New picture set

I’ve put up pictures from the trip I spoke about earlier. Enjoy.

This isn’t happening

As fate would have it, my returned PowerBook’s screen, while relieved of its white spots, has a yellow pixel line spanning from top to bottom on the right-hand side, and another “clear” line spanning from left to right near the top. You heard right, they sent me a broken replacement screen! It’s just my luck. This means that I have to go through the entire repair process again: call Apple, complain, wait for the box to get here, send the PowerBook away, wait 7-10 business days to get it back. To summarize, I will be without my PowerBook for the entire break and probably won’t have it back before school starts! Fuck!

Now, I understand that this could have happened anywhere along the shipping path, and surely they didn’t send it off with the very apparent lines running through the screen, but none of that helps to quiet my anger. Bleh.

Expanded archives

I’ve received a few requests from people wanting me to create a way for them to be able to read the archived entries more easily. I decided to keep the single list of entries, but added the option of reading through the entries by month (something that MT makes rather simple). If you check the archives section, you will now see the individual and monthly links — and yes, everything is future-proofed.

She’s a flight risk

As usual, when I’m back at my Dad’s house, I spend a lot of time reading through the magazines he has saved for me since the last time I was home. Yesterday I was reading the October Esquire (one of the best issues ever actually) and came upon an article that I absolutely could not put down. The author opens with:

The story you are about to read is true. It involves a fugitive heiress, guns, money, and layers of Internet intimacy and deception. It is a mystery that takes place at the edge of technology. And it is unlike anything you’ve ever read before.

It is pointless for me to try to describe the story here; you should read it. What really bugged me out about the whole thing is that I hadn’t heard of it before — it seems rather odd that I wouldn’t have come across it through my incessant internet-news-reading habits. Perhaps I did and blew it off. Either way, the story has its tentacles around me now and I plan to read this girl’s entire weblog from start to present. If your interest has been piqued, you should first read the article to get a feel for what’s going on, and then dive into the actual weblog (I just realized that her last entry was in October, the same month that the Esquire article broke). As the author of the Esquire story points out, this could all be an elaborate hoax, and probably is, but the more I read, the more I believe — I’m hooked regardless. [I found a May article from Wired which discusses the Isabella v. phenomenon, but keep in mind that that this article is about eight months old and came out well before the Esquire guy got the interview with Isabella]

Rolling Stone for life

In what I hope will become the trend throughout the magazine industry, Rolling Stone is offering a lifetime subscription for $99! I’m assuming that this also includes a lifetime membership to their online site, though this isn’t discussed anywhere on the sign-up sheet. Either way, it’s an absolute steal — a one-year subscription alone is over $100. Given my affinity for all things music, Rolling Stone is one of my favorite magazines and one that I have been reading for as long as I can remember. If you are considering taking them up on this offer, you might be interested to know that the magazine is published every two weeks, not once a month.

Note to American Airlines

When you announce that the flight time from Dallas to Orlando will be 2 hours and 5 minutes, don’t then tell us that the in-flight movie will be Seabiscuit, which I swore to the kid sitting next to me was more than 2 hours and 5 minutes. I was right, and the movie got cut off with at least 20 minutes remaining. While I had already seen it, most of the people around me hadn’t and were obviously perturbed.

And one more thing, you would do well not to call a granola bar, a cup of blueberry yogurt, and a package of raisins, a “gourmet” breakfast (unless of course you laugh slightly or say it with undeniable sarcasm).

An eventful day

Yesterday was quite eventful. A friend of mine from California, who knows the area well, invited me to checkout some of the sights in Monterey, Carmel, and Big Sur — rumored to be the greatest stretch of coastline in the world. I can’t disagree. It was b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l. I got tons of pictures and plan to put some up as soon as I get my PowerBook back. Before hitting up the coastline, we headed to the Monterey Bay Aquarium — one of the top aquariums in the world. It was obviously my first time and I absolutely loved it. I managed to get some decent pics from the aquarium (most of it was way too dark to take pictures) and I’ll put them up along with the coastline shots.

We had a great lunch at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., but I’m afraid that I got some sort of food poisoning from the place as I ended up getting extremely sick on the way home last night. I was violently ill; I threw up a few times and my stomach felt like it was being ripped open. This lasted well into the night. Thankfully, after approximately 13 hours of sleep, which I’ve never done on my own (read: without alcohol), I feel much better.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to replying to the large e-mail queue. “Your e-mail will be answered in the order it was received.”  :)

A difficult parting

My new PowerBook was sent off earlier today to have its screen, which has fallen victim to the notorious white spots, replaced. Though I’d like to talk about how it feels to have to part with my ‘baby,’ I know I could not compare to Tom Coate’s heartfelt description, and so I’ll let his pain speak for mine:

And so with a deep sigh I have consigned my beautiful Powerbook (which has been with me such a very little time) back to the welcoming arms of Mother Apple. My child needs to be fixed. The strange mottling blotchiness of his screen had become worse and worse as the days passed by until they resembled nothing so much as a pair of staring blank eyes - evil eyes - that hovered in front of every piece of work I did, every movie I watched, every e-mail I sent. It’s so difficult with beautiful computers - you love them (like a child), training and working with them until you operate as one (like a family) until eventually they betray you (like a child all over again). But when they turn sour that good feeling stays with you for longer - it’s so difficult to do what must be done but do it you must. They must be sent off to faraway scientists who’ll open them up with strange devices, rooting around in everything that makes them what they are and forcing their silicon biology back to standards that their parents can live with. They must be brought back to civilised behaviour whatever the cost.

Data may be lost - I accept that. The Powerbook that I gave to the rather nice-looking man from UPS may not feel or be quite the same when it returns. It will have been changed, fixed, broken and reformed. But when it returns it will work - and work it must - for I have typing to do.

Comes and goes

I’m comin’ ’round to open the blinds
You can’t hide here any longer
My God you need to rinse those puffy eyes
You can’t last here any longer

And yes they’ll ask you where you’ve been
And you’ll have to tell them again and again

And you probably don’t want to hear tomorrow’s another day
Well I promise you you’ll see the sun again
And you’re asking me why pain’s the only way to happiness
And I promise you you’ll see the sun again

Come on take my hand
We’re going for a walk, I know you can
You can wear anything as long as it’s not black
Please don’t mourn forever
She’s not coming back

From Dido’s See the Sun

Corporate survivor

I’m suddenly reminded of the feeling I had three days into my internship at Nortel where they let go of 80% of the division I had just begun working for.

Blogging hiatus

Due to upcoming law school midterms, I’m probably not going to post for a while. The exams run from December 2nd to the 16th.

Google is broken

It’s no secret that weblogs have really taken a toll on PageRank, but just to bring the point home, I offer a few examples gathered from my referrer logs.

At the time of this posting I’m the #1 Google result for tourist apparel, halloween photos 2003 san francisco, waiting with bated breath, and t68i daylight savings. I wish I had all day to sit around and find out every possible word sequence for which I’m the #1 hit.  :)

I’m the #2 result for t616 review isync, examsoft linux, and they found nemo.

I’m coming in at #2 for blanton.

PowerBook white spots

I’ve started to see the infamous “white spots” on my new PowerBook. I’m not amused. There has been a lot of buzz about this on the Net, but I figured I was immune as I hadn’t noticed any spots. A couple of days ago I was using Exposé to clear the screen and the ‘glowing’ spots just kind of jumped out at me. I tried to strike it up to fingerprints or something and attempted to ‘wipe’ them off — joke’s on me. The spots on my screen are incredibly faint (nothing like Joseph’s), but they are there nonetheless and will only get worse over time. If you know me personally, you know that I’m a tad bit anal-retentive when it comes to my “gadgets,” and, umm, this is my favorite gadget. I’ve signed the online petition and Apple has officially acknowleged the problem:

The new 15-inch PowerBook has been a big hit with customers since its introduction last month. However, some customers are reporting the appearance of faint white spots on their displays after using the system for a short period of time, and Apple is investigating these reports right now. Any customers experiencing this problem should contact AppleCare.

The problem is apparently from “spacers” that are placed between the screen and the aluminum casing. The spacers are to prevent the casing from bending; they’re putting pressure on the screen and causing the white spots, which seem to be in the same general area on all the screens. MacFixIt has put up a picture that outlines where the spots are appearing. I have spots at positions two and three.

