But we’re stuck. In the Ellenwood line, we can’t seem to get any further back than my third-great-grandfather, John S(tark?) Ellenwood. I believe I have connected his wife, Sophia (Wilson) to another family tree through ancestry.com, but I’m most interested in tracing the Ellenwood family name.

After looking at scans of orignal U.S. Census records from the mid-1800’s I am quite confident that John S. Ellenwood was born in Maine right around 1810 and resided for at least 20-30 years in Pelham, New Hampshire employed as a stone cutter. His son Alonzo is my second-great-grandfather and from there, my family has a fairly solid view of our lineage. Anyone know anything more about John S. Ellenwood of Pelham, NH? I’d love to hear from you!

In La Crosse, (my former place of residence) the only local shop with real character is Jules Coffee House on Pearl Street, downtown. I know there are many other local place, but frankly, non of the other local shops have the character I’m referring to. No offense to any of these other fine establishments; they just aren’t my cup-o-coffee.

In the Twin Cities area (where I’m located now) the search for local places is far more difficult. There’s just so many more streets to search. one recent find is Audubon Coffee at the corner of Johnson St. & 29th St. in North Minneapolis. It could almost be Jule’s long lost twin of a cafe.

Hopefully as I find more hot spots, I’ll take the time to post them

Building a CMS from the ground up has always been a dream of mine, kind of the ultimate “capstone” project for my career. I love the ideas that are addressed; the high-level questions that need answers; the administration of such large projects; the theorizing and planning; the input of users, developers and designers. There are just so many exciting aspects to such a project.

To me, the most complicated aspect of the whole development process is understanding what our users will need. Instead of building a feature set and then fitting our customers into said set, I want a CMS that builds itself around our customers. (Yeah, I know, that statement sounds like some lofty political campaign slogan, but does that make it any less true or honest?) Cameron Moll recently discussed a similar concept over at his site, Authentic Boredom. His post discusses the fact that as an industry, we’re finally getting the concept of a good user experience being beneficial to our customers. Cameron then goes on to point out one “next logical step” in building good experiences: allowing the user to build their own experience. That brings us back to my post and the development of ACTIVEA.

Cameron’s article and the related comments point out a few possible examples of what user-designed experience might look like; but really, we haven’t gotten there. What would such a CMS (or any type of website/application) look like if the experience was really left up to the user? And the most difficult question: How can we design ACTIVEA to accomplish exactly that?

I haven’t the slightest clue.

Individual A: “You brought me my computer last Monday.  I went to use the external mouse and I have a connection with a round end but my computer needs a connection with a flat end.  Can you get me the correct mouse or direct me as to where to get this?”

SOFTWARE Support Group: “I usually squish the round end with pliers until its flat and it usually works unless a wire gets bent. You have to be careful if the wires bent the data can’t get thru.”

In no particular order, some with links & some without:

1. A new racket & accessories (balls, racket cleaner)
2. A few pairs of jeans
3. Any number of the following CD’s: Collective Soul, Collective Soul, Flyleaf, Mute Math, Mainstay, Beck, Nirvana, Skillet, Chevelle, Chevelle
4. Any of the following books: VW Jetta Shop Manual, Bulletproof Web Design, Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life, Beowolf: A Verse Translation
5. A Creeper, Shop Stool,  & Covered Oil Drain Pan
6. And of course, my unicorn, a 2003 Chevy S10 ZR2, Black with all the trimmings.

Here’s to many more miles with the newest member of our family. (Click any photo to enlarge.)

‘Nuf said.

A Quote from Jeffery Zeldman’s latest article, Understanding Web Design posted at A List Apart.

If you care to, look me up. Maybe it’ll help me feel like I didn’t do something I shouldn’t have. Until we meet in some online social network…

“Wizmo is an extremely useful ‘Windows Gizmo’” as the application’s homepage states. Technically speaking, Wizmo is a simple executable that contains many helpful Windows shortcuts run by executing the program with the command you’d like to perform added after the file name as a execution option.

To create a function-key for ejecting the CD Tray, first download Wizmo (wizmo.exe) and put it wherever you’d like as there is no installation to run. I created a folder in My Programs and moved it there.

Next, right-click on your Desktop and go to New > Shortcut. This will start the New Shortcut Wizard. On the first wizard screen, browse to or type the location of wizmo.exe. Click Next to go to the second wizard screen and type a name for your shortcut (I named it Eject CD) and click Finish to complete the wizard.

You should now have a Shortcut on your desktop titled with the name you gave it and a big red circle with a ‘W’ as the icon, but we’re not quite done yet. Right-click on your icon and go to Properties. In the Target field add the text open at the very end of the field, after the quotation marks if there are any. Next click in the Shortcut Key field and on your keyboard, type the function-key combo you’d like to use to open the CD Tray. It should look something like the image on the right.

Note: Finding a function-key combo to use may take some trial-and-error as some function-keys are already assigned to other functions throughout Windows and the applications you have installed. I chose Control+F12 as my combo.

Finally, click OK to apply the settings we just made and close the shortcut Properties window. Now, give your new function key a try! If the combo you chose is available, your CD tray should open. If another task is assigned to your combo, then it won’t work and you’ll have to go back and try another combo in the Properties menu.

You now have a working function-key for your previously inaccessible CD Drive!

There are also a few tricks we can do to clean-up the shortcut we created on the Desktop. First, I changed the icon image to something more meaningful. To do the same, re-open the shortcut Properties and click Change Icon… Then browse to the location of shell32.dll on your computer (it should be C:\WINDOWS\system32\shell32.dll) and click Open. You should see a collection of standard system icons to choose from. I chose one that looks like a CD Drive. Pick whichever icon is meaningful to you and click OK. Click OK again to close the shortcut Properties.

Last, I’m not a big fan of icons cluttering-up my Desktop. I copied the shortcut I created to my Start Menu simply by dragging it and dropping it in the All Programs menu. You can then delete the original shortcut on your desktop.

That’s it! Everything works as desired so I no longer have to walk through a series of steps to open my CD Tray. All I have to do is a quick Control+F12 and it’s open. One could create another shortcut for closing the tray; but for me, it’s just as easy to manually push the tray closed when I’m done.