The Life of Brian

Is Social Media just a Fad?

September 9th, 2009 / View Comments / by Brian

Our CEO posted this video on our intranet at work the other day – I just had time to stumble upon it.

Sometimes it’s pretty cool working on the bleeding edge… ;-)

click here if you don’t see the video above

Posted in: Internet, Techie, software

Guadalupe River

September 9th, 2009 / View Comments / by Brian

Here’s a pic of the whole gang on the river Saturday.  Had a blast & can’t wait to get back next year!  Hopefully it won’t be quite as low/slow next year….

Posted in: Entertainment, Family, Friends, Pics

Sinead’s Hand

September 3rd, 2009 / View Comments / by Brian

From change.org Gay Rights blog yesterday:

This may just be the best commercial out there on the subject of marriage equality. And it comes from Ireland, and the group “MarriagEquality“. Watching this ad, “Sinead’s Hand,” makes it crystal clear that putting the question of marriage on the ballot is not only ludicrous, but it’s offensive as hell. This Fall, the state of Maine will vote on whether gay and lesbian couples should have equal rights to marriage. It’s important to win that vote.

But the premise behind putting civil rights on statewide ballots smacks in the face of the types of protections and rights that governments – whether in the U.S. or in Ireland – should automatically provide for its citizens. Watch the commercial, and then ask yourself, “What if you had to ask four million people to marry someone?”

If you don’t see the video above, click here.

Posted in: Gay Stuff

Tags: equality, marriage

Quick Tip for Searching in Gmail

September 1st, 2009 / View Comments / by Brian

This is just a little tip I figured out last week which has come in really handy for me several times, so I thought I’d share it.

For those of you that use GMail – ever had to search for a message that you know is there somewhere, but you’re not sure where exactly?  This happens all the time for me, with my horrible memory…  Anyway, most of the time when just typing my search term in the search box, I get lots of results — mostly crap from my Junk E-Mail folder.

So here’s how to filter that out:

<your search term here> -label:junk-e-mail

Say for example you’re looking for your student ID, like I just was, because you never remember it and the stupid website you need to log into prevents your browser from remembering it as well.  (yeah I know there’s a “fix” for this but I’ll get to that later lol).  Here’s what I searched on:

dcccd -label:junk-e-mail

Bingo!  There’s my student ID on the first page of results, whereas I would have had to wade through page after page of junk mail looking for it otherwise.

If you care how it works…  the - just means to exclude something, so combining that with label:junk-e-mail tells it to exclude items with the “Junk E-Mail” label applied (notice you substitue a hyphen for spaces).

Now to star that sucker…

There’s loads of additional google search info here.

Posted in: Techie

Tags: gmail, search

Pardon my Dust

August 28th, 2009 / View Comments / by Brian

I decided it was time for a change – so please bear with me while I get settled in my new theme. I’m adapting this one with some of the features I liked from the old one (like the tabbed thingy over to the right) — and I’m no php/css/html guru. This may take me a while. ;-)

Posted in: Administrative

Tags: blog, new, theme