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04.02.2010 - Quack Attack
It was my honor to coach the "Quack Attack" Aflac Relay for Life tournament softball team this weekend. I started out as the shortstop and coach but after a superman slide into 3rd base during an Aflac Men's softball game the week before the tournament I became just "coach". I suffered a badly dislocated and fractured finger. See pictures. No regrets though, I coached hard, and the team played hard. We won the first 3 games by mercy rule. We played 2 games Friday night and then again Saturday morning. By 4:00PM Saturday we found ourselves undefeated and playing for all the marbles, the championship game. It was a double-elimination tournament and we were the only undefeated team. One of the tournament rules was that players could be "purchased" from teams that had been put out. Our opponent took full advantage of this rule and we found ourselves playing an all-star team. We fought hard but were denied our championship by losing back-to-back games to the same team and settled for second place. Not bad for our first year though and no "single" team was able to beat us. Rest assured, Quack Attack will be back!
01.28.2010 - AutoHotKey
One of the coolest tools I have run across in years. AutoHotKey is an application that allows you to create scripts and macros to do a wide variety of Windows type functions such as creating hotkeys for common tasks, macros, etc. It runs in your systray and can make your Windows experience much more gratifying. Very addictive. Click here to learn more.
08.25.2009 - Today is the perfect day for something.
While riding down the road the other day with the family, my youngest daughter, Bailey, said "Today is the perfect day for something". There was silence afterwards as we all absorbed how profound that statement really was. I believe that this statement has great depth and truth and promise. "Out of the mouth of babes". So challenge yourself each day to find something perfect and pursue it. Allow yourself to believe that "today is the perfect day for something".
06.29.2009 - Reminder: Add your cell phone to do not call list
REMEMBER: Cell Phone Numbers Go Public next month. REMINDER.... all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sale calls. .... YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS Even if the message is saved on your phone, you will be charged for the minutes to listen to it. To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222. It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time. It blocks your number for five (5) years. You must call from the cell phone number you want to have blocked. You cannot call from a different phone number. OR go here - https://www.donotcall.gov/
04.15.2009 - Facebook
I have a confession to make...I signed up for Facebook last night. Okay I know, for those of you have raved about Facebook go ahead and get it out of the way and say "I told you so". However, I am still not really into the whole social networking thing so I probably will not be one of those who checks it frequently. Weblazer is currently writing an application which will interact with Facebook so I figured I needed to become more Web 2.0 savvy.

For those that may not be familiar with "Web 2.0" it refers collectively to the social networking sites such as MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, etc. So anyway, I now have a Facebook account. I added a link to it at the bottom of this site. I guess I always saw these sites as somewhat of a distraction on a personal level, and rightly so, I spent hours on it last night getting setup and just dorking around. Many of the things that Facebook provides I was already doing and I guess I saw this as a duplication of effort (Blogging, quotes, links, email, photos, etc.). I will admit, however, that it's networking of people is unparalleled.

So, long story short (too late), you can visit or friend me on Facebook now but just don't expect too much. I guess I am old school in this respect and still prefer emails.

Cheers.

03.14.2009 - Photo Search
I cannot tell you how many times we, myself included, have wondered when an event took place and then spent considerable time clicking through months and years of photos manually trying to find a particular event or photo. Wow, that really sounds like a job for a program doesn't it? This is one that I have been thinking about for a while and finally made time to build. Now from the photos screen you will find a Search button adjacent to the Month drop down. Clicking this button will take you to a new Photo Search screen. From the search screen you can now search for any combination of Months, Years, and Events. You can even specify that you only want to see the list of events or show a thumbnail of the search result. Let me know what you think. I am sure it could still be improved upon. Cheers!
03.10.2009 - Search Portal
As a web user I found myself frequently searching the same sites over and over again. As a web developer, I saw this as a redundant task and could not resist the urge to automate it. Why? probably just to see if it could be done, but I now see the value in it.

My answer to this is a search portal within my site. If you go to Search at the top of the screen you will be presented with a screen filled text boxes representing site searches, effectively combining all the search capabilities of the sites listed into one convenient screen.

