Friday, April 21, 2006

My brother the rock star

Well, I knew someone in the family would make it big eventually. And now it's happened.

My brother Benj just put out his first CD. Apparently his group is called Virginia. If I recall correctly he was born in Virginia, so that must be the connection.

I guess he's become somewhat of a celebrity up at BYU Idaho (the college formerly known as Ricks), because of a song he and his friend sang at a Guitars Unplugged event. The song is called Snow Fort Heaven, and chronicles their ill fated efforts to create a Snow Fort for the ages.

They have an even funnier song called "The Girl For Me (Polydactyly)," which includes such lines as "She's got a little something extra," "She has something other girls lack," "She's good for gathering nuts and berries in a primitive society," and many more. (For those not in the medical field, Polydactyly means having an extra digit, a la the six fingered man ("My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die..."))

The CD is entitled "She Usually Wears Mittens," which is another lyric from the Polydactyly song. The CD totally rocks, and it can be yours for a paltry $7.00 including shipping. If you would like to help support a new young talent, just send the money through paypal to "tannerb _at_ gmail.com" and put "CD order" in the instructions field. Enjoy!

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Blog Alert gets some notice!

I noticed a little traffic starting to build on my Blog Alert page, so I checked the web stats, and I found out that Blog Alert was listed on a tech site called eHub that lists "next generation" web products. Pretty cool!

In case there starts to be too much traffic on the Blog Alert site, I thought I would mirror some of the content over to here. (Google, who owns Blogger, can probably handle the traffic.)

For those of you wanting to add Blog Alert functionality to your own blog or site (allowing people to sign up for email notifications of your blog posts), you can use the following HTML. Just replace http://YOUR-FEED-URL-HERE with the URL of your RSS Feed, and paste the HTML into your blog template:

<!-- START BLOG ALERT BOX -->
<div style="padding-top: 16px; padding-bottom: 16px;">
<table style="border: 1px solid rgb(13, 41, 183); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" width="160">
<tbody><tr>
<td>
<h3 style="border-bottom: 1px solid navy; margin: 0px; color: navy; display: block; height: 20px;">Subscribe</h3>
<div style="font-size: 9pt; margin-bottom: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">
Enter your email address to receive notifications when there are new posts
</div>
<form method="post" action="http://www.shootthebreeze.net/blogalert/index.php">
<input name="formSubmitted" value="true" type="hidden">
<input name="fromBlog" value="true" type="hidden">
<input name="feedURL" value="http://YOUR-FEED-URL-HERE" type="hidden">
<input name="email" size="20" maxlength="200" value="" type="text">
<input name="submit" value="Sign Up" type="submit">
</form>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<!-- END BLOG ALERT BOX -->


When you add it to your blog, it should look something like this:

Subscribe


Enter your email address to receive notifications when there are new posts

Thursday, March 30, 2006

Get email notifications whenever I post something new!

A few days back I was complaining about how Blogger should have the ability for all 3 of my regular readers to get an email whenever I post something new to my blog. I looked around on the Internet, talked to some people in the know, and found out that there ARE ways to do that. My friend Blake pointed me to some good possibilities, such as Yahoo Alerts.

But I didn't really love any of the available options, so I created one of my own. I called it "Blog Alert." So, you can now experience the sheer pleasure of receiving email updates every time I decide to share my wisdom.

To sign up:
  1. Enter your email in the "Subscribe" form on the right. Or you can use this link.
  2. Submit the form.
  3. You'll get a confirmation email to make sure it's really you -- just click on the link in the confirmation email and you're ready to go!
  4. You will get at most one email per day -- if there were any new posts that day, you will get an email with a summary of the posts; if there weren't any new posts that day, then you won't get anything.
You can also use Blog Alert to sign up for email notifications from other blogs and sites. Here is a list of popular feeds that you can try out. Or you can try one of my favorites (after clicking on the link, scroll down to "My other recommended RSS feeds").

