Today is dragging for me so I thought I would post a little humor that my little brother has been emailing me (my type of forwarded emails Ü). Hope you enjoy! ~Paul W.

“The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.” ~Susan Sontag

So, for the last few years I have been using a free piece of software, called Stick, that has been really quite useful. Stick allows you to add a virtual “push pin” to any widow pane or software interface. Once you add the push pin that window will always be viewed as the top window pane. This is extremely helpful when I am going from one program to another and have lots of windows open. Before this great piece of software I had to add an additional step of clicking on the window in the task bar. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but when you have to do it several hundreds of times it gets old and fast.

I have no idea where I downloaded it.  I looked into the software properties and there is no attribute to the creator. Thus, I can’t give a hardy thank you to the designer of Stick. Really, I use this software multiple times a day, and frankly I am surprised that Microsoft hasn’t added this feature into Windows (but let’s be honest when does Microsoft really build for the user in mind, IE is a perfect of example of this corporate blindness).

Anyway, Stick is free, and as far as I can tell it’s under creative commons. I will be using another computer for the next few weeks, and this software is something I can’t live without. So, I decided to upload it to mymarketer in order for me to download it when I start using the new machine.

It might be a little strong of language to refer to Matt as a god, but he truly is amazing with what he has done with wordpress. I actually meet Matt last year at a WordCamp in Utah. The event was really good and it was also nice to rub shoulders with Matt. He really is a down to earth bloke who loves what he does. Not to mention he has a stellar piece of software.

Any one who knows me, knows that I am a wordpress geek. Plugin, themes, blogs, anything wordpress I study and analyze just about anything I can, and I do it just about every day. Pathetic…possibly, but a good career as well. Anyway, I found the below interview of Matt on WordPressOfTheDay.com and thought I would share it. I really like the cinematography done by SpeakingEvents.com (the company interviewing Matt), and I feel it gives a good insight to what wordpress really is all about. I particularly like the part that he talks about why wordpress is free. You can almost see pain in eyes as he talks about putting ads on wordpress (he is talking about wordpress.com). It’s funny and inspiring all at the same time.

For the last several years I have been working on a wordpress MU project that seems to be the bane of my existence. I will work on it non-stop for several days, and then leave it alone for a few months and then go back and find errors that I hadn’t noticed before. It is really frustrating but some day I will actually finish and launch this project.

One of my biggest issues though, is my desire to have the theme editor active while I am in the development phase. Obviously, it is not wise to have the theme editor available when you launch a community. Having your theme editor global allows any user the ability to change the theme for your whole community. Yet, I spend a lot of my time in the wordpress admin area and having to jump from admin to ftp is annoying (yes, I admit I am lazy, efficient, but lazy).

Anyway, WordPress MU deactivates the theme editor by default. Since I go periods of time without touching MU when I come back I have to update my wordpress instance. Every time I lose my precious theme editor, and every time I have to dig through Google to find the solution to bring it back.

Happy 2010! For some reason I always prefer even years over the odd years. Not sure why, but I just feel more energized at the beginning of even years (probably a part of my OCD-ness showing).

Today I was looking at a couple of my blogs and I realized that the copyright date in the footer of some of them had not updated from 2009 to 2010. I figure I am not the only person to have this problem. So, I thought I would offer as a new year’s gift the below PHP code that automatically changes your blog’s copyright date to the current year on January 1st.

Required Code
Copyright © //Shows the copyright and its associated symbol
< ?php echo date('Y'); ?> //shows current year
< ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>. All rights reserved. //shows the name of the blog found in the wordpress general settings and reserved rights

So, I know that this isn’t a marketing post, but when you eat, breathe, and drink computer programming you tend to also write about it as well. Currently, for my master’s program I am enrolled in a Java programming class. As stated in previous posts, Java hasn’t been easy for me to learn. I am a hard core marketing guy. However, I do see great value in being able to speak geek language. It probably isn’t efficient any more for me to tell programmers to wave their magic keyboard and build what I am dreaming up in my head.

With that being said I am going to post the java projects that are either a) really cool or b) projects that I am just dang proud of completing. This project falls into the later category. The project is not all that interesting, unless you are someone who wants to validate ISBN codes for fun. Didn’t think so!