From what I can gather, Apple is fixing the screens without much hassle (100% free while under warranty — anything else would obviously be unacceptable). The screens are permanently scarred and so Apple is replacing the entire top portion of the notebook. I bring this up because I currently have no dead pixels — who knows if I’ll have any when they replace the LCD. I’m also apprehensive about the fact that some people have reported that their “fixed” screens have spots as well.

I’m going to wait until after my law midterms to get it replaced (perhaps some of the inconsistencies with the repairs will have been worked out by then). I’m headed back to Florida around Christmas and so I thought I would do it then. I called a few Apple stores around here to try and get a consensus as to whether or not Apple could send a repaired computer to an address other than the one the computer is “registered to.” I got conflicting answers from the retail stores and so I called AppleCare, who claim that it will be no problem. We’ll see.

I understand that no product is impervious to design flaws (yes, even Apple products are susceptible!), but it still infuriates me that something I paid so much for has such a glowing (pardon the pun) defect. At lease Apple is doing the right thing and replacing the screens free-of-charge and without too much fuss. Be that as it may, I’ll be singing an entirely different tune if my returned, and presumably ‘fixed’ screen, starts to show Orion’s belt again.

Quick trip to San Francisco

More pictures from yesterday’s ‘trip.’

Science grab bag

The New York Times has an excellent compilation of the top 25 most provocative questions facing science.

Nothing but TiVo

Alan Taylor posted an interesting read about his three-year old daughter having never known life without TiVo. The part that I especially liked:

She has no idea when her favorite shows are on, never has. She gets quite confused when we are watching a non-TiVo TV, and she asks to watch ”a kids show”, and we have to explain that this TV won’t do what ours at home does. We’ve sometimes shortened this explanation to ”This TV is broken”, which she seems to accept, and will wait until we get home to watch our ”fixed” TV.

Speaking of TiVo, WeaKnees has just added Interactive TiVo Upgrade Instructions.

Buyers beware

I’m incredibly disappointed with the battery life of my Bluetooth mouse. It took less than three weeks for the batteries to die. I can’t find any literature as to the purported lifespan, so I’m here to say that it’s less than a month! To be fair, I’m always on my computer, but even so, I shouldn’t be worried about having to replace the mouse batteries every three weeks. What is more is that the tracking is very, very poor; it just seems to “skip” a lot and doesn’t feel very fluid. Looks like I might have to put this bad boy up on eBay or Craigslist and find a Bluetooth mouse with a charging cradle.

On a completely unrelated note, Microsoft has started to move IE into the 21st century by offering the option to block pop-ups. Way to go MS, you finally got a clue — alternative (and better) browsers have been doing this for years — I haven’t seen a pop-up since 2000. I always catch myself laughing on the inside when I’m sitting in class and notice people clicking away at pop-ups as if that is just a part of the web experience. I guess some people are into it (last paragraph).

The Elegant Universe

A PBS mini-series about Brian Greene’s Elegant Universe, is availabe as a three-hour stream on the website. I can’t wait until I have time to watch this.

Can’t sleep

My oh my you know it just don’t stop
It’s in my mind I wanna tear it up
I’ve tried to fight it tried to turn it off
But it’s not enough

It takes a lotta love
It takes a lotta love my friend
To keep your heart from freezing
To push on ’till the end

From David Gray’s My Oh My

The Matrix Revolutions

Jason Kottke pretty much sums it up. I was a little disappointed, but wasn’t really expecting too much given the Reloaded letdown. If the Revolutions post at Kottke’s site interests you, be sure to check out the huge Reloaded thread (don’t miss the ‘update’ at the bottom of the post that links to the monster comment thread).

UPDATE: I enjoyed the following reviews:

• New York Times
• Salon
• Slate
• Roger Ebert

Photographs

Well, I decided that I was sick and tired of waiting and went ahead and re-added photos to the site. Enjoy.

Panther

I’ve been running Panther for a few days now and don’t have too much to complain about. The upgrade/install was flawless (and rather quick). Truth be told, I would have paid $129 for this ‘upgrade,’ but I’m glad I only had to pay $20.

The feature that I am most impressed with and one that I’ve talked about quite a bit in the past, is Exposé. It’s just one of those features that makes you wonder how you ever lived without it. I’ve yet to “feel” it get bogged down and I’ve thrown upwards of 35 windows at it. Apple also (finally) ‘fixed’ command-tab application switching. Anyone familiar with Windows and most modern *nix window managers, knows that command-tab allows you to quickly cycle through your open applications, a very useful feature and one that was sorely missed when I moved to OS X. The pre-10.3 implementation cycled through your dock and was useless if you ask me. Jason Kottke proposed a great idea concerning the merger of command-tab with Exposé.

Mail.app has gone through a significant overhaul as well. It has a much faster feel and a slightly more polished look to it. The big change is the addition of threaded messages, which is something it should have supported from day one. A big change for me has been the “Place signature above quoted text” option. You see, before, when I replied to a message, I had to manually cut/paste my signature each time from below the quoted text to above it where my message went. I realize that Apple’s implementation comported with the RFC, which requires that message replies go on the bottom and that signatures are the very last thing in the message (this has been carried over from Usenet), but I think it is rare that anyone complies with that anymore and I’m glad to see that Apple now lets me abandon it without too much fuss.

The Finder has also received some significant enhancements, including a major aesthetic change — it now has the brushed-metal look. I’ve heard a lot of complaining about this switch, but I love it. In fact, I wouldn’t mind it if the entire interface moved to brushed-metal .

On a slightly related note (by way of the fact that I’m running Panther on my new PowerBook with built-in Bluetooth), I got a Bluetooth mouse last week and couldn’t be happier with it. So nice to be able to pull my notebook and mouse out in class and not be encumbered with wires.

Keeping it consistent

I decided that I wanted to future-proof the entire site and so I’ve gone ahead and made the necessary changes. All links on the site now point to directories and not files (including all of the internal links — blog entries that point to past blog entries). The path of the RSS feed has been changed as well; please point your aggregators to the new location right away.

There she goes

Winona Ryder turns 32 tomorrow. The probability of meeting, dating, and eventually marrying her is starting to look a little slim (yah, that’s right, the generational disparity is the only barrier to our love).

Waiting with bated breath

Much to my disappointment, I found out last week that my up-to-date coupon for Panther (from my new PowerBook) is not redeemable in the Apple stores — they have to mail the OS upgrade to you. Luckily, I can fill out all of the required crap online instead of having to fax/snail-mail it to them.

I’ve been looking forward to Panther for a while. I’m kind of bummed that I can’t just download a disk image and burn it. No matter, it should be here sometime next week.

In the meantime, have a look at Mark Pilgrim’s What’s New in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.

Also, be sure to check out this great video of Exposé in action.

Going, going, gone

Within 48 hours of putting my old PowerBook up on Craigslist, I received five offers at my going price — it has been sold and cash is in hand. I won’t have to incur any eBay or PayPal costs (which would be a lot considering the price of the item). Gotta’ love the Internet.

Aluminum PowerBook

Well, after taking my first law school exam this morning I felt like COMPLETE SHIT and so I decided to buy the new PowerBook. I’ve been lusting over this thing for quite a while. The migration from my old PowerBook to this new one occured without issue.

You guys know that I’d love to write about my likes/dislikes, but as it stands, I’m up to my neck in schoolwork and I’m in a pissy mood to boot. Perhaps another day year.   :\

Lack of posts

Three words — law school sucks.

Ingenuity at work

This is one of the most novel ideas I’ve ever seen: Packet Juggling.

Shure E2c In-Ear Headphones

UPDATE: I’ve moved up to the E3cs, discussed here.

I told myself I wasn’t going to do this, but I can’t help it — I have to talk about my new headphones, the Shure E2cs. It’s no secret, I’m a music junkie and take the “listening experience” thing very seriously. Enter the Bose TriPort headphones I got last Christmas. There is no denying that these are great headphones, but I needed something smaller. I’m in and out of the law library all day and so I needed headphones that I could fit into my bag without being worried about breaking them. I also wanted them to be better at blocking outside noise.

