Flix Brewhouse coming to Round Rock

Round Rock's version of Alamo Draft House is set to open in the summer 2010, the plan is to have six movie screens and six taps of house brewed beer (32 taps total).

http://flixbrewhouse.com

Create a Free Disposable Web Page with DinkyPage

Create a Free Disposable Web Page with DinkyPage: "

Have you ever had the need to create a free web page quickly to share information with a group of people or even a team member? You have to fire up your editor, make the page and then upload the page to the site, find the URL and pass it around.

Now we have discovered a service that does ALL the hard work for you! It’s called DinkyPage and can be found here.

All you need is content and if you want to use pictures, a place to host them.

When you arrive at the Dinky home page you have one large option and a smaller one below. You can create a new free web page or create a custom page with a custom name. This means your page’s URL will be something like www.DinkyPage.com/Name instead of www.DinkyPage.com/74u…

This is a great way to make the URL easy to remember and it looks better in an email. Create one of the links and move on.

If you choose the custom name for your page you will have to input it before your page is created. Next up you will find yourself looking at a What You See Is What You Get editor (WYSIWYG) – this makes creating the page ultra simple.

Start by naming your page in the page title area. This will show up in the web page’s header. Below that you have a text box to enter anything you want. Type in some text and then highlight it. Click the globe with a paperclip in the toolbar to create a hyperlink. This means when your reader reads this page they can click on this line of text to go somewhere else. The link will appear underlined. Go ahead and try it out.

The dialogue box looks like this:

For a normal link just leave it as is, but if you want to make the link a Mail To: or link to another portion of the page pull down the link type box and choose accordingly:

Now like I said before if you want to add images to your site they need to be hosted elsewhere. You can hotlink to an image by right-clicking on the website it is hosted on and selecting properties. Copy the image’s full URL and paste it into the URL box. The image will appear in the preview box on the right.

Hit OK and your image will appear with your text like so:

So below you can see my page with some text, a hyperlink and an image. I then hit the Publish Changes button in the upper left hand corner and the site is now live on the world wide web. You can see this page here: http://dinkypage.com/74u.

This is what your page looks like online. Not too shabby for a few minutes of work.

And if you used a custom name for your URL it will look something like this:

If you are feeling adventurous you can click on the HTML mode button in the upper right hand corner and edit the real deal HTML of your page. This is awesome for adding other code into the page or pasting in a ready made document.

Partly cloudy, chance of labels

Partly cloudy, chance of labels: "by Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineer, Blogger (Krakow, Poland)

In April, we announced that we wanted to hear from you about your wish list for features in Blogger. Many of you said that the label gadget should be more flexible. Today we are rolling out two enhancements to the label gadget.

Label Cloud

Previously, the label gadget showed a list of labels—and by far the most requested enhancement was to present the labels as a 'cloud' instead of as a bulleted list. That's now supported in the gadget directly:

Once enabled, the more popular labels appear in a bigger font than the less popular labels:


Selected Labels

If you've been on Blogger for a while, you might have more labels than you know what to do with. Don't want to show all of your labels in the widget? No problem: go to the label gadget settings and choose 'Selected labels.' You will be able to select a subset of labels to be displayed in the widget:


We hope you like it!

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

"

Google Reader Unleashes A Gaggle Of Nice Social And Feed Management Updates

Google Reader Unleashes A Gaggle Of Nice Social And Feed Management Updates: "

A few days ago, I sent out a tweet wondering how long it would be until Google Reader added a tweet button to the bottom of each feed item. My guess was that it would be very soon. I was quite right. Today, the Google Reader team has unveiled a bunch of new updates to the product, including, yes, the ability to easily tweet any item.

But that’s hardly all this update contains. You can also now easily send feed items to a number of places including Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, Blogger, and others. To enable any of these, simply go to the “Settings” area of Google Reader and enable the ones you want to use. If the services you want aren’t listed, you can even customize the “Send To” feature to enable sending items just about anywhere.

Another new feature allows you to easily subscribe to feeds owned by people you are contacts with. This is an obvious, but nice addition, as it makes it easier to locate feeds you may be interested in — assuming, of course, that you’re actually interested in the people you follow on Google Reader. This feature also includes Twitter updates, so you can easily import all of those and see that person’s tweets through Google Reader if you don’t feel like scanning Twitter all day.

But the best feature of the bunch may be the ability to have more control over the “Mark all as read” functionality. We all use the “Mark all as read” button when we’re too far behind on our feeds to possibly catch up. But now you can just mark items that older than a day, a week, or two weeks as read, saving the newest ones for you to still be able to read. That’s a great idea.

Google Reader still has some social issues, but it’s hard to argue with any of these features.

"

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am a sucker for this kind of movie. It is an "up all night in the city, having an adventure" type of film. Similar but totally different films: Judgment Night, Go, The Warriors, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and even Adventures in Babysitting.

Incredible songs make me want the Soundtrack for my iPod.

I am getting a bit tired of Michael Cera playing the Dufus underdog rolls he seem so well suited for.

Put it in your Netflix queue and enjoy.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling

My review

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

I finished book 2 just as Taylor finished book 3 of the Harry Potter series. I don't think that I will ever be able to catch up with her at the rate she is flying through these books.

It is nice to have a little book club right here in our own house, just Father & Daughter.


View all my reviews.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling

My review

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

I do not know why it took 14 years for me to "discover" this book. I guess I was waiting for my daughter to be old enough to read it first. Not bad for a "children's book".


View all my reviews.

Therefore, Repent!

Therefore, Repent! by Jim Munroe

My review

Rating: 2 of 5 stars

My first stab at reading a Graphic Novel. The plot twist at the end boosted my rating to "it was ok". I would have liked this better as a traditional novel. I need more exposition to flesh out a story enough to hold my attention.

I have not yet sworn off Graphic Novels, but one more like this will push me into the uninterested group of readers.


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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

My review

Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Interesting future history where there is no death, set for the most part in Disney World. You can buy this book at your local bookstore or Amazon, but it is also available for free from the author's website: http://craphound.com/down/


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Shopgirl

Shopgirl by Steve Martin

My review

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Nice to read a book by Steve Martin that is not humor based.


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