George W. Bush’s speech after the capture of Saddam:

The success of yesterday’s mission is a tribute to our men and women now serving in Iraq. The operation was based on the superb work of intelligence analysts who found the dictator’s footprints in a vast country. The operation was carried out with skill and precision by a brave fighting force. Our servicemen and women and our coalition allies have faced many dangers in the hunt for members of the fallen regime, and in their effort to bring hope and freedom to the Iraqi people. Their work continues, and so do the risks. Today, on behalf of the nation, I thank the members of our Armed Forces and I congratulate ‘em.

Barack Obama’s speech after the killing of bin Laden:

And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network. Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and [I ] authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad , Pakistan.

This is very important. Don’t think that you’ll never be questioned by police because you’re a good person living a good life. My wife and her entire office were questioned a couple of years ago by a SWAT team just because of where they worked, so no one can say with certainty that they will never be questioned by the law or government.

I’ll come out and say that the first man comes out of the chute sounding like a political wacko with a couple of his first statements, but he fully and completely supports everything he says and the second man (an officer with 28 years of interviewing experience) confirms everything the first man said, so keep that in mind when you hear the first man’s fast-paced lecture.

This was very, very eye-opening to me. You can safely ignore the title of the video. The other compilation of this lecture was in 6 parts and entitled “In Praise of the 5th Amendment.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some daredevil young soul decided to do a “Superman jump” off the swing and broke his arm and his parents sued and won a judgment of $20,000 against the district. I ask you this:

As a kid, did you ever perform a Superman jump off the swingset, see who could go highest while jumping, or see if you could go all of the way around the set and got a blood blister from the chains as the slack went away and pinched your fleshy hands?

Yes! Every boy who has a decent set of kahonies has done one or all of these stunts on a swing set.

The difference is that in the 1950s through the early 1990s parents knew innately that “kids will be kids” and some of them have fragile bones and would break them playing on the playground. We always had a kid in a cast somewhere in the 2-3 grades surrounding mine. I broke my nose jumping onto a raft in our pool when I was about 7 years old. Did my parents sue the pool manufacturer, raft manufacturer, or God for creating water that is denser than air?

NO! That would have been laughed out of court in 1988, just as this should have in 2010.

Has every lawyer and judge in this country lost sight of the fact that breaking arms and legs is part of growing up? I would dare say so.

Second item, and this is purely judgmental based on where the lawsuit came from: maybe if the kids parents had a job and weren’t on food stamps, they wouldn’t have needed $20k, because that sure isn’t much money after the lawyer takes his cut. All they succeeded in is making their kid a weenie (he’ll realize it by the time he’s 40) and ruining the fun of all of the other kids in the school district.

This ranks up there with the coffee lawsuits against McDonalds 1n 1994 and a recent one this year against Starbucks after SHE spilled the tea on her son. Amazingly, the Starbucks lawsuit had over a decade of warnings printed on coffee and tea cups as a result of the McDonald’s lawsuit to warn those who should wear helmets to protect their precious few brain cells that the drink they have just been served hot is, indeed, HOT!

Let’s work on personal responsibility, people.

Starting With the Basics

Your blog obviously has a width set for the content area, and for most sites, this is between 450 and 650 pixels (px) wide. This site, as it is at this moment is using a 640px content area, so I have several WordPress media settings set to create appropriate thumbnail and full-width sizes of my images based on that width. Many of us use a lightbox plugin that enlarges the image when it’s clicked, so the maximum size you want that to go is the size of a laptop screen for those on the go, limiting the largest image you need to be 900px wide or 600px high, whichever is comes first. It does you no good to have a 100px tall image that is 1800px wide on a 13″ laptop. So, what are you supposed to do if you have an image that is too big?

Enter, ImageWell

I discovered this about a week after I got my first Mac: a 6 yr-old, 12″ MacBook running OS X 10.4, rather poorly. I got it used and it clearly needed a lightweight program for image editing rather than trying to run Photoshop Elements on it. Looking at the capture above, you can see how simple the window is, and that’s about it, but it’s so powerful in little ways.

• You can open images nearly too many ways. There is the drag and drop method of dragging a file from Finder to either the ImageWell icon in the Dock or to the image area of the program itself. You can also Control-click the image area to bring up a dialog box with even more options that make Windows users jealous.
• You can change the image dimensions, compression, file name, file type, save location, watermarks, and orientation all from the main window. This makes for very rapid image processing, especially when you’re creating a gallery. The screenshot of a gallery of our vacation photos here were all later re-sized (and watermarked) using the method described below in just a couple of minutes.

Steps for Resizing

1. Get the image into ImageWell. I usually drag and drop them because I have Finder open at the bottom of my screen.
2. Enter a new height or width based on the orientation of the image. Since this is landscape, I choose 900px wide.
3. Rename the file up at the top and select a location to save it to just below the image. I chose my blog folder on Dropbox. I’ll explain how to set those up in a bit.
4. Sometimes with camera images, you need to rotate the image and re-save it, which is done on the More tab, and you can see Watermark is just to the left of that with watermark options.

5. Every now and then, you’ll want to crop an image or adjust the brightness or contrast, right? Then click Edit at the bottom left for a new screen with those abilities. See the crop tool in the upper right? Click the ImageWell icon on the far left to return to the normal view.



6. Click the Send button to save the image to the location you have selected from the pull-down list (explained below).

If you click Locations on the main screen, you can add all sorts of save-to spots for one-click saving to a folder, FTP, Flickr, ImageShack, or SmugMug, to name a few. While it can be handy to upload straight to FTP for certain blogging platforms, I choose not to for WordPress because it generates thumbnails when uploaded directly into a post, which also associates the files with the post for creating a gallery, as I’ve done with the four trashcan images in a row. You’ll notice that sometimes I create a folder just for a particular time of editing (p2-June is a folder in my blog folder for my vacation photos) because I can easily remove them with the minus button at any time the list gets too long to be easily functional. Click the plus button to create a new entry, select the location type on the right, and then the Location Properties area will take on the new format for the fields required for the location selected. If you selected Folder, click the little ellipses button to bring up a folder selector.