I never thought I would buy in-ear headphones. It just never dawned on me that they would sound better than the over-ear types. Looking back, I’m not sure how I could have thought that. Logic suggests that speakers that are situated in your ear canal and aimed directly at your eardrum would offer superior sound. Logic prevails — these things are sick. That isn’t to say that all in-ear headphones sound like this, certainly some [most] sound like shit. But, I did my research (as usual) and everybody was raving about these things. I remember looking at the Etymotic ER-6s a couple of years ago and wondering what they sounded like, but I couldn’t convince myself to take the $140 plunge, especially given the fact that they looked like they would break if you touched them wrong.

After having used the Bose headphones, I really had no desire to seek out another pair until I started law school and the aforementioned problems presented themselves.

I’ve been using the Shures for a few weeks now and have nothing to complain about. Nothing. While I will admit that in the beginning they were slightly uncomfortable in my right ear, the discomfort has since dissipated completely. I can’t really blame them for this though — they come with three sets (of various sizes) of foam and rubber “flex” sleeves. Apparently my right ear canal is very small and so I had a little trouble getting even the smallest “flex” sleeve in there. You can strike a lot of that difficulty up to inexperience — it’s no small task to put these things in your ear; it has become much easier over time.

Now, to the fun stuff: these things rock! I genuinely feel that I will never go back to regular headphones. It just wouldn’t make sense — I would be denying myself sonic bliss. All the reviews were correct; there is nothing better than good in-ear headphones. They almost completely block out ambient noise, while injecting your brain with the best sound you’ve ever heard. It’s like listening to old music for the first time. You can even make out artifacts in some MP3s that, after listening to the song 100 times before, you never noticed.

I’ll concede that I was worried slightly about the bottom end of these things; how could they create bass with no real woofer? Answer: as long as you get a tight seal, you’ll get that bottom end, and it’s wonderful. I’ve been extremely happy with the bass reproduction.

The high end on these bad boys is nothing less than spectactular. Listen to [insert incredible female vocalists here] and prepare yourself to be absolutely blown away.

Another perk you get with plugs is that you can turn them up as loud as you want and you won’t disturb anyone. You absolutely can’t hear them outside of your own head.

I think the greatest testament to these plugs is to say that when I’m listening to the music, I sometimes feel that if I open my mouth the music is going to come pouring out. Incredible.

Oh hell yes

It’s about time: ScanMe from Planetwide.

With ScanMe you can collect your post from anywhere in the world - at least anywhere you can find an internet terminal!

Planetwide scans your mail, emails the scans to you and stores the originals.

These then get forwarded to you when you notify Planetwide of an address to send them to. Easy as!

This is freaking awesome, save the serious privacy issues.

Digital gold… hah

From: Gary Cote (gary@cotecorner.com)
Subject: classified ad
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
Date: 2003-09-18 17:44:01 PST

For Sale:

Apple iPod
15 GB model, lightly used
167 songs loaded

The RIAA says it’s worth about $25 million.
I’ll let it go for $5 million, plus shipping.

Radiohead concert

This is a picture from the Radiohead concert that I went to last week at the Shoreline Amphitheater. As usual, I forgot my damn camera and had to resort to the shitty one on the mobile phone.

I obviously meant to put this picture up last week, but there were several hangups. The first was that I installed the OS X 10.2.8 update which broke all kinds of things including the ability to send files from my phone to my computer through Bluetooth (of course syncing and sending from the computer to the phone work fine). So then I tried to send over e-mail from my phone to myself. That didn’t work because the Cingular network is all funked up (I can’t even receive e-mails through it right now :\). The next option was to try to send it through IR on a friend’s PC. No go. IR port wouldn’t open. Finally, I just brought my Bluetooth dongle to class, plugged it into a friend’s Mac (she hadn’t yet applied the 10.2.8 update) and sent it to her computer. I’d like to say that all of the effort was worth it, but really, did you look at the picture?  :P

If I had time this would be the spot where I would go into a long rant about Radiohead and how they are one of my favorite bands of all time and blah blah blah, but most of you already know that, so I digress. Needless to say, the concert was excellent. I hope to see them again someday (hopefully next time I’ll have better seats and won’t forget my camera).

Fringe benefit

The future-proofing of my archives has turned out to have an advantage that I didn’t foresee. Previously, when browsing my site statistics, the frequency/number of hits was attached to a filename like “000134.php,” which is obviously very cryptic. But now, with the new system in place, I can immediately see which posts are receiving the most attention and can realize right away what the post is about.

I still need to go back through my site and change all of the internal links (those posts that link to other posts) to the new scheme. All of the old files still exist (e.g., 000134.php) so the links won’t break, but as soon as I change the (X)HTML and CSS of the archive template, the old files will undoubtedly render poorly.

They found Nemo

Digitally Imported

If you have never been to Digitally Imported, I strongly encourage you to check them out. I stumbled across this site a few years ago — it has grown exponentially and now includes 24-hour streams of everything from trance to modern jazz to classical.

I’m not sure there’s anything I like listening to more while studying/working than the vocal trance stream.

Drool

I’m assuming most of you are aware of the new 15″ PowerBook that was introduced a few days ago at Apple Expo 2003. What a brilliant machine. I’ve been working all week on trying to sell my current TiBook to a fellow student. I figure that I should be able to get the new one without paying much, if anything, out-of-pocket. My TiBook has the SuperDrive, but I have no problem getting the new Powerbook with just the Combo drive — new PowerBook with Combo drive and education discount = $1978.00. I should be able to get close to that for my current notebook. We’ll see though, there are other things that have to be taken care of before I can start thinking about that, though the longer I wait the less my current notebook will be worth. Grr.

The new model offers countless improvements to the TiBook:

• Aluminum alloy body
• Backlit keyboard (only on SuperDrive model)
• Ambient light sensor which adjusts the brightness of both the screen and the keyboard (only on SuperDrive model)
• Built-in Bluetooth
• FireWire 800 and USB 2.0
• 512K L2 cache
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9600
• 333MHz DDR SDRAM
• 802.11g

The biggest additions for me are the aluminum body and built-in Bluetooth. I find it incredibly annoying to have to plug in the dongle each time I need to connect my phone to the computer. Also, as I use my computer all the time in class, it would be really nice to pull out a Bluetooth mouse and be done with it; this goes for home use as well.

I’m assuming that the new model won’t suffer from the same keyboard-imprint-on-the-screen problems that the TiBook and iBook do, but that is yet to be determined.

In related news, Steve Jobs’ keynote from the expo was put online yesterday.

Future-proof your URIs

I’ve taken some steps to future-proof the archives of this site. The idea is that even as the underlying technology changes, the URI of the entries should not — links should work indefinitely. Out of the box, Movable Type does a bad job of future-proofing your archives as it simply puts the entry in a file (you give it the extension) named by the internal ID that MT uses (e.g., 000164.php). The problem with this is that it will break to all hell if and when you export/import your entries to a new MT setup on a different server — none of the links will point to the correct file as the internal ID of the file will have changed.

I wanted to setup a hierarchical structure for the archives that would include the title of the post and keep the filename out of the link. Now, instead of “/archives/000200.php” for this entry, I have “/archives/2003/09/15/futureproof_your_uris/.” You’ll notice that the filename has been removed and the URI now points to a directory. Under this directory resides an index.php file for that entry. In the future, if the technology changes (say I start using .xml instead of .php), I can make the needed modifications without breaking the link. If this interests you at all (it should!) and you use MT (you should!), then you can make the same changes to your site by following the instructions below.

Step One

Download and install the Regex plugin from Brad Choate.

Step Two

From MT’s control panel, go into “Weblog Config.” Choose the “Archiving” tab. Put the following in the “Archive File Template” field of the Individual “Archive Type”:

This will create the /year/month/day/title/index.php structure. You’ll want to use dirify=”1″ here as this will remove all spaces (and any other characters that can’t be used in directory names) and replace them with an underscore (some things aren’t replaced with underscores but are removed instead).

Step Three

For whatever file(s) you plan on using the archive link in, you need to add the following to the top of that file’s template:

<MTRegexDefine name="noExtension">s|/index\.[^/]+$|/|g</MTRegexDefine>

Whenever this is called (next step), it will remove the file part of the link (/title/index.php becomes /title/) before the URI is created, thus making the URI file-independent.

Step Four

The final step is calling the regex plugin. Wherever you use the archive link tags, you need to add the following to the tag: regex=”noExtension”

For example,

This does what was explained in step three above.

There you have it, future-proof URIs. As things change in the future, all you’ll need to do is modify/define the default file loaded for a directory. For instance, all I need now is one line in the .htaccess file: DirectoryIndex index.php.

