Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Personal News
I’ve been Arrested & Locked up for the MDA
Dec 7th
Yesterday I had the opportunity to spend an hour making phone calls to my friends and family to raise money for the MDA. I’d like to thank everyone that donated or made a pledge, it’s most appreciated and I’m happy we were able to raise so much money. I had a goal of $2600 but raised a total of only $680.00. Still $680 is not bad for an hour of phone time and I’m proud to be able to say we all came together to raise money for a worthwhile charity.
One of the great things about the Internet is that it brings ease and access to everyone for just about everything. Like most the MDA has recognized the value the Internet brings and has evolved. You can now make a donation online. In fact I have my own donations page available:
This is certainly a big change from the milk cartons we used pick up at the local 7-11 and then use as kids to collection donations door-to-door around the neighborhood to “help jerry’s kids”.
I know the MDA has been both praised and attack but one thing is certain they are definitely helping people with Muscular Distrophy so I encourage others to donate as well.
Oh and for my hour of time I got a nice little goodies bag and a pretty nice picture frame. It’s funny, I noticed if you got your $2600 bail you got a t-shirt, if you missed it you got a picture frame. Honestly, I have enough t-shirts, I’m not a college kid any more and although I still enjoy wearing t-shirts (like my Rocky Balboa T-shirts from 80stees.com ) they just don’t get the use they used to. The picture frame was a much nicer gift in my opinion.
Applied Innovations is all grown up & Microsoft Certified Gold!
Nov 3rd
Applied Innovations (www.appliedi.net) (applied-eye is how we say it, most of our hosting clients call it app-lid-E) was merely an idea in November of 1998, in February of 1999 we took on our first webhosting clients and officially launched the company as a Microsoft Windows webhosting company running NT4 and IIS4.0 and offering both ASP & PERL on windows! When Windows 2000 launched we were among the first hosts to launch Windows 2000 hosting and joined the Windows 2000 Hosting early adopter program.
The move from NT4 to 2000 was probably the easiest migration we had ever made and to become a Windows 2000 only host was not difficult at all. Why? Because we only had 1 webserver and 110 websites!
Since our modest start Applied Innovations has continued to grow and today is recognized in the webhosting community as a premier windows webhost specilizing in E-Commerce and ASP.net webhosting.
It is with great pride I announce that we have finally completed the process of becoming a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with multiple competancies and specilizations.
Achieving status as Microsoft Gold Certified Partner represents our commitment to one of the core values Applied Innovations was founded on: to provide the best level of service, support and technical expertise to our clients possible. Microsoft Gold Certified Partner represents the highest level of competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies, and provides us the closest working relationship with Microsoft allowing us to provide an even higher level of service and support to our hosting customers.
Applied Innovations currently maintains Gold Certified Partner competencies in: Networking Infrastructure Solutions and Advanced Infrastructure Solutions with a specialization in Hosting Solutions.
Applied Innovations Corp (www.appliedi.net), A Boca Raton, FL based webhosting provider was founded in 1999 to provide cost effective webhosting solutions to Small and Medium sized businesses allowing them to grow and successfully compete in the Online Marketplace. Today we host thousands of websites and have clients worldwide. Our specialization is ASP.net hosting, E-Commerce hosting and sharepoint hosting on the Microsoft Windows family of Operating Systems.
I got ICONIZED! Yeap, I’m now a desktop cartoon character
Oct 6th
I read an article recently about www.iconizeme.com. For $50 they’d take a picture of you and create an icon out of it. Think of it as a digital cariacture. Well, I couldn’t resist it. $50 is a lot of money for this, no question about it but it’s just too cool of a concept to not do it.
Here’s the original image
and here’s the generated image.
The artist that did the work was Jose Ramos and I’d highly recommend him.
BTW, now that I have a digitized picture of myself, the FUN begins. First there’s the icon at the top of the browser. It used to be that horribly ugly greentree from communityserver, now it’s my goodlooking mug:
Yeah, it’s amazing the smaller the picture gets the better looking I get? Go figure!
Then there’s … the “Jess Coburn Fan Shop“!! Yes it’s a good time here at JessCoburn.com and we everyone wants to show the love. So thanks to cafepress.com we have the following great products available now:
Then there’s the ladies favorite:
Yeah, I don’t think too many people out there want a Jess Coburn G-String but hey you never know!
Anyway, all this is made possible thanks to www.iconizeme.com and www.cafepress.com
CrazyTalk Videos Part 2
Sep 6th
So I don’t feel that my first CrazyTalk video, the video below with me talking like Bill Clinton really did CrazyTalk any justice as to show just how great of an app it is and how realistic the video can appear, although it’s funny as hell. So I’ve uploaded another video of a buddy of mine who has a strong admiration for Dusty Rhodes (A super-hero among men who possesses the only bionic elbow ever known to mankind .. Yes we grew up watching Florida Championship Wrestling and Dusty is one of those bigger than life childhood heros and as kids every saturday afternoon we tuned in to see just what would happen next.). Anyway, this little demo was put together using CrazyTalk and then exported to SWF using flash-video-mx. I then imported into my blog very easily using WP-SWFObject.
The audio from the video was taken from a video off of www.dustyrhodeswrestling.com, converted to WAV and then imported into CrazyTalk.
Ladies & Gentlemen, I give you Putz as Dusty Rhodes
[SWF]/putzonwrestling.swf,240,320[/SWF]
Pimpin’ My WordPress – Part 1
Aug 24th
For this post series (my first post series) I want to highlight some of the wordpress plugins and extensions I’m using. As noted I’m running wordpress on MySQL & PHP on a windows 2003 server running IIS6 hosted at AppliedI.net. Oh and since acronyms like WIMP (WTF? WIMP?!?!) are hot these days I have officially coined my own for this series: WOW! for WordPress on Windows! WOW! (I wanted to use HOT DAMN! But just couldn’t come up with the right set of words 
)
Probably the first thing that stood out when you visited my blog was the theme I’m using. I’m using Vistered Little Theme. One of the nice features with this theme is the great backgrounds. You can select the backgrounds by clicking on one of the small thumbnail squares up in the left column. To upload your own background image you simply upload an image to the backgrounds folder and reload the home page and your new image is one of the available backgrounds. The backgrounds are listed in alphabetical order so you can adjust which background appears as default by selecting it above.
Another nice feature about this theme is that you can customize the location of the status bar on the right hand side from within the theme options.
You can also adjust the skin around the various blocks. I personally prefer the default skin as the others are well ugly in my opinion but then it’s my blog and my opinion.
One thing I found difficult with this theme was getting a handle on which page to edit to extend it. Some of the other plugins I’m using required special blocks and such so I had to get a handle on that first. Really there’s just two files I ever edit in the theme editor, the “Main Index Template” and the “Sidebar”. I edited the sidebar to add the various special features like weather, clustrmaps, my tagcloud, etc. I edited the Main Index Template for things like my rate this post, number of views per post, etc. The nice thing about this theme is that each block is setup in it’s own CSS div block so it’s really quite easy to get a handle on how to edit it.
All in all, the theme is very impressive visually and definitely gives the “WOW” effect and if nothing else the themes in wordpress were reason enough to switch to wordpress from the CommunityServer application I was using before.
