One of my domains from early on had “Private Registration”, meaning that WHOIS info is not displayed for that domain (I’ve since decided I don’t really care about that). GoDaddy manages their Private Registration through a sister/child/whatever company called “Domains By Proxy”.

The Process

To transfer my domain, I need to remove private registration.

To remove private registration, I need to log in to my Domains By Proxy account. Whenever I purchase private registration through Godaddy, it’s supposed to send me a customer number for Domains by Proxy (note the wording there). So to log in to Domains By Proxy, I have to find an email from GoDaddy with my customer number. I found (via online search) that the password is the same as my GoDaddy password.

Then I log on to Domains By Proxy, remove private registration, unlock my domain in Godaddy, and get the transfer authorization code.

The Problem

None of the emails I have on record from GoDaddy contain any mention of my Domains By Proxy login information. I’ve seen other accounts where people haven’t received their information either. I don’t believe I have deleted these emails, I am generally good about keeping them. I’m pretty sure I never received them. I tried logging on to Domains By Proxy with my GoDaddy login info, and that did not work.

I also tried to retrieve my DBP customer number by going through the “forgotten my login information” form. But it didn’t work, which was my fault– I had originally registered the domain with an old email address that no longer exists. So I presume that DBP was trying to send info to that email address.

At this point I was getting a little discouraged and was about to fill out the huge form at Domains By Proxy that requires me to prove my identity by faxing them a copy of my drivers license and requires a three-day waiting period.

The Solution

Luckily, I found a search result that gave me the following tip:

• In the GoDaddy product overview page, select another domain name and start the process to add Private Registration to it (click “Add” in the Private Registration column for a domain that doesn’t have it).
• In the modal window that pops up, near the bottom is a prompt that says “Select your Domains By Proxy account”
• There should be a choice that contains your customer number (8-ish digits). Use that customer number to log on to Domains By Proxy, and use your GoDaddy password.

Go crazy.

We’re going TV-free – and to celebrate, we’re giving away a free TV (you see what I did there?).

You probably don’t want this. It’s not new, light, or sleek. It’s one more thing to use up space in your room and time in your life. Hopefully, there’s someone around you who is more important to you than watching another sitcom on a standard-def, 27-inch CRT. Heck, in order to even get over-the-air reception, you’ll need to get one of those analog-to-digital converter boxes. And an antenna.

Hopefully all this kind of explains why we’re getting rid of it. To boil it down, we just don’t need it. We’d rather spend time with the baby and each other. We don’t particularly use it except for sports and (sometimes) news, and those can be done on the computer if we need. At some point we’ll need to figure out how to handle the Olympics.

So we’re really giving it away, but you’ll need to act quickly if you do want it (for whatever reason). Otherwise we’ll be taking it to Goodwill within the next couple days.

Because of the complexity of trying to manage “who can see what”, especially on multiple social networks, I personally favor a “keep it simple” approach:

Post everything publicly; and assume everything you post is public.

So what does this mean?

Choose carefully what you post online, and post it publicly

Only post a status, photo, or video if you’re OK with the whole world seeing it. If you’re not OK with that, don’t post it. Remember that anything you post CAN BE directly or indirectly shared with the whole world. Might as well put it out there to start with, right?

Whatever you choose to post can (and likely will) be viewed in a job search, by a co-worker or boss, pastor, potential date, parents, family, and more. It’s a no-brainer that you need to think about what you post instead of relying on Facebook to protect it.

Additionally, when I post publicly, it removes the temptation to post something that could be harmful or hurtful if it gets out. For example, I’d love to post horror stories about some of my web design clients. But that’s professionally a bad idea and the story could make its way to those people.

If you have something private to discuss with another person, Twitter & Facebook both have good private-messaging systems. Email and the phone work too.

Also: Check over your Facebook profile. Is your phone number shared publicly, or just with friends? What’s your current job, and who can see that? Most of the Facebook setttings are “Friends”, “Friends of Friends”, or “Everyone”. Choose carefully – but remember that even if you put restricted settings on some parts of your profile, they can still get out there if someone shares them. Are you OK with that? If not, take it down and hope nobody has already shared it.

Try to control what other people can say about you

Now what you’re all waiting for – actually digging into Facebook’s privacy settings. Click the little triangle at the top right of your Facebook page and choose “Privacy Settings”. Make sure – like above – your default status is “public”.

“How you Connect” and “How Tags Work”

Here are my settings for these sections (click each to enlarge):

As you can see, the idea here is that anything I post is public (that is, filtered before I post it). Then, I restrict others from tagging me in photos, checking me in to places (even if I’m not there), etc. – so it reduces the risk that someone can negatively impact my reputation in this way.

Kudos to Facebook for seriously revamping this interface – but it’s still needlessly complicated.

Also: Be careful of approving Facebook apps since they can access and share your information. I got an app request the other day for some birthday calendar thing. Uh, no thanks.

