So, yesterday my company launched it's 6th or 7th incarnation of our website. Here's a link to the first one :) Starting back in 1999 we had this crazy idea to start tracking vehicles on the internet, and now here we are 10 years later and still kickin!

Things have come a long way, the product has matured into a VERY stable platform complete with a tracking API, a newly released AIR Application (interface designed by me), Flex application and a Coldfusion driven reporting system (done by your's truly.)

So go check it out, and if you or someone you know could use vehicle tracking for their company, give 'em my name, and our website http://www.navtrakgps.com

well, at least I can drive a really old bobcat to the tune of billie jean in a friends back farm yard... what :)

we made this so that i could get on the "Eternal Moonwalk" but alas, we were 1 day late to enter the video.

So, I did what probably a lot of my Geek Friends around the web did this morning and that was an attempt at "bing-ing" myself...

the results of my search for "tony weeg" are at the end of this link: http://www.bing.com/search?q=tony+weeg&go=&form=QBLH

and with that, I want to look at the results... as of the time of posting this article, i notice a few things...

(first and foremost, google has 36,700 articles about me today, and bing has only 23,900)

1. there appears to be a reliance on "Social Networking" sites for top billing

2. the first link, LinkedIn, is the only social networking site that I am part of that I do not use at all, and that got 1st place :(

3. the results are mostly like google's search results, not much difference there, however if someone were searching for me on google, they'd find better more relevant information, as they would find my domain TonyWeeg.com and i got bored after page 4 looking for my domain on Bing.com

4. the mouseover-right gutter "info" tab that shows up is cool, doesnt really make me NOT want to click on the link, so, I guess it does its job, but not a necessity when im searching, im going to click on it anyway, regardless of that

5. i guess ill bookmark it and see if it helps me at all, but i have to say, as entrenched as i am in using google's tools, it would be weird to LEAVE gmail, and go search for something else in another window, for what? the same results? eh... probably not.

6. search history is cool on bing, but not a game changer, google search has had this a long time.

7. the obligatory image search for "Boobs" that most of us do to test new search engines (you do too, right??) came up with a REALLY neat way of showing an image search... a seamingly ENDLESS grid of images... and when i say endless, i mean, i kept scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling and they never seemed to stop... EVER! brilliant idea #1 so far... good job bing peeps. (so far this is the coolest feature) and at 1.6 million results, thats a LOT of boobies they are droppin on the screen in a VERY ajax fashion.

8. they (microsoft bing developers) took a major note from the search preferences page of google's - and anyone familiar with turning off "Safe Search" will recognize this page... minus a few

so, all in all, it looks to be a well thought out application, but im going to have to say, why? why now? why try to take on google at this game that they have mastered? i just dont get it guys and gals. it would have been a great time to innovate something else, not search. leave that to the search pro's, google!

Dear Roger Clemens,

I just listened to you on Mike and Mike in the morning on Espn Radio and i have to say, you are a big fat liar. The joke of an interview that you just gave those guys was about as disingenuous as I've ever heard in my life. You stammered, you dodged and you evaded everything the guys asked you.

For you to think that we are this stupid, that we would take these answer you gave as truth, is an insult. No one believes you roger, not one single bit. As evidenced by your broken speech patterns and as I mentioned before, stammering, you were and are lying to everyone. And to think that Andy Pettitte "mis-remembers" anything hahahaha, right! I did not even realize that "mis-remember" was a word. Jackass!

We don't care what you think you are doing now that is good, what you overshadow that with is a cloud of dishonesty so thick that we can't see the accomplishments you did on the field. Sure you enamored us with your play on the field, sure you won 7 Cy Young awards, but what you fail to see is that you did it all with the help of performance enhancing drugs. Oddly enough, we wouldnt care about that, not one bit, if you were just a bit more honest about it. Your colleagues have said you took and discussed with them steroids and other drugs, and they have even been man enough to come out with the truth themselves, why can't you do the same?

You make it worse, with every lie told Roger, and in closing, I hope that someday you come to peace with yourself and this game and the way you have tarnished it. at that point, you may find yourself voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. until then, i just dont see it.

Good riddance Roger, and thank you again, thank you for ruining my outlook on Major League Baseball.

tony

i thought it might be neat to see what words i most use when tweeting in my favorite twitter application, Wordle to see if i could generate a beautiful word cloud. first i went to my twitter page, and made sure that all of my tweets from all the way back to the first day i signed on "April 17th, 2008" and simply copy and pasted them into my favorite text editor, adobe dreamweaver cs3, and from there removed some words i didnt care to see in there "twittelator, twhirl, am, pm, etc"

Anyway, here is my Wordle

very cool to see... go try it with yours!

you can hide these blog postings if you'd like... i understand... they are not for you... and would bore me if i were you... facebook has a great feature whereby you can link your blog to your facebook page and draw interested web searchers that way.

conversely, to all of my geek friends, you might want to try adding your blog's rss feed to facebook's "notes" system and see if help's generate traffic!

i know that i have enjoyed a 280% increase on my Google Adsense payouts this month, and i'm looking to get that return to increase even more. why not. we have good knowledge, that new people in the industry want - more and more each day!

good luck, im sure you will be able to figure it out. but if you cannot... here is some information that i found here at SiteProNews "5 ways to Import and Promote your blog on Facebook"

down for the count the past couple of days with strep + fever and you know the rest... back in action soon. in the meantime, utilizing coldfusion, and my iphone, and some secret sauce type stuff, im building a way to remotely start my car as well as remotely unlock my car. no keys needed.

yeah. no keys. just my iphone, my mobilemanager and a backend app in coldfusion.

w00t.

ok, i know they are not definitely in the tournament as of yet, they have another 7 minutes or so left in the game, but Osiris Eldridge is already showing in this Missouri Valley Conference championship game that he has what it takes to be this years Stephon Curry.

Wow, this kid has that IT factor, and its coool as shit to watch. He gets BUCK!

I'll post some of the highlights from today's game later.

that's right. we've got anywhere from 4-10" inches a little farther north than me. here is a panorama i just took of our house and the surrounding weather today. lots of snow!! i love it!!

Can you find the sun trying to peek out??

So I had a problem I had to tackle, and this is one that I've tackled before using various methods, but this one I wanted to tackle a bit differently.

Imagine a text area inside a graphic that would be at the head of a page... kinda like this one (look on the right side, the text inside the white rectangle)

View banner Image here

And then imagine that you want that to appear on this page, but it has to be in the center of the page, it needs to be dynamic (the text on the right side) and you dont feel like making a <DIV> sit on top of the image, with text, and links... how many different ways can this be done, probably 2 or 3. however this time I wanted to harness the power of ColdFusion 8 to do this, this time. Since I know ColdFusion can write text in an image, and I already had the image, why not make the space blank, generate the text and the links from a database call and write those values to variables, then take those variables and write them to the image, and then display the image?

To accomplish this I did the following (First I had created the base Image with no text on the right hand side, just white space. I saved it as a transparent PNG and ColdFusion preserved the transparency!!)

• Read the image into memory imageNew()
• Create strings for each of the text row's
• Create an attribute structure to give size, shape and weight for the font
• Set the drawing color for the color of the text
• Use the imageDrawText() function to write each of the strings to the image at the most correct spot (note that the x/y coords are for the bottom left portion of the text
• Then I simply use the tag to write the image to disk, and the tag to display my newly created dynamic text inside the graphic, exactly where I want.
• I used an image map on the page where you can see it live

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