Wayne and Erika Pfeiler

I've improved the free cell phone uploader on our site. Now, you can browse the Gallery and send ringers, images, etc directly to your phone. Previously, you'd have to manually type in a jump code link, or else download a file from the gallery and then re-upload it to your phone. The new method I've worked out is much simpler.

Here's how it works: Go to the uploader gallery. You'll see a new box at the top of the page where you can type in your phone number. Do that and hit the set button. Next, click through the gallery categories to find something you want to send to your phone. You'll see a 'send now' button below each item in the gallery. Click that button for any files you like, and an SMS message will be sent to your phone with a link to that file. Then use your cell phone to follow the link in the SMS message and download the free file.

As always, the phone uploader and the gallery are totally free. Be sure to understand your cell phone plan since your company might charge you for SMS messages, or downloads. For instance, I use a Sprint Vision plan that gives me 50 free SMS messages each month and unlimited downloads. As long as I don't receive more than 50 SMS messages, this process it totally free.

Let me know what you think of the uploader and enjoy!

Posted by Wayne at 11:20 AM | Permalink

http://www.srmun.org/
I've been -very- busy lately updating and css'ing this website for the Southern Regional Model United Nations (SRMUN). What's SRMUN? It's a collegiate-level model UN held each November a little before Thanksgiving, usually in Atlanta, GA. Around 500-600 students come from around the country to compete, learn, and have fun. I've been involved with the group since my sophomore year in college (1999). Man I'm getting old. Anway, it's a blast and I'm serving as Secretary of the Board of Directors now. So if your college is involved in model UN, you should check out SRMUN. Registration for November just opened, hurry and reserve your countries now! :-)

Posted by Wayne at 08:59 PM | Permalink

If I've done a good job, you probably can't tell.

But behind the scenes, I've moved my website to a new hosting company. I had been hosting the website with Globat since January 2005, but I've become very unhappy with all the limitations they place on customers and their high renewal rates. So the new hosting company is Site5.com. This new company provides many more cool features, more storage, faster servers, faster ping times, better and faster customer service all for less than Globat charges!

You may see some new features coming to the site soon, as I have time to add them. But for now, you (hopefully) won't notice much difference in how the site looks and works. Please let me know if you do!

Posted by Wayne at 04:33 PM | Permalink

I got a funny comment from IP address 210.21.235.73 early this morning. They used the email address denia@mail.com and were trying to advertise a link for "sports betting ebooks" and another link to "buy horny goat weed cheap".
No Thanks.

If you Google that email address, you'll see a bunch of similar comment spam messages with some variant of the common line "Hello, it's a very good site too".

Posted by Wayne at 09:17 AM | Permalink

This is very cool. I've added a new utility to the website that lets you upload ringers, images, animations, and even java applications to your cell phone. All for free.

If your cell phone carrier charges you for ala carte data usage, you might get a per kilobyte charge. Otherwise if you have Sprint Vision, or a similar plan with your carrier that lets you access the internet or download ringers and wallpapers, it should be totally free.

I've been working on it for a while, so check it out. Just click on "Free cell phone uploader" on the left sidebar, or you could click right here too.

Posted by Wayne at 01:24 AM | Permalink

How interesting!

Today I had two comments left on the site concerning the cell phone ringer that had zero to do with the topic. So I got curious and looked closer at them. They were both posted at exactly 5:28 pm, from IP # 82.94.251.206

One was from "Merideth Carleton" and the other from "Allison Trump". Each left an URL for a different site, something silly about guessing numbers. You can google these names and actually see basically carbon copies of the comments. I think these were from some automated spider that spams MT commenting systems to advertise other websites.

Posted by Wayne at 05:51 PM | Permalink

The website's been acting a little screwy on my end, so we haven't posted much lately. Anybody out there notice any problems?

Posted by Wayne at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I just upgraded to MT 3.2

Posted by Wayne at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was just looking through my webstats, and I saw 77 people had views my tip on how to make a cell phone ringer for free. For our site, that's a lot of views for one page. So I looked deeper into it, and I found that most of those came from Yahoo! search engine. Apparently, we have the #1 result for the search string on Yahoo! Pretty cool. I may add a comments link soon for people who use that tip. Thanks for everyone's interest!

Posted by Wayne at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Did you know that my grandmother is an author? She recently published a book, Before the Dawn, about people and events leading up to the birth of Alexander the Great. I suppose it's technically historical fiction, but she's been working on it for many years, and even made a trip to Greece for research. You can check it out at Ki-Eea-Key or click on the Faye link under Friends on my main page. Her book is available now on Amazon.com in soft cover and hard cover.