First month of law school

71 cases have been read and briefed.

31,132 words (actual count) have been typed.

Ugh.

You might live in Silicon Valley if…

…you see a new Ferrari with a license plate that says “Jobs Suk” in the Starbucks parking lot.

(Picture taken with phone)

Sony Ericsson T616

It’s about that time again. That’s right, another mobile phone review. I’ll be discussing Sony Ericsson’s latest effort, the T616. As is usually the case, SE doesn’t disappoint.

At the outset I’d like to remove any doubt as to how I feel about this phone: the T616 is absolutely the best phone currently available (in the U.S.). There are only three phones that even come close to its feature set: its predecessor, the SE T68i, the SE P800, and the Nokia 3650, which is really no match as it has to be one of the ugliest phones I’ve ever seen, not to mention that it’s about twice the size of the T616.

It should be noted that the only difference between the T616 and the T610 is that the T610< operates at 900MHz, while the T616 uses the 850MHz band (both are triple-band GSM and can also use the 1800/1900MHz frequencies). I make the point only to clarify that they are exactly the same phone, save their antennas.

The biggest deal for me, coming from a Sony Ericsson T68i, was that SE fixed the damn calendar application so that it now correctly syncs with Apple’s iSync utility. I would not have bought the phone if this had not been fixed. Previously, with the T68i, all calendar entries would get shifted by one hour. This meant that after you did your first full sync, you would get two entries for every single appointment — an hour apart. Even though all is fixed now, I was still required to change the “Daylight Savings” setting to “1h Summertime.” I had to spend some time playing with these settings before everything was syncing correctly, but I haven’t had to touch it since I got it working. The PDA is dead; long live the smartphone (this isn’t really a smartphone, but… :).

I’ve had zero trouble using Bluetooth to connect the phone to my PowerBook. Apple’s Bluetooth support is quite remarkable. On top of syncing all of my information through Bluetooth, I also use it for Caller-ID and SMS sending/receiving through the computer. I simply open up the Address Book and click the Bluetooth icon. If a call comes in, I get a pop-up window on my computer that tells me who it is (I don’t have to take the phone out of my pocket to see who is calling). Similarly, if I’m sent a text message, the message will show up in a little window on my computer. If I want to send a text message to someone, I can simply open up the Address Book, right-click on a contact’s mobile phone number, and choose “send message.” When I send the message it is sent to my phone over Bluetooth and then from my phone to the contact. Very neat. All of this says nothing of the Clicker software.

The menuing system is faster and much more responsive than that of the T68i. There’s always a trade-off though — they removed the joystick counter from the secret menu.  :\

The T616 also adds a recurring alarm. You can give it a time and then select the day(s) of the week that you want the alarm to go off — perfect for me as I have to get up at the same time M-F. If, for whatever reason, you need to change the time of a particular day, you can do this without disturbing the recurring alarm. A great feature all around.

The battery life is very impressive, especially when you consider that it’s powering a fairly bright 16-bit color screen. I certainly can’t complain about its modest power consumption.

As is always the case, I have a few gripes. The first, and the one I’m most upset about, is the loudness of the speaker (during phone calls) — it’s rather low, even on the highest setting. I’ve read that this can be fixed with a firmware upgrade, but I’ve yet to find someone in the Bay Area who can do this (granted, I haven’t spent any time trying to find someone as I don’t have said time  :P). To add to that gripe, I’m also pissed that there is no speakerphone — this is perfectly doable given the loundess of the ringtones. Perhaps this too will be added in a future firmware update. I know this was one the big complaints with the T68i, so it surprises me that it wasn’t added to the T616, especially when the Nokia 7210, Nokia 7250 (both are tiny ‘candybar’ phones), and Sony Ericsson’s own P800 have this feature. No excuse.

Another major shortcoming is the limited amount of memory that comes with the phone. You are only alloted 2MB (though there is a “13-second trick” which can bump it up to 2.5MB). This might seem like a lot to some, but as soon as you start taking a few pictures, receiving (and saving) SMS messages, downloading J2ME/Mophun games, and playing with some themes, the memory dissipates quickly. I can’t say that I’ve run out of memory yet, but I know that some people really have to juggle to keep what they want on the phone.

As I’ve said in the past, I really don’t care about having a camera on my phone, but it just so happens that the best phones these days come with them (this is my third camera phone). If they had left this feature out, I would have still bought the phone — in fact, I would have liked the phone even more (it would have been cheaper and would have had one less thing that could break). Camera phones are nothing but a novelty to me; until they reach 3MP+ I just don’t care. Given all of that, I can’t really comment too much on this phone’s camera. It takes decent pictures (though the max resolution is 288×352), has a “night” mode, and offers three effects — B&W, negative, and sepia. It also has a self-timer. For the vanity in all of us, it comes with a small mirror (that plugs a hole in the back of the phone; defaulty plugged with a rubber stop) so that you can take pictures of yourself. If I want to send a picture to the computer, I simply choose, “send | via Bluetooth.” Done.

Lastly, I’d like to talk about the phone’s design. I think one would be hard-pressed to say that the phone isn’t easy on the eyes. It’s so simple and yet so perfect. Less is definitely more. The indented sides provide a great grip on the phone and also allow you to set it down horizontally on a surface to take a picture. I put up some hi-res photos (from SE’s site) — if that isn’t great design, I’m not sure what is.

Justin, the bartender

I present to you a little concoction I like to call, “No Life.” Enjoy.

Ingredients:

• 10 cups law school
• 1 teaspoon life

Directions:

1. Pour contents into spill-proof container.
2. Vigorously shake container until contents have mixed.

Be advised: Contents tend not to mix well and, despite your best efforts, might never coalesce.

Santa Cruz tour

Yesterday, a few of us took a trip out to Santa Cruz — the Santa Cruz Food Tour (”food” was removed from the title as some were being misled as to the point of the tour — apparently not everyone likes to eat every waking minute of their livf  :P). One of the guys that went on the trip grew up near Santa Cruz and was able to show us around the town, and more importantly, was able to take us to some great restaurants. As soon as we we got into the city we made our way to Taqueria Vallarta, where I had one of biggest, best burritos of my life. To give you an idea of how big the burritos were, the guy that took us there, Dave, actually set his down vertically between bites. After we stuffed our faces there, we made it out to the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Because of Labor Day weekend it was understandably crowded, but fun nonetheless — played some mini-golf (*cough* I won by 10 strokes), rode the “Great Dipper” roller-coaster, and did some people-watching.

The next stop was downtown Santa Cruz. We walked around and went into some stores. We passed a man playing a guitar and singing, “I’m gonna get a burrito, ain’t gonna sell crack, no.” He stood in stark contrast to the shoeless family in straw hats singing folk songs on the corner. Perhaps the funniest sight was that of a man and a dog on his bike; he had the dog sitting on a slanted platform above his back wheel — it was hanging on for dear life. After exhausting the downtown area, we made our way over to Capitola, a small, somewhat ‘artsy’ town next to Santa Cruz. Went out on the pier there, got some drinks and listened to the band play. As we were walking off the pier we saw a seagull get caught in a fisherman’s hanging hook. I almost cried. He kept tugging on it which only made me angrier; he finally cut the line. We capped off the “tour” with a great seafood dinner at Carpo’s in Soquel.

I guess I should also mention that we went up to UCSC to check out the “campus.” I put campus in quotes because I’m not sure one can consider it a real campus. The university is sprawled out all over the mountain there — it’s kind of like you are driving up to a ski lodge or something. It was incredibly beautiful, but I’m not sure I would enjoy the treks required between buildings. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, so there is really nothing to show from the trip, save this funny pic of Dave that I took on my phone at one of the mini-golf holes (I obviously have to use that for his picture-ID on my phone  :P). Even if I had taken pictures I would have been unable to share them.

Apple army

Out of the 87 students in my section of the first-year law class, only five have Apples. While that number is low, the more surprising statistic is that out of the five people in my “study group,” three of them have Macs — a pretty amazing percentage if you think about it. I think I’ve convinced a fellow classmate that he needs needs a PowerBook, so it might soon be 6/87 for the class. Below is a small picture that I took today; it just so happened that four of the Apple people sat in a square. Keep in mind that the picture was taken with my Sony Ericsson T616 (the review is still coming, I swear).

