The strongest woman I know

My grandma.

I really like Mint

A couple of months ago I finally decided to bite the bullet and pay for Mint, a statistics package for websites. What? Yah, I couldn’t believe it either, but you know I loves the numbers. $30, to be sure, is a lot to pay for what amounts to nothing more than a somewhat simplified stats program, but I love it. I love everything about it.

I’m not going to go into detail about the product, lord knows the blogosphere had its way with it when it was first released (mostly with regard to its admittedly high price), but I will say that I’m more than pleased, even if a bit miffed that I actually paid for it. It actually reminds me a lot of the old Reinvigorate system (which was *cough* free).

It’s not Analog or Urchin (now available for free from Google Analytics), but it shows me the information that I want to see, and beautifully I might add.

I think my absolute favorite feature is the RSS feed for new referrers. No need to follow anything else; Technorati, PubSub, and all the other ways I used to track incoming links have been obviated. Shaun gets around the referral spam problem by “validating” every hit with JavaScript, which really seems to do the trick.

One other really nice feature regarding referrers is that it can usually deduce that different URIs are the same site (e.g., www.foo.com, foo.com, foo.com/foo.html) and record/present them as such.

Pepper

The “Pepper” plugin interface is fantastic and as soon as I think of something I need that hasn’t already been created, I’ll be sure to release my own addition to Mint.

I currently use the following Peppers:

• FeedBurner Stats
• Fresh View
• Trends

Mild complaints

There is no way to filter the RSS feed. In other words, there is no way to remove from it things that come up often, but in slightly different contexts (e.g., I get a ton of referrals from Google Images which I couldn’t care less about). Yes, I know of the Referrer Filter Pepper, but it only filters the page view pane, not the RSS feed.

Another thing I would like to see is the ability to switch between various color schemes. Sure, I could whip up a custom CSS file, but, well, I’m a busy man, and for $30 I would expect at least one alternative color combination.

All in all though, it’s a great piece of software and something I see myself using for years to come.

Busch Gardens

Yesterday I went to Busch Gardens with a bunch of friends for the first time in ~10 years. It was an absolute blast and everything I remembered. I think it’s always been my favorite theme park and yesterday just helped to solidify its position at the top. The new big ride, SheiKra, is completely insane, and were it not for the ridiculous wait times, we probably would have rode it all day.

Eric, a good friend of mine

WordPress 2.0

WordPress 2.0 was released yesterday (from v1.5.x) — I upgraded my installation last night and had no issues. Great job guys.

Also, both of the plugins I maintain for WP work fine under 2.0 (I’ve updated the list of working plugins to reflect this). On a related note, I’ll be releasing Smart Archives v1.1 sometime in the next few days and am working on two new plugins.

As you were.

I just can’t keep up

Too many friends to see. Too many voicemails to respond to. Too many conversations to have. I’m afraid that there just isn’t going to be enough time to fit it all in this break. If you haven’t received a response from me (other than through SMS/e-mail), trust that you are in the queue.

Uhh, at some point I should probably do some patent bar studying.

I ended up getting the EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens I spoke of in an earlier post, but haven’t had a chance to shoot with it yet; hopefully tomorrow I can find some time. I’m currently sitting on about 10 pictures I think are good enough to post here — expect them to trickle in over the next few weeks.

Florida sunset

Today was the first day since I’ve been home that I’ve been able to take any pictures (my previous efforts had been thwarted by rain and lack of transportation), but even today I was only able to go out for about 45 minutes before it got dark.

You can find another, similar sunset picture below this one in my Flickr photostream (I took a ton of pictures because the sky kept changing colors) along with a B&W picture of a parked train that I took before I got to the water.

Expect many more photos, weather and transportation permitting.

I am a workaholic

That’s the first step, right? Now what? It’s no doubt getting worse with age, and, well, it kind of scares me.

What’s a GSM fanboy to do?

UPDATE: I actually ordered the i-mate SP5 again. Should be here tomorrow.

Am I going to be ‘forced’ to move to Verizon? Of all the phones I’ve owned and services I’ve used, the only major carrier I’ve never gone with is Verizon (for various reasons). However, that might have to change given that they seem to have both the Palm Treo 700w and the Motorola Q locked for the foreseeable future. Not sure if we’ll see unlocked GSM versions of these phones until well after the Verizon launch-hype has worn off.

This puts me in a very contentious position. Perhaps I’ll have to try and get the i-mate SP5 again(!) (obviously not from Expansys) or just wait for the Nokia E61, which I think might be a huge hit next year, assuming of course that Nokia doesn’t follow their usual practice of pricing “high-end” phones completely out of the market.

Still reluctant to move to Verizon

My love for GSM really has nothing to do with the underlying technology. That used to be the case, but as this industry progresses we’re starting to see that the big three (Sprint, Cingular, and Verizon) are converging toward similar ceilings. I think the biggest reason I’ve never gone with Verizon (or Sprint since about 2001) is because the [CDMA] phones they use are locked to the carrier, and so phones without the carrier’s “seal of approval” simply will not work. What does that mean exactly? It means that the latest and greatest devices (read: those available anywhere but America) can’t be used on these networks. If you flip mobile devices like I do, you not only want access to the newest gadgets, you also want to be able to sell them easily, which becomes a bit more difficult if your ad is limited to a specific carrier. When locked in with either Verizon or Sprint, you’re at the mercy of the respective provider as to which phone you’ll be using next — unless they decide to pick up the phone you want (and the manufacturer decides to let them have it), you’re shit out of luck. This has never sat well with me and I’m not sure the Q or the 700w can change that. Couple this inability to control your device with the fact that Verizon’s unlimited data plan for devices is $45/mo., where Cingular’s is $20, and the possible switch quickly becomes a non-decision.

I actually purchased a RIM Blackberry 8700c after the whole SP5 fiasco, but returned it the same day after realizing that there was no way for me (err, Cingular wouldn’t allow me) to use my all-I-can-eat data plan with the RIM device even though I didn’t need/want any “push” functionality; I simply wanted web and POP/IMAP access, but this required a separate $50/mo. “BlackBerry” plan. Just one more way to get your money. I’m so sick of the providers here I can’t see straight and could talk at unbelievable length about the inequities and ineptitude of the entire mobile phone industry, but I’ll save everyone the bore (for now!).

On the lack of new pictures here

Yes, I know I’ve been a little lax with pictures here lately — I’ve been busy. Truth be told, I haven’t taken a single shot in about two months — I’m itching to get back into the swing of it and plan to shoot a ton while here in Florida.

While on the topic, I should mention that I might be adding the EF 50mm f/1.4 USM to my arsenal fairly soon.

On having luggage lost

Well, as usual, the black cloud of luck that hangs over my head decided to rain on me again today — American Airlines lost my luggage, which included both my patent bar study materials and some rather expensive clothes. Hopefully they’ll find it and rectify the situation. This is just what I needed after the last month and a 7:00AM-midnight transit from California to Florida. Same shit, different day.

What a month

I had my last law school final of the semester last night and am completely burnt-out. Not sure why, but finals really took their toll on me this semester. They always do, but this semester seemed a bit more intense for some reason. I’ve essentially been a machine the last few weeks and am now devoid of energy. All that’s really left to do is wait for my grades to start trickling in and ruining my day(s). Luckily, I’ll be able to drown my sorrows in good company, Chik-fil-A sandwiches, and fried okra from Sonny’s (see below).

Unfortunately, there’s really no downtime — today is the girlfriend’s birthday and tomorrow morning I head back to Florida for about three weeks. On top of the fact that there are 2342353 people I need to see and hang out with in Florida, this break is likely going to be a lot less fun than years past because I’m going to have to spend the majority of it studying for the patent bar, which is not the most exciting thing in the world. In fact, I dare say it’s the most boring, god-awful thing I’ve ever been made to do.

Notwithstanding the fact that I’ve got all of this stuff going on and that the next few weeks will arguably be as busy as the last few, you should expect a ton of posts from me over the next month or so — there’s a whole lot I’ve been wanting to say, but just haven’t had the time to say it.

