While I’ve helped other people create HTML-based emails, I haven’t had to do it for myself. After a lot of tests on various email clients, I finally released my first newsletter to about 6500 e-mail addresses, collected from my registration database at FlashSupport.com, old mailing lists I use to run, and LinkedIn.com. You can view the mailing online. I used poMMo to manage the announcement mailing list. So far, it’s been a great tool with excellent administration features, including subscription management.

Fill out the subscription form if you’d like to receive future announcements.

Just got the e-mail today from iStockPhoto.com that my application for photography/images has been accepted. I guess they liked the three pictures I picked for the application. They were some of my first portfolio images, and the pics were all originally shot on black-and-white film. I’m psyched! Now if I only could magically finish all my Flash Bible revision writing, and just go out and shoot some sweet pictures.

So, last month, during the Adobe Community Summit in San Jose, California, I had a nice visit with my cousin Karen who lives there. We had dinner at her house (where she lives with her partner Peter), and they made a comment during dinner about doing some karaoke in their living room afterwards. At first, I thought they were kidding, but my cousin isn’t exactly a jokester. Peter is seriously into karaoke, and we had a ton of fun for a couple of hours singing in the living room. Oddly, I think I caught the karaoke bug, because it’s been in the back of my mind since the trip. This week, I bought a karaoke game for the XBox 360 (which I haven’t turned on for a long time), American Idol Encore. As far as karaoke games are concerned, I think Konami (and Blitz Games) did a pretty decent job. I don’t think the 3D renderings of Randy, Paula, and Simon are all that great, and that’s probably the biggest thumbs down for the whole game playing experience for me. Oh, I guess I should disclose that I’m an American Idol fan, but that’s not necessarily why I got the branded title. I just couldn’t find many options for the XBox 360 that were karaoke style games. I’m hoping that if I practice a bit on the XBox that I’ll be in better form for the open lounge singing at Nye’s Polonaise Room with Piano Bar. Watch out Jer Thorpe! Here I come!

For the last six months or so, I’ve had my Francis!Francis! (aka FF) X1 espresso machine taken apart and laid out in my work area in the basement, and I’ve known for a while now that the only thing wrong with this overpriced but stylish espresso machine is a faulty thermistor. This little d0-dad simply opens/closes a circuit when the boiler reaches (I think) 125 degrees Celsius. I’ve found some close but inexact matches at various electronic parts stores online, but I would really love an exact match. Anyone know where I can grab some spare parts? (Oh, and I won’t go into the long and dreadful story of contacting customer service for seeking a replacement part and not a full blown repair requiring the whole unit to be shipped.)

I’ve been MIA since Monday morning trying to solve a crisis with my home office network servers. Of course, being the tech idiot and geek that I am, I run my own Microsoft Exchanger Server and maintain a domain controller, yadda yadda yadda. What happened Monday morning? Well, I got a new MacBook Pro. Cause for celebration, yeah? I started by trying to setup Active Directory services on the new computer, and me, being the tech idiot and unnecessarily rushing the process while looking after my daughter, inadvertently specified my domain controller’s computer name as the MacBook Pro’s name when I added the the new computer to the domain. Well, SHEEEEAT! All hell broke loose with Active Directory–so much that Active Directory’s DNS zones registered the MacBook Pro’s IP as the IP for the lookup of my domain controller, and I only have one primary DNS service running on my network. I have a secondary DNS, but that doesn’t allow me change jack, and that secondary DNS is running Windows 2000 Server, not Windows Server 2003.

It’s now Wednesday and every tech note I could find on Microsoft won’t help me get rid of the error messages I’m seeing on my poor domain controller. Luckily, I have an older domain controller that’s been offline for the last eight months, but I don’t make many changes to Active Directory, so rolling back to that data shouldn’t be a problem. BUT, and here’s the huge but, that machine has been on the fritz, not completing boot cycles, hanging randomly, etc. So, I cloned that machine’s hard drive to some a new drive and put it in a Pentium 4 box and ran the Windows Server 2003 install CD and performed a repair. So far, everything looks intact, but I haven’t rebooted the monster domain controller that’s run amuck yet. All e-mail @theMakers.com is down at the moment, and I’m hoping to have it resolved tonight.

BTW, I should mention that I did have backups on the monster domain controller, but the last backup was CORRUPT! The damn BKF file couldn’t be read by NTBACKUP and the most valuable information there–System State–could not be extracted “as is” by all of these damn popular BKF repair utilities. Those are great if you need to recover documents, but system recovery? FORGET IT!

Dang it if I didn’t chip my front tooth while eating a bagel today. I’m at a client meeting here at the Schematic New York office. I was puckering my lips as much as I could to try to grab a glimpse of my mustache for lingering cream cheese, and somehow my lower front tooth caught my front tooth and chipped it. I already scheduled an appointment for next Wednesday with my dentist back in Portland.

We here in Portland enjoyed prime viewing conditions for the lunar eclipse last night, February 20th, 2008. I didn’t realize an eclipse was in progress, even though I thought the moon looked a bit

Last Friday, I was woken up by the sound of my cat, named Jones, playing with a mouse playing in the kitchen. I went the next day to the hardware store and stocked up on some traditional mouse traps, and set them under the fridge and dishwasher. However, Jones beat the mouse to the trap, and dropped the mouse in a pile of dirty laundry on the basement steps. Snow discovered the mouse (still alive!) while sorting through the laundry, and promptly re-covered the mouse with the laundry. I grabbed a heavy book and started to re-sift through the laundry, only to discover the mouse had moved on to a new hiding spot. Our basement steps are draped with a thin work cloth (we had our basement steps rebuilt last summer and still need to paint/stain the wood), and I proceeded to stomp the book around on each covered step. As I stepped down, I felt something soft under my foot–the mouse was dead. I took the poor fella outside to take a picture.

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Tranquil Moments

So, for the second year in a row now, Phillip Kerman, author of Sams Teach Yourself Adobe Flash CS3 Professional in 24 Hours, has inserted a puzzle into his newletter. Can you find it? I found it after about 45 minutes. I did harass him a bit over IM, but he did tell me, “The only hint I can think of… and in retrospect I shoulda done… is that you should remove that first sentence ‘this is a great tip…if only it existed’ “.

You can download Phillip’s newsletter at:

www.phillipkerman.com/newsletter