This week has been a winter wonderland with two big snowfalls. Wednesday was fun at work as we anticipated the snow and watched its approach on radar. Once it started coming down there were giant fluffy flakes of snow. And in almost no time it started sticking to the grass and parked cars. A couple of people were talking about how silly it is when the news talks about bridges and overpasses icing over. Overpasses are bridges. The only time this distinction seems to be made is when referencing ice. And there just isn’t a distinction.
Cinemania 96 Updates
I still use Cinemania ’96 to look up movies and tell me the difference between Panavision and Panascope. Microsoft stopped issuing new versions eventually and no one else has come up with anything quite as good. I can eke out a little more info by getting the updates and installing those, which gets me current through the summer of 1996.
You can get downloads from Microsoft’s FTP site (updates for other versions of Cinemania as well as Encarta are available there too by going up to parent directories and then back down):
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/deskapps/mmapps/public/cinemania/Cinemania96/Windows
Download the executables, double-click to run them which will give you a bunch of .cin files. Rename them to give them the extension .cin96upd
Put them in the Program Files/Microsoft Multimedia/Cinemania folder. Then when you run Cinemania from CD again, it should see the files and incorporate them.
Pepper Pad
Prior to today’s Macworld keynote speech by Steve Jobs, there were rumors that Apple would announce an internet tablet device with a large touchscreen that would fill a gap between the iPhone and a notebook computer. What Jobs actually introduced was a very thin notebook computer for $1800.
In the days leading up to Macworld I looked up what else was out there. Several years ago Microsoft had introduced Tablet PC’s which were to be notebooks without the keyboard. But the idea of a true slate form has met resistance and instead what you have are sub-notebooks and notebooks that convert into a slate by rotating the screen and folding it on top of the keyboard. They’re expensive too, more than the average notebook. Later, Microsoft (again) introduced the Ultra Mobile PC or UMPC which was supposed to be a small slate like I am talking about. With Microsoft behind it, it was supposed to run Windows and have several other features. They have gone nowhere either, but a few companies make subnotebooks that are considered UMPC’s even though UMPC’s are supposed to be slates, without a keyboard.
Redirects
One problem with changing web sites like I am doing is to make sure the search engines can still find you. The best way to do this is apparently to use an .htaccess file that will automatically re-route people (and search engine crawlers) to the new site. Another way (that apparently search engines don’t deal very well with) is to use redirect pages. I tried doing an .htaccess file at speedfactory, but it would just give me an error message. So instead I have installed a couple of redirects (with a one-second delay), but not on my main battery and dejumbler pages since those bring in the most revenue. I figure I can watch and see how long it takes Google to start referring to those files in their new location.
Also I did a global find and replace on the blog to at least get all of my past links to point to the new site. On my web pages that I am leaving at Speedfactory for now, the links to other pages point to iGirder pages instead of local versions. Maybe that way Google will see the links to iGirder and start to rank those pages.
iGirder
Now that I am switching to high-speed internet and will eventually ditch Speedfactory (where I have been since 2001), I wanted to move my web page to its own website. This meant I needed to buy a domain name. Jeb suggested I use my own name, but this is from someone named Cashel, so I didn’t think it was a good idea to use my actual name. A few months ago I went through and tested out whether different domains were available by going to networksolutions (this could have been a mistake, because recently it was revealed that when people search for domains there, networksolutions takes the name so that only they can sell it to you).
If I tried bridge-related names, then bridgeguy, boxgirder, and ibeam were not available (all with .com on the end; I don’t see any reason to get anything else). Other names like gobbledygook, spiderwort, and seriesoftubes were also not available. However, in addition to my name being available (not just last name which was taken years ago), dejumble, dejumbler, and my web username brted were all available. With bridge themes, igirder, georgiabridges, kipfeet, kipfoot, and igirder were available. “Kip” is short for kilo-pound, a unit that comes up a lot when designing bridges. And kip-foot is a unit for moment, torque, bending, or leverage meaning you have one kip pushing down one foot away. It’s a fun word.