In PowerPoint, it wouldn’t be too hard to automatically export every slide as an image. But in this particular presentation, the pictures did not take up the full height/width of the slide and therefore the background would appear in every slide. This simply would not do.

Firing up Automator, I was able to quickly throw together a script that would export every picture contained in the PowerPoint presentation to a folder, where i could later pick through the images to find those that would meet my quality control standards.

Is there a built-in Windows utility that would be able to do this? I think not.

Mac wins… again.

UPDATE CurrentWeek SET CurrentWeek.LastName = StrConv([LastName],3), CurrentWeek.FirstName = StrConv([FirstName],3);

If I call that piece of SQL from an update query, I can easily update all of the records in the table without touching a single piece of data. This doesn’t take into account names like Mc, Mac, (and Paddywack), but a quick sort in ascending order of the LastName field will show any of the M’s that need specialized attention. I could modify this code at a later date, but this quick and dirty solution works for now.

I’m taking what used to look like this:

…and bringing it in to the days of Web 2.0.

I have a pretty good design in mind right now, and after about 30 hours, it’s finally coming together. I wanted to do something a little different by having rotating header images, but not the complete header; only a fraction. There are a handful of scripts out there that rotate images, but many of them are written in JavaScript, and suffer from an important limitation: in order to add or remove items from the pool of images to pick from, you need to get in there and edit the code yourself. Every time you want to make a change. In every page that rotates images. I wanted something simple, and changing the page only slightly and in subtle ways can work miracles for an otherwise ‘static’ website. For example, imagine a masthead-graphic that’s different each time someone reloads the page. How about a product image-link that seems to magically change with every pageview?

In looking around a bit, I found a solution that references the bg-image in the css to a URL that points to a PHP script, in turn selecting a random image from the folder in which the script is contained. It’s actually a pretty ingenious solution.

1. Download the PHP script rotator.txt here. After downloading, rename the file to rotator.php.
2. Put the images to be rotated in the same directory as rotator.php.
3. Upload all the files via FTP.
4. Insert this code in the CSS for the DIV which contains the image you would like to switch.

background: url(images/rotator.php) no-repeat center top;

And presto! You’re image is dynamically changed every time the page is reloaded.

I’m not going to show you how I’m going to implement this code as of yet, but hopefully you should see the result (live, of course) by the end of Thanksgiving break. I’m quite excited about what you’ll say!

The short version is as follows: summercamp. office. long nights. sweet dreams.

Naked As We Came
by Iron and Wine from Such Great Heights

I love this version by Iron and Wine because is so soothing to listen to. Be careful, the song can get stuck in your head. Seriously, though, this song became a mantra to the stressful nights and the bonding time with friends and just seemed to melt the bad times away to reveal the beauty in life.

When you think about it, it’s all about our growth through life as we age. It’s like riding on a sinusoidal wave. You have your down days, your up days, and things always balance themselves out. It’s the phenomenon of what we perceive to be karma. So when you’re in a trough and you need a pick-me-up, this song will always be there to guide your way.