I wanted to let you know that based upon your valuable contributions to BX you will be the Featured User on Business Exchange (http://bx.businessweek.com) starting tomorrow, February 25th at approximately 9:15 AM ET and lasting for 24 hours.

It is a nice gesture considering I only joined a few weeks ago.

But, BX is a fantastic tool for keeping notes. When researching a topic, I just pop in the URL and add a note or two.  Sometimes the page description of the URL is sufficient so I don’t have to add anything.

After I get enough information, I’ll go back and write a blog post, article, or use the events as possible use cases for new products.   It’s a great site for keeping current on business events.

I’ve been struggling using 3rd party solutions to post whereby many simply don’t work very well.  My biggest complaint is that when you take a picture and want to post it to your blog, it doesn’t show up there.

For example, if you use PixelPipe to post to your blog, the photo is hosted on their server instead of on hosting account.  Here, WP accels by uploading your photo directly to your site.

Take this photo below.  It’s not interesting, other than I took the backside of the DVR to get the serial number since Time Warner wanted to know what it was when I tried to activate the box.

Backside of the Time Warner DVR

I don’t know why they would ask the information other than I have two cable boxes in the house and they need to isolate which one to activate.  (The simple solution would be to activate both boxes at once and not have the customer unrack the cable box just to get the s/n on the bottom of the box.)

Anyway, the WP Droid Application is incredible if you like to blog from your phone.  I don’t care to plog other than uploading photos to my digital photos site.  Now if there only was someway to plog using dictation …

I was very diligent in taking 5000 mg of  D-3  everyday yet my levels were somewhat surprisingly low.  Perhaps it was the vitamin manufacture because you can never know which Vitamin Company you can trust to provide the best product.  I’ve switched over to GNC … perhaps that will help.

Anyway, I’m always interested in local Thousand Oaks authors and Doctor Zaidi recently published the Power of Vitamin D.  I heard about him from a fellow Choir member who recommended reading his books.

It’s not like I’m new to the vitamin and I’ve been a big fan of Vitamin D ever since seeing Dr. John Cannell’s video and how he found a relationship between influenza and Vitamin D deficiency.

While Dr. Cannell has a good overview of what the vitamin can do for your, Dr. Zaidi’s book fills in all the information on how much you should be taking to supplement your diet and what levels should be found in your blood.

I enjoyed his level of writing where it wasn’t too technical and very easy to understand.  His conclusions of why we are having an deficiency epidemic: modern lifestyle, sun phobia and obesity is somewhat obvious other than obesity, but he gives good examples of the cause of the problem.

Is this book for you?  If Dr. Cannell’s video excites you about the power of vitamins, then you should pick it up and read it.  I’m fairly certain that you or someone you know can benefit from the Power of Vitamin D.

Decades of an unergonomic work environment really caused severe tenosynovitis in my wrists and right shoulder. For whatever reason, the inflammation reared it’s ugly head with such intensity that work was nearly impossible.  Ten days after giving blood, the pain was bad enough to seek medical help because the 1600 mg of Advil a day just wasn’t reducing the inflammation anymore.

I guess my mind was playing tricks on my, but with the bluish-yellow bruise from the blood donation, my only thought was that it was infected and the source of the pain.  Just tenderness and slightest touch in the area was magnified 10 fold due to the tenosynovitis.

Luckily, there was no infection or blood clot.  Just continue on the anti-imflammatories until the pain subsides.  Some physical therapy to boot.

Sorry, I digressed, but to make the point clear, an ergonomic environment really reduces this type of injury and makes it easier to recover while continue working.

I splurged and installed an HumanScale keyboard tray because in my honest opinion the best that I’ve ever used.  This is the second one I installed in the house.

My original plan was to install keyboard trays underneath the built-in desks in our home office.  But I never got around to it because I liked the keyboard on top of the desk even though it was awkward and never quite the right height and position.

I took about an hour to install.  I’m sure that anyone else could have done it faster.  It just took me about 15 minutes to find the tools that I’ve left scattered all about the house.   The 1″ thick desktop is dense and even after drilling starter holes, I had trouble attaching the base plate while laying on my back.