So if you want to search for a local business, type the business name into the Yellow Pages box and press Enter. If you want to search for an image, type in the name of the image into the Google Images textbox and press Enter. You get the idea. Your search will be executed and your results will be presented inside troyedwards.com without another window opening. To me this is very cool and much more convenient.

Furthermore, I have built this in such a way where I can add new searches from within the website itself making it very easy to add new searches (another convenience. Aren't computers great?). As I find new things that I want to search for I will add a search to this screen so check back frequently. Also, if you have ideas on sites you like to search, please let me know. You know where to find me. If not, do a search...Enjoy!

03.06.2009 - Bill and Jean added to site
For those of you that may not be aware, my Dad (Bill Edwards) is even more camera-happy than I am and supplies me with many of the great pictures you see on troyedwards.com. He and my mother (Jean Edwards) now have their own site (billandjeanedwards.com) to show off some of the pictures that they take. I added a link on this site under Family called "Bill and Jean" which points to billandjeanedwards.com. Enjoy!
02.27.2009 - Woot
Woot is a cool site which you should add to your list of sites to check daily. They only sell one item per day and it is always cheap and usually something everyone wants. Here is an excerpt from their page:

What is Woot and who's behind it?

Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it's taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043 – by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices. Until then, we're still the lovable scamps we've always been. But don't take our word for it: see what the online community has to say at this Wikipedia article.

I see only one item, do you sell anything else?

No. We sell one item per day until it is sold out or until 11:59pm central time when it is replaced (see next entry for details). However, each item we sell is in stock and typically ships within 2-3 business days.

02.25.2009 - ZoomIt
Onc of the coolest little tools I have seen in a long time. This is a must have for presentations but I have also found it very useful to have loaded to point out things on my screen.

ZoomIt is screen zoom and annotation tool for technical presentations that include application demonstrations. ZoomIt runs unobtrusively in the tray and activates with customizable hotkeys to zoom in on an area of the screen, move around while zoomed, and draw on the zoomed image.

ZoomIt works on all versions of Windows and you can use pen input for ZoomIt drawing on tablet PCs.

02.18.2009 - OpenOffice 2009
OpenOffice, as the name might imply, is a tool much like Microsoft Office. In fact, you can create spreadsheets, documents, databases, and presentations much like Excel, Word, Access, and PowerPoint. Anything you create in OpenOffice can be saved in a Microsoft Office format, but here is the best part...It's absolutely free. I just downloaded it yesterday and started playing with it but it looks pretty awesome. If you are looking for a Microsoft Office compatible tool without paying the Microsoft price, here you go. Available for download on the web or from the downloads section here. For more information go to http://www.openoffice.org/. Enjoy.
02.17.2009 - PicBlazer available
PicBlazer is a tool that I built to automate the organizing, archiving, resizing, renaming, and uploading of photos to a website. On the web server side, I have .php code that takes the photos and displays them in an organized fashion. The result of this can be seen on this site by clicking Photos. If you have a prior version of PicBlazer, you will need to uninstall it via Control panel. To install the latest version go to www.picblazer.com and click install. From this point forward, the software will auto-update itself as before.
02.13.2009 - Notepad++
Notepad++ is a free source code editor. It is lightweight, mature, uses tabs, supports several languages, and is free. If you are a developer this is a must have for your arsenal, and if you are anyone else, it beats the socks off Notepad. Give it a shot, you have nothing to lose.
02.12.2009 - Google Chrome
In case you haven't heard, Google created a free web browser (Chrome) and in my humble opinion, it rocks. I have been using Google Chrome for some months now but enjoy using it so much that I thought I would blog about it again. It's small, light-weight, easy to install (and uninstall), feature-rich, and free. It incorporates tabs, recent bookmarks, thumbnails of recently visited sites in order of most visited, and on and on. Definitely worth a try. Click the title of this blog entry to jump to the downloads page.
02.07.2009 - Site Back Online
After many hours of reconstruction, troyedwards.com is back online. About a week ago it was determined that my RAID 5 server with 6 hard drives had 2 unrecoverable drives. RAID 5 has built in failover to handle the loss of one hard drive but cannot recover from 2 bad drives. Needless to say this was not expected and difficult to recover from. At any rate, I am still working to put many sites back together.