We’re now off to find Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play for my PSP. This cartridge comes with the original Mortal Kombat trilogy (I’m an MK god; it’s been a while, but…) and ~20 other games. I can’t wait!

We also plan on seeing King Kong this afternoon, and from what I’ve heard, it’s nothing short of brilliant.

As you were.

Del.icio.us alternatives redux

I received quite a bit of e-mail regarding the Del.icio.us alternatives post I put up a few weeks ago. As is always the case when I write something like that, much of the feedback comes from similarly situated people looking for the same solution and asking me to let them know if and when I come across it.

However, not all of the e-mail was from end-users — I also got feedback from various del.icio.us competitors hawking their wares. In fact, the CTO of Furl, the service I commented on in the earlier post, e-mailed me to get a better understanding of what I was talking about regarding the URI-forwarding and has since told me that a “furl”-free referrer is now on the to-do list. I really hope this actually comes to fruition.

For what it’s worth, I did try out quite a few other social-bookmarking services, but all of them suffered from the same no-HTML-in-comments shortcoming.

Something tells me that at the end of the day I’m going to have to migrate the entire thing back to my own CMS to get this very simple feature. I explained how to create a “linkblog” with Movable Type a while back, though I’d likely use WordPress this time around if it comes down to that.

Out of curiosity, has anyone come across a del.icio.us importer for either WordPress or Movable Type (either would work — importing/exporting between those systems isn’t too terribly difficult)? When I say “importer,” I’m referring to moving the actual bookmarks (+descriptions) to the CMS (i.e., each bookmark ends up being a separate post); I’m not looking for a way to present del.icio.us bookmarks on a site powered by either of those CMSs.

Gmail and Lynx

Not sure why I’m writing about this here, but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Gmail works, and works well, in Lynx, the text-only web browser for *nix terminals.

A few days ago there were some network problems on campus (surprise, surprise) and about half of the sites I was going to were not coming up. I desperately needed to check my e-mail and my phone’s battery was dead so I couldn’t do it from there. I didn’t know of any proxies off the top of my head and so I ended up SSH’ing into my webhost and using Lynx to get to Gmail.

Now, I fully realize that Gmail has an HTML-only version that is triggered when JavaScript is disabled (or missing), but for whatever reason I just assumed that the site would somehow break under Lynx. Lucky for me it didn’t break, and honestly, the navigation isn’t that bad in a pinch.

Note to self

It’s probably not a good idea to do this again. Finals are killing you this semester.

Hacking Gmail

It appears that Wiley has put up a few excerpts from Hacking Gmail, a book for which I was the technical editor (also see Google Hacks).

Keep in mind that the selections Wiley offers don’t touch at all upon the real crux of the book, namely, the API and other code-related things that were Ben’s focus.

If you’re a Gmail “power user” and really want some neat, practical insight into the web service’s innards, I suggest you check out the book, which I’m told should be in stores before Christmas.

As an experiment, I started using Gmail exclusively about a month ago and have a lot to say about the experience (not the least of which is the fact that I’m still using it). Because I fear the post will be relatively long, I’ll likely wait until law school finals are over before writing something up.

Colored bubbles

Mike Haney’s got an excellent article up on Popular Science titled, The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles. It’s one of those inspiring feel-good stories that really makes you want to keep pressing on and producing, knowing that there are still problems yet to be solved and things yet to be created, and hoping to one day claim your well-deserved jackpot for figuring it all out. My favorite passages:

“I started with Jell-O, because I thought, ‘Well, it’s got pretty intense color.’ So I mixed Jell-O and Ivory soap. I got nothing.” Undeterred, he went back to the store and tried food coloring. Then hair dye. Then ink. Within weeks, he was taking Sherri on dates to the grocery store, where he would buy as many colored products as he could afford. Back in his kitchen, he’d dump the Fruit Roll-Ups or Juicy Juice into a pan, heat it on the stove until he figured the color was loosened up, and pour in the dish soap. Only clear bubbles emerged.
…
Color remained elusive, but his try-anything approach kept plenty of other strange bubbles floating across his kitchen. One exploded with a loud bang. Another gave him chemical burns when it popped. The best one bounced, just like a Super Ball. He thought he could have sold that one, but he couldn’t re-create it. He could rarely re-create any of his experiments. “I never wrote anything down,” he says. “I’d get too excited as I was doing it. But once I lost that bouncing bubble, I was crushed. I started videotaping myself so that next time I’d know more than ‘It was something on that side of the kitchen.’ “
…
Ask Kehoe now to describe the day the first colored bubble appeared, and the details are fuzzy. He remembers dipping his wand into a pot of blue solution (although they produced clear bubbles, most of his solutions were colored by then) and looking at the quivering film, thinking that this one seemed different. He blew, and a bubble floated across the room. It was blue. He tried again. The next bubbles were blue too. He called Sherri in to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. No, she agreed, it was a blue bubble. As far as they knew, the world’s first blue bubble. In his kitchen.

What the hell is up with PopSci’s pagination? That entire story should have been on three pages max, not 11! I get that they want to hike up page views and ad impressions, but their scheme is a bit overkill — I can promise you that if I haven’t clicked on an ad by page two, I probably won’t on page 11. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on ad period, but that’s beside the point, or is it?

Use CSS to place Firefox tabs where you want them

I actually hacked this up for myself a couple of months ago and the explanation of how I did it was sitting in the “queue” waiting to be posted here (like 30+ other things at the moment), but it seems that I’ve been preempted by mozillaZine, which I was just informed, has some instructions on the process.

I like everything on my computer to be on the right (tabs, system dock, application drawers, etc); for me, it makes perfect sense both from an efficiency standpoint (i.e., it’s usually the case that my mouse pointer “sits” on the right side of my screen) and a screen real-estate standpoint (i.e., my monitor, like most, is wider than it is tall).

Del.icio.us alternatives

Can anyone point me to a “social” bookmarking service that has everything del.icio.us has plus the ability to use markup in the comments you add? If there’s no relatively easy¹ way to import my del.icio.us links into whatever you’re recommending, then forget it, but if you think you know of something that might fit the bill, pray tell.

Of course all of this would be moot if del.icio.us would simply allow HTML in the comments. You listening Joshua? Come on man, make it happen; I don’t want to leave del.icio.us.  :)

I’m well aware of Furl and if I switch that’s likely what I’ll switch to, but there’s one thing about that service that really bothers me, namely, the fact that when you use it to put links on your site, those links are routed through their servers each time someone clicks on them (i.e., sites won’t see that I’m linking to them because the referrer will show Furl; not only does this perturb me personally, it frustrates the means and ends of search engines).

Cribcandy

I got turned on to Cribcandy, “bookmarkable stuff for your home,” a few months ago and can’t get enough of it. Every day its RSS feed alerts me to neat products that I can add to my “wist” (wish + list) with a single click. Nevermind the fact that I can’t afford 99% of the stuff I add — it’s there waiting for me when I can.

Perfect Blue Buildings

Just down the street from your hotel, baby
I stay at home with my disease
And ain’t this position familiar, darling
Well, all monkeys do what they see
Help me stay awake, I’m falling…

Down on Virginia and La Loma
Where I got friends who’ll care for me
You got an attitude of everything I ever wanted
I got an attitude of need
Help me stay awake, I’m falling…

Asleep in perfect blue buildings
Beside the green apple sea
Gonna get me a little oblivion
Try to keep myself away from me

It’s 4:30 a.m. on a Tuesday
It doesn’t get much worse than this
In beds in little rooms in buildings in the middle
of these lives which are completely meaningless
Help me stay awake, I’m falling…

Asleep in perfect blue buildings
Beside the green apple sea
Gonna get me a little oblivion
Try to keep myself away from myself and me

I got bones beneath my skin and mister…
There’s a skeleton in every man’s house
Beneath the dust and love and sweat that hangs on everybody
There’s a dead man trying to get out
Please help me stay awake, I’m falling…

Asleep in perfect blue buildings
Beside the green apple sea
Gonna get me a little oblivion, baby
Try to keep myself away from me

From Counting Crows’ Perfect Blue Buildings

Chaos theory

I recently received the following e-mail from a good undergrad friend:

This link in your bits feed made it into lecture today after I sent it to Dr. Wu.