A curious e-mail

While I’ve received numerous link-exchange requests (from people who are looking to increase their Google rankings), I’ve yet to get one quite like the one I received yesterday morning:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I recently visited your website (http://www.justinblanton.com/links.php) and noticed you have a link pointing to driverguide.com.

Since I have a similar kind of website mabey you could also link this one.

The URL of my driver resource site is http://www.driverfiles.net

Kindest regards,

Johan Struijk
DriverFiles.net

It’s quite obvious that the owner of driverfiles.net (notice the lack of the link here and in the paste above  :P) is running some sort of automated sniffer to seek out sites that link to DriverGuide so that he may e-mail the owners of said sites and request that they add a link to his DriverFiles site. While devilish, I can’t say that this isn’t a good idea — it’s certainly going to get the guy more hits to his site. I might make a few suggestions though — try to make the spam look a little more personal. For example:

• Replace “Sir/Madam” with “Justin”
• Change the From address to a real name (not info@)
• Don’t say you visited my website and then point to my links page as if that is my website
• Next time, use the contact form or send to my actual address (again, not info@)

I promise you Johan, if you follow these simple steps, your spam will be much more effective and your life much more meaningful. Keep up the good work.

Practical bookmarklets

I meant to write about these a few weeks ago, but forgot. Jon Hicks has put together a few very useful bookmarklets. These are incredibly practical and can be modified to handle most any kind of word “look-up” (e.g., instead of dictionary.com or thesaurus.com, which he provides, you could just as easily create one for Google, Amazon, etc). On top of the highlight-word(s)-then-press-button interface, he has also created one for links — if you are on a particular webpage and want to send the link to a friend, you simply hit the links bookmarklet (that you’ve dragged to your toolbar) and it opens up your default mail client with the subject set to the title of the webpage and the link included in the body. Good stuff. I had actually planned to do the dictionary.com thing on my own, but he beat me to it. While he made these for Safari, I’ve found that they also work in Mozilla/Mac — I haven’t tested them beyond that.

First week of law school

What a week. Not only has this first week of law school been more difficult than I thought it would be, but I’m also trying to deal with this at the same time. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to sleeping in on Saturday (read: not waking up until at least 9AM :P).

I must admit that law school is quite different from what I envisioned, at least insofar as how the material is taught. I have six courses:

• Torts (two semesters)
• Criminal (one semester)
• Pleading and Civil Procedure (two semesters)
• Property (two semesters)
• Contracts (two semesters)
• Research and Writing (three semesters)

All of the classes, except Research and Writing, are similarly laid out. The basic idea is that before each class you are to read a number of cases that have gone up on appeal. You usually “brief” each case — an outline to help you remember the important points of the case — and then discuss it in class. Needless to say, there is a lot of reading, writing, and analyzing. The first week has been quite demanding; it’s only going to get worse. Free time is literally a thing of the past.

I’ve made some really great friends this first week. We are going to get to know each other rather quickly as we are always in the library together.

All of my classes are in one building, and as luck would have it, the entire building is WiFi’d. It’s really nice. While I do have some gripes about their authentication scheme, it’s works well for the most part. The law library is also WiFi’d, though the signal in the room that we usually “rent” is extremely weak.

I’m having a slight issue with the PowerBook. Given that I’m constantly carrying it around in my bag with other books, the keys are starting to leave imprints (and oil from my fingers) on the screen. While I knew some people were experiencing this problem (the screen actually being scratched in some cases), I hadn’t come across it yet. I have no option other than to place something between the screen and the keyboard each time I close it. I’m going to use a piece of paper for the time being, but if that proves insufficent, I’ll probably order the Acme iCover or JR Hill’s screen protector.

Speaking of PowerBooks, not too many people in my class have them. One of my friends has an iBook and I’ve seen one other PowerBook (the 12″). I found it odd that there were so few Apple machines, but given that we are required to have a Windows machine for exams, it’s understandable (kind of).

Mom, you live through me

As some of you are very well aware, this past week has been the hardest of my life. It just became impossible — she passed away this morning. I’m not sure when I’m going to post again.

And she said losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow

From Paul Simon’s Graceland — one of our favorite songs.

Let me go

The kind and concerned folks over at NetIdentity (formerly MailBank) are about to get on my last nerve. I’ve had justin@blanton.com through them for almost six years now. Yes, I bought justinblanton.com four years ago and have been forwarding everything there from day one, but I just didn’t want to give up the other address, especially to someone else with the same name. Silly, I know. Anyways, the company e-mailed me about 10 times before the account was set to expire to let me know that I should renew. Now, it’s been three full weeks since I let the account die and they’re still sending me e-mails about how it will soon expire; each one a little more urgent than the last — “Renew now! Don’t let someone else take your name.” They’ve sent an e-mail every three days since the account expired. I’m curious to see how long they’ll keep this up. I can still login to the account and my status is still “active.” What really gets me is that when they were MailBank I distinctly remember paying them $50 for a lifetime account — I guess they meant the lifetime of the name — who knows. No matter, I just don’t care anymore. That’s right, all you other Justin Blantons out there are free to take the address, but it looks like you’ll have to convince NetIdentity to release it first.

The DMV

We all know that going to the DMV is about as fun as watching paint dry, but it has to be done. Previous experience told me that I’d probably have to wait a little when I got there. That previous experience was from DMVs in Florida, not California, where I liken the experience to waiting in line at Disney on opening day of a new ride. I’m dead serious. I went in yesterday, waited 10 minutes before I could actually talk to someone, and was then given #G306 — they were on #G94. After striking up conversation with the lady sitting next to me, she informed me that I would need more than one form of identification to move my drivers license over from Florida (i.e., my perfectly valid, current, non-expired drivers license was not enough to prove my identity); they wanted either an original birth certificate or a passport. I don’t have the birth certificate here and my passport is expired — it will have to do. I headed home and then went back down there today, passport in hand. I got there 30 minutes after it opened (which didn’t mean that everyone and their brother didn’t do the same thing; in fact, it took 10 minutes to park) and received #G116. I was money. I strolled around the building, not unlike a high school gym with rows and rows and rows of seats circling the center area where all the DMV people stood, guarded by their plastic, chest-high fort, and after circling twice, finally found a seat. It would only be a few minutes before my number was called. “Number G43, window 21 please.” Hrm, I’m far back in the line, but not nearly as far back as yesterday. I can stick this out. 45 minutes go by. No new G (non-appointment) numbers have been called yet. At this rate, four new Disney rides will have been unveiled by the time I get out of here. I left and decided to try out the online appointment-maker thing on their website. It’s down. I give up.

Busy busy busy

Well, I just got Internet setup at my new place in California. Let me apologize right away for what is sure to be a sporadic post. There’s a lot of ground to cover.

The move was relatively painless (save the emotional part of it obviously). Most everything went as planned. The flight from Dallas to California (Orlando-Dallas-San Jose) felt like it was never going to end — my anticipation/anxiety had taken over. I got into California around noon on Saturday and have spent the last couple of days running around the valley looking for essential things (bed, desk, chairs, food, women, etc.).

The weather has been absolutely incredible. I have to start getting used to the fact that just because it’s a little windy outside doesn’t mean that a thunderstorm is approaching. Apparently, it doesn’t rain much, if at all, here in the valley during the summer. This is in stark contrast to Florida, where it rains every single day in the summer, and often more than once.

I find myself constantly licking my lips and looking for something to drink. It’s pretty dry out here.

While on the subject of the valley, let me discuss the traffic situation. There is a stoplight every eighth of a mile. I’m being completely serious. It absolutely amazes me how many stoplights they can fit into a given area. I thought there were laws that limited things like that. I just don’t get it. Driving around here is simply an exercise in downshifting and braking. It’s absurd.

Speaking of traffic, let’s talk about cars for a minute. I’ve been here for less than three days and have already seen four, brand-new, convertible Ferraris. It’s completely insane. It really is a waste to have such a nice car only to be held back by the damn stoplights; they probably never get out of second gear in the valley. I guess they take them out to the Pacific Coast Highway, or any one of the other perfect driving strips I’m yet to discover, and let ‘em loose. Around here Ferraris are like BMWs and BMWs are like Hondas. There’s so much money I can’t see straight — I can’t imagine what it must have been like during the whole dot-com boom.