And finally, if you have a blog of your own, you can add Blog Alert to your own site so people can get email notifications whenever you post something new. You just have to know the URL of the RSS feed for your site (which will vary depending on what blog service you're using). If you're using Blogger it's http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml. Once you figure out the RSS feed URL, you can get the HTML for your site here.

Enjoy! And please let me know what you think!

Friday, March 24, 2006

Caz and Z

As you may have heard, I won a recent contest for cutest niece and nephew in the world.

Don't believe it? You be the judge!

(Kodak will try to trick you into creating an account, but you don't need to. Click on the above link and then go to "View Photos without signing in" on the bottom right. The only reason you might want to create an account is if you want to save the album for future viewing.)

(Yes I know flickr is better. But I don't feel like paying the $25 a year, as of yet...)

(No, I don't mind if you skip this section if you aren't in my family. :)

Thursday, March 23, 2006

I know you want to subscribe to this blog... but how?

OK, I figured that a lot of you (i.e. my mom) would want to get notified by email whenever I posted something new to this site. And I figured that that would be pretty standard functionality.

Well, it looks like I figured wrong! I can't find anything about email notifications for blogger posts. If anyone out there knows how to do it, PLEASE let me know, nate _at_ lunchclub _dot_ com.

So I guess RSS is the only way to subscribe to my infinite wisdom. For those of you geek-tech-com-soft types, my RSS feed is:
http://natetanner.blogspot.com/atom.xml

If you're new to RSS, it's a way to get all your news and other publications of interest aggregated, using an (aptly named) "aggregator," such as Feed Reader (which is free, and the one I use).

(If you aren't already in the RSS game, then it would be a silly idea to sign up just for my feed. I'm pretty sure that I won't post to this blog often enough to make it worth the time. But if you're already an RSS person then it can't hurt.)

My other recommended RSS feeds:

  1. The most popular sites that people have bookmarked:
    http://del.icio.us/rss/popular

  2. The most "dugg" tech news and tidbits:
    http://digg.com/rss/index.xml

  3. All that Web 2.0 craziness:
    http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch

  4. The sports guy!
    http://search.espn.go.com/keyword/search? searchString=bill_simmons& page=espn&filter=null&feed=rss

Enjoy!

Shawn Marion at the car wash!

I've been meaning to start a blog for a while, and today seemed like a good "journal entry day."

After dropping my roommate off at the airport this morning, I went to Danny's Car Wash. (I had a voucher for a free car wash, since my company, DineSmart, has been doing some advertising trade with Danny's.) As I was in line at the carwash, I heard some old guy behind me say "So, are you guys going to take 'em tonight?" and I looked back, and he was talking to Shawn Marion!

I didn't say anything at that point, but when I went out to the parking lot (where they dry the cars) to pick up my car, there was Shawn again, so I sat down by him. I made some small talk, and then said, "So how's Amare doing?" At that point I think he might have grimaced a little, as in "Hey I'm an All Star, I'm CARRYING this team, stop asking about Amare!" But then he answered "He's coming back tonight." I said, "Wow, I guess I should read the paper. That's big!" Shawn sort of shrugged.

So then we sat there for a minute or two. Everyone that walked by would say hello to Shawn or nod or wave or smile shyly. I felt like I was sitting by Vito Corleone in the Godfather with everyone coming to kiss his hand. So I said "Shawn, let me ask you, does it ever get old having everyone recognize you everywhere you go?" He said "Hey, if I didn't want to be recognized I should have gone into something besides basketball." I said, "Yeah, or you shouldn't have been so good at it." He nodded, and went on to talk about how it's all good and positive to have people like you, but sometimes you don't want to be bothered, but if you come to a public place like a carwash without bodyguards or anyone to provide a buffer zone, then you have to expect people to talk to you and be cool with it.

Then one of the car wash minions came over and gave Shawn a quick bow to indicate that his car was ready. (For everyone else, they yell out something unintelligible from across the parking lot, but NBA players get a little special treatment, even at a car wash). Shawn said something like, "Hey, later man" and was gone.

So there you go. Shawn Marion -- nice guy, clean car. Go Suns.