When Is Starbucks “Sweet 15” Free Drink Going Mobile?
With the Starbucks mobile app and Mobile Card, it’s a wonder why they haven’t moved their free Sweet 15 drink offer to a mobile platform as well. Don’t get me wrong, I love getting these postcards in the mail, but keeping track of them and their expiration date is somewhat humbug. But I guess that is the point. If I forget to use the card, then it’s my loss and Starbucks’ gain.
But still, if I can pay for my Holiday-themed Peppermint Mocha with my iPhone, why can’t I redeem my free drink using my iPhone?
Forever Begins on November 18
Have you noticed the recurring theme of “forever” in the upcoming Twilight saga, Breaking Dawn? Here’s one example from Twilight’s official YouTube channel.
I guess Breaking Dawn is the beginning of Bella’s immortal life forever with Edward, so it is appropriate. In any case, the forever of Breaking Dawn in only a few weeks away on November 18.
Who Is Scott Kaneshiro?
No, Scott Kaneshiro is not the next coming of Glenn Miyashiro. The common sounding Scott Kaneshiro is a designer from Mililani who’s the winner of the Hawaii SPAM design contest with his SPAM Shaka.
For his design, Scott wins $1000, a year supply of SPAM, and his name printed on every can of SPAM sold in Hawaii – that’s pretty cool.
Is Bigger Better?
Inspired by the “big” layout in The Unseasoned Wok, I figured I’d see what Pulpconnection would look like if I spaced things out. So I went from a three-column layout to two columns.
The main column when from 540 pixels to 680 pixels wide and the sidebar went from 195 pixels to 260 pixels. The primary reason for the main column size is to accommodate wide aspect ratio videos on YouTube (see the Christina Perri Breaking Dawn post) and the medium-size image setting in WordPress.
More playing around and tweaking for sure, but it does seem like bigger is indeed better.
Update: Expanded the sidebar to 300px. Might try for 2 columns in this single column for the Powered By graphics.
How to Integrate Instagram?
I’m looking for a way to integrate my Instagram activity here. There are a few WordPress plugins that update a widget with your Instagram images, but I prefer posting my Instagram image on Pulpconnection rather than displayed in a sidebar widget.
Any ideas?
Trying the Ubiquity Fix
After upgrading to 10.7.2, I’ve noticed system slowdowns at random times. Not sure what triggers it, but my system bogs down and eventually becomes unusable. I came across this tip related to iCloud and hopefully, this fixes the slowdown.
Music from Christina Perri, Video from Breaking Dawn?
Yes please. A Thousand Years (the official music video).
I became a fan of Christina Perri’s music from Lovestrong. And, have you pre-ordered the Breaking Dawn Part 1 soundtrack yet?
My Apologies!
My sincerest apologies to those on Facebook and Twitter who were flooded by old posts from the #Archives. For the past day, it seems like a WordPress plugin, Tweet Old Post, went crazy and began posting every few seconds vice every 20 hours as configured.
Reliable @abaggy and @cocobeanheart told me about the aggressiveness of my archive posts, and I was totally clueless what they were talking about. Then I saw my timeline filled with Archive posts. Yikes!
Sadly, I think my server was so busy serving up these posts/tweets that I couldn’t access it. I went into my Twitter account to unauthorize the plugin, and that seemed to give my server some breathing room. From the WP admin page, I also unauthorized the plugin from Twitter and then deactivated it.
So what happened? I’m not sure. There are several recent turn of events that probably contributed to this craziness. To help figure out my sites’s (in)stability, I provisioned a virtual private server for my MySQL backend. This process took little over a day before all my various, scattered databases were migrated to my new virtual server. Last night, I noticed I was getting a database connection error across all my sites. All configurations looked right but apparently wasn’t. I generated a trouble ticket for this incident and went to bed.
This morning I got a reply from the Help Desk saying everything looked okay. And yes it was. All my sites were working once again. Weird. But also over this time frame, the WP plugin Tweet Old Post started doing its thing, really, really well. I didn’t notice all the tweets every few minutes originating from my account. Again, sorry for flooding your Twitter and Facebook timelines with all these updates.
So, it might be that the migration of my databases looked like new DB entries. Therefore Tweet Old Post activated and started tweeting out all these “new” old posts and ran crazy trying to catch up. Up to this point Tweet Old Post worked as expected, so I’m not knocking this plugin. This is probably an anomaly triggered by unique technical changes to my WP and MySQL backend.
Again, I apologize to all who got too much pulp from my site. Sadly, I’ll have to endure the Twitter followers I lost due to this outbreak and all the spambots I picked up.
