New shinnphoto.com!

We have an updated site at www.shinnphoto.com!  Stop by, take a look, and tell me what you think in the comments below.  Is there anything not there that you’d like to see?  How’s the musical selection?

Excited,

Andrew

Friday Funnies

This guy could probably be me.  I’m sure I’m responsible for more than my share of tube-clogging content or traffic jams on the information superhighway.  Look, I’m doing it again!  Right now!  Posting a video to my blog!

Happy Friday,

Andrew

[coolplayer width=”500″ height=”380″ autoplay=”0″ loop=”0″ charset=”GBK” download=”0″ mediatype=””]
Funny video about the internet crashing
[/coolplayer]

Blogging like it’s 1999

Just for kicks this morning I checked to see if my first web site is still up. It is.  Complete with cheesy graphics, music on many pages, egregious amounts of advertising, and <blink> tags, this testament to my history on the web still stands.  It’s where I first started learning to write <html> and how to post photos online.  But it’s also where I started blogging, before the word had been created.  I called my blog posts updates, and put together a few of them.  I posted on politics, spirituality, and what was going on in my life.  I also posted writings in stilted, overly descriptive language.  I thought I was such a good writer. :-)  I also posted some photos there.  They’re photos of a chunk of my life I haven’t thought about for a long time.  Most of the photos are poor quality, but now they’re meaningful because that was my life.  I guess the old site is like an old snapshot of me.  Out there for all to see.  I thought about logging in and editing it, but can’t bring myself to do that.  Sometimes it’s just best to leave history as it was.

Check out this really cool video

[coolplayer width=”380″ height=”380″ autoplay=”0″ loop=”0″ charset=”GBK” download=”1″ mediatype=””]
A really cool video
[/coolplayer]

Funny Maggie

I looked under the desk a few minutes ago and Maggie had a computer cable wrapped around her neck. She was just sitting there. Funny dog! I hope she’s not trying to send me a message or anything.

NORAD Tracks Santa

Okay, so we’ve all heard about this on the news on Christmas Eve. But the noradsanta.org web site has some interesting history and fun stuff to get you in the Christmas mood (military-defense style). Ho ho ho!

Now I’ve seen it all.

I thought I had seen some of the wierder intersections of life and internet. Things like dotcomguy back in 2000, and more recently the one red paperclip guy. That was before today, when I found whatwouldjesusdownload.com and Christianubuntu.com. Tired of the borderline-porn ads on Myspace? If you go to whatwouldjesusdownload.com, you can instead be encouraged to check out Christian dating sites and buy Michael W. Smith albums. Try the prayer forum, or buy some Christian Geek apparel.

Okay, that’s it. Now you can’t surprise me with anything! (Actually, the Christian Ubuntu operating system does sound pretty cool. I wonder if it comes in server editions?)

Also, if anyone actually reads this and is looking for ideas for birthday presents, I’d love to have a Christianubuntu.com baseball jersey (cool) or a shroud baseball Jersey (even cooler).

Apology for my choice of browsers

Hey, Shinnfans. I just today took a look at this blog using the Internet Explorer web browser, and I realized that it looks terrible. Is this the blog’s fault? Nope. It’s the browser’s fault. You see, Microsoft’s default browsing program, Internet Explorer, does not support the web standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C.

Instead of Internet Explorer, I strongly recommend that you use a standards-compliant (and in every way superior) browser, Firefox. This first thing you’ll notice is that our blog looks a heckuva lot better in Firefox. As an added bonus, you can easily increase the size of the text on almost any web page in Firefox by holding down the ‘ctrl’ button and scrolling up or down with a scrolling mouse. That’s a usability feature that Microsoft just can’t match!

Click here for a preview of our blog in Firefox.

Yahoo! Answers

I’ve recently come across a fascinating attention economy knows as Yahoo! Answers.  It’s a place where you can log on and ask questions.  Or answer questions.  Or rate other people’s answers.  “What kind of questions can I ask?” you wonder.  That’s a great question.  You should log in and see what kind of questions other people are asking.  I’ve been addicted to this service all week now.  For joining, you get 100 points.  Every question you ask costs you 5 points.  Every questions you answer garners you 2 points, and when your answer is chosen as the best answer to a question, you earn 10 points.  When you earn a certain amount of points, you get….. something.  I don’t know what the something is yet, but I reached level 2, and Yahoo! assures me that there’s something special headed my way.  When I reached level 2 without a significant reward, I kind of gave up on this as an obsession.  I thought I’d come back to daily blogging instead.  Check out Yahoo Answers anyway; it’ll be worth your time.