A Whole Lotta Nothing

Paul released his great (windows

Paul released his great (windows only, sorry) photo gallery engine thing. Expect great things from this simple script. I bet he comes up with a template and ftp engine for the blasted thing.

While Michael Moore's take on

While Michael Moore's take on Enron's connections to the Bush Administration goes a little far, and a little overboard, as Moore often does, there still seems like enough actual wrongdoing took place, with enough evidence to lead somewhere. I wonder if anything will come out of it and if Ken Lay will ever be convicted of any wrongdoing.

I knew it was cold

I knew it was cold last night, but I had no idea it was cold enough to snow in wine country. Check out pb's pics around his place in Sebastapol. Unbelievable.

UPDATE: more Bay Area snow porn: is this a shot of the Rockies? The Grand Tetons? A ridge near Everest? Nope, it's Mt. Tam, yeah that Mt. Tam.

If the 70's were "the

If the 70's were "the me decade" and the 80s were "the decade of greed" the 90s and 00s should both be called "the retro-throwback, rehash everything while not coming up with anything new decade."

I caught myself tonight listening to Nico, which is new to me, and I figured (probably like others that discovered Nick Drake in the past couple years) that it must also be new to the world, as in new music. CDnow shows the artist behind Nico dead for 14 years. Nick Drake has been dead for almost 30 years.

What's wrong with music today when I hear the Strokes for the first time and think "what is this? some Ramones cover band from 1978?" and I can hear someone's 30 year old music and think it was recorded a few months ago. I guess I can't wait until something truly new comes out.

Whoa, this is big: everyone's

Whoa, this is big: everyone's favorite lefty newspaper cartoonist Tom Tomorrow is blogging [thanks Joe]

I can't accurately describe how

I can't accurately describe how happy I am to see Andre writing again. We once again get to enjoy stories like this one now.

I see that Columbia's "six

I see that Columbia's "six degrees" study is making the rounds again.

I got an email as part of this experiment back in November. It was a name in new york city, a writer I'd never heard of. I know a few working writiers in NYC, so I sent an instant message to an old friend. "She was my boss when I used to work at (failed dotcom I forgot the name of)."

Aha! I was two degrees from this stranger.

I went back to the email, followed the obscure login and password instructions, filling in lots of sensitive information. It was for science, so I figured it was worth it. At the end of the long series of forms, there were some cryptic instructions about giving more emails. "What emails?" I thought. The one of the next degree, or the person I'm supposed to contact? "Where's the help file?" I wondered. I closed my browser, re-read the email, but still nothing. I went back to the site to try it again, determined to put my friend in nyc, the first degree into the field at the end. Upon entering my user/pass, I was confronted with an error screen that said something to the effect of "sorry, you can only log into the system once, thanks and goodbye."

I searched the site, found two contact email addresses, one for the project, the other leading to the principal investigator. I fired off a long, descriptive email, noting where I got confused, why I got confused, and what help/changes would remedy the situation.

All I got in return were two bounces from the columbia mail server for "user not found on this system."

Talking about the project with another friend that ran into some difficulty, it sounded like new columbia study wanted to disprove the six degrees theory. It's too bad they're collecting faulty data and getting faulty results.

SF Gate's Morning Fix newsletter

SF Gate's Morning Fix newsletter (sign up here) is the best thing to arrive in my inbox each morning. It's one guy basically blogging the SF Chronicle newspaper, with a sharp wit and sharper tongue that in my opinion trumps comedy central's Daily Show in terms of laughs and smarts. Not only is it a cheeky look at today's news, it also offers historical tidbits about San Francisco, a word of the day so obscure you've never heard it uttered, best bits from the news, and his replies to reader email. Today's fun fact was exceptionally good, since I'm a fan of Anchor Steam Beer, and had no idea those folks in Anchor Brewing jumpsuits wandering around Potrero owe their thanks to a former appliance king:

In 1965, Fritz Maytag, heir to the washing machine fortune, invested his inheritance in a bankrupt brewery that was nearly 100 years old. Ten years later, Anchor Brewing Co., with its Anchor Steam Beer, had a nationwide cult following. Maytag is credited with launching the microbrew revolution.

...and I'm off and running.

...and I'm off and running. I spent about four hours writing today, getting almost 1,200 words written in that time. Introductions are always the hardest part I find, but I think I did a good job creating a brief overview of everything I want to cover, with enough sneak peeks to entice readers to follow the text. I'm hoping to turn in the first 20 pages, or about 6,000 words by Friday, and I feel confident I can make that goal. The hardest part seems to be blocking everything out and getting the words to start flowing.

I guess this is my first paid, professional writing gig, and it boggles my mind to think it's actually happening. I spent most of high school and college struggling through english and literature classes, and I distinctly remember my SAT and GRE verbal scores being lower than classmates that didn't speak english as their first language (thank god I aced the math and analytical portions). I never liked sitting through english classes, and hated being forced to write and read on command.