This is his reply:

“It is easy to explain why we see green dot. Since the pink dot moves fast, what we see is actually the complement color of pink, which is green. When the pink changes to grey (the background color), you will see green. If a monitor show R and G at different location, you will not see R and G, but yellow, as long as the lighting moves fast from R to G (faster than 30 Hz or so).”

He showed it in class and said he would ask how it works on the final exam.

Is this an example of chaos theory? The effect of including a link in your page alters the final grade of Dr. Wu’s students.

Hopefully no one in that class reads my site.  :)

32-inch LCD HDTV recommendations

UPDATE: I think I’ve settled on the Sony BRAVIA XBR.

Though I already have a few well-informed friends on the case, I thought I might as well ask the question here too: what’s the best 32-inch LCD HDTV for less than $2500?

It’s very likely that I’ll still do my usual over-the-top, leave-no-webpage-unread research on the subject, but I wouldn’t mind hearing from a few people who might be a bit more knowledgeable than I when it comes to this sort of thing.

Expansys and delayed shipping

UPDATE: Well, I’m fairly certain that I’m going to be going with the 8700c I mention below — currently Expansys is claiming that my order will not ship until Nov. 30th Dec. 11th Dec. 23rd!!! If it ships on that day (and it won’t), it will have taken more than three months to arrive at my doorstep. No thank you.

As I mentioned previously, I recently purchased an i-mate SP5. It still has not shipped. When I ordered it I was told that it would ship in six days. It’s been 30. Every time the “estimated shipping” ticker drops down a couple of days, it always seems to jump back up by four or five. Currently, it says four days, so assuming it actually ships this go around (unlikely), it will have shipped 34 days after I ordered it.

I’ve used Expansys multiple times without incident, but this is really starting to rub me the wrong way. I understand that the holdup is likely on i-mate’s end, but not once in the past month have I received an e-mail explanation from Expansys regarding the delay. Nothing.

I’ve been looking very seriously at the Blackberry 8700c and if it ends up coming out on the 21st as expected, I may very well cancel the SP5 order if it hasn’t yet shipped. Hell, I may just cancel the order out of principle — this is getting ridiculous.

Disabling auto-paragraphs in WordPress

If WordPress feels that a tag you are using needs to be wrapped in a paragraph tag, it will just go ahead and do that for you no questions asked. No thank you.

I first ran into this problem when checking the site for XHTML validation after coming up with a method for producing weblog footnotes using Textpander. The XHTML would not validate: there was a closing paragraph tag without a matching opening paragraph tag. Poring over my code again and again, I knew that I wasn’t doing it — WordPress was adding the rogue paragraph tag sometime subsequent to the calling of the_content(). After taking the issue up on the support forums (and finding agreement that it was indeed a bug), I noticed the problem again when I did the latest redesign, however in this instance it was adding an opening paragraph tag and not closing it, which compelled me to re-examine the issue.

After sifting through more code than I’d like to admit, I figured out a very quick and easy fix that doesn’t seem to break anything else (on my site anyway). All you need to do is open the /wp-includes/default-filters.php file and comment out the following line:

Logic would suggest that if you don’t currently roll your own XHTML, then this little hack probably isn’t for you, because, I’m assuming, that without this filter, posts that are typed up through the WordPress web interface are never wrapped in paragraph tags. In other words, don’t comment out the above line unless you know what you’re doing.

Keep the change

I hate change. Hell, I hate cash period. I’m very used to the surprised looks I get from friends when, for whatever reason, I actually whip out some cash to pay for something. One of the biggest reasons I hate cash is that you have to keep replenishing it, which means taking trips to the bank (or selling things on Craigslist), which means you’re being inefficient (unless of course you walk around with thousands of dollars in your pocket or you work at a bank).

That said, most of the people I know don’t seem to agree with me about this. They almost always use cash and make frequent trips to the bank to get more of it. My argument is simple: it’s 2000-fucking-5, the world is electronic, why aren’t you? I don’t get it. With a debit/cash card you never have to worry about not having money (if you actually have money in the bank), there is an electronic record kept of whatever you purchase, and best of all there is no change to deal with.

Perhaps Bank of America has finally realized that a significant number of people still prefer cash, because they’ve just come out with a pretty ingenious program, Keep the Change, that would seem to prod people into using their debit cards more. Basically, the program rounds up any purchases you make using your debit card to the nearest dollar and puts the difference between the rounded amount and the actual amount into your savings account — automatically and with every purchase.

What I don’t quite understand though is that the name “Keep the Change” seems to be a bit of a misnomer. I mean, if you are using your debit card, there is no “change” anyway, right? Right. Notwithstanding the confusing name, I still think it’s a neat idea, especially for those spendthrifts who don’t normally “save.”

Sadly though, the program can’t really compete with some of the other cash-back credit card programs out there because those give you something on top of what you’ve already put in (assuming that you pay off your balance each month) rather than skimming the top off of what was already there and repackaging it . That said, I do think that this aspect of the program is pretty cool:

For the first three months, we’ll match your Keep the Change? savings at 100%. That means for every Keep the Change transfer, we’ll contribute the same amount to your Bank of America savings account. And when the three months are over, to make it even easier to save, we’ll continue matching 5% a year, every year.

While on the topic of Bank of America, I have to say that their website can be pretty goddamn annoying sometimes. For those not in the know, BoA has two completely separate computer systems, east and west, that cannot talk to each other; apparently, like those that still use cash exclusively, no one there got the memo that it’s 2000-fucking-5 and that this sort of interoperability should be a non-issue — it’s the same company for christ’s sake!

I have accounts in both California and Florida and if I want to deposit a check into my Florida account while in California I actually have to go into the bank, fill out some paperwork and then wait in line so that I can talk to a teller (even though I can withdraw “Florida” money from any BoA ATM). What is more is that the deposit is not instantaneous and usually takes a couple of days to show up in my account. It’s much easier to just deposit it into the California account and then move it over electronically.

While this isn’t that big of a deal (I mean, how often do you use checks anyway?), there is another aspect of this divide that is incredibly annoying, namely, the fact that you can’t consolidate multi-state accounts (if they exist on opposite systems) into a single online “account.” I have to use separate logins to get into my accounts even though they are through the same damn bank. This wouldn’t be such a chore if you weren’t required to choose the state in which the account is held (the different login name isn’t enough), but you are and the song-and-dance requires multiple steps.

If anyone can explain away this chasm, pray tell.

From iPhoto to iView MediaPro

ADDENDUM: A few days ago, Apple announed Aperture, a professional-grade photo editing and management tool, which, after watching the demo videos, I’m incredibly impressed with; something tells me I’m going to be doing this whole “migrating” thing all over again with Aperture pretty soon. It’s obvious that Aperture is currently meant to complement Photoshop, not obviate it, but I’m sure Apple isn’t ruling out the possibility years down the road.

A couple of weeks ago I decided I was going to stop using iPhoto and move to something, umm, what’s the word, oh yah, USABLE. iPhoto had been giving me all kinds of trouble, much more than I want to get into here (and that you likely want to hear about), but the problems are by no means specific to me and I’m sure most of the people reading this post know exactly what I’m talking about. Indeed, in the last month I’ve seen a considerable spike of I’m-sick-of-iPhoto rants across the blogosphere.

The biggest problem for me was always speed — use iPhoto to organize a substantial amount of photos and you’ll quickly realize that it’s incredibly slow, to the point that for all intents and purposes it’s quite unusable. This annoyance quickly became unbearable when I started using iPhoto with the larger files produced by my Canon 20D and I knew that something was going to have to change.

Let the OS do the work?

