Category: nerd

The stars aligned and I decided to move from hosting my own site to getting a real domain. The old domain will continue to work for some time, but I’m no longer posting on my Moveable Type installation on my iMac at home and will be instead using Word Press hosted on a real host. No more Tivo welcome screens.

Yes, I realize there are still some issues. I’m working on them. Hold your horses. They’ll get fixed. Let me know if you notice any real problems though.

Saturday night at the brewers festival, Chris and John thought it would be funny to throw 2 beer tokens onto the ground and see how long it took for someone to pick them up. It took much longer than expected and I quit taking pictures because it got kind of boring. Someone eventually did pick the two tokens up, and the look of glee on his face was only 10% alcohol related.

Watch the mov (1.2MB)

I’m tired of domain squatters. I’ve lost several domains to squatters when my borderline-extortionist registrar botched my renewals and now I have to wait until the squatters grow tired of the domain in a year. Since my domains were non-commercial, I thought maybe I could get a sympathetic ear, but apparently $250 is the minimum offer before they start paying attention.

Now I’m trying to find a new domain and I’m finding the same to be true. Most of the names I would like to use are taken but for sale, or simply taken with no apparent use. Stupid speculation.

When Ben, Theresa and Howie were down her recently, we made a trip south to Babysaurus to pick their expert brains. It was fun and surreal at the same time. The amount of stuff that is available for babies is absurd. This mini-play station was not the most absurd thing we found, but I felt it was a model for the future cubicle. Imagine being able to swing your chair around your desk to work on a project on the other side? Or if you knew your boss was coming, you could swing back to the clean side of the desk and blame the mess on someone else.

Yes, I did write “poop” on the magnetic screen. I did that on several dozen toys at the store. I figured “poop” isn’t so much a dirty word but a fact of life for babies. The parents are probably going to be too tired to care anyway. Besides, if this really were a baby’s cubicle, you can be damn sure that “poop” would show up on their day planner several times. “Let’s see, it’s time for my ten o’clock…”

One of the greatest reasons for having a bluetooth enabled phone is that you can put your own ring-tones on your phone. My old Sony-Ericsson T616 could play midi files so I was able to trim midi files down to short loops that sounded decent on the phone.

My Motorola RAZR plays midi files, but it can also play mp3s, which opens up a whole new world of potential. Now, instead of settling for whatever crap I could find on the Internet and removing any vocals or bad instruments, I can use bits of real songs from my own collection.

Accomplishing this is not as easy as I thought it would be. Trimming the Mp3’s is simple enough with shareware like Mp3 Trimmer. The first batch I made had been encoded at really high bit rates so 10 second clips were huge, and didn’t play on the phone. So after a few beers Saturday night I sat down, trimmed some tracks, and re-encoded them with iTunes into 56kbps, fixed bit rate, joint stereo files. This worked, and several sound great. Even some of the vocals are great, though I’ve decided not to use the sample from Gimme Some More for decency’s sake.

Any other advice? Yes – For some reason Motorola crippled the Bluetooth functionality on this phone with Windows, so you have to buy additional software to upload files to the phone, or sync your calendar. Uploading via Bluetooth Exchange on the Mac is cake though. So, do yourself a favor…

Also – choice of music is important. And not just because people will judge you by what gets played, or by the fact that you have a song playing when your phone rings. You want to get a small segment that sounds good when it loops, or pick something long enough that you’ll answer it before it loops. Also, space is a premium, so keep things short.

I’m not sure if Blogger is trying to tell me something, but the combination of the bold red font and the letter selection makes the word verification seem a little personal.

It appears that some of the cement workers in Portland were forward-thinking enough to create web friendly street names, like those in the picture. Using underscores like this is a common technique to avoid problematic URL encoding problems where spaces get converted to %20. How confusing would it have been to figure out your location on a street labeled NE%20SUMNER%20ST%20?

Managing meat is so much more challenging than pixels.