First off, this thing was cheap. We shopped around and found a cutter from US Cutters on eBay (don’t buy from their website). After negotiating my own shipping the end price door to door was around $505. Not too shabby for a 36″ vinyl cutting monster.

The cutter itself is about 50″ long and it comes with a stand. Along with the tiny little cutting blades there is a pen plotting attachment that you can use to draw with.

We’ve cut a few things already, mostly stuff for Rob’s farm as you will see in the pictures.

Applying vinyl is pretty straight forward as long as you think things through in advance. It’s really sticky and once it’s on whatever surface you are using it’s not really coming off without being destroyed.

Anyway, with the amount we spent it’ll save us a fortune in sign making costs. Since cutting a few yards of vinyl ourselves will cost about $4/yard and having a shop do it would cost 10 times that.

The plugin gave me errors the entire time I was running it but I just kept hitting next and now WP isn’t bugging me to upgrade. Yay!

The last two months have been pretty frustrating as DreamHost was constantly having problems and my blog was extremely slow. Even just navigating their control panel was a boring nightmare. And Wordpress! It’s slow enough as it is but when I have to wait a full minute to post something it’s not bearable.

So I switched to GoDaddy. My friend Rob and I pitched in for a Virtual Dedicated Server together and it’s only costing about $35/month total. So far it’s going well and I have a lot more options for customization with their full cPanel install that DreamHost’s dumbed down manager.

I am still well within the 90 day refund policy that DreamHost has so I emailed them today asking for a refund. Hopefully they don’t make up an excuse and just give it to me.

It was an interesting listen and I heard a few familiar voices. Check it out here:

Starting Your Own IT Company with Ken Gordon, Boris Wertz and Daniel Boulet

Wow, that was the simplest update I’ve done for a piece of software online before. Just copy a few files and go to the upgrade page, super simple.

I really like the new WordPress layout. It’s smart looking and a big improvement over the outdated layout they previously employed.

My favourite part is the write page: it’s a lot easier on the eyes and the options are grouped in a much my organized manner. All the common tasks are on the right while most of the extra junk you’ll never use is pushed below the post.

What really looks awesome is the new built in gallery part. You can upload multiple files at once and it will catalogue them in the nice gallery for you. Matt Wullenberg, WordPress’s founder, has a great example of a fully functioning gallery.

My biggest gripe with WordPress to date has been the speed and the stats. Right now my installation is pretty sluggish, and I don’t think it’s DreamHost. I’ve read a few comments and it’s one of the top ideas in the Most Popular Ideas section of WordPress Ideas. On that note I think it’s awesome how WordPress includes the highest rated ideas in their upcoming releases. Most community sites might do well to implement something along these lines

So far I haven’t been able to get my stats to work with WordPress, but that’s ok because I’m using Google Analytics as well and I think it’s a bit more accurate anyway.

Screencast of WordPress 2.5

You can grab the latest WordPress release here: http://wordpress.org/download/

Nexopia…

…haha, made you look

Matt just posted a screencast of the new interface, it looks awesome.

The only thing I have to say about the new FriendFeed hype is that I’m kicking myself for not taking action on the good ideas I have. I basically threw this idea past a few friends over a year ago and I never pursued it. Live and learn.

Hopefully they’ll be able to monetize it some how. I see way too many sites that have neat ideas but don’t make a cent. *cough* YouTube *cough*

They link to a few well known services like Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and WordPress. But these aren’t really phone blogging “tools”, they are more like existing services that have phone blogging support.

When I think of phone blogging tools I think of services more like Utterz or Nokia’s Lifeblog that I wrote a review for previously. Check it out.