Stevens Creek Boulevard, one of the main roads in the valley and about a half-mile from my place, has to be the car dealership capital of the world. Not only does it have all of your usual suspects (Lexus, Honda, Acura, Mazda, etc.), but it also has Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, and two Hummer dealerships that are no more than 300 feet from each other.

Today, the bed arrived, the digital cable/cable Internet was setup, and all my boxes from back home (I shipped seven big ones through UPS) were delivered. Just to let everyone know, Comcast knows nothing about Mac OS X. You wouldn’t believe the lengths I went to just to “register” the cable modem (after which I knew I would simply be able to connect it to my wireless router and never have to deal with their alternative-OS-hating tech-support again). To make a long story short, the lady that came out to install the modem (*cough* plug into the wall) and digital cable knew absolutely nothing about OS X and told me that the install CD was for Windows only (I later realized that the CD actually contained some OS X software). So, she told me that I had to call customer service to get instructions on how to register the modem without Windows. The first lady I got knew nothing. She told me that there is a way to register the modem without the CD, but that it would require me to change my proxy settings so that we could do some stuff over the web. Not a problem. Oh wait, slight problem, she doesn’t know what those settings need to be, which kind of makes sense when you think about it, I mean, after all, she’s tech-support. Ridiculous. After trying a billion things with her, she tells me that she doesn’t know what to do and is going to pass me up to “more advanced” support. She also tells me that this wouldn’t be immediate, but rather I would be called within 24 hours by a “technician.” This didn’t sit well with me and so I set off to fix the problem on my own, armed with the IP of the server that I was supposed to get to through the proxy that they couldn’t tell me the address of. Needless to say, I figured out a way around all the hoopla in about 20 minutes and even called tech-support to offer some tips that they might want to give to future OS X customers. Tips that would actually help them get on the network, unlike tech-support, who think that Windows is the only operating system out there (I know, I know, Windows really isn’t an OS, but for the sake of argument…   :P). There’s actually quite a bit more to the story but I recall saying “to make a long story short” somewhere up there.  :)

I got a new desk yesterday. I had my eye on it for quite some time, but unfortunately it was sold out when I got to Crate and Barrel. They had three at this store when I called a couple of weeks ago, but of course they sold their last two the morning of the day that I went to buy it. After calling all the C&B stores in the Bay Area and finding out that they were sold out everywhere, I decided to head back to the store nearest me and order it. The lady went to the back of the store to look and see how long it would take to arrive from the warehouse. She came back and said she actually had one in stock. It had arrived earlier that day (probably someone else’s, but we both ignored the possibility).

It’s a great desk and looks awesome with the PowerBook. The one problem I have with it is that because the top is tempered glass, and my mouse is optical, I’m going to have to buy a mousepad — I haven’t used a mousepad in five+ years and have grown rather fond of not having to have it on the desk.

As a lot of you know from my e-mail about the number change, I recently got a new mobile phone; no surprise there. I plan to put up a short review of the Sony Ericsson T616 later in the week after I’ve had a chance to play with it some more. So far I have no complaints. I’ve been waiting for this for a while (bottom of page).

Well, it’s been a ridiculously busy few days and I can’t wait to take a shower and sleep in a bed. I’ve had to take baths the past couple of days because my apartment complex kept forgetting to bring me a damn shower rod. Also, I’ve been sleeping on the floor (without pillows) the past couple of nights because I didn’t have a bed. Tonight’s going to be great — hot shower + new pillowtop bed. Good night.

Coast to coast

In about four hours I’ll be leaving Florida and heading to California. I’ve been here since I was nine years old — I’m 23. I had planned to wax emotional about how the last two weeks have been so incredibly tough for me, but at the risk of becoming way too caught up in it, I digress. I’ll simply say that I have, without a doubt, the single greatest/strongest network of friends that anyone could ask for; you’ll be sorely missed. Words fail me.

Hurry up already

I’m really starting to get annoyed by the fact that Six Apart has still not incorporated photo album functionality into Movable Type. They’ve been talking about it forever and were (are?) supposed to release a Pro version of MT this summer, which will include album support, but this waiting is making me nuts. Yes, I realize that they are extremely busy with TypePad (which includes photo album capability by the way), the expanded company, the new office, and a million other things, but dammit, I want my integrated photo album! They’ve said that they are going to charge for the Pro version, and frankly, I couldn’t care less. In all seriousness, they could delay photo album support for the next five years and I’d probably still say that their CMS is the best available.

I keep putting off using other photo systems because I really want to use MT’s. I’ve used Gallery quite a bit in the past and have written my own rudimentary PHP photo handler, but I’d like this to be seamless with MT before I dive into it again. I know that Gallery can be “integrated” into MT, but it requires a fair amount of work (including 11 new templates) and I know that as soon as I got done setting that up MT would announce the Pro version.  :\

I’ve also toyed with the idea of using the photo album available through my .Mac account, but it allows no customization, save the templates you can choose from, and would therefore greatly throw off the feel of the site, not to mention take you outside of my domain.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is this: MT, produce album support soon or I’m, I’ll, ah crap, I won’t do anything, but shit guys, I need this feature!  :)

Gotta have it

The BBC News is currently running an article titled, Loss of e-mail worse than divorce. A study shows that for some people the stress involved with the loss of e-mail is tantamount to marriage, divorce, or moving home.

Electronic mail is playing such a key role in companies that most people start to get annoyed after just 30 minutes without e-mail access, the study found.

And when something goes wrong with e-mail for a week, the experience can be more traumatic than moving home, getting married, or divorce, at least for a third of those taking part in the survey.

As you might expect, the results of this survey don’t surprise me too much.

I Grieve

From Peter Gabriel’s “I Grieve”:

It was only one hour ago –
It was all so different then
Nothing yet has really sunk in
Looks like it always did
This flesh and bone
It’s just the way that we are tied in
But there’s no one home

More of the same

I’ve obviously made some minor aesthetic changes to the site. I was certain that I wanted to keep the black-on-white text, but I also wanted the page to stand out from the background a little and to seem slightly more structured, hence the border. As usual, everything should look fine across all operating systems using browsers that are 5.x and up. Alert me otherwise.

I’m content with the current design, but we all know that that can change at the drop of a hat, as it has many, many times. There are some more things that I’d like to add to the site, but it already feels a little too busy for me, though I know some of you would vehemently argue the opposite. We’ll see.

I’ll have a Big Mac with extra Wi-Fi

After badgering my Comcast (digital cable/cable Internet) “representative” in Santa Clara for the past three days, I finally got an appointment for 12-4PM on Saturday — the day that I move out there. The only problem with this time is that my plane doesn’t get into San Jose until 11:13AM. I’m taking a taxi from the airport to the car dealership to pick up the car and then taking the car to my apartment. There’s no way this can be done in 47 minutes (and that number is based on the assumption that the plane itself isn’t late, there are no holdups at the car dealership, and the cable guy comes at noon — fat chance, but with my luck…). After coming to terms with this, I decided to change my appointment to the next available time — Monday afternoon.

It should come as no shock that I have definite plans to get on the Internet before the damn cable guy makes it out there. I have a few public Wi-Fi hotspots mapped out that I found through WiFinder. If all of those fail, there are 75 McDonald’s locations in the Bay Area that are decked out with wireless access, including two in Santa Clara and four in San Jose. Tell me I’m not moving to the right area.  :)

Worth the wait

One down, one to go.

Goodbye Gainesville

Well, last night was my last in Gainesville. Fortunately, it was a really great night spent with wonderful friends and a lot of alcohol. Some people put together a little send-Justin-off thingy which was really nice. Besides the fact that I drank enough to kill a small horse (s-e-r-i-o-u-s-l-y), I woke up feeling great (because I was still drunk no doubt) and had a final lunch with some of my best college friends. In typical Justin fashion I managed to break down and cry (nothing unusual here) when saying goodbye to some of them. Ugh. They will be missed.  :\

Given the emotional weight of those farewells and my well-known propensity to get weighed down by emotion, I’m extremely apprehensive about saying goodbye to my childhood friends while I’m back home (before I leave for California in about 10 days). Those that know me know that it’s going to be ridiculously hard for me to leave so many great friends behind. I could write pages and pages on this — you know I could — but I think I’d rather not dwell on it right now. Maybe later.

