Bnpositive's Blog

Automobile master craftsman and artist, Boyd Coddington died yesterday. He was famous for his beautiful modifications and improvements on cars like the Cadillac and “little deuce coupes”.

Coddington, who started building cars when he was 13 and once operated a gas station in Utah, set a standard for his workmanship and creativity, with his popular “Cadzilla” creation considered a design masterpiece. The customized car based on a 1950s Cadillac was built for rocker Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top.

Boyd had gathered even more fame recently with his Discovery Channel TV show, “American Hot Rod”. That’s where I was first really introduced to him. I had already been fans of Jesse James from “Monster Garage” and Chip Foose from “Overhaulin’” but I didn’t realize that they were both students and apprentices of the master Coddington in his own garage.

Boyd’s creativity and vision will be missed directly from his leaving this earth, but I’m sure we will continue to see the nuances and influence of that vision for years to come from those who have worked for and been inspired by him.

Our sincere sympathies and condolences to the Coddington family during this time.

Visit Boyd’s website at BoydCoddington.com

I lucked out today and won a little drawing that b5media had for their bloggers. They were giving away a registration ticket for SXSW (South By Southwest) event that’s coming up in Austin and it starts next week.

There are three different focuses of the conference/festival

• SXSW MUSIC AND MEDIA CONFERENCE
• SXSW INTERACTIVE FESTIVAL
• SXSW FILM CONFERENCE AND FESTIVAL

I had originally thought I’d go for the music portion because of my Christian Music Fan blog, but Christian music doesn’t have much of a presence or showing at this festival from what I could tell from their website.

So, it looks like I’ll be heading down for the Interactive Festival portion which fits more into my general niche of blogging and technology.

The challenge is getting my butt down to Austin next week as cheaply as possible. I’m not opposed to driving, but would rather not spend 14 hours one-way heading down there and back. Heading down there probably wouldn’t be bad, but I’m sure heading back after 5 days of non-stop activity would be a challenge for me.

If anyone would like to sponsor my transportation costs on this little trip, just send me an e-mail or leave a comment. I might even consider a tattoo or shameless plug on all future blogging posts for the right price.

By the way, the photo is of Darcie and Laura drawing my name out of our CEO’s motorcycle helmet!

• Whenever Jason Bean plays Chutes and Ladders, he treats the chutes as ladders, because he’s not some sissy who can’t climb up a plastic slide.
• Jason Bean died ten years ago, but the Grim Reaper can’t get up the courage to tell him.
• When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night he checks his closet for Jason Bean.
• Jason Bean’s calendar goes straight from March 31st to April 2nd; no one fools Jason Bean.
• Jason Bean was originally cast as the main character in 24, but was replaced by the producers when he managed to kill every terrorist and save the day in 12 minutes and 37 seconds.
• World champion eater Takeru Kobayashi once ate 53.5 hot dogs in 12 minutes. Allotted the same time, Jason Bean ate Kobayashi.
• Jason Bean once stated that he “doesn’t wail on sissy boys.” This led to the pink polo shirts with popped collars craze. Little do those pitiful fools know that Jason Bean was just making it easier to find sissy boys to wail on.
• Jason Bean is the reason why Waldo is hiding.
• Jason Bean and Superman once fought each other on a bet. The loser had to start wearing their underwear on the outside of their pants.
• Weeping Willows are a result of Jason Bean yelling at trees for not being tough enough.
• If at first you don’t succeed, you must not be Jason Bean.
• A Handicap parking sign does not signify that this spot is for handicapped people. It is actually in fact a warning, that the spot belongs to Jason Bean and that you will be handicapped if you park there.
• Jason Bean doesn’t play “hide-and-seek.” He plays “hide-and-pray-I-don’t-find-you.”
• Crop circles are Jason Bean’s way of telling the world that sometimes corn needs to lie the hell down.
• Jason Bean is the only one who can “try this at home.”
• Jason Bean has beat the crap out of so many people over his brilliant life that most medical journals now classify him as a laxative.
• Superman owns a pair of Jason Bean pajamas.
• There is no theory of evolution, just a list of creatures Jason Bean allows to live.

Thanks to my friend Ben for sharing this as well.

For some fun of your own go visit 100factsabout.com

The European Union today threw down a $1.3B fine on Microsoft for their unfair pricing towards competitors for their software information.

EU regulators said the company charged “unreasonable prices” until last October to software developers who wanted to make products compatible with the Windows desktop operating system.

I’ll give you that Microsoft has strong-armed a variety of businesses and competitors when it comes to promoting their business. But there’s a part of me that says laws that require a company to make their intellectual property easy and cheap to obtain aren’t helping anyone.