There really aren’t too many alternatives on the Mac when it comes to image organization. Given the lack of options, I, at one point, thought that I would just use hierarchical folders (year/month, etc) and navigate the pictures using a combination of the Finder, Spotlight, and smart folders. As ever, I thought long and hard about the possible long-term implications of such a move and ultimately decided that that was probably not the best approach right now (though I might very well decide otherwise in the future).

After dismissing the “filesystem” option, it didn’t take me long to stumble upon iView MediaPro. I’d heard of it before and even read some reviews, but never really considered it until now. I knew that a lot of “serious” photographers swore by it and so I decided to give it a shot.

Post-move Details

I knew the transition was not going to be easy and I put it off as long as I could. I was aware of the iPhoto import feature (truth be told, I doubt I would have attempted the move without it), but I was scared that the amount of pictures I had would make the importer shit on itself (especially in light of the fact that all of the pictures were tagged with at least one descriptor, if not many). Imagine my delight when the move was completely error-free. That’s not to say that there wasn’t some post-move work to be done, but the catalog and thumbnails built themselves without a hitch; this included both the albums I created (called “Catalog Sets” in MediaPro) and keywords.

The only real hang-up regarding the transition was manually moving the image files to another directory. iPhoto stores its photos in a particular year/month/day structure located in ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library and when you “import” these pictures into MediaPro the disk location is maintained. Obviously, I didn’t want my pictures to reside in the iPhoto directory anymore and I also didn’t want the directory structure to be so granular (i.e., I wanted just year/month).

Surprisingly, this wasn’t too hard to do in MediaPro.¹ I first created a directory off my home directory called “images” and then created subfolders for the years and months. I added the images folder to the “Catalog Folders” pane in MediaPro, which already contained the iPhoto directories because of the initial import. Finally, using the Catalog Folders pane I selected each of the “day” subfolders within the iPhoto directory, highlighted all of the resulting thumbnails, and dragged them to the corresponding year/month folder under the images directory. Using this method, MediaPro physically moved the files to the new directories and kept all of the meta information (keywords, sets, etc) intact.

Likes / Dislikes

A few things I really like about the program:

• Very, very, very fast. I’m running it on a 1.25GHz PowerBook G4 with 1GB of RAM and am loving it; it’s such a departure from the spinning beach-ball that was iPhoto.
• Good configuration options (not great, but certainly very powerful).
• Very nice interface. There’s no real clutter and everything feels like it has a purpose — the entire application is very navigable.
• Excellent metadata options.

A few things I don’t like:

• When browsing through thumbnails you can’t select multiple pictures using the mouse (i.e., you can’t click and drag over multiple pictures) — if you want to pick more than one picture you have to CMD-click each of them.
• Can’t select multiple keywords at once (i.e., there’s no way to see pictures tagged with both “justin” and “friends”).
• Can’t change the size of the thumbnails — they’re stuck at 128 pixels wide.

Backing it all up

I’m a huge fan of rsync and have been using it for years to backup various important documents and so it was the logical choice for backing up my photos remotely now that my webhost gives me enough space for this sort of thing.² The following is the rsync call that I use to backup my photos (once a day using cron). The first instance of this obviously required all of the pictures to be moved to the webserver, which took forever given my upload cap.³

cd /Users/justin;rsync -e ssh -rtR --delete --stats --progress
images/ jblanton@justinblanton.com:/home/jblanton/

Keep in mind that to run this particular command you will need to have setup passwordless SSH access on your webserver. Also, you might want to delete the “delete” argument, lest you run the risk of deleting all of your remote files if syncing from an empty disk.

i-mate SP5

I recently sold my Sony Ericsson K750i and purchased an i-mate SP5, which probably won’t arrive for at least another week — consider this a pre[re]view. As some of you may recall, I had an i-mate SP3i a few months back and loved it — there was literally nothing wrong with it. Now, take everything I liked about that phone and square it. Seriously. Pretty much nothing comes close to the specs on the SP5. A brief list of notable features:

• Tiny, candy-bar form factor (107×46x17mm; 106g)
• QVGA screen (320×240 pixels shoved into 2.2 inches)
• Wi-Fi (802.11b)
• EDGE (class 10)
• MiniSD
• Quad-band (850/900/1800/1900)
• 1.3 MP camera (yes, a step down from the K750i’s 2MPs, but I could not care less)
• First Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone Edition phone
• Bluetooth¹

If the construction of this phone is as solid as that of the SP3i, I have a feeling I’ll be keeping it for a while. In fact, I’m pretty sure that even the Motorola Q won’t be able to pry me away from it, if only because the Q will not have Wi-Fi (and possibly not even EDGE), nor will the Treo 700w, which was also on my radar. However, the Nokia E61, which was announced subsequent to my ordering of the SP5, has really got my attention. It will have everything the SP5 does, save Windows Mobile (Symbian OS v9.1 will be the platform), plus, if past support is any indication, it will sync with Macs.²

flickrRSS

UPDATE: Dave Kellam, the author of flickrRSS, sent me an e-mail shortly after I put this post up to let me know that he reads my site and to thank me for the plugin plug (well deserved Dave). He also expounded on his future plans for the plugin and his intention to take care of its inability to display Flickr’s “medium”-size images (500 pixels wide), my only complaint. Then, not two hours after that first e-mail, he sent me an updated PHP file that addressed the “issue” (you can now see the larger pictures on my photos page). I’m told that he’ll release this version to the public in the next week or so.

Ever since the latest site re-design (and even before), I’ve been a little less than pleased with my photos page, which basically contained just two links, one to my Flickr photostream and one to my PHP Slideshow script. I have a couple of ideas to help fill in this space, but haven’t had time to implement them. I was either going to use the Flickr API to populate the page with the most recent photos or run the Flickr RSS feed through an XSLT transform to accomplish the same.

However, while doing some very cursory research I stumbled across flickrRSS, a WordPress plugin. To be honest, I didn’t have high hopes for it and never expected to actually use it, but after setting it up it was hard to convince myself that it wasn’t exactly what I needed. The available customization options, image caching, and integration with the WordPress panel have really sold me. The only thing I will probably hack it to do is to pull medium-size images (500 pixels wide) instead of the smaller sizes it currently supports.

Truth be told, I’m a little bummed that I found this because building it myself now would likely be re-inventing the wheel.

iPod nano + Brasso + invisibleShield

As you have no doubt heard, the Apple iPod nano gets scratches when looked at, much less used. Even my nano, which, if you know me personally, is transported on a cloud and handled with velvet gloves (read: I’m anal), has succumb to noticeable scratches.

After reading about the guy who removed nano scratches with Brasso (a mild abrasive), I was intrigued and knew that I had to try it out. As per Todd’s example, I used a micro-fiber cloth and concentrated mostly on the screen, which I rubbed for ~15 minutes. Surprisingly, all of the scratches that were there had disappeared — I was amazed. Granted, my screen was in pretty good shape to begin with, but after applying the Brasso it genuinely looked new. The same treatment was given to the metal portion of the nano with the same spectacular results.

After letting the Brasso dry and wiping the nano clean, it was time to put on the invisibleShield, which is basically a military-grade, nearly impervious, nano condom (watch the demo videos); the end result looks as if the nano has been vacuum-sealed.

Getting the shield on is a bit tricky and requires you to dip the film into soapy water to allow for it to slide about the nano so that perfect alignment may be achieved (the film is cut to fit the nano precisely). I was a bit reluctant to soak my nano with water, but knew that others had done it without incident and so I went against every anal-retentive bone in my body and “dove in.” I decided to apply the front film first, and surprisingly, I had it bubbleless and perfectly aligned in less than five minutes. I found that the best way to get the film on the nano is to completely soak it, shake the water off, and then lay it perpendicular to the top or bottom of the nano and kind of let it ‘fall’ until all of the nano is covered. This method completely obviates the bubble issue and all that’s left to do is align it (be careful though as this can produce bubbles if done incorrectly).

