August 5, 2004
It looks like we are back online after the server move. There will be another one at some unknown point in the relatively near future.

I'm now happily back after a few weeks of traveling. It was great, but now I have lots of mail to go through and other such things to catch up on.

In other news, I started a new job today. I am now involved in the design and manufacture of automated industrial packaging machines. If you know me and are curious for more details, ask me about it.

I've recently designed a webpage for Whispering Acres Carriage Co. That's been a fun (if small) project that I'll work on more in the future. If any of you are getting married (yeah, happening all the time with this crowd right?), maybe you should do so in Springfield, Tennessee and make a spectacular exit or some-such.

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July 20, 2004
I have now received 3 replies to my comments form since its inception. One from a total stranger looking for beos info, then linknoid acting surprised and confused, and finally, almost 2 weeks ago, from yanthor posing as jaeger and questioning how I could know who actually made the comment. Yanthor's message was "Am I really Jaeger?"

Well, yanthor, sorry to be so long in replying. I've been doing some traveling and have been away from the net for most of the last 2 weeks. You're question is broader than just my web form. Knowing who is who on the internet can be a problem. I'd like to first mention that a visitor to my webpage sending me an email can be just as hard to validate. If you (or even someone I didn't know at all) wanted to prove his identity, he could have signed his message and pointed me to his webpage to retrieve his public key. There is know need to thing that having a form someone can fill out is a bad thing.

Anonymous comments are not necessarily a bad thing after all. It is true that using my form was easier than sanitizing your email, but it is equally true that using the form does not guarantee anonymity.

Sorry if I came off as defensive there. I guess maybe I was a bit. It felt like you were saying I was a complete idiot for allowing such a mechanism. True I could force fields for email address, etc. and do a lot of checking before I would accept a form submittion, but I find that sort of thing annoying. Given the low volume of comments I get, I'm willing to hear what someone has to say even if he doesn't give me email and webpage links. Anyway, it was a fun couple minutes figuring out who actually sent the message, so thanks for the exercise.

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June 20, 2004
Well, I got an email this evening that made my day. I don't know how many of you have noticed the two icons in the upper right, but a good visitor clicked on one of them and subsequently sent me an interesting email that made my day. It's not very often that I hear from someone who happened to wander by my webpage. Very neat.

Anyway, the fellow's name is Nathan, and he was researching how to change the Deskbar icon in BeOS. Well, Nathan, I don't know if you'll come back this way and maybe you already figured out how to change the icon, but I'll explain it anyway; maybe someone else will want to know.

Open Deskbar with QuickRes. This can most easily be done by opening /boot/beos/system in Tracker and right clicking on Deskbar then selecting Open With. In QuickRes you'll see the main Deskbar icon not too far down a list of stuff next to the label "kBeLogoBits". Click on that and it'll open an icon editing area that's the same as the standard system icon editor. You can modify the icon by hand or select and copy an icon from the system editor and paste into this larger icon field (it's wider). Of course you can also convert a graphic to icon (a thumbnail), open it in the system editor, then move it to the icon field in QuickRes.

I hope that ends up being helpful for someone wanting to change the Deskbar icon. I really did enjoy hearing from someone visiting my webpage. So all you visitors out there, if you have a question you think I might be able to answer, feel free to ask.

Oh, as far as explaining the icons, I couldn't do that, that would spoil all the mystery. Thanks Nathan for making my day. I don't think I was expecting anyone to fill out that form any more than you were planning to fill it out. Best wishes using BeOS and in general.

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