Just one feed

I’ve decided to remove the .91 and 1.0 RSS feeds from the site. If you are subscribed to either of these be sure to change your subscription to the 2.0 feed. There was no real impetus behind the change other than realizing that I don’t need three separate feeds, especially when most news aggregators can now handle 2.0 feeds. The files associated with these dropped feeds will be removed sometime tomorrow, so hopefully all of those subscribed to them will see this post before then.

A smart move

I’ve convinced myself to start using John Gruber’s MT plugin, SmartyPants.

SmartyPants is a free web publishing plug-in for Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit that easily translates plain ASCII punctuation characters into “smart” typographic punctuation HTML entities.

You can never be too anal-retentive.

While on the topic of HTML entities, be sure to check out the wonderful chart(s) put together by Tony Stephens.

Clear: both

I received an e-mail from a friend this morning who pointed out that, in Safari, pages on my site are “cut off” near the bottom. When the content section is shorter than the menu section (e.g., on some individual archive pages), the menu is cut off. When the content is longer than the menu section, the last three or four lines of the content is cut off. For both of these cases, the browser window must be shorter than the length of the menu. While I do use Safari 100% of the time, I don’t make it a habit of looking at my archived posts or, as it seems, any of the other pages where the content might be shorter than the menu, which explains why I never noticed this error. It won’t happen again.

I fixed it by applying the clear: both property right before I closed the container div.

Oddly enough, I couldn’t reproduce the error in IE5/Mac, Opera6/Mac, Mozilla1.4/Mac, Netscape7.1/Mac, IE6/Win, or Opera7/Win — only Safari.

Back in Florida

I arrived back in Florida yesterday morning. I ended up finding a pretty nice apartment in Santa Clara: less than two miles from the school, covered parking, six blocks from Westfield, the biggest mall in the valley and perhaps the biggest mall I’ve ever seen — at least 3x bigger than any mall I’ve ever lived near, air-conditioning (I’ve come to find that this is a rarity in northern California), completely renovated last year, GSM coverage, and a liquor store across the street. Good stuff.

Save the car accident, the trip to California was an otherwise fun (stress == fun, right?) and productive excursion.

All that’s left to do now is everything: ship all of my stuff, schedule the setup of utilities (digital cable, cable internet, electricity, etc.), change the address on all credit cards/bank accounts/a billion websites, purchase and ship some new furniture and other household necessities, blah blah blah. Moving across the country has turned into a bigger headache than I had anticipated. It’s nothing that can’t be organized and executed efficiently, but it’s requiring more work than I thought it would.

Rolling with the punches

We all know that my luck certainly leaves a lot to be desired. I’ve inherited this from my father and when we are together it always seems to be doubly bad. As the story goes, we were stopped at a red light, bickering back and forth as usual, when a car, on the other side of the road coming in the opposite direction, ran the light while the driver was talking on his mobile phone, something he conceded right away. This car was carrying himself, two women, and a baby. Another car was going through the intersection and got nailed by the first car. Both cars came across the median; the second car hit the back of ours. A fourth car, behind us, was hit as well. No one was hurt. The guy at fault had no license, but did happen to have insurance. The lady driving the second car was driving on a suspended license. It came as no surprise to us that our car was the last one to get towed. A good 45 minutes passed from the time that the first car was towed to the time that our tower arrived. Our luck. We lost 3-4 hours because of this whole misadventure, which may not seem like much, but when you are clear across the continent for four days and have to find a place to live before you leave, every minute counts.

Most of yesterday was spent calling apartments, getting a quote on their cheapest 1BR/1BA, and then promptly hanging up the phone only to once again complain about how expensive it is to live out here, where air-conditioning is not only the exception to the rule, but quite rare in a sub-$1000 apartment. Ridiculous.

Yesterday evening we drove up the Pacific Coast Highway in the convertible as the sun was going down. It was so incredibly gorgeous; I’m afraid I’m going to be forever spoiled. The driving here is going to be absolutely amazing. The first thing I’m going to do (outside of the 456243 things involved with moving across the country) when I arrive here for good is get in my new car and drive, drive, drive. The hills, weather, and views make for perfect driving conditions. I’ll admit, I’m a little apprehensive given my last ticket, but that isn’t going to deter me from soaking all of this sick road up.

After today’s accident we got our sanity in shape by having some of the best Mexican food of my life. This particular restaurant is less than a quarter-mile from the place that I think I most want to live. I say think because of the fact that we went by the place four times today and never got to talk to a leasing agent. The entire complex is locked down and you have to call the leasing office from the gate outside before you can even set foot inside the ‘fort.’ No one ever came to the door (yes, they were open). Hopefully tomorrow they will be a little more accommodating, else they’re just going to have to live without me.

Though this trip has left little time for relaxing and sight-seeing, we did manage to make it up to San Francisco today. What a beautiful city. Wow. I can definitely see myself making that trip quite often. I’ve been asked by a couple of people to see the pictures I’ve taken while here. Unfortunately, I’ve taken much fewer pictures than I would have liked, but again, this isn’t really “vacation” time. I do plan to post some of these pictures though, probably sometime next week. You’ll notice that I’ve actually removed the photos link from the menu bar. This is because I went ahead and got the full .Mac account earlier tonight and so I’m going to start moving all of my online pictures over to that, at least until MT adds support for photo albums.

Well, I have to call it a night. It’s been a long day and tomorrow will be even longer.

In California

My father and I arrived in California in one piece (well, two pieces as it were). It’s been an incredibly demanding day as we got up around 5AM, flew to LAX (from Florida) and then to San Jose. Silicon Valley is absolutely incredible. Really neat. I was expecting a lot, but nothing like this; I’m pretty excited.

After getting off the plane in San Jose we got into our convertible rental (I’m only 23 and can’t yet rent a car, ergo my father’s accompaniment), put the top down, and proceeded to get lost. And again. And again. Ah, the joys of a new city clear across the continent.

After we got situated (*cough* after broadband internet in the hotel was up and running) we were off to look at my school and to also look at some of the apartment complexes I’ve been researching for the past two months; there are about nine that I really want to look at. We got to two of them today. One was a complete bust (i.e., didn’t even pull in, just kept driving by), but the other is a definite possibility. We’ll see how the next few go. I’d like to get to at least five tomorrow. That’s going to be a stretch though as we also have a meeting at a Honda dealership to see about getting me a new car.

We have already been doing some serious eating while here. Got some great Mexican for lunch and excellent sushi for dinner. If there’s one thing I can bet on about my father, it’s that we’ll eat proper. You guys that know me personally know that my 155lbs can eat some serious food — bring it! I wasn’t talking to you, Takeru. Hopefully, we’ll get a lot of this apartment shit out of the way so that we can head up to San Francisco and take in some of the sights together.

Speaking of taking in some sights, my father almost got to see me bust the lip of the guy that puts your shit on the x-ray conveyor belt at the airport. As is extremely well known, I’m absurdly anal-retentive when it comes to my personal stuff, and tend to get fairly upset when someone damages my things. At airport security you are required to take notebooks out of their cases and place them in a little plastic bin. To make a long story short, I put my PowerBook in the bin and asked the guy to be gentle as he put it on the conveyor belt. Is he? Fuck no! He literally ramps the bin up the metal roller things until it *hits* the conveyor belt causing the notebook to slide across the bin and slam into the side. I was livid. The sides of the computer didn’t sustain any noticeable damage, but the bottom is pretty scratched up. Not looking forward to doing it all over again on the way back.  :(

Ahem, this post has certainly turned out to be longer than anticipated. I’m obviously still on Florida time so that puts me at about 2AM — nothing out of the ordinary, but that coupled with the fact that I got up at 5AM this morning after going to bed at 3AM the night before and at 6AM the night before that (blame the alcohol), has left me slightly drained. Night.

One last thing: if anyone reading this site has any suggestions as to where to eat in the valley, be sure to let me know.

Is California ready?

As some of you know, I’m headed out to California tomorrow to try and find a place to live (I start law school there in August). I’ve never been to California so it should be a fun trip, assuming I find an apartment that isn’t $1200/mo, else I might have to call this place home. Ugh.

I’m certainly not looking forward to the flight (from Florida), but that’s how it goes. Hopefully the PowerBook, iPod, Gameboy Advance SP, and some books can hold me over.

Article links

Not sure why it has taken me so long, but I just added a permanent link to each post. You’ll notice the ::: next to the title of each post. This a direct link to the archived entry; just in case you wanted to link someone to a post. You’ve always been able to go into the archives section and get the link from there, but this is one less step and is a bit more intuitive.