Unfortunately, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and ended up trying to get out a piece of dust near the bottom, which caused a seemingly endless cycle of pulling the film off, soaking it, and re-applying it. While the “stickiness” of the film never seemed to dissipate, its clarity did, and after more than a few “tries” it became apparent that some of the marks were going to be permanent. So, the lesson to be learned here is that you should roll with your first effort if you think you can live with it, because it’s probably only going to get worse.

Applying the back layer was nearly as easy as the front, but because the back piece also covers the sides I had to tackle its application in two steps. I found that trying to align the sides (and get them to stick) before the back was completely dry was damn near impossible. What I ended up doing was aligning the back and letting it dry for about 45 minutes before working on the sides (I just let them hang over the edge). After setting the sides and letting the whole thing dry for a few hours I have to say that I’m really happy with the results.

[It's amazing how some posts that you envision to be three lines end up being six paragraphs.]

Where are those damn kids?

I’m really happy with this shot and I’m curious to see how you guys receive it. I played around with it quite a bit in Photoshop, mostly just experimenting with isolating the clown and blurring the background to make it look like the clown was spinning on something. While the effect was neat (and believable), I ultimately decided to just crop it a bit and play around with the color.

The original colors were brilliant, but after desaturating everything I knew that I had to present it in black and white. To get the black and white seen here, I did the following: created a new hue/saturation adjustment layer with mode set to “color”; created a second hue/saturation adjustment layer with the mode set to “normal” on top of the first adjustment layer and set the saturation of this layer to -100; went back to the first adjustment layer and adjusted the hue/saturation until I was happy.

I’ll leave the context and circumstances of the shot to the imagination.

Site design v137.1

As you can see, there is a new site design here at jb.com (if something looks a bit off, empty your cache and refresh). As is always the case, the minimalist in me seemed to take over. To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure if I could get any more “skeletonized” than my last effort, but I do think I’ve pulled it off.

I’ve shot at the design with just about every browser gun on the planet, and it seems to have held up alright. That said, if you see any bullet wounds, please be sure to let me know.

Miscellaneous Comments

• Yes, that’s pink in the Bits section on the right. Shut up, you love it!
• Referrer spam has forced me to remove the referrer page. Despite my best efforts, it was time to throw in the towel. I fought the good fight for a couple years, but it just wasn’t worth it anymore, especially in light of the fact that there are many other ways to gather that sort of information nowadays.

• I moved the “descriptions” that were at the top of the nested pages to the sidebar to try and make that element more uniform throughout.
• I moved all the feed links to a single area in the footer.
• I’ve had a site in one capacity or another since ~1993, but have never put up an “about” blurb, until now (see index page if you came here from an aggregator). Though I’m sure this little description will be in a constant state of flux, I’m going to try to keep it up for a while and see how it plays out. I keep telling myself that I’m going to put together a full colophon page, but it just never seems to materialize.
• The links page has always been hand-rolled, but just recently I decided to let Bloglines have a go at it and I’m pretty happy with the results; the aggregator service offers all the necessary options regarding CSS and privacy.

Sleep is for weenies

So much to write about, so little time. Why so little time you ask? Five law classes (including two bar courses and Federal Courts, arguably the toughest, most ‘abstract’ class in law school) + working part-time at the firm + intermittent patent bar studying + working on a book + keeping up with this website + “life.” I have so many ideas I want to run with and flesh out here, but I just can’t find the time to put pen to paper.

In other news, I hope to have a new design up here fairly soon (perhaps even tonight if I choose not to sleep). I’ve been working on it for a while and now I just need to integrate it into my “live” system. Don’t expect anything too crazy — less is more baby, less is always more.

Cammy Cam Party

I took this picture last weekend while walking around downtown San Jose. I debated just throwing it on Flickr and not putting it here, but I really liked the lighting and so I figured what the hell. I’ll probably put up at least one more from this outing in the next couple of days.

Archives without using WordPress’ Pages

A fair majority of the Smart Archives e-mail I field is concerned with how to actually create the /archives/ directory structure without using WordPress’ Pages. I thought about just putting the solution on the project page, but I think this tip will help others with similar problems (unrelated to WordPress) and so I’m posting it here on the weblog.

I’m working off the assumption that you want the same URI as my archives page (i.e., foo.com/archives/). The first thing you are going to want to do is create the /archives directory off your root. After you’ve created this directory, place your PHP file (the one with the Smart Archives function call) within this directory. Make sure that this PHP file has the following code at the top:

Once the PHP file is placed in the /archives directory, you’re going to need to add the following line to your root .htaccess file:

It’s probably self-explanatory, but this rule redirects any page request that falls under the /archives directory and points it to the index.php file sitting in /archives. This line must go after whatever htaccess rules that WordPress, or you yourself, have already put in your .htaccess file that redirect browsers pointed to pages within the /archives directory.¹

That’s all there is to it.

1TB+ datastore recommendations

UPDATE: I received a lot of great recommendations, but none of them could pull me away from the Infrant ReadyNAS X6, which I’ve had in mind from the beginning. If interested, and judging by the volume of e-mail I got regarding this, a lot of you are, be sure to check out TomsNetworking’s take on it. I’m not buying this tomorrow or anything, but barring any dispositive feedback from you guys, it will likely be the solution I run with.

I’m looking to purchase a rather large datastore fairly soon and was wondering what you, the readers, might recommend. I was initially hunting for an all-in-one solution, but prices haven’t been dropping at the rate I anticipated and so I’m also thinking about just buying an enclosure and filling it myself.

Requirements / Desires

There are a few things that I’d like the datastore to have:

• It must have an on-board RAID 5 controller (I want both striping and fault tolerance).
• If you’re going to point me to an enclosure-only setup (i.e., it doesn’t include hard drives), the box must be less than $400.
• If you’re going to point me to an all-in-one setup (i.e., it includes hard drives) it must be at least a terabyte (truthfully, I want much more because I’m afraid I’ll fill up a TB immediately, but cost is so prohibitive) and less than $1200.
• I’d like SCSI, but I realize that SATA or IDE are probably the only interfaces that will allow me to stay within my cost constraints.
• It must have at least four drive bays.
• I’d like both USB2 and FireWire 800, but either will do.
• Any kind of wireless connectivity would be great, but it’s certainly not going to be a dealbreaker.

Craigslist automatic relisting

Why doesn’t Craigslist allow you to automatically relist an item? The current system simply removes your item from the site seven days after you post it. You’re never informed that the item is about to “expire,” nor are you told when it’s ultimately removed. I sell a lot of stuff on Craigslist (mostly to circumvent eBay + PayPal fees)¹, and on more than one occasion I’ve failed to remember that I had an item on the system until days after it had been removed. The worst part is that if after it’s been removed, you let too much time slide, the link sent to you by Craigslist to edit/delete the item will no longer work and you will have to rewrite your description from scratch.

Why can’t Craigslist simply let me know by e-mail that my item is about to be removed and provide a link that I can use to extend the life of the listing (not unlike the link it sends me right after I initially list something)? Everyone wins. I know, I know, you get what you pay for, but…

Apple iPod nano

Just when I thought I would never buy another iPod (pipe dreams, I know), Apple drops the most badass digital music player ever, the iPod nano. Let’s be honest, when Apple comes out with a device called “nano” they’re pretty much guaranteeing a purchase from me. Sadly, I’m told there won’t be any in Silicon Valley until the weekend, but you can bet I’ll be first in line when they arrive.

While I’d like to say that I’m going to ‘review’ it, it’s highly unlikely; all that really needs to be said about it is that it’s an incredibly tiny, full-featured iPod without the hard drive. Have you seen it?!?

UPDATE: Valley Fair got a “ton” of them this morning and I picked one up earlier today. If you think it’s impressive online, just wait until you see it in person. They were flying out the door; everyone in line had at least one and I saw one guy with five.

Motorola ROCKR

This entry originally included a very long rant concerning the Motorola ROCKR, the first “iTunes” mobile phone and the other “big” announcement from Apple yesterday, but after reading it a few times I realized that I sounded a bit like a gadget elitist (surprise!) and so I digress. Let’s just say that it’s strikingly underwhelming both as a mobile phone and as a music player.

