Motorcycle Racing and Riding

I loaded-up Picasa 3.5, and it automatically began sorting photos by face.  It was able to recognize my face in extremely dark pictures.  It also recognized my daughter, regardless of age.  Baby faces don’t look like third-grader faces, but Picasa was able to choose the correct ones in most cases.

My daughter is adopted, so her early-days photos are extra-special; those are the times that I missed. Now I can easily create a photo album that contains all of her images.  Easily, being the important part here. Most newer images are stamped with a creation-date. This is not the same as the file creation date, which will change when you copy the file to a different storage medium.  Picassa will organize the photos by face, and sort by creation-date, making it easier to produce a photo album of all of her images. Excellent.

How do you get this feature?  It’s a standard part of the image scan in Picasa 3.5-and-up.  Just get the new version of Picasa, and get organizing those photos by face!  This video contains Google’s demonstration of the Picasa facial recognition feature:

Apparently Kanye West Likes Our Web Site… Click on this link to see what he has to say about our Kanyelicio.us-ness.

I like the new-site (dangerismymiddlename.com’s) URLs.  The Web site was previously hosted by WordPress.com.  WordPress.com embeds the publish date in the URL’s. If you change the date?  Incoming links to your URLs won’t work anymore.  There is no way out of that madness.

WordPress.com also won’t allow URL rewriting or redirects (either of these would allow me to kludge my way out of the above limitation). On the new site we can revisit a subject, and replace guesses and rumors with the actual Press Releases, and re-publish it.  Links to the old article would automatically be pointing to the new one. On the old site we could do nothing of the sort, because of those dates getting embedded into the URL.  We would need to have multiple copies of the article-in-question, or broken links from the outside.

Last month was by-far our largest month on the old-site (dangerismymiddlename.wordpress.com), and this month?  In the first five days of this month the old-site (dangerismymiddlename.wordpress.com) did about half-the-volume of last-month’s record indicating, that readership expansion was accelerating in-spite of the fact that the old Web site is basically dismantled.  Can we get to the point where we explode again on the new site (dangerismymiddlename.com)?  I sure hope so. At this point we are worried about losing all those readers.  Simply putting links on the old-site directing folks here isn’t doing-the-trick.

Why do we care?  We never made a cent doing this.  I just love motorcycles, and writing about them is more satisfying when I know that people are reading what I wrote.

Most Beautiful Buell image #1 by Paul Danger Kile (c) 2009 dangerismymiddlename.com; Free for use on the Web with two conditions. (1) You link the photo to http://dangerismymiddlename.com and (2) you put this caption on the photo.

Here is how to add WordPress posts or comments to facebook notes.  It works with WordPress.com, and WordPress.org installs, and yes, it really is this easy:

1. Go to: http://www.facebook.com/editnotes.php?import
2. Enter the following: http://[the URI for your Wordpress blog goes here]/feed/ in order to import your posts into facebook notes.  Replace [the URI for your Wordpress blog goes here] with the correct URI (URL).
   
3. Enter the following: http://[the name of your Wordpress blog goes here]/comments/feed/ in order to import your post’s comments into facebook notes.  Replace [the URI for your Wordpress blog goes here] with the correct URI (URL).

That’s it!

This is “fun”: usdebt.org.  It’s not as bad as it seems. USDebt.org’s clock doesn’t take inflation into account. The less that each dollar is worth, the less the nation is in-debt in-terms-of the work needed to pay the debt off.  Please feel free to consider this last comment to-be sarcasm, or wisdom, depending on your mood.  This one was sent in by Don Benish.  Only dangerismymiddlename.com can be held accountable for the words in this post though.

www.racingreality.net uses 3D models of Valentino Rossi and his Yamaha M1 to create products such as screensavers.

Apparently someone motion-captured a woman dancing, and RacingReality mapped that woman’s movement to their Valentino Rossi model.  The model is very good, and the animation is very strange.  Expect to see this used as YouTube video responses by people that don’t like Valentino Rossi, which is ironic, because RacingReality obviously does like Valentino Rossi.

Yes, I know, great racers usually begin racing real motorcycles at around four-to-five years-old, but not every toddler is (urm… not every toddler’s parents are…) ready for that. This toy was around $30 at the time of this posting. In the words of Mrs. Lillie Hoag, “They can’t make it for that!” 

Click here— or on the image below— to go-to Step2’s online catalog page for the Step2 Ride-on Motorcycle Toy in red, green, or pink.

Imagine a world where motorcycle races have as many spectators as these two racers have... or maybe that's just a pattern on the wallpaper? With those wheels the bikes look like a cross between a Triumph 675 and the Chrysler Tomahawk concept. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

Mike Benkovich— my favorite Microsoft Evangelist— (yes, I actually have a favorite Microsoft Evangelist), pointed-out that Microsoft is offering Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade Edition to eligible college students for only $29.  How do you get it?  The instructions are on more than one Web page, so I will put them here for you.

1. Go to http://windows7.digitalriver.com/.
2. Enter your “.edu” college email address. The Web site will let you know that you are eligible.  Don’t depend on the list of colleges there.  If you are a student, and want the software, then give it a try.   Interestingly-enough Digital River’s Web-based-ordering-system appears to be built on Sun Java technologies
3. You will receive an email from Digital River.  Follow the directions in this email.
4. You will receive another email with a download link on October 22, 2009.  Use this email to download your software.

Go here to see which features come with Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade Edition.

http://drh1.img.digitalriver.com/DRHM/Storefront/Company/msshus/images/product/detail/win7_hp_upg.png