DansNetwork

I’ve been an ING DIRECT customer for some time now. It’s a great way to bank. I pay all of our bills from their bill pay system and they even give you the ability to send paper checks to just about anyone at no cost.

Over the holidays our 8 month old son acquired some cash for his first Christmas. This is what pushed us to open an “Orange” savings account for him. Minors aren’t allowed to have their own, stand alone, savings account, so the account had to be a joint account.

ING DIRECT has a referral program that gives you money for every person that you can get to sign up and make an initial deposit of $250. After the deposit, you get $10 and the new customer gets $25. You can have up to 25 referrals, which means you could potentially make $250 for getting people to join. I wanted to use this method for enrolling my son in his first savings account. There isn’t a guide on ING’s website to walk you through the process, so I’ve put one together here.

Here’s how it works:

1. Send a referral email, to yourself, for your child.
2. Use the link, in the provided email, to sign up. You’re going to need your child’s social security number and birth date (in case you forgot).
3. Make sure you select “joint” account from the drop down (when you get to it). Fill in the appropriate fields with your child’s information. Most people put their child as the primary person on the account. They do this for tax purposes.
4. For the secondary person on the account, you’ll need to enter your ING DIRECT customer number.
5. The part where you are asked to enter bank account information is where I got lost. I ended up calling them on the phone to get some clarity. In order for the referral program to work, the initial $250 must come from a bank outside of ING DIRECT’s realm. This is the reason they are asking for bank account information. I gave them the same account numbers that are on the account that I already have verified with ING DIRECT (it’s a credit union). After entering your routing and account numbers, you must specify who’s name(s) are on the account. Just select your name. You do not have the option to select your child’s name. (This doesn’t mean that your child’s name has to be on the (non-ingdirect) account with yours.) Minors aren’t allowed to have accounts in their name. This is why you don’t have the option to select them.
6. Now that the account is set up, there should be $25 available in your child’s account and $10 added to your account. The initial $250 is unavailable for 10 days. You should be able to view your child’s account in your control panel, under the name you assigned it during enrollment.

Opening one of these accounts for your child provides an easy way for you to save money for their future. When they’re old enough, they can log into ING DIRECT themselves and monitor their saving’s progress.

Photoshop has a handy feature that allows you to save images for web use. It allows you to save images as JPGs, GIFs, and PNGs. It also allows you to resize your image before saving it. Some time ago I noticed that some of my images had a thin white border around them. I believe this to be a result of image resizing. After some trial and error, I found a couple of ways to fix this problem.

Before you “Save For Web”

1. Try to resize your image first: Image -> Image Size…

2. Try to “Flatten” your layers first: Layer -> Flatten Image

If all else fails open your file, after you’ve Saved For Web, and paint around the edges with the same color as your background. Once you’re done painting just: File -> Save

I recently installed the popular forum software, phpBB3(RC7), on my server. I knew that I wouldn’t get a ton of traffic at first, so that’s why I decided on the release candidate version (RC7) vs. the stable phpBB2. After a week or two, the stable version 3 (Olympus) was released and I was very interested in upgrading. At this point, I had made a ton of modifications to the many files contained in the phpBB3 directories. I was worried that if I upgraded, my files would all be replaced with the new ones from the stable version. My solution was to set up a “non-production” server to test out the upgrade.

I downloaded the upgrade package from phpBB’s (3.0.0) download page. After uploading the /install directory and it’s contents to the server, I pointed my web browser to http://myserver/phpBB3/install/ to begin the process. The current version of phpBB is checked and then the database is updated. This portion of the upgrade took only a few seconds.

The next step is what I was waiting for:

The upgrade scripts check for file differences.

After the differences are collected, the option to merge, existing and new files, is given.

It gives you the option to:
Merge, Use The New File, or Keep The Old
Merge is selected by default.

The script can use the File Transfer Protocol to upgrade/merge your files. This was very easy. Just enter your username, password and path.

All of my files were successfully merged, which preserved ALL of my previous modifications. I am now fully upgraded to phpBB version 3.0.0/Olympus.

When working with text in Photoshop, I’ve come across situations where my text/fonts turn out to be rough or jagged.

I’ve seen websites where designers have used images like the one above and may not have known that there is a very simple fix: When the “Type Tool (T)” is selected there is an anti-aliasing drop-down menu in the toolbar at the top of the screen. The selected option, to produce the text above, was “None“. This is the default anti-aliasing method.

If you change this to “Smooth” or possibly any of the other options, you will get a much smoother font.

. . . and here’s the final result

I’ve tried to search for this solution before and didn’t have much luck. That’s why I’m sharing this with everyone!