Month: March 2009

Telluride, Spring 2009

A few days ago, I got my most recent skiing fix in Telluride, Colorado. In four days of skiing, I got to practice on all conditions: ice, slush, and powder.

I tried to take some videos of skiing this year with my Canon point-and-shoot. Recording was awkward with small camera and while holding poles, so I’ll need to find footage I took a couple of years ago when first got an HD camera. I think what I really need is a helmet cam. It’ll be fun to use on my bike rides, and it will also give me an extra incentive to finally get a ski helmet. Yes, I know, skiing without a helmet these days is like biking without a helmet or smoking. It feels stupid. But when I started skiing it just wasn’t the norm and I’m lazy. It’s on my Christmas list this year.

First up is an attempt to capture what it’s like to go from the top of Revelation Bowl (elevation 12,570 feet) to the base of Lift 7, which is located in the town of Telluride at an elevation of 8,750 feet. While I did make it all the way from the top to the bottom without stopping, my camera did not and split the journey into four different videos, with the middle two each only about a second or so in duration:

I almost fell at 4:06 in the first segment.

Let’s take a break from skiing and head into Mountain Village for some crêpes with chocolate chips:

Courtyard with steam rising from the surface. It's snowing.

Yep, that’s steam rising from the ground in the middle of a snowstorm. I think they got tired of shoveling in Mountain Village. The solution? Heat the entire walkway.

You probably noticed a lack of snow in some areas in that first video series. Fortunately, the second part of the trip was full of fresh powder. Here are a couple of videos of some relaxing glides through the good stuff:

And here are some stills:

snow covered tree
snow-covered trees

Snow-covered trees.

clouds

Above the clouds.

empty mountain

It’s lonely at the top.

ski run with a lot of trees

Through the trees.

On Wednesday, I woke up to find this sight outside of our window:

whiteout

See those trees? There’s a mountain behind them, but you can’t see it through the fog. If I couldn’t see a mountain that’s right in front of me, I didn’t think the chances of a pilot seeing the runway would be very good either. The weather does change quickly in the mountains, so I opened up the WeatherBug app on my iPhone to see what we were dealing with. I was relieved to see that while there was a patch of snow on the radar, the pushpin representing my location was right on the edge of it. By the time I got to the airport a few hours later, the worst of the clouds had blown past, and my flight took off without any major delay or cancellation.

Again, I’m going to talk a bit about the airport. There are plenty of airports where the runway ends shortly before a large body of water, but there’s just something a little more exciting about it ending right before a cliff. I attempted to take a video of what it’s like to take off from America’s highest commercial airport, but since I was busy trying to conceal what I was doing, I was unable to properly angle the camera to catch the ground disappearing beneath. You can find better videos on YouTube (search for things like [telluride takeoff]), but here’s what I ended up with just in case you wanted to take a look:

This is a better video (not shot by me):

And in case you missed it last time, here’s a pretty good shot of our landing back in December:

This time around, my family (not I) had the rare privilege of landing in the uphill direction (Telluride’s runway isn’t level), something I don’t think I’ve ever experienced. It sounds like fun. A couple of fun anecdotes from small airports (which I love):

At TEX, the TSA officer asked, “You do realize that we confiscate all laptops since this is a vacation destination?” Yeah, I heard him use the same joke on the people ahead of me, but hey, it’s the TSA.

At HHI, if nobody is staffing the parking gate, they open it up and have a box where you pay via the honor system.

I’ll end with the last picture on my memory card, of something I wrote about back in November. Ladies and gentlemen, Chicago’s favorite Las Vegas Italian Restaurant:

Chicago's favorite Las Vegas Italian Restaurant

How I should be able to add images in WordPress

I should be able to specify the size of the displayed/scaled image. There’s quite a big jump between 300 pixels wide and 1024, and neither of them are what I want.

A required title attribute? Who do you think I am? Randall Munroe? I don’t need people hovering over my images and seeing the file name. Remove that red star.

And why is the caption and alt attribute the same thing? I want to add alt text, but I don’t want to use the caption at all, partly because I use a super old-school template which doesn’t do much with it. And I think we can assume that any user who can see the image can also see the caption. So if my caption is the same as my alt text, which is a textual alternative of the image, it’s going to be pretty redundant. Don’t make me look like an idiot by having me post a picture of a tree, with a caption below reading: picture of a tree.

I’m spending hours on a Friday night just trying to post some pictures of a vacation. This shouldn’t be that hard.

At work and at play

I recently went on vacation in Telluride, Colorado. Vacations are one of the few times I’m surrounded by non-Googlers, and I was asked several times by my parents’ friends what my day at work is like.

Well, while not totally representative of an average day, here’s what I did on my last day of work before my vacation:

  1. Worked with Albert to figure out how to take portraits of team members, because our manager thought it would be fun.
  2. Did some work for the Webmaster Central YouTube Channel
  3. Went over to Charlie’s (a Google café) for some potstickers and David’s bacon fried rice.
  4. Sampled food from a variety of vendors hoping to get our votes to stock their products in our microkitchens.
  5. Spent the afternoon racing members of my team at Gokart Racer.

