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Awesome
A Whole Lotta Nothing
Matt Haughey's Personal Blog
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November 2006
November 30, 2006
November 29, 2006
links for 2006-11-29
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multiple people said this looks like me.
November 27, 2006
A broken TV tastes like eating crow
I've been meaning to write a post about all the stupid articles and references to a couple people that have tossed their Wii controllers so hard it broke their television. I've been playing about 30 minutes a day for the past week and having a controller slip out of your hand just seemed ridiculous. I was so confident in this assertion that I took the leash out of the remote when I first set it up. I noticed a bunch of blogs linking to the broken TV stories and the press seemed to glom onto it because it's a funny new angle they can deflate the Wii hype with. You'd have to be a total spazz to not only need the leash but also break it, and then break your TV too.
Blogs and newspapers both love to do this: find a silly outlier story to discredit/attack/mock a new trend. The "you'll hurt each other playing a Wii" and "you'll break your TV!" stories definitely fill the bill and allow a pundit or blogger to scoff at anything interesting, new, or innovative in something like the Wii and just make jokes about it. I'd also say jokes about the Zune coming in brown or Microsoft employees calling file transfers "squirting" is doing the same thing to the Zune: overshadowing the actual innovative feature that lets you share songs with random people nearby (I'll never own a Zune but I wish my iPods could do that).
Anyway, this is just a long way of saying last night I was playing the training part of the Sports disc, where you can bowl with up to 96 pins. You have to throw the ball as hard as you can, and while doing this the controller slid clear out of my hand. It banked off the fireplace in front of me with so much force that it bounced directly up into the ceiling where it hit hard and bounced back down. It missed the TV above the fireplace by a couple of inches.
So I guess the moral of the story is you should really use those little leash things and I'm a bigger spazz than I thought.
Posted at 12:00 AM in journalism, nintendo, wii | Permalink | Comments (19)
November 26, 2006
links for 2006-11-26
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I found a stash of photos taken in March of 2004, back when I visited Flickr HQ to talk about Creative Commons licenses. Hard to believe that was only 2.5 years ago.
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All hail the Woz
November 25, 2006
links for 2006-11-25
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a billion handy tips for running apache
November 23, 2006
links for 2006-11-23
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JD highlights his problem with adsense. On a blog promoting responsible use of money, all the keyword ads are undesirable MAKE MONEY NOW junk counter to his message. When algorithms attack.
A pre-thanksgiving thought
When you think about it, "free range chicken broth" never stops being funny. It's like a Far Side cartoon that was never drawn but can easily be imagined.
Posted at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
November 22, 2006
November 21, 2006
November 20, 2006
links for 2006-11-20
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I wish this page had a feed associated with it. I have to keep reminding myself to check out new videos here once a month or so
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Awesome, here's the secret feed for that search
November 18, 2006
links for 2006-11-18
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damn nice looking blog/trend aggregator
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Microsoft embraces and extends the CSS Zen Garden
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I've been meaning to build this for three years.
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awesome looking stuff, made from recycled skate decks
November 17, 2006
Crap I love: Wesabe
After working on my own for a year, this past summer I finally got around to examining my finances. I did what most people do: I got a copy of the latest Quicken, spent a week entering data into it, and then I stared at graphs wondering how on earth my spending always seemed to go up when my income went up, even though it didn't feel like I was going on new shopping sprees.
I quickly found Quicken to be a bear. The category system is a pain, and every charge can only have one category attached. Making new categories and arranging subcategories would frequently crash Quicken 2007 for the Mac, making me lose work in the process. Like every other time I've tried to use some piece of financial software, I eventually gave up.
About a month ago, I started using the Wesabe beta (co-founder Marc Hedlund is a friend of a friend). The app has lofty aim of helping you track spending, realize your goals, and share tips with everyone. There are also social effects, where people using the same merchant can post reviews, allowing you to surf around for a new mechanic or grocery store based on other members' satisfaction and spending.
For me, the main draw was simply having a powerful web version of something like Quicken, but flexible like flickr or delicious. Instead of categories, there are tags. And you can put any number of tags on something, and sort spending per tag. This is a really big breakthrough. A few things I discovered from doing this:
- I tagged every gas station purchase with gas and auto. With a single click, I could see how much I spent just on gasoline each month and I could also see how much I spent overall on owning cars (by tagging all payments and repairs with auto).
- Among the dozens of gas fill-ups I had this year I noticed some were for roadtrips, so I could tack on a tag for that single trip (and add the tag: travel), then tag every other purchase from that trip with the city name. One click on the roadtrip city name and I could see how much that trip cost me, and I could also see how much travel in general cost me each month.
- I've taken to tagging any purchase that is a gift to myself, or an extravagance, or any non-necessary thing with: extra. In a click, I can see how much money I waste each month on silly gadgets, bike upgrades, and wacky t-shirts. There was never an easy way to get that kind of data from Quicken.
