A Whole Lotta Nothing

links for 2006-06-30

• Flash MP3 Player
  sweet
  (tags: music flash)
• ColdFusion MX 7 -- Evaluating the results of a file upload -- Version 7
  CF file upload tag details
  (tags: coldfusion fileuploads)

links for 2006-06-28

• MARMOL RADZINER Prefab
  one of the nicest prefabs I've seen
  (tags: architecture modernhomes prefab)
• Cool Hunting: Evany Thomas
  Evany has a book out, cool!
  (tags: books design)

links for 2006-06-27

• this is sippey.typepad.com: alt.soundtrack
  this is so freaking brilliant
  (tags: clerks ipod movies clever)

links for 2006-06-26

• Gabbly - del.icio.us
  Chat live on delicious!
  (tags: clever chat im dhtml ajax firefox)

links for 2006-06-25

• The Strippy Tickle
  Awesome. I could see an entire site dedicated to Cathy singing NWA lyrics.
  (tags: comics comedy)
• eBay Motors: Chevrolet : Bel Air/150/210 (item 4652163394 end time Jul-07-06 14:51:20 PDT)
  Foose-designed custom '57 Chevy from Overhaulin' is on ebay
  (tags: ebay cars foose)
• Home - Chowhound
  Awesome new redesign of chowhound
  (tags: food cooking design)

links for 2006-06-24

• Super Sugar Star: Random Madness
  I want THIS for my next birthday. But a giant cupcake unicorn jumping over a whale. Done in pixel-type colored cupcakes.
  (tags: cupcakes food awesome)

links for 2006-06-22

• YouTube - Gnarls Barkley Vs. Beastie Boys
  well played, dj, well played
  (tags: mashup dj video youtube)
• Images: Office finds place for Creative Commons | CNET News.com
  holy crap, good work CC peeps!
  (tags: microsoft creativecommons copyright)
• macosxhints.com - 10.4: How to disable (and enable) Dashboard
  how to turn off dashboard without any apps at all.
  (tags: dashboard osx tips howto apple)

links for 2006-06-20

• CONSUME :: Buy Stuff That Doesn't Suck (a blog from the minds behind Consumating)
  You know what's freaky? Ben Brown starts a blog for Consumating and right out of the gate it's really good, as if he'd been doing it for years.
  (tags: blog consumating wishlist)
• Twist Salon
  I built this site today (for a friend) in about four hours, including the time to go down there and take photos. I like the end result, complete with all the ugly css hacks.
  (tags: hair oregon css)
• eMusings: Lava River Cave - Chez Goodman
  todo: go hike the lava caves this summer
  (tags: oregon vacation spelunking hiking)

Speaking in Portland this Wednesday night

Just a reminder mostly to myself so I don't forget that I'll be speaking on a panel discussion about Building Online Communities this Wednesday night at DevGroup Northwest. I'm looking forward to meeting WardCunningham and getting the chance to edit anything he puts in front of him.

links for 2006-06-16

• Upload Progress Bar / AJAX File Uploader: FileChucker - by Encodable Industries
  Perfect for big uploads.
  (tags: ajax ui uploads javascript tutorials)
• Willamette Week Online | News | COVER STORY | Holy Mackerel! (6/14/2006)
  Oh great, the moonies control my sushi.
  (tags: sushi food religion)

Lazyweb: accelerometers and MAME, if you please

I keep seeing novel ideas for using the accelerometer in laptops like this Google Maps one but I'm still surprised I haven't seen anyone port games to talk to the device.

Seriously, if anyone knows the ins and outs of gaming applications like MAME, please make me a version that I can use to play Marble Madness on my macbook. I would kill for something fun like that, using a physical interface to interact with the game. I thought it would be a matter of days after the macbooks came out that someone would do it, but I haven't seen a game yet that interacts with the accelerometer.

update: sweet, thanks to some comments, there's an open source marble madness type app, in addition to the standard sensor app, making a tilt game possible. Here's a video I just shot of it in action:

links for 2006-06-14

• 'boards - Screening Room
  This is my favorite commercial of the last couple years.
  (tags: coffee commercials video comedy)

Not dead yet

Normally, I can easily track people talking about or mentioning me by tracking my last name, but lately these ego searches are useless, since the corrupt former Irish PM Charles Haughey finally died (and people are dancing on his grave from the blog posts I've read but it sounds like he was an awful man). It was like a big DOS on my RSS reader, as my normally 3-5 hit ego searches are coming back with hundreds of items every few hours.