There was an interesting post at Kuro5hin the other day, by a high school student wondering why he couldn't just keep a weblog to learn the finer points of english and grammar. I've found that practice does indeed make perfect. If I had to point to one thing that allows me to write well today in comparison with my college-aged self, it'd have to be email. After seven years of churning out thousands of words a day, I've grown a lot as a writer. Keeping a weblog here and with MetaFilter has also helped, especially in terms of learning how to make a point and structure an argument. Maybe blogs have a place in education, I know just the daily act of writing has immensely helped with expressing myself.

Tomorrow I turn over a

Tomorrow I turn over a new leaf, by doing what I'm calling "lose weight/gain a book." (LoWeGaBoWriMo?)

I'm working on a few book deals right now, but the first one starts in earnest tomorrow morning. I have a chapter in an upcoming usability title due in a few weeks, and to force myself to unload all the ideas in my head I'm sticking to a schedule. When I wake up, I'm going running, showering, then writing for two hours every morning until the 50 pages are done.

Although I'm not a morning person, it's when I can get the most work done. Getting the painful time out of the way early was key, I've tech edited a couple books, which I used to put off until the end of the day. Cursing my keyboard at 2am, wanting to go to sleep but being forced to meet deadlines wasn't the way to do it, so I'm going with the morning schedule. The running part is another little thing I need to force myself to do. I used to run 5-8 miles a day in college and this upcoming march will be five years since I completed my first (and only) marathon. Although the marathon was painful and I wouldn't do it ever again, I used to enjoy 10k and half marathon races on a fairly regular basis. I've run a couple times a week for the past month, and I think it's time to get serious.

I have a good feeling this schedule will work for me, it'll allow me time to relax in the evenings, give me time in the afternoons to complete the freelance work I'm doing, and get me into a rhythm I can hopefully put to use on my other book projects.

What every dessert needs: fun

What every dessert needs: fun and danger!

The torch, at Fell &

The torch, at Fell & Masonic Streets, 6:30PM 1/18/2002:

More photos

Even though I have major

Even though I have major problems with the lame design of the 2002 Olympics website, I'm kind of excited to see the torch will be cruising right past my apartment tomorrow night.

Bryan figured out (scroll

Bryan figured out (scroll below the photos to the iPhoto section) what the real breakthrough in Apple’s releases were last week: the legitimization of digital photography in the minds of consumers, and the perfect bridge between the real (printed photos in your hands) and the virtual (jpegs in a photo database on your hard drive).

It makes me wonder about the moment Apple chooses to do an online publishing application. If they ever create something like an iWrite application that automatically stores and categorizes local copies of writing (which could offer weblog as a format option), with some sort of instant html-ize and upload to your homepage.mac.com account, they stand to legitimize the collective work of online writers if they choose to allow print and custom book creation. I can see the Steve Jobs presentation now “The Great American Novel will be written on an ibook running iWrite, and printed, published, and delivered instantly for $14.95 for the first 50 pages.”

I noticed today I've taken

I noticed today I've taken over two thousand images with my camera, which is only about three months old. Most are garbage, as I learn how to deal with composition and light by experimentation.

This past weekend Meg, Jason, pb, Lance and I went on a hike in the southern part of Pt. Reyes National Park. Here are some images from the hike.

A wiser fella than m'self

A wiser fella than m'self once said, sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes the bar, well, he eats you.

(via pitfall and Lebowski)

Over the past couple weeks,

Over the past couple weeks, I've worked on a variety of freelance web gigs, on a variety of website hosts. The biggest surprise has been the lack of standards in terms of basic server software deployment. I have a windows/apache/php dev environment at home, I have a remotely hosted FreeBSD/apache/php environment with my web/email host, and I have a windows/IIS/ColdFusion environment on my metafilter server. When I develop scripts for clients, it's usually something I can finish in an hour or two, test locally, then deploy on the server. And then the fun begins...

The integration and deployment has often doubled and tripled the development time. Given the array of apache configurations, php & perl configurations, and various levels of user security on each host, it made realistic budgeting of time and money nearly impossible. I guess I've been spoiled, running a couple servers myself with any features or rights I wanted. Apache and PHP restrictions seem the most surprising to me. They're open source applications, but for one reason or another the configuration of the services aren't shared in the same open source spirit.

I suppose if one host figures out how to give everyone full script access in any directory without compromising the security of others, that's an advantage in the crowded marketplace. When you shop for a host, they are rarely upfront with the technical details of their hosting setups. It makes me wish for a serious, development-oriented list of what website hosts really offer, with reviews of technical snags other developers have faced.

Apple has shown time and

Apple has shown time and time again they are good at creating and perpetuating their own buzz. I don't know if today's product releases lived up to the hype, but they were good releases for the company. I'm glad to see they continue to fully go after the new computer user. As a lifetime windows user, no matter how much easier windows xp gets, it's never going to compare to the mac OS in terms of usability and simplicity. My personal beefs with the mac OS are usually related to it not allowing power users like me to route around the simple paths setup for new users, but with OS X I can have the command line if I want it.