If software companies don’t like how they have to pay to play with Microsoft then stop writing software for their machines. Start writing Linux or Apple software. Or just write web applications, or mobile applications, or develop your own OS and start writing applications for that.

I’m sure I’m oversimplifying everything, but I’m just a regular guy that thinks there are  a bunch of whiners saying someone’s not “playing fair”. Like a kid on the playground. As I would tell my own kids. Ignore the whiney kids and or shut-up if you’re the one whining and go play by yourself.

I also don’t want to sound like I’m against international business and trade, but the seeming power that the EU holds over Microsoft is annoying me as well. If I were Microsoft, I’d pull everything out of Europe for a couple of years and see what happens.

Will this additional fine impact Microsoft’s ongoing offer for Yahoo!?

Source: EU fines Microsoft record $1.3B

Just saw this twitter update from my CEO, Jeremy Wright. He said the b5 corporate office has ditched their Wii in favor of getting Rockband for the Xbox 360.

We (b5) traded in our wii for rock band this week (for the 360). Whole toronto team’s looking forward to playing tomorrow ;-)

Note to Self: Don’t send an e-mail to corporate office and expect a response tomorrow.

Stracka.com is a new social network for people who love golf. It’s a lot more than any social network I’ve seen though. Stracka seems to focus more on the idea of golf than the latest “social” features, which is a great idea executed cleanly here.

One of the most interesting things is they have actual yardage information available for courses all over the United States and some worldwide that you can download and view in Google Earth and Google Maps. Now that’s slick!

They also have their patented Stracka ” Never misread another putt™ ” tool that let’s you look at a green and see a visual representation of how the elevation, water flow and contour to see the green like never before.

Uncover some golfing secrets of your own, then share them with your new friends at Stracka.com

Less than 24 hours after I talk about the Knighthood application on Facebook on this site it gets removed! What’s up? From the comments on my original post it doesn’t look like anyone knows the reason.

I just clicked on one of the links provided to sent Mark Zuckerberg a question about it though and noticed the icon was back in my applications column as before. There’s still some kind of problems though. Here’s the message you get when you try to access the application.

So, what happened? I spent some time today trying to let my friends on Facebook know about the game and encouraged them to give it a try. Then the sucker explodes and they can’t access it.

We’ll see what happens.

I wrote late last year about looking for an application that would let me gain even greater efficiency of using multiple monitors. I found MultiMon by Mediachance provided exactly what I was looking for in a small application.

The problem now is I want that same functionality for Windows Vista machines and sadly MultiMon isn’t Vista capable.

Does anyone have a suggestion for an application like MultiMon that works on the Vista OS?

UPDATE: It looks like Microsoft is working on this but hasn’t delivered a solution that I can see at this point.

Someone invited me to join them in the Knighthood game on Facebook awhile back and I joined because it looked kind of interesting.

I didn’t really start playing it much until today and I’ve got to say it’s really growing on me.

I’m a HUGE fan of the Sid Meier classic strategy game, Civilization (if you’re a Civ fan you’ll probably like this site as well.) Knighthood reminds me a lot of that with far less graphics and turn-by-turn based playing. It’s more about the strategy decisions you employed in Civilization that’s really fun.

The idea of combining that with a real social network of friends that start out as your “vassals” makes it all that more engaging.

If you’re not playing yet, I’d love to have you in my realm and kingdom. Look for me on Facebook and just send me a note asking to be my friend for Knighthood.

Uncover the joy of feudalism and play Knighthood in Facebook with me.

Okay, I’m about to drive myself crazy trying to figure out why I can’t get rid of the space between the lines of data above on my web page.

The lines are made-up of three fields stacked directly on top of each other. They are all sitting in a single table cell with no height or width attributes set and padding and spacing on the entire table set to “0″.

Here’s the CSS that’s being applied to each data item.

   1: margin: 0px; font-family: Arial; font-size: 8pt; padding-left: 30px; line-height: 9px

What is the stinkin’ deal with this. I need these lines to smash right up next to each other to conserve spacing for a printable page.

Any help would be appreciated.

I’m getting this error when I try to sync my iPod. Anyone got any clues? Part of me would be a bit pleased if I had to replace mine, although I’m a tight wad and would hate to pay for the replacement.

Update: I found something online that said it may be a cable issue. That would be annoying now wouldn’t it. You get a new cable with a new iPod don’t you? =)

I blogged about this ad last year but at the time didn’t have the ability to embed the video into the post. My father-in-law sent me a new link to the ad that allows me to embed it thanks to Albino Blacksheep.

That’s a sharp looking station wagon! I’d drive it in a heartbeat!