links for 2006-06-13

• YouTube - "That Old Pair of Jeans" Music Video Contest Entry
  This is some psycho good juggling
  (tags: juggling youtube fatboyslim)

links for 2006-06-12

• crawlspace|media
  holy crap, worldcup via telnet!
  (tags: soccer worldcup telnet ascii)
• Stuff to Think About: How to Get Google AJAX Search For Your Site
  ajax google search for your blog.
  (tags: google ajax css javascript)

links for 2006-06-10

• rendr
  pretty cool live HTML renderer
  (tags: html css javascript)
• Archive - Commonwealth Club
  it's real audio but damn, lots of great talks here
  (tags: audio to_listen)

Cars

Thoughts from seeing Cars today (only the second time I've gone to the movies since Fiona was born -- she was in daycare):

- Oh my god, the Ratatouille preview was awesome. Is that the sweet sound of PATTON OSWALT DOING COMEDY?! I can't wait for Patton's big film.

- The One Man Band short is mildly amusing, but forgettable compared to their earlier works.

- My god there are a lot of children in this theater.

- Disney once had a short cartoon about cars-as-people where an old junkyard is revisited by 50s teens and they soup up a rust bucket. The way the eyes and mouths work on these cars is pretty similar.

- The look of the film is mostly cartoonish. Here and there you see amazing super realistic digital effects (accurate reflections, atmospheric effects) but for the most part the lighting feels purposely "wrong" so everything looks like a cartoon. The Incredibles looked like little plastic/clay figures in real space -- it was hyperreal but I guess talking cars are clearly fiction and the look was tailored to avoid realism.

- The film is clearly aimed at kids, with a few adult joke nods but not many. The Incredibles was total adult material while Monsters Inc. and the Toy Story series felt equally aimed at children and adults. I expected the film to work on multiple levels but it feels mostly like a very good children's flick.

- The story is nice, but fairly simple and not particularly strong for a Pixar film. I know they spend 5-6 years working on scripts there and every Pixar film has been amazing. This is probably their weakest effort, but it's still good. It just felt a bit weak for a Pixar project.

- I loved Tony Shalhoub and it was great to hear Paul Newman do another classic older hero role.

- I'm a car nut and I loved the little nods to car history but overall, I'd give it a 3 and a half out of 5 stars. Maybe it's because I expect 5/5 movies from Pixar, which has always delivered.

links for 2006-06-09

• onegoodmove: Sunday Bloody Sunday
  oh. my. god.
  (tags: bush u2 video music)
• blog.myspace.com/pambeesley
  the actress that plays Pam on The Office has a MySpace blog that she updates frequently. I think it's real, but you never know.
  (tags: nbc office myspace)
• openid for vox - Brad Fitzpatrick's blog
  vox talks to LJ via OpenID with FOAF as well. Hopefully they'll extend FOAF to other services too
  (tags: vox livejournal programming socialsoftware)
• Extensible document types in Dreamweaver
  getting Dreamweaver to recognize and color code files that don't have the obvious extensions (like parsing .html as .php) requires the editing of xml files on your file system (there are no options in the UI for this)
  (tags: dreamweaver programming adobe)

I should go back to tin cans on a string

Greg is kind enough to let me shack up on his server and today he sent a bit of info he noticed when checking the logs:

[root@eod log]# grep 'Jun 7' maillog | grep haughey\.com | \ grep 'User unknown' | wc -l 5678

[root@eod log]# grep 'Jun 7' maillog | grep metafilter\.com | \ grep 'User unknown' | wc -l 12976

That's the total number of messages (in one day) going to anything@my domains that I previously told him to ignore and send to /dev/null.

That's 18,654 spams going to non-existent email addresses. Greg says about 700 come in each day to my real matt@ accounts, and of those 700 only about 40 are legit. Gmail does a fairly good job screening the remaining, but it's far from perfect. I probably wade through 100 spams a day to see my real mail.

It's nice having the same email address for the past 9 years, but jeez, filtering 19k emails a day down to 40 is pretty messed up.

links for 2006-06-08

• 4 color rebellion » 4cr Presents: The DS lite Buyer’s Guide
  Nice roundup of info and not a bad use of flashpaper
  (tags: nintendo)
• Comments are back! - Engadget
  that looks oddly familiar :)
  (tags: blogs comments communityproblems)
• whythebugaboo
  Yeah, it's a $600-900 stroller but my god is it well designed and flexible. I *almost* bought one but already had a viable alternative.
  (tags: strollers daddytypes baby video)
• COSBY Fat Kid T-Shirt
  heh. I tried to watch Goonies the other day for the first time since the 80s and it was unwatchable. Most of it was his fault.
  (tags: tshirts goonies 80s)
• stevenberlinjohnson.com: In Which I "Debate" Popular Culture With Stephen Colbert
  can't. wait.
  (tags: sbj colbert comedy)

Happy Slayer Day

National Day of Slayer: June 6, 2006 (6/6/6)

TURN IT UP!!!