It has to be cool enough, but not too cool…

Ok, so as Nelson pointed out, shortly after my rant against WeFollow, I went ahead and sent them three replies. Why? Because enough people were doing it that I figured I should just play along and participate. Of course as I indicated in my last post, once this becomes too mainstream (tech goes below the fold), I’ll lose interest.

This reminds me of my use of smileys (or emoticons, if you prefer), and how it proves I can be susceptible to peer pressure if I respect my peers. For the first 12 years of my online life, I refused to use smileys. Well, except for when I used them ironically, but again, I’ll note that this is before I had ever heard of a “hipster.” I think this was when people were just starting to talk about emos, which I later learned were not large Australian birds.

I refused to use them because I saw them most commonly used by people who did other annoying things like using colored fonts, writing *shrug* and *sigh* and otherwise trying to bring emotion into a textual medium. One day, I was shocked to see Tony (Dude, update your blog!) use a smiley in conversation, and I called him out for it. He shot back with something like, “I’ve been using email since the ’80s!” so I decided to refrain from judging him, but still didn’t deem smileys to be good enough for my use.

Finally, in the summer of 2006, I found myself at Google, surrounded by geeks. And you know what? They use smileys all the time. I probably started using them just to fit in and not get fired, and didn’t really see a huge value in them. At some point, however, I started to realize the great thing about smileys. They let you say almost anything without risking offense. As someone whose constant attitude of “I can’t believe you took that personally/seriously, you fool” gets me into trouble more often than I’d like, I’ve found smileys to be a great safety net. Let’s take a look at an example:

Without a smiley:

You want to know what else looks like a bug? Your face.

With a smiley:

You want to know what else looks like a bug? Your face. 😉

Pretty neat, huh?

And now even Twitter confuses me

Life used to be so simple. Look at messages that were 140 characters or fewer in length sent by your friends.

It reminds me of the early days of Flickr — a place for people who liked pictures to share pictures. At one point I stepped away from it for a bit, and when I came back, I found MySpace-level antics going on. The mainstream users had found it. There were seemingly automated “join my group” requests, and comments with, I hate to say it, glitter text.

And then there’s Facebook. I used it daily for about a year in school. Now, I log in about once a month and can’t even figure out where to find my own profile, and have to reject a bunch of requests to fight zombies or some other nonsense.

So what happened to Twitter? It looks like again too many people are trying too hard to get in touch with everyone on the planet. As you may already know, I’m never thrilled about meeting new people. And you know what? I didn’t get into computers to interact with humans. I thought that was part of the deal… I mean since when were nerds social animals?

Here’s what made me finally write this: Today, my Twitter home page is full of people writing some variation of this message:

@wefollow #google #search #tech

I don’t know what this means. Yes, I know the hashtag thing, but why is it to this wefollow character? I’m sure I could easily find out with about one click, but it’s a Saturday, and Saturdays ain’t for learnin’ nothin’.

Why do people think I’m incapable of embarrassment?

A few minutes ago, I was trying to get some information out of Nelson, but he said he was too embarrassed and wouldn’t reveal the info. I respected that, but as a final attempt to get it out of him, I offered:

“I’ll tell you something embarrassing about me.”

But Matt immediately took the value out of this offer:

“Yeah, but you’d probably just blog about it if we waited long enough.”

True.

Online florist marketing

I just placed an order for some flowers online and a bunch of things bothered my about the experience:

The very first thing they asked me for was the recipient’s zip code. So why did they wait until the checkout screen to tell me the following information?

  • There’s a $15 “delivery fee,” even though I don’t even think they offered a local pickup option.
  • Sunday delivery is not available in that area.

After checkout, they had a link to some survey thing through a third party. It promised me something like $100 for my thoughts. Of course on the next page this $100 turned out to be credit toward magazine subscriptions, I’d have to pay a “processing fee,” and the survey looked like an SAT exam. Want to know what I would like for a survey? A single (large or expandable) text box on the checkout page that asks, “How was your experience?”

And then in my confirmation email, I saw this text:

*** NOTICE: This order qualifies for a
FREE SHIPPING REBATE: > Click to claim

“Free shipping rebate” was actually in red, but WordPress’s visual editor is crapping out as usual. Hey, I’m in the middle of complaining. 🙂

I knew what that link was going to be thanks to previous experiences with the merchant, but this was especially scummy. It was listed right below the order total, and made no indication that it was an ad. So what was it? Some paid membership service where you get rebates on shipping charges. And their signup was labeled with “One-Time Offer!” in huge text. Their only service is a one-time offer? How long does it last? The life of the business? The offer probably referred to the free trial, but still, that’s like a grocery store offering free shopping bags (with purchase) as a “one-time offer.”