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How you can help Hurricane Ike victims!

You can help the victims of Hurricane Ike by making a financial gift to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. This Fund enables the Red Cross to provide shelter, food, counseling and other assistance to victims of Hurricane Ike, as well as others.

I was shocked to learn that the Red Cross has accrued more than $70 million in debt, caring for victims of the recent Hurricane Gustav. Now completely strapped for cash, they are literally borrowing from everywhere, but have stressed that they will continue to help victims of these disastrous hurricanes, no matter what.

You can donate $5 to American Red Cross disaster relief efforts simply by text messaging the keyword “GIVE” to “2HELP” (24357). Donations will appear on your monthly bill or be debited from your prepaid account balance. Standard text messaging rates apply.

Millions of Houstonians will be grateful for your help during this difficult time!

Our Hurricane Ike Story

For those of you who somehow missed the news, we were recently hit by Hurricane Ike, a Category 2 storm with a storm surge more typical of a Category 3 or 4 storm. We were fortunate to have avoided any major damage, and our power has been restored after nearly 60 hours. More than 2.2 million folks in and around the Houston area are still without electricity. Our story follows…

On Friday, September 12th, we began preparing the house (and yard) for Ike. We setup a shelter in my garage office, since it is the most secure part of our house. Had an air mattress, the kiddos’ sleeping bags, battery-powered lantern and other goodies in there. Outside, I spent an hour tightening up our fence, and then took the reflector from my satellite dish down, since it had the biggest potential to be torn off in high winds.

We spent most of the evening hours in the cul-de-sac, visiting with neighbors who rarely spoke with us otherwise. That was probably the most enjoyable part of the experience. Read the rest of this article »

iTunes 8 Available Today

Apple announced today the immediate availability of iTunes 8, a substantial upgrade to the popular music software for both Mac and PC.

New in iTunes 8…

1. Genius playlists and sidebar. Create a playlist of songs that go great together and get recommendations for new songs.
2. HD TV shows. Buy your favorite shows, including Heroes and The Office, in high definition. Episodes cost just $2.99.
3. New ways to browse. Browse your music, movies, and TV shows by cover art. Quickly skim albums by artist and genre.

iTunes 8 also syncs with your iPod or iPhone much faster than previous versions. All in all, a must-have upgrade.

Fonts Too Small in Apple Mail?

Do HTML messages sent from Outlook users appear too tiny in your Apple Mail inbox? You can use the following trick to force Mail to always use a larger minimum font size on received messages – some HTML messages might not look exactly as intended but at least you can now read them.

1. Quit Mail
2. Open the Terminal and type in the following:

   
   defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 12

3. Restart Mail.app and your HTML messages should now be more readable.

Of course, you can set the point size to whatever you like.