Jealous

I'm not sure what I'm more jealous about in this video: his drumming skills or his video editing skills. It's amazing what the average Joe can do at home these days.

The Kite Runner

Last night my wife and I watched the movie The Kite Runner. It is based on a book that came out in 2003. I had not heard of either before we watched it, but I think this is one of the best movies I have ever seen! It was a very enlightening tale that exposed me to another place and culture that I am not very familiar with. But most of all, it was a great story of redemption.

New Blogs

I've started 2 new blogs. Actually, one isn't really new. I've separated my technical tips and tricks into their own blog called "Hucklebuck's Tech Blog". Then, I've started a new blog called "Huck On Politics" which is just my take on things in the political world. And I suppose I'll keep this one around just for my random musings. ;)

I ♥ Special Characters ☺

I started to write a similar post to this a while back and just never finished it. After Katdish's last comment, I decided to write this post instead.

So how do you include special characters like a heart or smiley face in a post or comment? Well, there are 3 ways that I can think of.

1. Copy and paste. It's that simple. See something you like? Copy it and paste it to your own blog. But of course it's not that simple if you can't remember where you saw it or how to get to it.

2. If you have Microsoft Word, then go to Insert → Symbol on the toolbar. From there, you can find just about any symbol you need. Speaking of Word, I just remembered something. There is a plug-in for Word that you can download and install that will let you type your blog posts from Microsoft Word and then press a button and publish it from Word. Why is that so great?
a. Spell check
b. If you wanted to save copies of your posts to your personal computer
c. If you have Internet issues, then you don't have to worry about losing your post

3. The last is fairly easy especially if you are good at memorization. First a little computer talk. For every character or symbol on a computer, there is a number associated with it. (They are called ASCII codes if you're interested.) To type a special character (in Windows), press and hold down the Alt key, then type the number associated with the character on the Num Pad and then release the Alt key. (Be sure your Num Lock is on).

Here is a nice chart of codes.

For example, if you needed to ask someone "where are the pinatas?"
¿Donde estan las piñatas?
¿ = Alt 168
ñ = Alt 164

Or "where is that boy?"
Où est ce garçon
ù = Alt 151
ç = Alt 135

Keep in mind that codes and keyboards are different across the globe, so what might look like a heart to you might end up looking like garbage to someone else. For further reading, check out this exciting article on character encoding on Wikipedia.

Google Is Your Friend

I have said it a million times: I don't know how I would do my job without Google. It's simply amazing. But are you harnessing its full power? Here are a couple of tricks that I often use.

Say you want to search Stuff Christians Like for the phrase worship eagle. If you type site:stufffchristianslike.blogspot.com followed by "worship eagle" into the search box, it will then only search the Stuff Christians Like Web site. By putting the words worship eagle in quotes, it will also only search for the words as a phrase. Now to make things even easier, if you click the Cached link underneath the search result, it will show you a stored copy of the page, with your search term(s) highlighted. If you have multiple search terms, it will highlight each one a different color. Very useful for skimming through a long page to find exactly what you need.

What about you? Any other Google tricks that you use?

Tech Tip: Use the Clipboard

Have you ever spent hours pouring over the perfect blog comment, hit "Publish", waited for the page to load...and then got an error message? So you hit the "back" button on your browser only to find that your magnum opus has disappeared into a cyber black hole? That will make you lose your religion in a hurry!

Here's a little tip. If you've typed something rather lengthy and/or important, make a quick copy before you submit it. On a Windows computer, you can press ctrl+a inside of a text box, then ctrl+c. This will put your entire comment into a magical place called the clipboard. Then, if for some reason the comment doesn't go through and you have to retype it, you can simply press ctrl+v to paste the comment back into the box. This works for blogs, Facebook, email, whatever. If it's something really important, you may even want to paste it into Notepad or Microsoft Word and save a copy to your computer just in case.

Update: Way of the Master Radio

Way of the Master Radio is now Wretched Radio.

Here's the explanation for the change:

Let's start here. We love Way of the Master. We love Ray. We love Kirk. We love EZ and everyone else at Way of the Master (Living Waters). For three years they graciously supported the program. We would not be doing this show had it not been for them. However, they recently decided to discontinue doing the radio show. FamilyNet very graciously stepped in and took it over.

In the future, you will still hear Ray and Kirk. Wretched Radio is pretty much the same as it was when it was Way of the Master Radio. In fact, Todd, Kirk and Ray will still be doing events together. We are all still pals. We are just two different ministries who are still laboring together. We hope that this serves as a model for other ministries and ministers who part company. It doesn't have to be ugly.

Unfortunately it seems that the free Podcast does not have full episodes. I'm very disappointed about that, but I understand that sometimes that it necessary.