Apple Mighty(?) Mouse

Steve, please, for the love of god, just split the damn mouse down the middle and give it two buttons. The pseudo-button(s) on the Mighty Mouse drove me crazy. I have to admit though that I never had any real intention of holding on to the Mighty Mouse, due in part to the fact that in the past nine months I’ve gone through six different mice¹ and because I, like a lot of other Mac zealots(?), am just compelled to try out anything new from Apple. I figured I would use it for a few days and then return it — that’s exactly what I did.

Before I start complaining, let me first expound on the virtues of the mouse’s only saving grace, the scroll wheel, or “nipple.” I’m a big fan of the nipple (to quote Jon Stewart, “settle…”) and can’t wait to see it adopted in other mice. It feels perfect and the “click” sound generated by the tiny speaker inside the mouse complements it well. I was this → ← close to keeping the mouse just so I didn’t have to give up the nipple.

The only thing I would change about the nipple would be to make it clickable. It can currently act as a button mapped to some action, but it doesn’t act independently of the rest of the mouse; when you press down on the nipple hard enough it causes the mouse itself to click (not unlike when you give the mouse a normal left-click) and the guts deduce from this movement that you’re pressing down on the scroll wheel. The whole thing feels a bit awkward.

Speaking of awkward, I was never able to stop thinking about hitting the “right” mouse button and this is what ultimately came between me and the nipple. I kept telling myself to try it for another day to see if I could get used to it or maybe come up with a different way of holding it. Nothing. My annoyance with this came into strong relief when happenstance had me use my “regular” mouse again, which immediately freed me from having to think about right-clicking and I quickly realized that the Mighty Mouse just wasn’t for me.

Another thing I was a little disappointed with was the length of the cord — <1m. It’s perfect for me, and, I suspect, for others who use Apple monitors (because they usually have built-in USB ports), but there’s just no way to use it if your tower is sitting on the floor.

Finally, the side buttons were horrible. Not only can they not act independently of each other (they must be pressed simultaneously), but they’re in a horrible position and offer pretty much no tactile feedback. To be honest, I thought the buttons on my mouse were broken until I saw other people with the same complaints.

Six symbols

This is a metal sheet that conceals a ‘garage’ on the side of a building across the street from the Borders I frequent. Every time I walked past it I thought that it might make for a good photo; I think I was right. I did quite a bit of post-processing on this image, but it doesn’t deviate too much from what I actually saw.

Donate “logo”

I’ve had a few people e-mail me asking for permission to use the donate image I’ve been displaying above the menu on the right. Of course I told them that they could, as can anyone else who so desires; if you feel that it will do some good on your site, then please, by all means.

Katrina relief

As I did for the tsunami victims, I plan to donate any advertising revenue generated during the month of August (which I’m going to match) to the Katrina relief effort, and I encourage other webloggers to do the same.

To be honest, I kind of wish I was there so that I could contribute physically, but seeing as how that really isn’t feasible, I do hope that my monetary donation can help to make at least one person’s struggle a little easier.

My thoughts are with all of you.

Footnotes and Textpander

I’ve contemplated using footnotes here for years and have fleshed out all kinds of variations, but I always seem to abandon them rather quickly, opting instead to use long parentheticals because implementing footnotes in HTML is a bit of chore.

Technically, it’s pretty mindless. All you’re really doing is using anchors to specify a spot (i.e., the footnote) to move to within the HTML document — HTML 101. The thing is, to make everything look nice and function well, a bit more effort is required, and this effort, over time, can become quite burdensome.

That’s where Textpander swoops in to save the day. “Textpander listens to what you type and inserts predefined text snippets on the fly whenever you enter their corresponding abbreviations.” While there have been other programs that do this very thing, I’ve yet to find one that does it as well as Textpander; it’s fun to use and lends itself well to all kinds of applications, including hypertext footnotes, which I describe below.

I’ve ‘mapped’ both the footnote reference and the footnote itself. Whenever I type “rf” (in any application) the following automagically appears:

<sup id="r1-%m%d%y"><a href="#f1-%m%d%y">1</a></sup>

And when when I type “fn,” out pops:

<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="f1-%m%d%y">
<p>FOOTNOTE TEXT<a href="#r1-%m%d%y">&uarr</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>

As you can see, these little snippets of text are nothing more than footnote ‘templates’ that I created and all I’m required to do after they’ve been ‘called’ and inserted is add the footnote text; I went ahead and ‘mapped’ the 2nd and 3rd footnotes as well so that I don’t have to manually change the number at the beginning of the anchors that corresponds to the current footnote (see above examples).

Unique anchors

Obviously when you’re using anchors you need them to be unique, else, when visitors are on a large archive page (such as that for 2004), a footnote reference might bring them to a footnote meant for a post other than the one they’re currently reading. See the “%m%d%y” text in the examples above? I use these to produce the date in the form of “082905″ (for August 29, 2005), which, as it turns out, are perfectly suited to uniquely identify a particular point in the text.¹

You’ll also notice a little arrow at the end of each footnote. The links used for these arrows need to be unique as well because they bring the reader back to the footnote reference that brought them down to the footnote in the first place (hat tip Gruber).

Too serious?

I realize that some of you might think that by using footnotes I’m taking myself (and this site) a bit too seriously, and you might be right, but if at the end of the day the footnotes make the posts easier to read, then I don’t really care.

booq Vyper PowerBook sleeve

I’ve been slacking lately with “reviews” here and so I figured it was high time I talked about something that I’ve been using for a few months now, the booq Vyper PowerBook sleeve. From the website:

Simply put, Vyper has to be the coolest laptop sleeve. We sandwiched durable, semi-rigid high density foam between a layer of 1682D cross-weave ballistic nylon on the exterior and a super non-scratch lining on the interior - an effective blend. Virtually molded around your 15-inch laptop, Vyper M is the most compact sleeve for your 15-inch PowerBook.

That pretty much sums it up and I can’t say that I disagree with any of the claims. Find me a better sleeve and I’ll buy it. I’ve never been a big fan of sleeves because they always seemed to miss the point. Almost by definition a sleeve is handleless and doesn’t really allow the user much flexibility. But the Vyper changes all of that because it’s rugged (and thin) enough to be put into a regular bookbag, as if it were just another book, which is exactly how I use it (and why I purchased it in the first place¹). I’m incredibly careful with my “toys” (it’s kind of absurd actually) and so for me to be able to treat my favorite toy this way and not think twice about it is really saying a lot.

This is the paragraph where I’m supposed to complain about something, but I can’t come up with anything — it’s a great product.

Largest Mail.app mailbox size?

I mentioned a couple of months ago that my “personal” inbox had crossed the 20,000 e-mail mark; I’ve now just passed 22,000.¹ I’m fairly certain that the app itself doesn’t have an upper limit, and so I’m curious to know, what’s the largest usable Mail.app mailbox out there (and by “usable” I mean a mailbox that’s being hammered on a daily basis)?

I’ll keep updating this post with the largest number I receive.

Currently, the largest number is 283,686 (I required screenshot proof of this one).

The PowerBook Prank

The PowerBook Prank is a very entertaining account of one man’s attempt to scam the scammer. This is something that would normally get relegated to the bits (you can actually find it there as well), but I wanted to put it here too so that no one missed it.

Apple wallpaper

This picture is of the Apple store in San Francisco (the side facing Stockton street). As soon as I took this shot, I had a feeling I was going to be happy with it. It came out perfectly symmetrical (I didn’t crop it at all) and I thought the colors were awesome. In post-processing I bumped up the saturation a bit to bring out the gradient and wiped out a few artifacts that surfaced due to dust on the lens.

Remember that clicking the photo will take you to its Flickr page where you can download the full image (3504×2336) and comment if you’d like.

Fried okra in Silicon Valley?

