johnfulwider dot com

Slashdot | Teaching History In Schools With Video Games

I’ve always thought history should be taught in reverse chronological order — start with an event relevant to the day’s students, then explain what happened on the way there.

Do you like the new style here on johnfulwider dot com? Please leave a comment. Be honest and specific. I’m open to changes.

Please also point out any errors you encounter. I’ve only gotten around to testing on Safari (OSX), IE (WinXP) and Mozilla (WinXP).

Lest my loyal seven readers think I’ve suddenly become talented at Web design, I have to disclose that johnfulwider dot com’s new style is a minor modification of Pink Lilies by Naoko M., which won the first WordPress CSS Style Competition.

I modified Naoko’s beautiful background image of pink lilies to omit the flowers so my site wouldn’t be too girly. After this, I read this post on Naoko’s site:

my design was not generic and it may not be something many people wnat to actually use. Especially guys!

Well, there you have it! I also changed the header to a solid color (safety orange, my favorite) and changed the a: hover and a: active attributes so links would change to safety orange, instead of pink, when selected.

I fixed the problem where links to the Spring 2004 Climbing slideshow actually pointed to the Jami’s Graduation Party slideshow. Thanks to Jon and Erin for pointing out the error.

I’m switching to the WordPress blogging system. You can watch my progress here.

Jami’s graduation party (Master of Science in Nursing, y’all!) was a smashing success despite the absence of everyone’s good friend Jon, who claimed to be too ill to make even a brief appearance.

To make sure he realized the error of his ways we all called him from different cell phones back-to-back so his call waiting beeped incessantly while he talked to each of us. You sort of had to be there, but maybe you can get an idea just how hilarious it was by looking at the photos in the new Jami’s Graduation Party slideshow.

Sorry for the blurry shots, it was dim in there and a 1.8 lens and 400-speed film can only do so much when you’re already a bit woozy from Tim’s excellent Cranberry Cuervo Jell-O shots.

At my request Jon sent some corrections to the captions in my Spring 2004 Climbing slideshow. Among other things, I described as a couple two people who fit that classification in number only. Sorry, Tim and Shannon! The new captions are now in place.

Down here in Florida we decided to see Shrek 2 today on this, its first day in the theaters. Back in Lincoln we would have had to drive to the actual theater at which the movie was showing in order to buy tickets at the box office. Here in Florida, where they joined the 20th Century back in the 20th Century, we just went to Fandango and bought the tickets in one minute for a $1 per ticket service charge. Well worth it.

I can’t rag on Lincoln’s monopoly Douglas Theatres too much, though. They’ve long supported downtown Lincoln and decided to stay there to build a multiplex theater (PDF), which should get needed warm bodies into the heart of the city. Good for them. But it’s time for Douglas to get online ticketing, or at least let you buy tickets for any of their theaters at any of their box offices.

It’s quite literally been a year since I posted my last slideshow. Some photographer I am. Anyway, please enjoy Spring Climbing 2004.

Microtek is one of those flame-worthy companies that puts the Macintosh logo on their product boxes to fool customers into thinking their products are fully Mac OSX compatible. Bungholes. But I’ve beaten them, mostly, at their incompatibility game.

Their ScanMaker 4850 model, like a lot of consumer-grade scanners, has buttons on the front to perform functions like scan photo, e-mail photo, print photo, etc. According to tech support, the buttons aren’t supported on OSX. But I figured out how to make them work:

• Install the latest version of the Scanwizard software, if you haven’t already.
• You’ll get a ScanWizard 5 Folder. Inside is the application Microtek Scanner Configuration (MSC). Launch it.
• Right-click on MSC and select “Keep in Dock.”
• Select the “Scan” tab.
• You’ll get a number of options. Here are my settings for scanning the standard 4×6 photos you get from Walgreens and such:
  Original: Photo
  Purpose: Custom Value 300dpi
  Scan Type: True Color
  Send to Application: None
  Scan Frame: Fixed Size, 4×6 Landscape (or Portrait, depending on whether the photo is horizontal or vertical)
  Save In: Wherever you want
  Filename: Whatever you want. It will use the same name each time, and append a three-digit number starting with the second scan. “Scanned Photo 001,” for example. So don’t scan more than 1,000 photos.
  File Format: TIFF. This gives you an uncompressed scan. You can always compress to JPEG later.
• Without closing MSC, press the Scan button on the scanner (the left-most one). MSC will scan the photo, save it in the location you selected, and promptly crash.
• Hit OK to close the crash notification window, then launch MSC again.
• While MSC is loading, put another photo on the scanner. By the time you’ve taken the old one off and put the new one on, MSC will be loaded.
• Hit Scan again, rinse, and repeat.

I bet this procedure would work with other Microtek scanners.