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Archive for December, 2009

Illustrator’s Appearance Panel

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

I consider myself still a bit of a newbie with Illustrator and I’m determined to learn more tips and tricks. Today I decided to follow along with this tutorial, The Secrets of the Appearance Panel: Multiple Fills, over at VectorTuts+. The things you can do with only one simple shape is amazing. This cute little spring scene was a perfect project for this cold winter day.

I look forward to doing many more of the wonderful tutorials I’ve found here. Do you have any great Illustrator learning sites to share? I’d love to hear them.

Tags: appearance panel, illustrator, tutorials
Posted in tutorials | 1 Comment »

One Gmail Account, Many Addresses

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

Gmail_logo This may be old news to some, but it was new news to me. I had a customer service person tell me that someone had an email address very similar to mine, only theirs was all caps and that I should take my complaint to Gmail and ask them why they allow this. (Someone was using my email address and I was getting their “order receipts”, so I had asked the company to please put an end to this). After shaking my head for a bit, I decided I’d better reply to that customer service person with a link from Gmail explaining that case doesn’t affect an email address, me@gmail.com is the same as ME@gmail.com.

In looking for a link to send, I came across another great tidbit of info from Gmail. Not only does case not matter, but dots don’t either. I do use a dot between my first and last name in my gmail address, that’s how I signed up. Little did I know I can easily drop that dot or add more anywhere between any letters and still get my email!

Sometimes you may receive a message sent to an address that looks like yours but has a different number or arrangement of periods. While we know it might be unnerving if you think someone else’s mail is being routed to your account, don’t worry: both of these addresses are yours.

Gmail doesn’t recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they’ll all go to your inbox, and only yours. In short:

homerjsimpson@gmail.com = hom.er.j.sim.ps.on@gmail.com

homerjsimpson@gmail.com = HOMERJSIMPSON@gmail.com

homerjsimpson@gmail.com = Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com

All these addresses belong to the same person. You can see this if you try to sign in with your username, but adding or removing a dot from it. You’ll still go to your account.

If you get mail that seems to be intended for someone else, it’s likely that the sender entered the wrong address, just like if you’ve ever dialed a wrong phone number for someone. In these cases, we suggest contacting the original sender or website when possible to alert them to the mistake.

One last thing: Google Apps does recognize dots. If you’d like to have a dot in your username, please ask your domain administrator to add your preferred username as a nickname.

So basically, me@gmail.com is the same as m.e@gmail.com and .m.e.@gmail.com

I learn something new everyday.

Tags: case, dots, email, gmail
Posted in email | No Comments »

Wordpress 2.9 introduces a new…

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

Wordpress 2.9 introduces a new Thumbnail Feature! http://instanticity.com/blog/?p=18

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Wordpress Thumbnail Feature

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

WPsmbutton-grey Wordpress rocks! The newest version has added a nice little feature that has been long needed. With Wordpress 2.9, you can now assign a thumbnail to your posts. No longer necessary to use custom fields, you can now upload your thumbnail at the same time as writing your post. Now, where was this last week when I truly needed it?!

Before using this feature, you’ll definitely want to make it backwards compatible and you have to activate it. Read more about it over at kremalicious.com

Looks like I’ll be doing some Wordpress updating in the next few days