Privacy is your responsibility

Don’t rely on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ to protect your privacy. Anyone can share your information from those sites with the whole world – and we haven’t even mentioned what these large companies may do with your data. Did you know that all public tweets are archived in the Library of Congress?

I always assume anything that goes online is out of my control – therefore, I need to control it before it gets there. Posting my status publicly helps me to do that and it puts me in the right mindset when I hit that “Post” button.

Do you have anything to add? Write a comment! Of course, remember, everyone can see it!

This past Sunday I went out cycling. Since I’ve been a bit out of shape, this was a tough one even though it was only just over 33 miles and flat-to-rolling. It was cold (almost freezing) and there was a headwind for the last half of the ride. Overall, it was not my proudest moment as I struggled over the last hill and back to the car.

Every time I run or cycle, I figure I need three things in order to make the workout beneficial:

1. A plan before the workout
2. Execution of the plan during the workout (or adaptation if conditions change)
3. A takeaway – i.e., what do I learn from this workout?

The problem is, I didn’t have much of a plan this time, which meant that I didn’t do too well in execution during the ride.

The plan, such as it was, was to take it pretty easy and hammer the last third of the ride if I was feeling good. That’s not much of a plan – but it’s a good start. I probably would have done better if I had set a goal pace for the first 12 miles (which takes me to a landmark in this route). So I could plan to not exceed that pace, which would leave me more room for error later in the ride.

I also wasn’t prepared well for the cold or – especially – the wind. I didn’t bother to check the weather and if I had known what was in store, I would probably have ridden differently.

So because of a lack of plan and information leading in to the ride, I executed poorly. I rode too fast at the beginning because I “felt good”, only to have my legs practically drop out from under me toward the end of the ride. Again, this route isn’t that long, but I haven’t been riding much lately either and it was probably asking a little too much of my body.

When I turned into the wind, I got cold and completely lost concentration. My mind wandered all over the place, and pretty soon I realized I was freezing and was moving pretty slowly. I was able to get back in control and relax a bit, but the damage was done.

So… obviously the takeaway is there for me – since I’ve been out of shape, my preparation and ability to adapt to changing conditions needs to be sharpened. Even an easy ride or run needs to be carefully planned with a goal and I need to focus on improving each time I’m out there. For this ride, the takeaway is the important part since it’s all that I can control at this point.

Training is 99% mental. Maybe 100%. I don’t worry about being in shape physically because if I’m out there running or cycling consistently, my body will get in shape – it just happens. I just have to avoid injury. So I see each workout as a chance to work on my ability to focus and control all aspects of the workout. That’s how I get tougher.

So even a bad workout can be beneficial.

The goal this time

You know how I said I’ve been doing some cycling? Well recently I’ve gotten away from that and I would figure that between inconsistent cycling, and no running, I’m probably not in the best shape of my life. So I don’t have a particular goal quite yet other than the fact that I need to get going again as a matter of habit.

I would like to get a goal together – perhaps a marathon or a triathlon – but what that may be remains to be seen. Timewise, it’s difficult to get out.

Today…

… not that I’m going to do this EVERY DAY, but…

I took a nice evening run out at Salem’s Minto Brown Park. Trying to keep it SLOW and easy in order to take care of my knee the best I can.

Blogging?

My blogging goal here will be primarily to keep myself motivated. In addition, I’d like to be able to share some details about running in and around Salem in hopes of collaborating with others on where the best places and routes are. Maybe I’ll add a photo or two.

So stick around and see what happens. Do you have anything to add to this? Write a comment!

At this point, there’s still a lot unfinished:

• I’m going to make the website responsive – meaning it will reflow the content to fit tablet and mobile screens
• I have not done any Internet Explorer testing. I think I will do the minimum make the site usable in IE8 (there may be some work to do) and completely ignore IE7 and IE6.
• Some areas of the design need polishing – the header and footer, for example.
• Some development needs to be done – for example, the search results need to be displayed in a more friendly fashion.

So if you come across bugs or problems, let me know. I’ll be fixing a bunch of stuff in the meantime.

Visit Opt-e-Web.com

I am the website design director for Opt-e-Web, a web and tech agency in Salem. Opt-e-Web provides these services:

• Website design and development, and graphic design
• Web marketing and SEO services
• IT and computer services

Opt-e-Web generally works with clients in northwest and central Oregon, including Salem, Portland, and Bend. We also work with some clients outside these areas, including one in the UK – so feel free to give us a call.

While you’re at it, see all my bookmarks on Delicious.

See the new http://opt-e-web.com

Opt-e-Web is a web design, SEO & marketing, and IT company based in Salem, Oregon. Our new design stresses all three aspects of the business and provides a clean and friendly online experience for our clients.

Let me know what you think!