Posted by Wayne at 11:30 PM | Permalink

I checked the logs for the website today, and I see we've had visitors from all over the world. I'm not sure what the attraction is, but I think it's pretty cool. In particular, we've had visitors from Trinidad and Tobago, Belgium, and most recently Saudi Arabia. Welcome to any visitors from across the seas. Please feel free to leave comments on the site if you care to. Unfortunately, we mostly speak English only. Erika might be able to chat a bit in German and French. However, I took several years of Latin and a few weeks of ancient Greek, so I'm mostly useless ;)

Recently I saw a really cool perl applet that will display the geocode information from website visitors. It looked like more than a 1-hour project to implement, so if I get ambitious, that might appear on the site soon.

Posted by Wayne at 03:46 PM | Permalink

Erika and I love pointing out funny signs and products we see, and we thought we could share some of them on here. So I added a new section to the photo gallery called Funny Stuff. Go check it out.

Posted by Wayne at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The following instructions should help you to learn how to make your own cellphone ringers for free. I think this is pretty cool, since Sprint charges users for ringers that expire after a set time. The ringers you make yourself will never expire, and shouldn't cost you anything except possibly data charges on your phone. If you have a SprintPCS Vision or similar data plan already, the following should be totally free. If you don't have such a plan, you might be charged based on how many kilobytes you download onto your phone.

The first thing is to make sure you have these prerequisites:

Sprint or other cell phone allowing downloaded polyphonic ringers

mp3 file

mbuzzy.com user account (free)
Qualcomm Purevoice (free, download here)
WinAmp (free, download here)
Any .wav file editing program

1) Select your favorite mp3 file.

2) Use Winamp* to convert the .mp3 into a .wav file (it may be large ~50mb).

3) Use your favorite wav editing program to clip the wav down to under 30 seconds.

4) Use Windows Sound Recorder* to convert the .wav file to 8.0 kHz, 16-bit mono format.

5) Use Qualcomm Purevoice* to convert the .wav file to a .qcp file.

6) Upload the .qcp to mbuzzy.com* and send the file to your cell phone.

7) Use your phone to download the new ringer

8) Try out the ringer, you're done!

Posted by Wayne at 04:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've decided to add a section, called "Tips from Wayne", where I can help people learn technical things. If you have a Sprint PCS cell phone and would like to learn how to make and upload ringers to your phone for free, check it out. I had a hard time finding a good guide on how to do this, so I decided to make one myself. Let me know what you think of it, and how it works for you. If there's something else that you'd like to learn how to do let me know, and I'll start making a list.

Posted by Wayne at 02:19 AM | Permalink

It was brought to my attention today that people couldn't leave comments on here. That's wasn't our intention, so I took a look and found out I had a setting wrong. Anyway, it should be fixed now, so feel free to leave any comments you like. If there's a problem like that in the future, just send us an email and we'll take a look at it. The way a comment works on here is we have to approve it after you post one, so you won't be able to see it instantly. Have fun!

Posted by Wayne at 09:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've given the website drastic cosmetic surgery. Since the old page was pretty plain and boring, I decided to incorporate the blog as the major component. But don't worry, all the original stuff can still be found here, in about the same place it was before. Photo gallery and webmail still work and have links to the left on the main page. weather.com's tile didn't want to cooperate with PHP, so I ditched it in favor of a new one. Yes, I've also changed the main page from index.html to index.php... It's just better that way for now at least. There's a forwarding page for anybody who linked to the old one. I'm not sure if this color scheme will stay, but the general layout of the site should be pretty constant for a while.
Anyway, let me know what you think. Try out the Comments link below this post to share your thoughts.

Posted by Wayne at 03:52 AM | Permalink

Going in reverse chronological order, I can now talk about the first install of this thing. I was able to make the back end run, but I couldn't get the front end to do anything, and I couldn't seem to do anythign to change the templates. Also I somehow crashed the blog when I tried to change it to Dynamic. So, I went on to the second (previous) install.

Posted by Wayne at 10:55 PM | Permalink

So apparently I need to add several posts to see how the format is supposed to look.

So on the 2nd install of MT, I somehow royally messed up the templates, and couldn't fix it. Thus I went to the third (current) install...

Posted by Wayne at 10:51 PM | Permalink

Okay, this is the third time I'm installing MT. lalala

Posted by Wayne at 10:49 PM | Permalink