rat poop in the glue on envelopes because I now have to use a wet sponge with every envelope that needs sealing. ALSO, now I have to scrub the top of every can I open for the same reason.

I no longer have any savings because I gave it to a sick girl (Penny Brown) who is about to die for the 1,387,258th time.

I no longer have any money, but that will change once I receive the $15,000 that Bill Gates/Microsoft and AOL are sending me for participating in their special e-mail program.

I no longer worry about my soul because I have 363,214 angels looking out for me, and St. Theresa’s Novena will grant my every wish .

I can’t have a drink in a bar because I’ll wake up in a bathtub full of ice with my kidneys gone.

I can’t use cancer-causing deodorants even though I smell like a water buffalo on a hot day.

THANKS TO YOU I have learned that my prayers only get answered if I forward an e-mail to seven of my friends and make a wish within five minutes.

BECAUSE OF YOUR CONCERN, I no longer drink Coca Cola because it can remove toilet stains.

I no longer buy gas without taking someone along to watch the car so a serial killer doesn’t crawl in my back seat when I’m filling up.

I no longer use Cling Wrap in the microwave because it causes seven different types of cancer.

AND THANKS FOR LETTING ME KNOW I can’t boil a cup of water in the microwave anymore because it will blow up in my face. Disfiguring me for life.

I no longer go to shopping malls because someone will drug me with a perfume sample and rob me.

AND THANKS TO YOUR GREAT ADVICE I can’t ever pick up $2.00 coin dropped in the parking lot because it probably was placed there by a sex molester waiting to grab me as I bend over.

AND LASTLY, I keep my toothbrush in the living room because I was told by e-mail that water splashes over 6 ft. out of the toilet.

If you don’t send this e-mail to at least 144,000 people in the next 70 minutes, a large dove with diarrhea will land on your head at 5:00 p.m. tomorrow afternoon, and the fleas from 120 camels will infest your back, causing you to grow a hairy hump. I know this will occur because it actually happened to a friend of my next door neighbor’s ex-mother-in-law’s second husband’s cousin’s best friend’s beautician .

NOW YOU ALL HAVE YOURSELVES A WONDERFUL DAY????. AND A HEALTHY LIFE?????.
Happy 2011

*Originally posted Oct 17, 2010*
Ok, so last time I talked about security and how tough it is to pull off that level of safety. Well one tool that has done more than all the rest of them together for me is LastPass. I could write an entire book on LastPass but I’ll spare you all from that.

###What Is It?
LastPass, oversimplified, is a multi-faceted program that lets you keep all of your passwords in an extremely safe manner. In the simplest terms it is a password vault type utility but it is much more than that! To use LastPass you install it (more later) and then any time you need a password you just log into LastPass with one password and it either provides the password to you or it securely inserts it into the website you are accessing.

###How to Get To It?
There are many ways to get your passwords. LastPass has plugins for every major browser except Opera (due to how they do things). Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome all have plugins to serve your passwords when needed.

In addition to that you can log in to the [LastPass website][lp] to access your passwords and if you have a Premium account you can get to them via mobile apps for most devices. So, you can see you are never apart from your passwords as long as you have an Internet connection.

###What Can I Store?
LastPass is mostly a password vault for websites. Everything from your bank to your Twitter account has a password and you don’t want someone getting any of them. LastPass stores information so that when you are ready to log in to, say, Twitter, it asks for the master password and then fills in the blank for you.

But wait, there’s more! LastPass also has what they call “Secure Notes”. These are places you can store just about anything textual you want to keep safe. Things like passport numbers, bank account numbers, credit card information, etc. In fact there is even a new feature which provides templates for the most common items that helps make sure you put in everything you’ll need. Have you ever written down your credit card number and forgotten the 3-digit number on the back? I have and it is annoying! LastPass Secure Note Templates have a place for that so you won’t forget next time!

###How Safe Is It?
According to the user manual, and confirmed by various security people, the following are all things LastPass does to protect your data:

*        All sensitive data is encrypted on your computer, not at the LastPass server. The data can not be “sniffed” by a hacker reading packets and can not even be decrypted by LastPass themselves.

*        The encryption algorithm they use is acceptable for US Government top-secret data.

*        LastPass doesn’t even know your password. They store what is called a hash of the password which is compared when you log in, but can not be reversed to get the original.

* There are many extra layers of protection you can add such as:

* Multifactor Authentication – not only do you need the password, but also a physical component (paper grid or usb key) to open the vault.