Window Manger / Desktop Environment:

• Subtle Window Manager – Manual tiling window manager with a twist. Open a window, and it appears in the center of your screen. Hit <Windows key> + <Keypad 7> to move the window to the top left corner of the screen (see where the “7″ is on your keypad?). Hit <Windows key> + <Keypad 2> to move the window to the bottom of the screen and stretch it full width. That’s the basic idea of Subtle, although there are some other features as well. I like it because it’s both keyboard- and mouse-friendly, and I can arrange windows exactly the way I want.
• Clipit – A clipboard manager that keeps track of text I select and copy. Little utility but incredibly useful. Also, Linux is nice because you can temporarily copy text by simply selecting it, and paste with a middle-click (technically, this is a feature of the X window system)
• No links here because I’m lazy, but I set my GTK and icon theme with LXAppearance, my background with Nitrogen, and my panel is built in to Subtle. I like having a launch bar, it’s handy and fits my workflow. I use Adeskbar for this.

Terminal Apps:

• Roxterm – easy-to-configure, lightweight VTE terminal without Gnome dependencies. I’d use Gnome-terminal if I was running Gnome, but I’m not. Same goes for XFCE Terminal. I like urxvt but for me, it’s always more of a pain to configure than it’s worth.
• Ranger – Really a nice column-based, Finder-like file manager that uses Vim-ish keybindings. Kind of a pain to configure, but I did it once and am keeping my config files from now on. Works best if you install “atool”, which is kind of a meta-compression-decompression utility.
• moc – a music player that pretty much just works. Awesome and super lightweight.
• pianobar – Pandora.com music streamer. Much nicer than Pandora’s Flash player, but Pandora is revamping their website. Still, this has to be better than having another tab open in your web browser. There’s also a GTK pianobar client called “Pithos”.
• pyradio – Internet radio streaming. It’s just a single python script, and I had to edit it just a little to work in Arch. Requires mplayer, which also comes in handy for listening to single audio files or watching videos.
• tyrs – a fantastic Twitter client. Currently I’m getting some kind of error with it, but that might be something in my configuration.
• vim – best text editor known to mankind. Incredibly extensible.
• Also: Git, Tig (visualization of Git repository history), pngcrush and optipng (PNG compression, I have a script that uses these), Wicd-curses (network manager), whois, qalc, scrot (screenshots), probably a few others.
• Used in past: Alpine (I absolutely love this email client but it just doesn’t fit my workflow now, I think. I might need to try it again.), Wordgrinder (really basic word processing), Abook (address book/contacts), Newsbeuter (RSS reader, I prefer Google Reader), Calcurse and wyrd (calendar apps, I prefer wyrd but I need to have shareable Google Calendars), ikog (todo-list), hnb (hierarchical notebook), cursetheweather (weather report)

Graphical Apps

• Zim – a desktop wiki, which to me really means a super-handy note-taking application. This is probably my favorite app that I use. Perfect for organizing notes (including images, links, and other media) and easily sync’ed with Dropbox. As a plus, it runs on Windows also, so I can use Dropbox to sync my notebook and access my notes on Windows when I need to work in that environment.
• Komodo Edit – Another extensible text editor with a liberal dose of vim keybindings (optional). Fits my development workflow better than Vim. Can keep code snippets as well. For HTML, be sure to install the HTML Toolkit extension.
• Font-manager – great little app for categorizing, browsing, enabling, disabling fonts on your system. Does what it says on the tin.
• GIMP (Development version) (no link, of course) – The development version of GIMP adds a couple great features: single-window mode (especially nice for a tiling window manager) and layer groups. It’s also quite stable – anecdotally, I have friends who are always complaining about Photoshop crashing, and I’ve only had a couple crashes with the development version of GIMP. The stable versions of GIMP are always quite good. The only problem I have right now is some kind of messed-up antialiasing settings that result in a greenish outline on white text. I need to convert text to paths, then path to selection, then fill with white to work around this. This wasn’t a problem for me on Ubuntu.
• Zathura and Jumanji – Ever used the Vimperator extension for Firefox? Zathura is a PDF viewer and Jumanji is a web browser with similar interface to Vimperator. Think – a web browser completely controllable with the keyboard, no need ever to visit the mouse. Excellent.
• Others: Firefox, Inkscape, Skype, Dropbox (not really graphical on Arch), Filezilla (FTP), Calibre (E-book organizer), Mirage (lightweight image viewer), gpick (color scheme editor), Shotwell (photo manager), LibreOffice, Shutter (screenshot tool) and more. I much prefer lightweight, single-use apps but will use a heavier app if it’s better or fits my workflow better.
• Others I’ve used in the past and liked: Digikam (photo management, KDE app), Geany (code editor), Jajuk (ridiculously heavyweight and incredibly ugly music player, but some sweet features), Epiphany (Gnome webkit browser)

Things I wish for:

• Easier/better workflow for testing websites in IE 6-9 without having to boot Windows.
• Better/any CMYK support in GIMP and Inkscape, and better PSD/AI/EPS import and export in these apps. The KDE image viewer Gwenview does a decent job opening PSD files, but only for viewing.
• GIMP “Layer Effects” plugin updated to work in development GIMP
• Ubuntu Unity overlay scrollbars in Arch

That about does it for me. As I noted, there are obviously other programs I use, but this takes me through my normal daily workflow.

Screenshots: