Check out this novel use of flickr’s api to produce ‘compound’ photos – imagine if you took 50 flower photos and combined them all into one photo. The results are surprisingly cool.
Monthly Archives: March 2005
No progress on the house
Since folks have been emailing – still no progress on the house. There have been no offers, but the seller is now aware that I am interested. I’m striking out in the loan department – I was hoping to get a home improvement package bundled in with the purchase price but that’s turning out to be cost prohibitive. If nothing develops tomorrow on the financial end then I’m going to make an offer and take a traditional loan package and find a way to finance the repairs over the next couple of years. The pool I’ll pay for out of my savings, assuming I’m right in terms of cost and can get it done for around $7-8k.
More new pics of Soolin
I’m trying to work through a ton of photos I’ve taken over the last several months. I just posted the first new batch to the gallery, they’re mostly Soolin pics. You can check them out here.
I’ve got a lot more to come, including some great shots from a hike up Hadley mountain.
What a difference a ‘-’ makes
I already knew this lesson but man, I came close to being bitten by it on ebay this week. I mentioned earlier that I’m selling my iriver mp3 player on ebay this month to pay for a sony PSP. I put the mp3 player up for auction on Sunday. I’d been watching them on ebay for the past 2 weeks to see what folks were getting for them and based on my feedback I figure on getting around $260 for mine. But three days into the auction I had no bids and only 2 people watching it. I was starting to get nervous – why no activity? All the other ones that had gone up had immediate activity. Granted the html I’m using for the auction sucks, but I have great feedback and the thing’s in great condition. What was up?
I had a brain fart is what was up. I listed it as an i-river mp3 player. It’s an iriver. No hyphen. People searching ebay for one weren’t finding mine. D’oh! A quick adjustment to the listing and 4 hours later I have 2 placeholder bids and 9 folks watching the auction. The lesson – dot your i’s and cross your t’s and double check them. I could have taken a loss on the auction if I hadn’t adjusted it.
What a difference a ‘-’ makes
I already knew this lesson but man, I came close to being bitten by it on ebay this week. I mentioned earlier that I’m selling my iriver mp3 player on ebay this month to pay for a sony PSP. I put the mp3 player up for auction on Sunday. I’d been watching them on ebay for the past 2 weeks to see what folks were getting for them and based on my feedback I figure on getting around $260 for mine. But three days into the auction I had no bids and only 2 people watching it. I was starting to get nervous – why no activity? All the other ones that had gone up had immediate activity. Granted the html I’m using for the auction sucks, but I have great feedback and the thing’s in great condition. What was up?
I had a brain fart is what was up. I listed it as an i-river mp3 player. It’s an iriver. No hyphen. People searching ebay for one weren’t finding mine. D’oh! A quick adjustment to the listing and 4 hours later I have 2 placeholder bids and 9 folks watching the auction. The lesson – dot your i’s and cross your t’s and double check them. I could have taken a loss on the auction if I hadn’t adjusted it.
Recipe for knocking yourself senseless
Required ingredients – one lacrosse ball, bonus points if it’s wet and slobbery. One Golden retriever pup, preferably full of piss and vinegar. Procedure – interest dog in ball. Engage in tug of war with dog. Exclaim in horror when dog releases ball suddenly just as you are in mid-tug, causing the ball and your fist to crash forcefully into your face, busting open your lip and causing a bloody nose. Bonus points if dog then jumps in your lap (yum! tasty blood! yay!) and proceeds to lick your face whilst you lounge half senseless from the blow.
Speaking from experience, it’s a sensation not to be missed. Err, to be missed I mean. Oh, and extra bonus points for not losing one’s temper. I couldn’t quite bring myself to laugh due to the pain, but at least I can smile about it now.
Wheat Albumin helpful for glycemic control
Stupid Medscape and their retarded scheme for enforcing site registration – I can’t puzzle out how to link to the article they published this week that summarizes recent research in clinical trials that indicated that consumption of as much as a gram of wheat albumin before eating reduced post prandial blood sugar levels by as much as 30%. This is the second trial in less than a month demonstrating consumption of specific compounds can lead to dramatic glycemic control. And it’s the second one in a month where said compound is something I can’t seem to actually lay my hands on. Anyone got a source of pure wheat albumin? It’s in wheat naturally but I can’t eat wheat products because the carb content causes dangerous blood sugar levels.
Do you see what I see?
Spotted while checking out a house on east river drive in Lake Luzerne, NY. I didn’t manipulate the image at all in photoshop. Pretty cool I think.
Click on the link
That is to say this link, which is guaranteed to induce an epileptic seizure in most anyone. Don’t complain that you weren’t warned!
mp3 player up for sale
I put my iriver ihp 120 up on ebay tonight. If you’re looking for a best in class mp3/digital audio player, check it out. They go for over $330 and aside from itunes it has everything an ipod has plus tons more, most notably radio, digital audio in and out (as compared to analog on most every other player out there), recording, wired remote, and multi-format support including ogg, wav, wma and of course mp3. It’s really an excellent little device. I’m selling it because I crave a sony psp, so much so that I already bought it on the credit card. It’s fantastic, mostly. I’ll post impressions after I’ve had it for a while. Meanwhile though I need to sell the iriver before the credit card bill comes, so go bid up my auction, won’t you?
Major step tomorrow…
…if all goes well I’ll make an offer on this house, which is located here. It’s tiny, has really (really) serious leak issues in the basement, and needs a major renovation in the interior (2 rooms with ceiling to floor mirrors and another with one of those giant wall murals of a deer in the forest. mkay, to each their own, it’s not me though), but it’s what I can afford and it hits on a lot of my wants in a house, namely water access (it has deeded beach rights on the Hudson), property coupled with some sense of privacy (it’s on a little over an acre and a few plantings and I should have a completely private back yard), and it has potential in terms of ways I can work on it to increase the property value. Things I might do include: tearing out the ceiling on the kitchen/living room side of the house to give it cathedral ceilings, then stick in a few skylights; put in a pool and hot tub in the back yard, excavate to fix the basement leak issues, then finish one half of it to make an ultimate home theater room, fix the bathroom (to each their own and all, but wall to wall shag carpeting in the bathroom?), and put a gas stove in and convert the fireplace to one of those gas log deals. And that’s just to start. Anyway wish me luck, if all goes well I could be living in the place by June or even the end of May.
Magic cure for poison ivy/oak?
Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools weblog suggested using Zanfel Poison Ivy Cream as an immediate and effective cure for Poison Ivy and other similar ills. I’m skeptical but most folks seem to agree that it really works. Given the dog and the presence of poison ivy in the northeast I’m going to take the precaution of ordering myself a tube. Worth a look if you’ve struggled with poison ivy in the past, even at the pretty steep $40/ounce price point.
New photo album in the gallery
Check out the best of the photos from a hike Andrew and I did right before Thanksgiving on Black Mountain, the highest peak in the Lake George region. There’s a decent panorama included. We actually hiked this in November of 2004 but I am just now getting around to posting it. Shows where I am at with my backlog of weblog stuff. Anyway despite being the highest peak it’s not really a very challenging hike from the road side of the mountain, mostly because you drive up into the range and remove about 1000′ or more of elevation you’d have to climb if you tackled the mountain from the lake side. I hope to do that this summer during our annual Lake George camping trip as this year we’re going to be literally right at the foot of the mountain.
Hiking season is back baby!
Soolin summited her first mountain this week, Prospect up in Lake George. Of course dingus me forgot to bring the flash card for the camera so I whipped it out and discovered I was lugging the camera and case along for no good reason. D’oh! Anyway the hiking was excellent. There were still many feet of snow in places on the mountain and sections of the trail were seriously iced over, but it was warm and everything was coated with a thick frosting of crunchy ice froth, leaving me something to get a grip on with my boots. Highlights of the trip aside from the glorious view looking north along the lake were Soolin doing her best penguin impersonation as she discovered she could slide down the ice, running back and forth along this one ~six foot stretch of trail so she could repeatedly slide down it, and me skitching my way down like 80% of the mountain at a barely controlled pace on the way down. Great fun!
ushering in the age of the machines
All those videogames, cartoons and pen and paper role playing games about giant walking robots were actually onto something. Think I’m kidding? Check out John Deere’s spiderbot, a giant walking robot designed for timber work. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the Decepticons don’t get their hands on one or we’re in trouble!
work weblog now public
Another reason to prefer Skidmore over Bowdoin – ask, and the network folks open up a hole in the firewall so that my box is available from off campus. Easy as pie. As a result you can now get to my work weblog and wiki from anywhere. Assuming you’re interested, that is. I do occasionally bring up interesting apps on the box, it’s basically my test machine at work. Anyway the best way to get there is from my official skidmore website, where you can find a link to my blog. I’m running WordPress 1.5 in test mode on that box (after yet another instance of snipsnap shit the bed on me – this is absolutely the last time I touch that package. Very cool ideas, decent implementation, mediocre stability and totally crappy documentation).
Ruby on Rails is completely awesome.
I’m having an experience similar to one I had 5-6 years ago when I first starting tinkering with XML, this feeling of ‘woah – this is going to change how I do everything!’ What’s causing it? Ruby on Rails, this completely awesome framework for building web apps. I first starting looking into it after reading through some of the stuff about the development of instiki, the excellent wiki engine I linked to a few weeks ago. It turns out that the development of instiki inspired the work that became Ruby on Rails. Anyone building web apps would be well served to do a little reading on RoR. I’d be curious to hear if you have a similar reaction to the one I had. A few good starting points:
- Drop dead simple tutorial which uses construction of a simple todo list as the sample application.
- onlamp.com’s tutorial – there is a second part to this one as well.
- a response to the onlamp tutorial on slash7.com. There are a couple of other really good posts about RoR on slash7 as well.
- An introduction to Ruby for non-programmers – Why’s Poignant Guide – this is just one of the best introductions to programming I’ve ever read – fun, funny, well written, and it has an elf with a pet ham. What more can you ask for?
To give former colleagues a sense of how good I think this stuff is, I’m fairly confident that I could rebuild the notoriously buggy and never quite finished Flight to Freedom project myself, without the assistance of a programmer or DBA. I’m almost tempted to do this just for the exercise.
Anyway, check it out if you’re doing web app development. I’m glad I’m not at Bowdoin any longer – in 4 years there I couldn’t convince them to give me access to PHP despite the fact that outside of Java virtually all interesting web app development was happening on that platform. God knows how long it would take them to give me Ruby. Here at Skidmore I’ve already got it up and running for myself and am experimenting with using Rails for a project I have slated for this summer.
My name is David, and I have an almond problem
I eat 2-3 pounds of raw almonds a week, and perhaps as much as 5 pounds of nuts and seeds in total. Shocking isn’t it? They’re one of my primary sources of protein. This gets expensive – at close to $7 a pound for the good kind, almonds cost substantially more than almost any other protein source I could buy. I’ve been looking for ways to save myself money on this. My average weekly grocery bill comes in at about $150, of which about $50-60 is seeds and nuts. Happily, I discovered this ebay auction. With shipping they ended up costing me just under $4 a pound, a substantial savings, and the nuts were much fresher than anything I’ve managed to get outside of a Trader Joe’s. They’re smaller than the ones I usually eat, but if you have an almond habit like mine, this is definitely the way to go.
Now I just need to find equivalent bargains on pecans and sunflower seeds.
Tivo’s bacon out of the fire?
The news is all over the tech sites today so I won’t bother linking to it, but it looks like Tivo signed a deal with Comcast yesterday to provide the interface for Comcast’s DVR’s. This is great news for Tivo fans. Let’s hope they have more tricks like this up their sleeve, including (to my view most importantly) a more rational and consumer friendly approach to DRM.
New ‘The Shield’ season starts tonight
If you haven’t seen it before, give The Shield a try tonight at 10pm on the FX network. I had no idea how great this show is until I caught a reference to it one night (on the screensavers of all places), which led me to the reviewer’s weblog. Long and short of it is that it’s a great show – if you enjoy the Sopranos or The Wire on HBO there’s more than excellent chance you’ll enjoy The Shield.