Where can a brother get some fried okra in Silicon Valley? I think I’ve asked this question of just about every person I know in California and have come up completely empty. It’s kind of funny the responses I get out here on the left coast; they range from “What the fuck is okra?” to “What the fuck is okra?” Having exhausted the people I know, I figured I’d ask here and see what trickled in.

100,000 words

I just received an e-mail alerting me to the fact that my weblog entries now contain more than 100,000 words (you can see the exact number at the top of the archives page). Wow. Of course I now want 1,000,000.  :)

When can I get off this damn thing?

While I was technically really happy with this picture, the “bored” look on the girl’s face took some of the wind out of my sails. Either way, I love the colors, which I brought out a bit in the post-processing stage.

Related Entries apostrophe error

As many of you have noticed and routinely bring to my attention, the Related Entries WordPress plugin (you can see it in use on the sidebar when looking at an individual archive) breaks any time the title of the post for which related entries are being sought, contains an apostrophe. I e-mailed the author a few months ago, but he couldn’t nail down the problem.

I came up with a pretty elaborate solution that I’ve been using for the past week or so, but have since abandoned. Basically, I split the title of the post, delimited by spaces, into its constituent words. I then cycled through the array of words and used preg_replace() to remove any apostrophes and letters that followed them. Finally, I cycled through the now-modified array of words and concatenated them with each other to form the title sans apostrophes.

After slapping myself for wasting so much time I came to my senses and remembered the addslashes() function; a single call to this function fixes the problem. Feel free to grab my hacked version of the plugin and do with it what you will. Be aware that my code has the find_keywords() function removed (I don’t use it and I doubt many of you do either).

You don’t need to worry about the possible double escaping of anything because the term being escaped (i.e., the title) is never inserted back into the database. It might also be prudent of me to mention that addslashes() is not needed if your web server’s PHP installation has magic_quotes_runtime enabled, but of course if that is the case you probably aren’t seeing the apostrophe error in the first place.

Comfortable

I took this shot last weekend while up in San Francisco. I didn’t like the colors too much and so I played around a lot with different black and white setups before deciding on what you see.

Justin, circa 2005

I figured I might as well go ahead and bring this whole pictures-of-Justin thing full circle by putting up a picture from earlier this year (see 1993, 1997, and 2003). While usually pretty reluctant to post pictures of myself, I seem to have gone a bit mad the last few days and said to hell with it; I assure you though, this will be the last photo of me for a while.

Justin, circa 2003

I can’t seem to stop myself from adding to this series (see 1993 and 1997).

Justin, circa 1997

As promised, here’s another scanned picture of myself from back in the day. That’s myself and Bonnie, a good friend in high school and the girl I was dating when this picture was taken.

Justin, circa 1993

While back home for my friend’s wedding, I scanned a couple of photos of myself from a few years ago; you can find the first of these below. That’s Wendy (a good friend of mine since 4th grade) and I getting ready to head into the 8th grade dance in 1993. I’ll put up another in a few days.

SBC Park is beautiful

Yesterday I went to my first San Francisco Giants game with a few friends. Though I’d been asked to make my way up to SBC Park a couple of times before, it just never worked itself out. Notwithstanding the fact that the Giants lost (as did the Oakland A’s when I visited the McAfee Coliseum for the first time last week; truth be told, I couldn’t care less about the outcome of either game), we had a good time and I managed to take a few pictures, some of which I’ve put up on Flickr.

Sony PSP

I finally caved and bought a Sony PSP a few days ago. I’m sure no one is surprised that I picked up one of these (have you seen it?!?), but I’m sure some (including me) are surprised that I held out so long.

Within minutes I had it booted up, connected to my wireless LAN, and downloading a firmware update. Shortly after installing the v1.52 firmware I remembered reading that the Japanese v2.0 firmware was floating around and that this version included a web browser (not the Wipeout Pure hack) and worked fine on “English” machines. Not wanting to buy yet another cable (you can’t move files from your computer to the PSP over Wi-Fi, though after the v2.0 update I’m assuming that you can probably download files through the browser), I couldn’t come up with a reason why the USB cable that came with my Canon 20D wouldn’t do the trick, so I tried it out and it worked flawlessly. After transferring the update to the PSP over USB and then rebooting, I was quickly browsing my site on the device. Unfortunately, v2.0 has not been “cracked” yet and so any emulators or other things I want to run will have to wait, but I’m sure it won’t be too long before the deed is done.

Playing games and hacking away at this thing will be the death of me. It’s not without reason that I’ve denied myself a gaming system for the past few years (save the Gameboy Advance SP).

It’s official

Yesterday morning Kenyon & Kenyon officially offered me an associate position upon graduation from law school. I think it goes without saying that I’m ecstatic right now, but I’ll go ahead and say it anyway: I’m ecstatic!

I’m doubtful that I could have had a better summer at any other firm in the country. It was a wonderful experience and I feel very fortunate to have found what seems to be a great fit for me.

I’ve also been asked to work part-time during my last year of law school. While this will certainly be difficult given all of the things I’m already involved with outside of school, the opportunity was obviously something I couldn’t pass up and I look forward to working with everyone again as soon as possible.

San Jose Grand Prix

Earlier today the firm gave us some tickets for the San Jose Grand Prix, which, by the way, has turned San Jose completely upside down — the track is nearly two miles of streets in the heart of downtown and so getting anywhere in the city is a nightmare. We got to take a tour of the pit and had great seats right above it.

I didn’t bring my camera to work because I didn’t think I was going to the races, but one of the partners actually has a 20D and offered to let me use it. I’ll put some of those pictures up as soon as I get them from him.

Without question, the coolest thing I saw at the track on Friday was the drifting exhibition. I’ve watched a lot of drifting videos on the net the past couple of years and just read a great article in the latest edition of Esquire about it (subscription required), but had never actually seen it done (on a track!) in person. All the superstars of the sport were there and they put on quite a show. It was fun to watch everyone’s reaction to all of the near-crashes and donuts. I absolutely could not wipe the grin off my face each time they slid through my turn.

Got root?

I think it’s a safe bet that I’m the only summer associate at a large IP law firm that wears a “Got root?” shirt around his apartment. Old habits die hard.  :)

And so it continued

It’s well known among my friends that I’m pretty much the unluckiest person on the planet when it comes to most everything except women. However, that one exception keeps a lot of my friends from being sympathetic to my plight, yet I will always insist that, on balance, I’m generally worse off than all of them. Not wanting to deviate much from my destiny and NorthWest apparently looking to further cement themselves at the bottom of my list of ways to travel (somewhere between running and riding a camel), my bad luck with this wedding trip continued. My flight out of Orlando was delayed a full two hours, which, I was told, was likely going to cause me to miss my connection to San Jose in Minneapolis. Fortunately, I made it to Minneapolis on time, but only to be delayed yet again, this time for slightly more than two hours, with most of that time spent on the tarmac. If anyone is keeping score, we have one missed flight due to a mobile phone bug (which cost me $500 on top of my round-trip ticket), a delayed flight, a cancelled flight, another delayed flight, and finally, one more delayed flight. Oh, and two, nearly 24-hour days spent flying, driving, and complaining.

To add insult to injury I left my PowerBook power supply in Florida and so I had to ration my computer time carefully throughout the day. As usual though, when I did manage to brave the malfunctioning heating pad that is a PowerBook on your lap, someone sitting next to me struck up a conversation about Apple and I, of course, being the pundit that I am, did my thing. Not too long after we started warming up to each other she started to complain about NorthWest (her flight to Seattle was already an hour late), and so we began to trade war stories. Next, I did what any self-respecting computer dork would do; I used my mobile phone to connect to the net over Bluetooth and had her read my previous post. She said, “You win.”

As if there was ever any doubt, her story only reinforced my disdain for the airline and we both vowed to never fly them again.

That, however, was not the biggest lesson learned on this trip. No, the biggest lesson learned was that ignorance truly is bliss. This lesson came from the old, bat-shit crazy (think Tom Cruise) lady sitting behind me in the terminal who was convinced that she had done her part to save humanity because she had given $25,000 to a destitute “mystic” who is single-handedly keeping California “afloat” using a series of “atomic bubbles” placed strategically throughout the state. She swore to the poor guy who got caught up in her pipe dreams that all of the “news people” knew about it but didn’t want the public to know, because, well, they would obviously try to “pop the bubbles” and sink the state. What? Yah.