I was glad to see iPhoto. I was talking with a friend a couple weeks back about digital cameras. Whenever I go to a family function now, and whip out my camera, invariably, an uncle or cousin wants to check it out, and they say things like "I want one of those, but should I get a computer too?" I have to explain to them that yes, you need a computer, then you need to get fairly proficient at using that computer, then you get some photo software, get good at that, then buy a digital camera, and put it all together (I don't have the heart to tell them it could take a couple years of futzing around with a PC before getting very good at it). The next question is usually "how do I print photos out of it?" which opens up a whole new can of worms. Digital cameras are everywhere now, but it's pretty hard to work with the output. I think Apple's reaching a huge market of people that want to play with these cameras and don't have years of experience using computers.

The new iMac is interesting. Much of the criticism of the original iMac was that it was all-in-one and not very upgradeable. Given the current low costs of new systems, is that even a problem anymore? The market Apple is aiming for won't ever know how to put in a second hard drive, and they don't have to. The success of the older generation iMac proved customers would rather have everything included, and not have to fuss with any wires or hardware. Ease of use won out over expandability. The new machines should continue the success of the iMac, though the features are so numerous in the top of the line model, I wonder what will happen to their tower desktop sales.

Why doesn't Microsoft have a

Why doesn't Microsoft have a theme park yet? They could inject a little fun into their company while raising awareness of their products. Lego has one. All the entertainment (now media) companies have them. Heck, even beer companies all have theirs. I could imagine it now...

"Welcome to the new Windows XPerience, where you'll soar to the heavens, defying gravity as you jam to the hottest Madonna hits we could afford to pay royalties on."

Of course, all the rides would break down too often to be any fun.

links for 2006-08-26

• Babymama drama, linguistic. | Ask MetaFilter
  This is why I built Ask MeFi
  (tags: linguistics slang askmefi)

Another day, another car accident

Another day, another car accident outside:

Windows Productivity Tip: How to

Windows Productivity Tip: How to have a useful taskbar

I've had google as my home page for the past year or two, but I frequently found myself opening browsers solely to go somewhere else. So I figured out a couple ways to launch a new browser with alternate URLs.

- Put a few of your favorites in your links bar in IE (if you don't see a links bar, go to View, Toolbars, Links to enable it). Add favorites to it by just dragging the little IE icon in the address bar to the links bar. Delete unwanted links by right clicking and choosing delete (Microsoft has a way of forcing everyone to start with a bunch of worthless links).

Here's what the left side of my links bar looks like.

- Most often, I use the little quicklaunch bar near my start button to launch IE (which goes to google), so I wanted to simply add another launch bar to go to different URLs. Right click your taskbar and go to toolbars, then click the links option like so.

Once that is enabled, right click it to remove the title, and right click again to remove the text next to each URL. Your taskbar will look something like this. I also have my address bar enabled, in case I want to open a new browser to a specific URL I hear on TV or in coversation, or one I know I want to check.

With these settings, if I want to launch a browser going to google, I use the standard IE button on the quicklaunch bar near the start button. That's what I do most often. If I want go directly to metafilter, I launch the first icon in my links bar on the right (favicons help here, but the mefi ones disappeared and I've just sort of memorized my four shown bookmarks).

A few pics, taken around

A few pics, taken around xmas-time.

Just after college, I subscribed

Just after college, I subscribed to National Geographic. I picked one up for the first time since my childhood and the photography and simple layouts left me in awe. I guess I always took their design and layouts for granted when I was younger, when they were strewn all over my elementary school classrooms.

For the past few years, whenever I have photoshop open and I'm not working on anything crucial for work or a client, I've been experimenting, trying to come up with a simple way to display text and images that maximizes the impact of both. The goal is to somehow mimic the simplicity of a National Geographic layout: huge, visually interesting photos, with complimentary typography floating alongside, but accomplish it in the harsh environment of the web. Given the vast array of screensizes, gamma settings, and browser differences, I've never gotten very far with the project and I have dozens of abandoned photoshop mockups to show for it.

Tonight, I stumbled upon Tim's BigEmpty for the first time in ages, and I have to say the current layout is as close to the realization of what I've been trying to do as any I've seen. I remember the previous few layouts were also fantastic, but the current one takes the cake. Big photography, front and center, understated essential information alongside, and clear, legible text that doesn't compete with the imagery.

This porn captioning project made

This porn captioning project made me laugh uncontrollably tonight. If you pressed me for favorites, it'd have to be the suitcase gag or the caulk joke.

It's kind of cool to

It's kind of cool to see someone using an application I built for them, especially when they're publishing in Afghanistan. Maybe I should add that in the skills section of my resume: "designed content management system that works over phone lines in war-torn areas of the world."

Stop the presses. Not only

Stop the presses. Not only is Luke Seeman writing again, Greg Knauss is too.

At the convergence of ice

At the convergence of ice cream and database administration, you will find this job.

It's hard to believe we're

It's hard to believe we're just a little over a month away from the 2002 winter olympics.

This is probably the

This is probably the finest critique of The Royal Tenenbaums you will see.