Off the Cuff

I have a bunch of things that have just been sitting around waiting to be posted. Random thoughts, notes, and links are scattered throughout my desk and in Backpack, but since I was running this site through blogger, it was a major hassle to log in and update the site. That is beside the fact that blogger was down every other time I would think about updating!

I’m now using a development version (2.6-bleeding) of wordpress and absolutely love the fact that I’m able to ssh into my server and svn update the wordpress directory for the latest updates. Way better than waiting for an official release and re-installing everything. I don’t really like the current theme I’m using though. It’s a bit coffee-ish and breaks in IE6. If I have time before I leave for basic training, I’ll design something of my own. In the meantime, I’m open to any theme suggestions! My apologies to everyone who didn’t follow the geekness.

Oh, and for those that didn’t know, I’m joining the army national guard! In fact, I just finished and submitted my enlistment application today. More updates on that as this exciting story develops. Meanwhile, here are some interesting links I’ve been wanting to share.

YouVersion - Beta
YouVersion is a relatively new site from LifeChurch.tv I found over at Godbit Project. To quote Andy Knight, one of the developers of the site:

What distinguishes YouVersion from the rest of online Bibles is this extra content submitted by its members. If a verse of Scripture reminds you of a music video on YouTube, you can post it. If you’ve read a great commentary about a verse on another site, you can link it up. If a passage inspires you, you can tell everybody why.

Besides that, they have a very well designed one year Bible plan, and the way the actual reader works is pretty cool too. You can check out my (currently very empty) profile too.

Apple: Set To Screen
While I don’t really know anything about the movie, Apple is working with the production crew of the upcoming movie Australia, to give you “set to screen” look at movie production.

Every few weeks through October, a new podcast episode from Baz and his production team will introduce you to another aspect of moviemaking, starting with on-set still photography, then moving on to costume design, cinematography, scoring, and more.

I’ve watched the first few clips they’ve released and it’s actually pretty cool. For example, it never occurred to me until I watched one of these that there is a guy on set at all times just to take still photographs. I mean, I guess that makes sense, how else do they get all those cool shots for posters, DVD packages and websites? But I just never thought of that as a full time job before. Anyway, there’s a lot of cool stuff over there, so if you’re interested in movie production at all, you should download the video podcast from iTunes.

Open ID
If you’re like me and you have nearly a dozen different Basecamp accounts, plus a Backpack and a few Highrise accounts with 37Signals, you are probably tired of trying to remember all of those usernames and passwords. Unless, of course, you are also using an OpenID. I had been using MyOpenID for quite awhile now, and they’re great. Should work perfectly fine for anyone interested in getting an OpenID. However, being the geek that I am, I wanted to set up my own OpenID. I did some googling and found phpMyID. I’ll let you check out the details for yourself, if you’re interested, but I found it to be a pretty easy and painless way of setting up your own OpenID Identity Provider.

Is this a joke?
A friend of mine, Ryan, showed this to me, and I’m still having trouble believing it’s for real. Disney is apparently putting out a new movie call Beverly Hills Chihuahua. In Ryan’s words, “It’s like Highschool musical meets stupid!” You can view the trailer and if anyone actually watches this movie when it comes out in September, let me know how it is.