When I’m old I’m going to make up the craziest, weirdest shit ever, just to see what lengths people will go to humor me.

Taking the good with the bad

As some of you know, one of my best friends got married on Saturday and because I was in the wedding I headed back to Florida last Thursday for the rehearsal and whatnot. The wedding and the weekend in general were wonderful. I had a great time, met a lot of really neat people, and got to catch up with some friends I hadn’t seen in years. The wedding went off without a hitch and the rehearsal dinner and reception were a lot of fun.

So, overall, the trip was great, but getting to and from Florida was anything but.

On Thursday, the alarm on my mobile phone decided that it wanted to get me off on the right foot by refusing to sound. I missed my 6:40AM flight. I was livid, not only because I just missed my flight, but because I don’t think I’ve ever missed anything in my life (of any import) or even been late for that matter. I called Expedia, through whom I booked my NorthWest flight, and they told me that everything to Orlando from San Jose was full (of course). I then had them look at flights out of San Francisco. They had one seat on a 12:30PM flight for a little more than $500, which was more than my initial round-trip ticket. It was my only option. I was at the airport by 8AM (friend had to be back in San Jose for work) and I waited there for 4+ hours until we started boarding. I had a layover in Minneapolis where we sat on the tarmac for over an hour because the beverage people were running behind. And what did we get for this delay? Perhaps a free alcoholic drink or a “snack box?” Nothing. Nothing but a “we’re sorry about the delay, but now that the beverages have been loaded we can leave.” Thank god, because without my half can of Mountain Dew I might have complained about arriving in Orlando on time. As it turned out, I didn”t get into Orlando until after midnight and by the time I rented a car and drove to my dad’s house it was approaching 2AM.

Knowing that the fun couldn’t possibly be over, I was all kinds of excited to see what the flight back had in store for me.

My flight was supposed to leave at 1:28PM. I got to the airport around noon after returning my rental car and shuttling to OIA. As I approached the automated ticket kiosk I was apprehended by a NorthWest agent and asked if I was on the flight that was to connect in Minneapolis. I said I was and she proceeded to tell me that the flight had been cancelled because “the plane just leaked 400 gallons of gas onto the tarmac.” She then pointed me to the end of a line that practically reached California and said that I would be helped “soon.” Two and a half hours later it was my turn to bitch about the situation and make it known that I could have walked to California aleady had I not been made to wait in the line. I handed the guy my ID and waited patiently while he pretended to type a novel at 200 words per minute. Almost a full five minutes later he said, “I’m sorry, but there is nothing available for San Jose today.” I said “of course there’s not” and then turned around and asked the remaining line if anyone was suprised that there were no other flights available to Silicon Valley today; while a rhetorical question I got quite a few “NOs” and a lot of negative head-shaking. I had the agent try San Francisco and Oakland as well. Nothing. The earliest he could get me back to San Jose was 7:30PM… the next day. It was my only option. After taking that flight, I shuttled back over to the car rental place, rented another car, and then drove the hour back to my dad’s place.

Anyone want to bet that I don’t actually get back to San Jose tomorrow?

I thought typing all of this out would help to squelch my anger and frustration, but I’m afraid it hasn’t helped at all.

As you were.

Foggy harbor

Last Friday after work I headed up to Half Moon Bay (a small town on the northern coast of California just south of San Francisco) hoping to get some shots of the coast and the sunset. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that it was going to be foggy as all hell until I actually got there. Fortunately though, right as I was about to get off the Pacific Coast Highway, I noticed a small harbor packed with boats. The full harbor coupled with the heavy fog was a scene that I just couldn’t pass up. Besides the pics below, there are a few more from this set in my stream. Enjoy.

Expect more photos

You may or may not have noticed that I’ve just resized the width of my content div to 500 pixels (from 400). So, the site is now 830 pixels wide, which, while a little wider than I would like, should still suit most monitors just fine. The impetus behind the greater width is that I plan to put pictures up on the weblog a bit more frequently than I have in the past (after all, I didn’t sell my soul for nothing) and the larger the picture I can get away with the better.

Though I wouldn’t go above 500 pixels anyway, two factors restrained me regardless. First, Flickr’s “medium” file size is 500xYYY and you can’t specify anything different (i.e., 400 isn’t an option). Because, as of this post, I’m using Flickr as the “src” for the images on my weblog, I’m now constrained by its limitations. Second, I have to have the width of the paragraphs be the same as the width of the photos. It’s an anal-retentive thing that isn’t up for debate; I just don’t like how the page flows (or not) when one is wider than the other. Furthermore, if I started making the paragraphs much wider than 500 pixels they would quickly become annoying to read. Nothing, and I mean nothing, makes me crazier when reading a web page than to have to scroll over to read the end of the sentence. Text should always be confined to narrow, easy-to-read columns; anything else is inefficient and annoying. [I'm now jumping off the soapbox]

Why not a photoblog?

I thought long and hard about maybe doing a separate “photoblog” kind of thing, but I finally got the good and bad halves of me to agree that that probably wasn’t the best thing for me given all the other shit I have going on for the forseeable future (read: I don’t mind sleeping less than 99% of the population, but at some point I have to pull back a little). I also gave serious consideration to simply splicing certain photos from Flickr into my RSS feed using FeedBurner (you can actually specify which photos should be included in the feed using Flickr tags). The problem with this approach is that while I’ve been on the RSS bandwagon for years, I’m well aware that a lot of the people that visit this site (read: family and real-life friends) don’t have the faintest idea what it is (despite my best efforts to change their lives  :P) and that these people are more often than not those that I most want to see the pictures.

The transition

I spent the better part of yesterday morning resizing the pictures (sourced from Flickr) in my weblog and linking them to their respective Flickr pages, a process that can only be described as a horrible chore. This involved loading up my archive pages for each year, scrolling through them looking for pictures, finding each particular picture in iPhoto (not too hard because I have them all tagged with “weblog”), determining whether I’ve already uploaded them to Flickr, and if not, uploading them to Flickr, going to the “medium” download page on Flickr, pulling the HTML information that Flickr generates (very nice), adding some CSS values to the HTML, and finally inserting this into each post.

While a bit of work, I think the setup should serve me well for at least a few years. Unless they’re subscribed to my photo feed, most people will only look at the pictures (or picture sets) I direct them to from this site, which are usually those that I think are the best. Also, a nice bonus to using Flickr for everything is that it allows people to comment on the photos (separate and apart from the weblog itself) and I think linking to the photos directly from the website will spawn a lot more comments; I’m generally anti-comments, but it hasn’t yet been an issue with my photos. Indeed, I’ve quite enjoyed the interaction.

Not for nothing, but I’ve turned off Nice[r] Titles until I can get it working how I want with images. I’d like it to look the same as it does (did!) with my bits.

Smart Archives is doing pretty well

I was sifting through my web stats like I tend to do every so often and I just noticed that over 10,000 [unique] people have visited the Smart Archives project page. Wow, not too bad. That number seems to be commensurate with the volume of support e-mail I get.  :P

First shots with the dSLR

Below you’ll find some of the first few shots I took with my new Canon EOS 20D and EF 17-40mm f/4L USM lens. I didn’t have too much time to devote to picture-taking this weekend and so I just walked around downtown San Jose for a while and shot whatever I found interesting. While looking at the pictures, I ask that you keep in mind that this was literally the first time I’ve shot with this camera, or any type of SLR for that matter — I’ve much to learn (and learn I will). As always, you can find the full-size pictures in my Flickr photostream (along with 800+ other photos, including some more from this “christening”) .

The deed is done

I’ve just ordered the Canon EOS 20D and the EF 17-40mm f/4L USM lens (it took me forever to decide on the lens after it took me forever to decide