The other smart thing Wesabe does is make data entry easy. My bank gives me some ugly metadata that usually just features the address of the business where a charge was made. In Quicken, I'd have to memorize 1590 Booth Bend road equalled Lowe's Hardware and I'd have to categorize every purchase by hand. Wesabe is pretty slick in that you put a description in once for a merchant, then the app finds each and every purchase ever made at that same chunk of metadata, and automatically copies the tags and description for the first one you marked. Thanks to this feature, I tagged and described an entire year's worth of purchases in about 90 minutes. Now, I do weekly updates from my bank data and it takes just a few minutes to keep everything up to date.
The app is still new, and about the only drawbacks I've found is that the history reporting and graphing doesn't feel completely built out yet (and I've heard lots more is to come in that realm). I'm used to Quicken's graph magic and Measuremap and Google Analytics where you can click on any bar graph and figure out what exactly caused a spike. At the moment, the bar graphs simply report your patterns in spending but lack any sort of "zoom" feature to get more detail.
It didn't take long for me to fall in love with Wesabe. At every point where Quicken stood in the way of my progress with ease-of-use roadblocks, Wesabe makes it painless. Now that it's open to the public, the Tips and Goals sections might get built out more and the social aspects will kick in, but at the very least, the accounting section of the app is truly killer and helping me finally get a handle on my spending.
Wesabe (free, probably paid pro options in the future)
Posted at 12:00 AM in crap i love, money, reviews, webapps | Permalink | Comments (31)
links for 2006-11-17
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awesome images of Oregon
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huh, this might be a good alternative for uploading on mefi music
November 16, 2006
links for 2006-11-16
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Why Denton fired Douglas. Personally, I liked the old Valleywag, the new one is just a TechCrunch clone.
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My flickr childhood post ends up in an academic paper. (it's also slated to be in a college textbook)
Where there's a Wii, there's a way
Everyone I know seems to want to score a Wii on launch day, and most are betting on second tier outlets to get one. I agree and think that the world will line up at Walmarts, Targets, and BestBuys around the country so the secret is to find another option that is big enough to get Wiis on launch day, but also not so big that anyone would notice. This could be a local mom & pop store, a non-franchise video game store, or that seedy Kmart in the bad part of town.
I tested this theory out by visiting my local Fred Meyer. If you're in the Pacific Northwest and near any major city, chances are you are surrounded by Fred Meyers. I don't think I'll hurt my chances by sharing that they're open from 12:01am-1am this Saturday night and my local one has 75 Wii consoles ready to go. That's a lot of boxes, right up there with what most BestBuy stores will get and about double what any Target store is getting near me.
Posted at 12:00 AM in gaming, nintendo, wii | Permalink | Comments (7)
November 15, 2006
links for 2006-11-15
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The Temple of Ego meme spreads! I really need to set one of these up with my flickr, vox, delicious, blog, mefi, and pvrblog feeds.
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how awesome is this?
November 14, 2006
links for 2006-11-14
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fascinating story of an obsessed train fan (with aspergers, which explains a lot)
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mame for intel chipped macs
November 13, 2006
Flickr "detail" sets
I've been using flickr on a daily basis for over two years. Today I followed a link from someone's blog and landed on a page I've never seen before, and it rocked. It's simple, but I didn't have any idea it existed. It's the "detail view" of photosets, which is so much more useful for getting the gist of a gallery that I wonder why it's not the default view.
Don't know what I'm talking about? Check this out: Early this past spring I built a deck, and I made a gallery about that, so compare:
Holy cow, I built a deck! - a photoset on Flickr (default)
Holy cow, I built a deck! - a photoset on Flickr (detail)
See how much easier the detail view is? No more squinting at little thumbnails, you can instantly scan everything in a set without having to click on anything. Just add "/detail/" to your flickr set links when sharing a gallery. Your readers will thank you.
Posted at 12:00 AM in flickr, tips | Permalink | Comments (7)
links for 2006-11-13
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wow, nice use of XUL in firefox to do simple presentations
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Apple hacks for streaming movies
November 12, 2006
links for 2006-11-12
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huh, never seen this before until today. Arabic goes at the bottom?
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toread
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heh
November 11, 2006
links for 2006-11-11
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Where to go to get your wii and ps3
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whoa. Might as well try one of these next time I need prescription sunglasses
How to fly with an empty seat next to you
Lifehacker just posted a travel tip on picking seats most likely to stay empty at the time you buy your ticket, but I've found I only keep an empty seat next to me about a quarter of the time using that method. There's a much more successful way to get what you want and I find it works about three quarters of the time.
When you arrive at the airport, make a beeline for the electronic check-in kiosk and skip the humans if you have a choice. When checking in via kiosk, be sure to hit the Change Seats option. Then do what the lifehacker post says, which is select an aisle or row seat with an empty middle next to it.
The chances that someone buys the middle seat after you reserved your ticket weeks ago is much higher than the chances that someone selects that middle seat in the last hour or two before your flight. Of course, this works only on non-full flights that don't happen during holiday season. I'd say on average weekday flights I almost always get an empty seat next to me and it's only on end-of-weekend return flights with tons of standby passengers that I don't get the extra space.