Vox Love

From an interview with Jason Kottke:

When I first started putting my thoughts online in the mid-90s, there was little about my life that I wouldn’t put online, but now it’s almost the opposite situation.

What he said.

A year or two ago I realized I didn't really feel like sharing everything going on with my life anymore. It's got its upsides, but the drawbacks are many. Not to mention all the people that said too much about something or someone and later had it bite them in the ass.

After a few months of not blogging every little thing on my mind I realized I was missing something by no longer doing it -- writing about your thoughts and life's little triumphs and tragedies helped me work through my thoughts or understand the problems better. So I started blogging privately at LiveJournal and a dozen or so friends also did and I got a lot out of it. But LiveJournal has its limitations and all the little things I disliked about it eventually turned me off from frequent posting there. It's a pain to login all the time. A pain to add friends. It used to be a pain finding the "write a new post" link anywhere on the site.

Vox came out and I've been playing with it for a couple months and enjoying it immensely. It's still pretty streamlined and straightforward but it's got the UI that never gets in my way (unlike LiveJournal's UI). The friends and family blogging is the key feature and I've read a lot from people that don't understand what all the hoopla is about.

It's kind of like TiVo in that you have to try it out first, live with it a month or two before you realize it's the greatest thing ever. Or think of it as an iceberg -- it seems simple and not very useful at first but my god is that one little feature hiding a great deal of utility. I'm blogging at Vox now and a couple dozen people I see in real life and hang out with several times a year are also on it and on my friends list. If I want to ask them something or share an intensely personal tidbit, I can post it there for them and I don't have to IM or call anyone and I don't have to tell the same story 15 times as I see them throughout the year. And I don't have to read about how I'm the biggest dumbass on earth on another blog as a result of the post. Don't get me wrong -- I have skin as thick as leather but after seven years of this, it gets old when someone that doesn't understand you or your tone misinterprets something you've said. Blogging to friends means never having to explain the joke.

I kind of wish the functionality was built into my existing MT install I'm blogging with right now, but I'm ok with having a half public/private life on my vox site. I'm also a fan of the non-technical approach at Vox. If I never have to edit another blog template by hand again, I'll die a happy man. Same goes for tweaking inline styles in a HTML view. Vox is great for writing and not having to worry about template tag attribute documentation or having to add a style="text-align:center;" to an image ever again.

It's funny how things come full circle -- when I started out I hand coded blog entries, then I wrote my own CMS, then eventually I moved to a commercial CMS package and now I would prefer to never have to maintain a server or backups and I don't really feel like designing my own blog templates anymore.

I just want to write and not have to worry about all that other junk. And I'd rather keep the personal stuff to a few close friends. Vox is perfect for both of those things.

links for 2006-06-05

• Recent Tracks - CC Hits
  digg-like interface for CC licensed music
  (tags: creativecommons music mp3)

Webvisions this July

I've been meaning to write about this for weeks now, but this July I'll be speaking at the Webvisions conference in Portland on how to make a living blogging.

I haven't talked about it very much here, but ever since I started dabbling in making a little revenue from my blogs, things have went well and revenue grew to the point that last fall I got to quit my job to tend to my web things full time. It's been both stressful to make the leap and tremendously rewarding.

I wrote about my first experiences with Adsense almost three years ago here and I don't think it's boastful to say that it sparked a revolution in blogging. Since then I've tried quite a number of other things out that are worth talking about and have gotten tons of experience worth sharing. In the past few years I've noticed a dozen or so "blog networks" pop up and a similar number of people that have sites dedicated to "pro blogging" but my personal beef with most advice you find online is that it often centers on search engine and adsense gaming. I think that's the wrong approach and want to present a more sensible one.

When Nick Finck asked me if I wanted to speak at Webvisions this year, my first thought was yeah I'd love to do an hour on how to build a business online without resorting to cheap tricks. It's been a long, hard road for the past 7 years doing this but it's really turned into something great for me. I feel like there is a wealth of information that isn't getting out there that could really help folks live their dreams and make a living from fooling around online. It is my first solo talk at a conference so that will be a new adventure, but it's good to get out of your comfort zone every once in a while and I've already spent a month researching my talk and am planning the next month honing it into something concise and useful.

So if you're in the Pacific Northwest this summer and you love posting to your blog more than the drudgery of your day job, take a few days off and come see me talk about how I do it. I'm also talking about solo web development vs. open source and business blogging that same day so it should be a fun (and busy) couple days for me.

links for 2006-06-01

• Urban Legends Reference Pages: Cokelore (The Reich Stuff?)
  huh, Fanta was invented by Nazis.
  (tags: coke history wtf)