With base plate screwed to the bottom of the desktop, you then add the back rubber stoppers, insert the sliding adjustable keyboard mechanism and then the front stopper.   The tray comes with cable attachments so your mouse and keyboard wires are kept out of the way.  I use the wireless Microsoft Natural Mouse so there is no mouse wires to worry about.

An additional  feature about having a under desk keyboard tray is that you get an extra 2 square feet of desktop that you can now use.  My desk should be nice and clean which should make me and my wife very happy!

You would never know it by the with all the upper-middle class neighborhoods in the area that there is homelessness problem in Thousand Oaks.  But the numbers are growing at the Winter Shelters sponsored by local Churches with more and more seeking aid showing up every night.

With the state of the economy so fragile that it is on the verge of collapse, how many of you can survive the Great Recession?  Have you over extended your credit in the last great economic boom?

I pray that you won’t find yourself on the street like many of the breed of homeless if this downturn heads for the worse.

But in the mean time, you can help out your fellow sister and brother by simply walking in the 2010 Conejo Valley CROP walk.  Sign up to show your support to walk.  Sign up to contribute. Just sign up because you or a family member may be the one you’ll be supporting next.

The first time it failed, the NO test failed.  This usually is an adjustment so that more of the unburnt fuel is sucked backed into the ignition system instead of going out the tail pipe.   A simple adjustment that most mechanics can repair for under $100.

We took our Avalon to the Toyota dealer and they did the adjustment, but this caused the hydrocarbon test to fail.  The dealer said they had to repair the catalytic converter for a hefty $1,700.

We sorta gave up the idea of repairing the emission system and decide that we were going to get a new SUV instead.  We narrowed our new car choice down to the Toyota Highlander since it has plenty of room for us.  Even with the Limited upgrade version, the price is not too high and keeps us in the mid 30k range including taxes and fees.

I was so suprised that cataytic converter repair was so expensive, that I called around a few muffer shops in town (Thousand Oaks).  All of the quotes were under $500 so we took a chance at Competition Muffer on 50 Skyline Drive and the mechanic installed a new one in under an hour.  He said that we need to put on a good ten miles before retesting the smog.

The smog test passed and we’re good for another two years before we need test again.  This should give us some time to consider before buying our next car.

Ironically, I walked to Pookies to pick up some Thai food for and wondered if my $8 lunch would serve better as a donation to help the hungry.

Even though the walk was a short 1 mile round trip to Pookies and back, it gave me enough time to contemplate that if I could cut back on my meals for a month, I could easily increase the donation by $100 and also shed a few pounds.

I’m really big on Virtual PC and keep my personal and business expenses running and backed up on virtual computers that I run on my pristine copies of Windows 2000 Pro.

The virtual drives are kept small to fit on a 4g DVD which makes backup of the entire system as simple as burning a new DVD.  Before making drastic changes, I always create a copy of the file containing the virtual drive image in case something goes wrong.

Of course it did.

I ran the disk cleanup utility and all the unused files, old system upgrades were compressed or deleted leaving with 1GB of free space.  Plenty of space to install TurboTax.

Apparently .NET needed to be installed taking up 200 MB with the usual reboot.  Somehow pci.sys was corrupted in the intall or the disk cleanup utility messed it up.

I had a backup the backup copy, but it took 30 minutes to do the cleanup.  I decided to mount the virtual drive on another Virtual PC and copy a good version of pci.sys to the bad version.  Rebooted the QuickBooks and hoped nothing else was dorked.

That seemed to resolve the problem and I continued with the TurboTax install and everything installs fine, except …

We’ve noticed that you’re running Windows 2000.  This is the last year that you can run TurboTax using this operating system…

TurboTax, you’re killing me.  Now I got to move my data to an Windows XP Pro Virtual PC.

The first time I noticed this was that my credit card payment was delivered late. The second time was a letter we sent to Alabama that took over 30 days to deliver.  The strange thing was that instead of being postmarked in Thousand Oaks, it was postmarked in New Jersey.

So, mail your Christmas cards early this year. But at least there are 12 days in Christmas and the USPS will have until Jan 5, 2009 to deliver them.

So, I put on my Professors cap and believe that I can answer many of these “How to Write and Develop Software for the Beginner” questions on a new Blogger blog.  As time permits, and while I’m in the office, I try to any beginner or advance questions on writing and developing software.