Posted at 12:00 AM in hacks, travel | Permalink | Comments (4)
November 10, 2006
November 09, 2006
links for 2006-11-09
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awesome RSS mashup hack to build a Temple of Ego using existing feeds
November 08, 2006
links for 2006-11-08
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great stuff here for free no less
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to listen...
Yay!
I have voted in very race since 1990, back when I turned 18, but this is the first year where almost everything I voted for won. Even local races went the way I wanted, and across the country races fell as I wished.
I can't begin to describe how happy I am that Rick Santorum is out of the Senate now.
November 07, 2006
The craigslist check con, and its aftermath
From Wikipedia's entry on Con men and popular cons:
Stolen Cheques. A recent twist on the Nigerian fraud scheme, the mark is told he is helping someone overseas collect "debts" from corporate clients. Large cheques stolen from businesses are mailed to the mark. These cheques are altered to reflect the mark's name, and the mark is then asked to cash them and transfer all but a percentage of the funds (his commission) to the con artist. The cheques are often completely genuine, except that the "pay to" information has been expertly changed. This exposes the mark not only to enormous debt when the bank reclaims the money from his or her account, but also to criminal charges for money laundering. A more modern variation is to use laser-printed counterfeit checks with the proper account numbers and payer information.
This con is what recently landed a guy in jail, for merely asking his bank (BofA) if a craiglist scammer's check was legit or not.
Posted at 12:00 AM in craigslist, wikipedia, wtf | Permalink | Comments (1)
links for 2006-11-07
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huh, who knew that "get out the vote" has been around since at least 1864? And here I thought MTV made it up or something...
November 06, 2006
links for 2006-11-06
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I had no idea the warez key for winxp was this famous (note the talk page for added background info)
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I finally got this setup and it's absolutely amazing. Totally worth the hour or two of effort to get things just right. I now have a perfect cross browser testbed.
November 05, 2006
links for 2006-11-05
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hmm, might be just the thing for backyard movies next summer
November 04, 2006
links for 2006-11-04
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Lots of great rides mapped on this shop site, here's one I should do someday.
November 03, 2006
links for 2006-11-03
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Can you sue Borat?
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What it's like to show up as the butt of jokes
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whenever I find a coldfusion API for memecached, I'll use this
November 02, 2006
links for 2006-11-02
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american gulag bracelets are an interesting new product. Sorta like those cancer wristbands but edgier.
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Every decision made by the designers of a virtual world game is a political decision. Every debate over the rules and every change to the software is political. When players talk about the rules, they are practicing politics. Once you know to look for vir
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so awesome
Vista, the five year old's OS
I got a Mac Pro yesterday and the first thing I wanted to do after it was setup was to install Windows in Parallels, so I could test out my sites in IE/Win. I started on windows over ten years ago and only started migrating to the mac in 2002. About six months ago I finally retired the PC on my desktop but I've missed having it around for the occasional site test in IE.
I decided to install Vista first to get IE7 and see what the state-of-the-art in Windows was like (I'll also install XP and keep it at IE6 later on). After everything was installed, I needed to download a text editor to change a few files on the windows box and that's when I started getting frustrated by all the "safety features" inherent in Vista.
The following is a paraphrasing of the OS system alerts I was bombarded with as I tried to accomplish my simple task (if it sounds anything like this, it's because it felt the same way):
- Whoa, there tiger! It looks like you typed a URL into the address bar. Do you want to turn on the phishing filter? Because the web is really dangerous! No? You really trust websites? Ok.
- You went to a new site! Are you sure you don't want the phishing filter turned on?! No? Really? Ok.
- I'm sorry, but you can't download things directly, please read the warning at the top of the browser.
- You clicked on the warning at the top and said allow downloads, but as the OS I will do nothing at this point.
- You clicked the download link again! Are you sure you want to download that file? It could contain viruses, you know.
- Where do you want me to save it? Nope, sorry, desktop is no longer an option.
- It's done downloading, what do you want to do with it?
- You actually said "Run"?!?! Are you nuts? Ok, I'll run it if you're so sure.
- THIS IS NOT TRUSTED SOFTWARE FROM A TRUSTED SOURCE. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO INSTALL IT ANYWAY?!?!
I downloaded a few other utilities and this continued, along with all sorts of taskbar balloons announcing all manner of vulnerabilities I was opening myself up to by merely using the computer. After fifteen minutes of this, I gave up and closed my Parallels session.
Is there an "expert mode" in Vista I can set so I'm not treated like this is my first computer the next time I use it?
Posted at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBack (0)
November 01, 2006
links for 2006-11-01
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badass '66 Citeron
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sweet, can't wait to listen to this, so sorry I missed the conference(tags: audio conferences)
Hi, I'm Matt Haughey and this is my blog. I created MetaFilter, co-created Fuelly, started many other sites. I also ride and race bikes. I am battling a benign brain tumor currently but I'm winning. Some kind strangers wrote some nice things about my life at Wikipedia. You can always contact me via email at matt@haughey.com or give me a ring at (503) 465-4522.
