We had a snow storm here in North Car­olina this past week­end, so I got to do some snow wheel­ing. I mostly trav­elled the back roads, look­ing for peo­ple that are stuck or need help.

Jan­u­ary 30, 2010 Snow Storm

I took a few pic­tures of down­town lenoir, and some of my truck.

Posted in Life, Toyota

Just fin­ished up a redesign of a friends site for his buggy, The Pit Viper.

I imple­mented valid XHTML code, and added some meta data so that the site is more search engine friendly. I broke up the text into sep­a­rate head­ings so it would be eas­ier to read.

I used fan­cy­box to punch up the photo gallery at the bot­tom. I also took advan­tage of some CSS3 for some tran­si­tion effects on the links, and rounded cor­ners on the image borders.

Posted in Web Design

I have been try­ing to repli­cate the inte­rior light func­tions of some of the newer cars for some time now. I like how they stay on after the door is closed and then fade away. This is also called the­ater lighting.

This cir­cuit is based around the ever use­full 555 timer, and an N chan­nel MOSFET.

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Posted in Cars, Electronics

One thing I have learned from work­ing for the school sys­tem is that dry erase boards are pretty cool. They are great for map­ping out ideas, and mak­ing wire frames for web designs. That’s why I decided to make a dry erase board of my own.

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Posted in Life, Web Design

I put the new Win­dows 7 Pro on my work lap­top today (Dell Lat­i­tude E 5500), and was very impressed in how well it works. The lap­top seems more respon­sive than it did with Win­dows XP.

I have been using Win­dows 7 RC1 on my home com­puter for about 3 months now, and it has been pretty solid. I will con­tinue to use it until the RC runs out June 2010.

My favorite fea­ture is the Win­dows XP mode, where I can install older pro­grams that won’t work with Win­dows 7. Cool thing is that after you install a pro­gram to the vir­tual pc, it shows up on the Win­dows 7 side as well.

Posted in Computing

I changed the spark plugs in my truck today. I decided to try some E3 plugs I have heard so much about. I had to make two trips to the parts store because they shorted me two plugs, that will teach me to always check the bag.

After I got them installed, I took a lit­tle test drive. The truck did per­form a lit­tle bet­ter, had bet­ter throt­tle response. Of course the other plugs were worn out, I will never put Bosch plugs in a Toy­ota again, they didn’t last even 30k miles.

Only time will tell if they actu­ally make a dif­fer­ence in fuel economy.

Posted in Cars

I took my sis­ter and her fam­ily up on Hib­riten Moun­tain on Sat­ur­day. I took some pic­tures with my new phone, a Sam­sung Omnia I910, and I was impressed with the qual­ity of the pic­tures. The weather was nice on Sat­ur­day, and vis­i­bil­ity from the moun­tain was really good.

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Posted in Photography

Today I fixed my Par­ents’ RCA TV. It has a prob­lem that a lot of RCA TVs have in this model line. The Hor­i­zon­tal Out­put Tran­sis­tor goes out and the TV will not power on. Instead it just makes a high pitched sound and clicks (that is the fly­back try­ing to start).

Posted in Electronics

Here is a lit­tle tuto­r­ial on how to block a pro­gram with Group Pol­icy, and the program’s hash.

Posted in Group Policy, Tutorials