Also, I’ve made quite a few changes to the (X)HTML and CSS that define the site. You should see no change on your end if I’ve done my job correctly. If after force-reloading something still looks a little awry, be sure to let me know.

Always on

The New York Times is running a great article titled, The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive?. The article is about me. Alright, sure, I wasn’t interviewed or anything, but I might as well have been. It’s about the inability of those who have become indelibly attached to the Net to remove themselves from it. More generally, it’s about workaholics who have found in the Net, another way to exploit their desire to constantly be doing something.

These speed demons say they will fall behind if they disconnect, but they also acknowledge feeling something much more powerful: they are compulsively drawn to the constant stimulation provided by incoming data. Call it O.C.D. — online compulsive disorder.

“It’s like a dopamine squirt to be connected,” said Dr. Ratey, who compares the sensations created by constantly being wired to those of narcotics — a hit of pleasure, stimulation and escape. “It takes the same pathway as our drugs of abuse and pleasure.”

“It’s an addiction,” he said, adding that some people cannot deal with down time or quiet moments. “Without it, we are in withdrawal.”

I have to agree with this 100%. It’s the constant fear of becoming bored or complacent and the ever-present feeling that I need to learn as much as possible that drives me. Case in point: as I read said article I checked my e-mail three times, replied to two, began typing this post, and helped a friend setup a weblogging tool — all because of the slight delay incurred while going to the next page(s) of the article. Whether I’m reading a Harry Potter book on my PDA while waiting in the deli line, checking e-mail on my phone as soon as my date makes for the ladies room, or heading back to my computer each commercial break (no TiVo… yet) — I’m always checking something.

The article claims that the incessant multitasking might actually be counter-productive, citing a study that said that those who constantly traded their time and attention between two tasks were likely to spend up to 50% more time on each task. It goes on to say that multitasking begets a false productivity; a sense that one is accomplishing more than he or she actually is. While this no doubt holds true under certain conditions, I can’t imagine it being too valid in the real world. Honestly, I think that the whole multitasking argument presented in the article is moot simply because different people operate, well, differently. The fact is, some jobs and lifestyles absolutely demand multitasking, in which case the word becomes a slight misnomer as it no longer evokes the idea of doing multiple jobs at once, but rather doing the job, which happens to require you to divide your attention. I say to hell with the research results, divide and conquer.

I think a lot of the confusion lies in the way that technology is allowing us to push ourselves further and further — to see how much information and responsibility we can juggle at one time — to find the point at which we have to say “enough.” The article states:

They put themselves in situations where, if they don’t perform at peak efficiency, they’ll crash and burn. In the aftermath there is a rush of chemicals.

That one blurb sums up the entire idea: peak efficiency. I find a certain thrill in flirting with the deadline, in agreeing to help someone with task A even though it’s going to impede task B, in seeing how much I can tack on and accomplish within a given time range. Computers are enabling us to simplify every part of our lives to the point that we seek out ways to bring more chaos into them, so that we can then find ways to tame it. I’ve spent a lot of time organizing, ordering, and otherwise automating certain tasks so that they cause me less strife in the future; so I don’t have to think about them. That being said, the mind, as we well know, is a curious creature, and rather than allowing us to become less stressed, we find other things to fuss about. Though all the technology facilitates easier search and retrieval of relevant news and information while allowing us to seemingly better organize our lives, it inexorably leaves us craving some sort of disorder — something new, something more.

The Internet has a way of making us want to peer around the corner, to look over the edge, to click on the next link — in short, it exacerbates the human desire to learn and share. Russell Beattie commented on his information addiction in a blog entry titled, News Junkie, in which he writes:

Last night I spent at least 6 or 7 HOURS reading news. I didn’t even notice… but I realized that as soon as Ana got home around 7 p.m., I started opening up links in different Moz tabs and just kept on going. Exclusively reading news. At the end, when I had read just about everything that could possibly have been said in the past week about mobile technology, I was casting about for more - opening up random Slashdot threads, doing searches on Google news, refreshing my aggregator cache every 5 minutes or so, and more.

I’ve done this very thing for years. This on top of monitoring IRC channels, usenet posts, e-mail lists, and myriad other news mediums. It used to be the case that I wouldn’t let myself read the “news” for the day until a certain time at night, say 7PM. I looked at it sort of like a treat; a reward for getting other, more pertinent things done. Because of news aggregators, it is no longer the case that I have a certain time at which I allow myself to start checking the news, but I do have more news to check. This is because of the fact that adding a new feed to the aggregator is so simple and I easily convince myself that one more site isn’t going to kill anyone. Meanwhile, my subscription list has grown to 110 feeds. I almost feel guilty to not take advantage of what is available to us and when something comes along that makes the collection of this information easier, it’s practically impossible for me to turn the other cheek — I have to use/buy it.

But with all of these ways for us to stay more intricately connected and informed, we aren’t offered many ways to decide what to leave out; what to ignore. I realize that most people will have no idea what I’m talking about, but there are some — those like myself with a strong propensity for obsessive-compulsive behavior and a clue — who realize that the limit to what we can learn is bound below only by our connected devices and above only by the time we can convince ourselves to allot to them. We are the first generation able to experience this connectedness and should take full advantage of our good fortune by stuffing our brains and schedules with all they can hold.

On a related note, my aggregator is telling me that there are 76 unread headlines waiting for me to peruse. So yes, to answer the NYT article, data is addictive.  :)

Necessary tourist apparel

Uncomfortable with the thought that those in other countries might associate him with President Bush and his policies, Joel Aufrecht has gone out of his way to make sure that his position is clear. Hilarious.

Fun with google

This little gag is much like the one I told you guys about a while back. Type “weapons of mass destruction” into the search form and press the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Hopefully this will still work when you try it.

On .Mac and simplicity

I’ve just downgraded my hosting plan so that it will now cost me $20/mo instead of $30. I did this so that I may spend the extra $$$ on .Mac, which is $99/yr. I haven’t written about .Mac on here before because I’ve been in the process of evaluating it for the past month. Apple allows Mac users a free, 90-day trial of the .Mac service. Though there are many, many features, the one that really caught my attention was the Backup capability. It’s no secret, I’m incredibly anal about backing up all of my important documents and this program really simplifies the process, even to the point that I really won’t need to burn backups anymore (or not as often I should say). With the .Mac package, you get 100MB (or more if required) of space on their servers, which you can use however you like (I’ll talk about some of the other options a little later). The way I’ve been running my backup system for the longest time is that I’d essentially have two different categories of backups; one for stuff that would rarely, if ever, change (old schoolwork, e-mails, past website designs, etc), and then ‘living’ documents that changed often (current schoolwork, code, etc). I’d burn all of the older, static stuff to CD (2x) and also keep a copy of all of it on my current HD for easy access. The newer, dynamic stuff would get backed up once a week to CD and would also be run through a couple of scripts I wrote that would tar everything up, encrypt it, and then send it off to a couple of shell accounts. Now, the thing about .Mac’s Backup feature is that it automates this entire process and makes it, well, pretty. It also gives me peace-of-mind knowing that my data is in good hands. Not only are all of my regular documents backed up, but so are my iCal calendars, Address Book information, and Safari bookmarks — all automatically and behind the scenes. This feature alone is worth the $99/yr to me — it helps me sleep better.  :)

Another really neat feature (especially for those with more than one Mac) is that iSync can sync with your .Mac account. This means that if, say, you have a Mac at work and then one at home, you can sync your bookmarks (and everything else) across them. It’s all automatic.

There are those who will tell you that the $99/yr is worth it just for the e-mail address you get — you get an @mac.com with the account. To tell you the truth, I’d be pretty damn excited about it myself if it weren’t for the fact that I already have the greatest e-mail address on earth. This also goes for the web space you get with the account (homepage.mac.com/username).

Speaking of the web space, .Mac also lets you easily integrate photos from iPhoto into your web account. In fact, I might start putting the photos that I already share on the .Mac homepage and point to them from here (at least until MT adds photo-blogging functionality).

.Mac also gives you anti-virus support in the form of Virex from McAfee. Now, it’s incredibly rare that I ever have trouble with viruses in *nix, or Windows for that matter, so it’s hard for me to even care about this feature en