Phantom Limb

I’ve been caught up in a number of technological things. First and foremost, I finally made some headway on the Student Senate’s new website. wooooo. (In truth, it actually looks pretty good; link later once it’s up) In that vein, I also found out that Senate is funding my early return! Which is bittersweet, and means that my summer officially ends on Friday, August 17th.

While I was working on the Senate site, I started getting booted from the server. While I was on ITS’s site checking that it was their problem, not mine, I found a pretty cool link. It’s called Zamzar. What it does is convert a vast number of file types into… another vast number of file types. For instance, say I downloaded one of those cool vector graphics from wikipedia, and wanted to edit it in an older version of Adobe PS or stick it in a powerpoint without worrying about its fancy properties messing things up.

Zamzar claims to be able to turn that PNG into a regular ol’ JPG no problem.
I’ve yet to try it, and I’m mainly blogging about it so I save the link in case I find myself needing it in the future.

Additionally, I’m thinking about adding SnapShots to this site. Just toying with the idea, really. I like the blogs where I have a TON of links, just becuase a la wikpedia, getting distracted in reading the exact back-story of several little references is something I have a lot of fun with. SnapShots is a tool that makes a little preview pane of all those links pop up.

To check out exactly what I mean, I’m going to refer you to Ethan’s Xanga. Xanga started using SnapShots a few months ago. Initially, it irritated me, but I’ve sortof grown to like them and recognize the utility. Not that anyone really reads this, but if you do, and you have an oppinion on SnapShots, I’d like to know.

It wouldn’t be over-kill, it would only be links to stuff off-site that got the little preview pane, and it’s supposed to load really quickly. So I’ll see. It could be more trouble than it’s worth, but it could also be kinda slick.

Finally, I just wanted to comment on one of my favorite webcomics: Ctrl+Alt+Del. I really do enjoy this comic, but it can be a sortof love-hate relationship. The author summed it up best for me, placing the two extremes of the dichotomy of the comic back-to-back:
I hate these
But this is incredibly funny.

If you see the SnapShots start popping up, it means I’m tooling around with them. Even if I decide that they’re gonna stay, there’s code I can put up that allows you to turn them off, so fear not.