That’s all I can think of to get you started on the road to quicker, easier image re-sizing and saving on your Mac. If there is a better program out there for the money, or even more money, I haven’t seen it. I use ImageWell even when Photoshop Elements is already open because saving the image to one of my preset locations with an easy-access file name change field is faster than what I can do in Photoshop. Admittedly, cropping is faster in Photoshop, but if you’re combining a re-size, re-name, and a crop, go with ImageWell. You’ll be faster every time.

I am fundamentally opposed to Blogger because it’s not as customizable as I need to do what I want. I want fully-customizable or quick and dirty. That’s why I work in WordPress or Posterous. Posterous has a decent amount of control, but I use it because I can post from anywhere with anything quickly and easily without thinking about style. I don’t mind the lack of design control because I don’t want design control in this case. It’s for writing and publishing to Facebook and Twitter.

So, you can imagine my horror as I see that she wants a Blogger blogroll, just because it’s like Blogger. It’s actually a good idea to display what she wanted: the latest blog post title and when it was last updated. Who wants to go to a site that hasn’t been updated all week or month, right?

Then she said it after dinner: “then I want a Blogger site.” I knew she was both joking and serious at the same time. “Nooooo!!!! You’re not getting a Blogger site after all of this WordPress work. You can’t ditch the best blogging platform available just because you want links to show a certain way!”

I tried to explain how much code is involved in getting the RSS information to get the title and the publishing date and said I’d have to hire someone to do that programming for me. Partially true. Well, if I was going to do it myself, it was totally true, but I was holding out hope that there was a plugin that would do exactly what she wanted. There has to be, but it would likely be a matter of whether or not it’s still being updated for WordPress 3.0.

I’ve learned my lesson to not say I will do something and then not do it, but I also knew she had strong suspicions that I can do anything I set out to do. I tell her those stories of my coding conquests almost daily, so it’s possible that there is some slight undue over-confidence in my abilities. She went to bed thinking it wasn’t going to happen…

It took me two tries and to wait about 15 minutes of frustrating testing before Google’s AJAX feed API went through their system before the plugin started working correctly. It was just showing it like before no matter what I did until the API started working. Amazingly, the plugin even has a “Bloggger (TM)” display setting. LOL!

All said and done, I’ve once again proven why I’m the “WordPress go-to guy for WordPress people” and gotten the job done for my most important client. She said she’d pay me for any work I do, but I don’t think she’s got anything I don’t already own.

If this were So You Think You Can Dance, the bottom three would be: Didi Benami, Andrew Garcia, and Katie Stevens. My guess for the ONE leaving tonight: Andrew Garcia because I don’t think he has the fan base of the other two. Katie still has the Miley Cyrus-esque appeal to the teenie boppers and will be there for a while no matter what she does.

Here’s another esteemed colleague of the house of Democrats:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Haeley Vaughn, Alex Lambert, Jermaine Sellers, Katelyn Epperly, John Park, Didi Benami, Katie Stevens, and Andrew Garcia.

Michelle Delamor getting booted was the biggest surprise since “stroke face” girl didn’t make it to the Top 24. It would have been nice for her to stick around long enough for me to learn her name, because she was a natural. That surprise homecoming leaves an extra contestant in my list who will for sure make the Top 12 tonight. It’s a crap shoot among those girls, and here’s why.

Katelyn is a mess on stage, but she’s got the cute factor that tends to keep contestants around. Katie has no clue what she’s doing as an artist, let alone life, so she continually goes for the wrong songs… she should have waited 3 years to grow up. The younger Aaron Kelly is more mature than her, and that’s going to be the difference there. Didi is terrific, as far as I’m concerned, but I’m not sure she has the fanbase to continue.

Then there’s the awful, embarrassing performance that Paige Miles had. Oh. My. Goodness. I was dumbstruck that she chose that song and arranged it with the specific intent to put the audience to sleep.

I’d also like to add that the Top 4 girls are Crystal Bowersox, Lilly Scott, Lacey Brown, and Siobhan Magnus. I’ll be sad when any of those four have to go home. For the guys, I’m only rooting for Big Mike and Lee Dewyze, though Tim Urban finally rocked last night. Perhaps too little too late.

The men, yeah, my picks stand. They just weren’t good, and Todrick Hall may have thrown himself into that mix with such a… strange performance. Alex! Your mullet worked this week. Too bad you’re not cool. Nice radio voice, though.

Katie Stevens – “Breakaway” by Kelly Clarkson
Siobhan Magnus – “House Of The Rising Sun” by The Animals
Lacey Brown – “The Story” by Brandi Carlile
Katelyn Epperly – “I Feel The Earth Move” by Carole King
Didi Benami – “Rhiannon” by Fleetwood Mac
Paige Miles – “Smile” by Nat King Cole/Tony Bennett
Crystal Bowersox – “Give Me One Reason” by Tracy Chapman
Lilly Scott – “I Fall To Pieces” by Patsy Cline

Lee Dewyze – “Fireflies” by Owl City
Alex Lambert – “Trouble” by Ray LaMontagne
Tim Urban – “Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley
Andrew Garcia – “Genie in a Bottle” by Christina Aguilera
Casey James – “You’ll Think of Me” by Keith Urban
Aaron Kelly – “I’m Already There” by Westlife
Todrick Hall – “Somebody To Love” by Queen
Michael Lynche – “This Woman’s Work” by Maxwell