* Logoff when the browser is closed or after a set idle period. A compromise you determine between logging in for every password and having it available while you are working.

* Require password reprompt – certain sites or notes can be set to ask for your password when accessed, even if you are already authenticated.

* Clear clipboard after use.

* Kill other sessions on login – Yet another safety check in case you have a minimized browser logged in or log in from multiple places.

* Powerful features such as one-time passwords which gives you a list of passwords that will work one-time only so even if a computer has a keylogger and sees your LastPass password, that password will never work again. Very useful for logging in at a site you don’t have complete control over.

* Virtual Keyboard – lets you click out the password with the mouse so a keylogger has nothing to log.

There are many more features but, in my opinion, the strongest I haven’t already listed are strong, unique passwords and not using the browser password manager. The password manager in your favorite browser is not too difficult to capture and move to another system where they can take advantage of your stored passwords. The other point is best illustrated by a story I remember.

It was about 1985 or so, my memory is inexact as far as dates, and there was a group of young people who ran the most popular Bulletin Board System (BBS) in the US. They had come to the realization that A. people give personal information such as name, address, phone, etc, to a BBS when they register and B. most people use the same password multiple places. The BBS was a front for their real purpose. They would get a user’s personal information, find out where they worked and then try the BBS password in the work computer. Brilliant in a dark sort of way.

The truth is that if you use the same password in more than one place then you are risking the same thing! Every password you use should be both unique and secure. Don’t use Spotty for your password! LastPass can generate a wide variety of passwords depending on your needs including uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, special characters, and of any length you choose; I just generated one with 800 characters! Now that’s overkill, but for your bank account that allows 32 characters it’s nice to be able to take full advantage of that.

—
Here’s a little experiment in math. I know, math, yuck, but it’s easy, I promise.

If you have a password that is 1 character long and it can only be a lower case letter then you have **26** possible passwords. Add upper case and it becomes 52. Add digits and you have 62.
So, this far we have 62 passwords we have to try to get your password at the worst case! If it is ‘a’ we’ll get it on one.

Now, let’s expand that to just two characters with the same rules:
lower case only is 26 x 26 or 676 characters. Add upper case and it’s 2704 characters. Add digits and you have 3844 possible combinations!!!

You can see that by adding one extra character to your password you made it take a hacker 3,844 guesses to get your password instead of only a measly 26! This number grows in a similar manner as you add characters. If my college math and my calculator are both working properly that means that an 8-character password of upper, lower and digits will be **218,340,105,584,896** possibilities!

Imagine if you could use 12 digits! Even with modern computer speeds a password that long is not practical to try to hack unless it’s the nuclear launch codes or master password to the Federal Reserve computers. If you change that password once every 3 months then only astronomical blind-luck will get them in – they may as well just type random gibberish to try to get in.

—

So, why did I say all that? To say that LastPass will give me the ability to use the largest and most complicated password my bank can handle. If Twitter only has 8 character passwords then you can set that too. Letters and digits only, that’s fine, just uncheck the special character box. It will work with every site I have access to and that’s everything from banks to blogs.

###What Else Does LastPass Do?
Another very powerful feature is the form-fill feature. If you choose to, LastPass will even fill in the blanks with your address, phone, or any other information you add to it when you get to a form requesting those things. You can even set up different profiles with your work address and your home address if you like.

The other thing that is a life-saver that I’ve not yet mentioned is that all of these passwords are synched across all different ways to get to LastPass. If you are at work and sign up for a new website LastPass will ask if you want to save that info. If you say yes and then go home or pull our your mobile device the password will be there for you! No more “I forgot my password” emails or emailing yourself passwords that could be intercepted.

There are lots more features but this is already almost 1500 words and I’m sure you are waiting for the end by now.

I’ll leave you with this. If you use passwords online and want a safe and convenient way to keep them then you have to check out [LastPass][lp]!

Best wishes!
Jim Sewell / @Deverill

[lp]: http://lastpass.com

*Originally posted July 24, 2010*
You can hear the audio file of this review at this link.
This is a review I did of MacJournal for the Nosillacast Podcast hosted over at Podfeet.com – A Technology Geek Podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh Bias! I am posting here because it is a new way of thinking for me… I am an old-school computer geek but the people in the Mac community are changing my perspectives. I’ve done magazine reviews in the 80’s but this will be recorded as an audio review for a podcast show. How far have we come since I first laid hands on a computer in ’78!

This is Jim, aka Deverill, from Key West. In celebration of the arrival of my first Mac USB microphone I thought I’d do a review of a product that has really impressed me.

I am also using the product I am reviewing to save the typed version for the show notes and my blog. More on that in a minute.

The product I’d like to talk about is MacJournal written by Dan Schimpf and distributed by Mariner Software at marinersoftware.com. MacJournal is a tool for journaling and blogging and brings together the utility of a nice editor, the tracking of a good organization system, the security of your little sister’s diary – stored in a bank lockbox, and the Mac goodness of simplicity by interfacing well with blogs and other systems automatically.

There is a full 85-page manual included which is also very well done that covers all the details so you can imagine that there are too many features to cover completely in this format but I’ll hit the highlights.

The latest version, Version 5, has been rebuilt for Leopard and Snow Leopard and looks absolutely wonderful. No Windows or Mac Classic interfaces here, it’s pure modern Mac style complete with calendar, inspector, and other well-done panels to help create your masterpieces. It is nicer than TextEdit but not as gaudy as Microsoft’s Word. Just right for a tool that you can use to get in and get out but yet powerful enough you can perfect your document without ever leaving the program.

MacJournal handles every type of media: text files, PDFs, Quicktime movies, images, and can even store files it doesn’t recognize. You can record audio entries to your journal or blog and it will even record video with your iSight! You know I said I will post this on my blog? I’m going to use this audio ability to include this recording too so the visually impaired don’t have to rely on Alex to read it to them. He’s a nice guy and all, but I thought this would be a good use of the feature to give it a more personal touch.

With MacJournal you create journals which are like separate binders into which you place pages or, as they call them, entries. In my case I have a journal for work-related information, one for ideas or future products, one for a course I am taking and one for each of the websites I run as WordPress blogs. Inside an entry you can, of course, enter text either by typing or pasting but you can also insert images and screen captures. Audio and video recording is done by using the recording bar interface which is built in to MacJournal and can be placed directly in an entry. Each entry you create has a title, date, tags, status, priority, rating, size and content. Status has options to help organize your entries such as not started, underway, needs review and completed. Perfect for collaborative blogs or documents at your job.

A common feature among the better Mac programs is the ability to create smart journals. Using this you can combine any entries from all your journals into a single smart journal. Perhaps you want to be able to access all the entries about your new car in one place – just tag the entries “New Car” and create a smart journal. The companion feature to this is Entry Aliases which are like file aliases in Mac OS X. They allow you to put a pointer to a entry in a different place. This is especially useful if your need doesn’t warrant an entire smart folder but just a pointer to another entry somewhere else.

There is also a Quick Note window available that lets you press a shortcut and enter information into a compact note window without having to go back into the MacJournal program. It’s great for doing research in a browser and storing your findings without ever leaving your page.

MacJournal is not just some little kid’s diary program. It is a full blown application with very good security so it can be trusted with everything from corporate secrets down to the note you wrote to the cute little red haired girl you have a crush on and only guys like the CIA can find out what you said. Hopefully they won’t be that interested in your journal. The journals themselves can be locked with a password. You can store the password into your Keychain if you like, but this is optional, as is the password hint. After locking a journal you can click it again and choose to encrypt it. This uses AES-256 encryption which the U.S. Government says is good enough for Top-Secret level documents.

Of course a tool like MacJournal has the complete set of sorting and searching facilities. It’s always easy to find that entry you are looking for, but the features seem to never end. If you insert an image into an entry you can scale it right there to window-width, 25, 50, or 75% with built-in tools. No need to leave the program to find your favorite graphics editor. This thing will even auto-discover Wiki-like links to other entries! Just click a button and your internal linking is automatic if you like. Tables and lists? No problem, it does them too. Messy import? MacJournal will automatically do a wide range of cleanup such as removing e-mail quotes, smileys, removing multiple spaces, removing HTML tags, and so on.

Do you wonder if you are overusing that new vocabulary-building word you learned today? What about how many words you have in that term paper you are writing? The statistics panel will give you this and more in a single place.

Of course Growl support is built in. I love Growl because I set it to speak and I hear when a new mail comes in and can choose to ignore it if I’m busy since Growl announces who it is from and the subject. This and other features can be set in the extensive preferences choices you can use to modify MacJournal to be the best for you.

My favorite feature is the ability to update blogs. I have several web sites that I run and it’s always a bit of a hassle to log in to the blog, do the password thing, go to the posts and click Add New. Nothing bad but to do several sites with several entries is time consuming. With MacJournal I just go to the journal that is linked to the website I want to add a post to. When I create an entry and get it the way I want I just right-click and select Share and one of the options is “Send to -the-name-of-my-blog-“ and when I click that it’s done. No logging in, no browser windows, nothing, just blogging goodness. This works with most of the popular blogs such as WordPress, LiveJournal, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType and more. This is especially nice when you combine the ability to embed YouTube videos into an entry to the blog posting. Way better than using the blog interface.

The program has built-in support for MobileMe, but I have found that by saving your journals into a dropbox folder you can access your journals from anywhere. Mariner Software has a great licensing policy. They allow you to install one serial number onto two Macs but only if you are the only one using the product. This is great for me because I have my computer at work that only I use and then my iMac at home. Dropbox makes for the perfect sync mechanism in my case.

One final feature is the abilty to export to podcasts, MicroSoft Word, RTF, HTML and many other formats. You’ll never be trapped by a discontinued product but I have a feeling that Mariner Software isn’t going anywhere for a long time based on the quality of MacJournal.

MacJournal is available for iPad, the iPhone and Mac and in ten different languages. I have not tested it because I do not know what to look for, but the web site says “MacJournal is 100% Accessibility-supported.” which is totally awesome and sets the standard for the rest of the developers out there that should be taking note!

MacJournal is available from Mariner Software for $39.95. An upgrade is only $14.95 and they also have versions for the iPad and iPhone.

Check it out – MacJournal is a great software product and I think you’ll be happy you did take a look. Mariner Software has other products too so look around while you’re there – you may find something else.

*Originally posted Oct 16,2010*
We all know about the people who have energy, creativity, talent, and a spark of brilliance but yet they use all that to try to grab our passwords and get into our bank accounts or sell our information for cash. When I was growing up the term “Hacker” meant:
>HACKER n. 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. (from the original “Hacker’s Dictionary”)

Today the word has a much darker meaning. Most anyone hearing the word ‘Hacker’ now thinks of a lowlife sitting in a dark basement somewhere writing viruses to steal your passwords so he can sell them or use them himself to empty your bank accounts, steal your identity so he can buy a 900-inch flat screen TV and other nefarious things.

So, what’s a person to do? We all have heard the manifest of things to do to protect ourselves:

• Shred all papers
• Never give out our information
• Your bank will never ask you to give them your password
• Use a different password on every account…
• … and make it impossible to remember with numbers, letters, symbols, 300 characters long, not pronounceable, etc.

And I’m not saying that any of this is a bad idea! It is an excellent idea and will help protect you from the lowlifes trying to rip off everything you have worked hard to get. Worse yet, they want to steal the blessings that God has put into your life.

I have always said that if they pooled their talent, skill, knowledge and drive then these guys could cure cancer in a year. Instead they’d rather lie, cheat and steal to get what they have.

Check my next post for a tool that will help with at least 3 or the above points of security when it comes to your online life!

*Originally written Nov 29, 2010*

Did you know you can do Markdown in the excellent and free TextWrangler?

For anyone interested in the Markdown text markup language and doesn’t own Scrivener or doesn’t want to get into the Terminal to convert your text to HTML then here’s a pretty nice thing I found.

1. Install Markdown per the instructions at Daring Fireball.
2. Install the free TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software.
3. Open TextWrangler and select the menu item #! which they call shebang.
4. Go down to Unix Filters and click Open Filters Folder.
5. Open a new finder window and find the Markdown.pl file you installed in step 1.
6. Drag a copy (Option key while dragging) into the Filters Folder.

Now any time you have markdown text inside TextWrangler you can go to the #! menu -> Unix Filters -> Markdown.pl and it will convert your buffer into the appropriate HTML! Just copy and paste it into your blog or web page and you’re ready to go.

As an added bonus you can download SmartyPants, also from Daring Fireball and turn those typewriter quote marks into proper marks.

I have a blog called [New Perspectives][np] which is a collection of thoughts, insights, questions for myself and others and various other writings in the attempt to get a new perspective on our lives.

I tell you this because lately I have been letting computing articles slip into that blog and they don’t quite belong. My solution to this is to start moving those articles to this blog and eventually deleting them from that site.

So, prepare for some fun computing things to start showing up here as I write them!

[np]: http://jimscomputing.com/np

Church on Vacation?

If you are vacationing or if you are on a business trip to Key West and the Lower Florida Keys then I’d like to invite you to the church I attend.  At Covenant Word Church we have a contemporary worship service and Children’s Church and Pastor Kevin Kerr always seems to have the right word at the right time from God for us.  Stop by and feel like family at home in what I consider to be the best of the Key West churches.