Some quick steps to change your status from student to alum on Facebook:

1. Log in to Facebook
2. Go to the account page (top right)
3. Click on the Networks tab
4. Click the Edit Info link
5. Change your status from Student to Alumnus/Alumna and set your year

And if anyone didn’t know, I am now a full fledged graduate; no longer a student. Awesome. It was a great four years and I met tons of great people, had some great expereiences and met the love of my life.

I know I said this a while ago, but it never really played out as well as I had hoped. So here’s my second attempt at splitting up all (the very little that there is) of my writing.

All technology and web design posts you can find right here at wesbaker.com. I hope to feature posts about things I’ve learned while working and using the technology in my life.

Everything else: books, travel, music, photography, general writing and anything personal (eg. family and friends) will be on tumblr.wesbaker.com.

Last, but definitely not least, anything involving myself and my fiancée will be on shannonandwes.com.

Two weeks ago, my trusty IBM ThinkPad T42 decided to stop working. The screen went really twitchy on me and after a few attempts to turn it on, it wouldn’t even display the BIOS screen and it wouldn’t even POST.

Fast forward to last Thursday, my new Macbook Pro showed up! Something that I had been thinking about for a while and listing over. And the first thing i did was put in the 4GB memory upgrade.

I’ve spent a full week working on the Macbook Pro and I can say that I do truly enjoy it. There are a few applications I would recommend downloading and/or buying. Some are more for web design, but there’s a few peppered here for everyone.

• AppCleaner @ freeMacsoft.net (free) - Oddly enough Mac OS X does not come with an application uninstaller. I know purists will say just drag and drop the Application to the trash and it’s uninstalled. However, there’s lots of junk that applications leave around, and this takes care of just that. This will also take care of System Preferences panels and Dashboard widgets as well.
• NetNewsWire @ newsgator.com (free) - I love my RSS feeds and I’m always looking for a better way to read them. For probably two years now, I’ve used Google Reader because of the portability of it. However, NetNewsWire is a much better way to read the feeds and better yet is semi-portable. It syncs all of your feeds and the read/unread status of each item to Newsgator’s servers and is viewable from NetNewsWire (Mac), FeedDemon (win) and NewsGator Online. It satisfies my portability needs and is faster then Google Reader all at the same time.
• Adium @ adiumx.com (free) - iChat’s handling of multiple accounts had me looking for an alternative IM client as fast as I could and this was the most recommended one. After using it, I can see why. It does exactly what I want: handles multiple accounts, shows me minimal controls, tabbed interface and logging.
• Fluid @ fluidapp.com (free) - Some web apps we use so frequently that just treating them like another website can be annoying. With Fluid, you create “applications” for each web app and you can put that in your dock and treat it like an individual application. I recommend this for Backpack.
• Miro @ getmiro.com (free) - While iTunes is great for downloading podcasts, Miro is a lot better for downloading all of your video podcasts (vidcasts, vodcasts…etc). It has a guide that recommends different shows and has a lot of HD content as well. I recommend Diggnation HD, Macbreak, Tikibar TV, Unwired and Discovery Channel Video Podcasts.
• Evernote @ evernote.com (free) - While this is still in beta this is a great little application in the same vein as Google Notebook. The idea is you have notebooks and within those you can have notes. You can create notes either from scratch or ‘clip’ webpages which just copies all of the selected (or everything if you don’t select anything) content and makes a new note from it. I use this for copying snippets of code and various tips so I have one location to view them from. Also, this is a lot like NetNewsWire in that it syncs to the server and there are Mac, Windows and online versions available. If you would like an invite leave a comment and I’ll shoot one off to you.
• Anxiety @ anxietyapp.com (free) - This is just a front-end to iCal/Mail’s todo list, but it does it well and does it in a great interface. The interface allows you to add new tasks to calendars and check them off…that’s it. Anything more and you’ll have to go somewhere else.
• BusySync @ busyMac.com ($19.99/$15.96 with MacSPARKY coupon) - Portability is an issue for me, I’ve stressed this with other applications here. This little tool allows me to make changes in iCal and then view them in Google Calendar and vis versa without doing a thing. After seeing alternative options cost upwards of $40, I gladly paid the relatively cheap price to get this funcitonality.
• Coda @ panic.com ($79/$69 if you own Transmit) - This is a great tool and what you’d expect to find in between a text editor and a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver. No design view feature like Dreamweaver to mess up your code, but the preview feature bests that anyways. Snippets allow you to store frequently used code (Coda preloads DOCTYPE’s as examples). By far though, the best feature is Publish All, which after editing and saving the pages uploads all of the modified pages…fantastic!
• MAMP @ mamp.info (free) - For those websites you’re developing that use PHP and MySQL this allows you to run an instance of Apache on your Mac at the press of a button. While slim on features, it allows you to set the root directory for the server, which I promptly set as my client directory.
• VMWare Fusion @ vmware.com ($79.99/$39.99 on Amazon) - I’m sad to say it but I can’t completely get away from Windows and even worse is the reason: Internet Explorer. No it’s not my browser of choice, I haven’t used it for that since Firebird 0.3. What I do need it for is browser testing since the vast majority of users still use Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

So there’s my non-exhaustive list of Mac applications that I’m using and enjoy. If you’ve got any recommendations that I should try, drop me a line in the comments.

Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. For the longest time, I thought that was a crock of crap. I would stay up to the wee hours of the night, doing who knows what. The next morning/afternoon I’d awake and be fairly unproductive.

Well, I don’t have too many options these days. I have work at 8am three days a week and class at 9:30 the other two days. I wake up by at least 9am every day including the weekends. Now the classes force me to wake up, but when I work is up to me. I could go in later if I felt like it, but I read something that made me change my mind. It was something to the effect that after 11:30pm nothing really happens anyways, so you aren’t missing anything.

I feel that this change has made me more productive including in class and at work. My advice to you night owls is to try it out for a week or two and see how it goes, if it doesn’t work for you, its easy enough to go back.

Well, I realize its kinda late for me to be getting around to New Years Resolutions, but why not?

First and foremost, I’m going to work out three times a week. This has already been happening, so it should be easy to keep going.

In correlation to the first, I’m going to eat healthier. I guess my biggest issue there is eating pasta.

The last one I can think of, I’m not going to buy anything on Amazon.com for myself for at least three months, hopefully longer. Any one who has met me knows that I have an unhealthy obsession with books, that needs to get nipped in the bud.

Started up a Tumblr tumblelog and I fear that I may stray away from this site because of the ease of use that Tumblr has. It’s pretty fantastic. Anyways, you can get to it at tumblr.wesbaker.com. Anyways, most of the small content will be on that site and anything lengthy will be here as usual.

Times Matt Ryan was mentioned during the ACC Championship:
1st Qtr - 24
2nd Qtr - 19
3rd Qtr - 20
4th Qtr - 25
Postgame - 1(by Sean Glennon)

Number of games Matt Ryan won today: 0

Virginia Tech Winning the ACC Championship: Priceless

So it’s Blog Action Day today, and I believe I am supposed to talk a bit about the environment. So it makes perfect sense for me to talk about a small bit of environment I walk past on Tuesday and Thursday: the duckpond.

It’s just a lake between a parking lot and the rest of campus, yet it is a lot more than that to me. I started parking in that particular parking lot out of necessity, as the other parking lots were regularly full when I had class. It’s about a ten minute walk from my car to the classroom. Yet, I keep parking there even with a less students parking closer. But why?

Well, I love walking by the duck pond. I get to see the ducks, the geese and the squirrels. I love the trees canopying overhead and the shade they supply. I love the irregularities in the asphalt created by the roots of trees much older then the asphalt. And then there’s the bridge; a wooden number, disarrayed by the same predicament as the asphalt. It’s not very big, but its so picturesque.

I guess my only issue with this area is complete lack of concern show to it from the rest of campus. There’s usually trash floating around and a dirty film on the water. They demonstrate a complete lack of concern for the wildlife in the pond, which includes fish among the fowl. I wish everyone had the same appreciation of this small body of water as I do. Maybe then, it would be as good as I believe it is.

Well, I haven’t been doing too much worth mentioning lately. I went to the Cascades again, been running errands and going to class and work. The Hokie football season is under way and we’ve finally ditched Glennon as the starting quarterback.

However, I have done something worth mentioning. I created an online resume and portfolio. I’ve had the domain — mynameiswes.com — for a while now, but didn’t quite know what to do with it. With the career fair rolling around the corner here at Virginia Tech, I figured an online portfolio would be a good idea. So, I spent much of last Thursday working on it and hammering it out and here it is:

There are a few people who know me well and know that I used to read a lot of feeds. I was subscribed to over 100 feeds – not terribly uncommon. But I found myself staring at a few feeds and questioning their worth. Wondering if the insights they provide actually helped me at all. So, I began to keep a mental list (granted I would somehow make this more concrete) of the feeds that I just skipped over. It mostly turned out to be Lifehacker and a few others.

So I purged my list of feeds that generate lots of posts with little value and replaced them with unique insights by authors I want to hear from; like Dan Cederholm and Jeff Croft. After doing that, I am reading no fewer feeds (about 96 now); however, I read less news per day (around 60 articles) and half of them are from photoblogs.

I recommend that if you are reading 100+ articles a day, take a look at what you are just skimming over. You may not even need that feed.