A few years ago, I was remembering a sketch I had seen on TV, and I wanted to see it again. Well, about a year and a half ago, I determined that it was probably a performance by Rowan Atkinson, and asked for the appropriate video (available only on VHS), for Christmas. I got the video, and it was the right one! Woo-hoo!
The sketch is called “A Final Bash.” Just in case you had spent the last few years wondering.
Since reading all of Reid’s blog, I’ve been thinking about the days when I used to be a more prolific blogger. I used to complain profusely about silly things (because I thought it was funny), and skip over the stuff that really bothered me. Recently, something happened to me that is totally something I would have complained about.
Last night I came back to my apartment to find my Airport Extreme unresponsive. I tried finding it in the Airport Utility. No joy. I unplugged it. I tried a hard reset. I unplugged it again and let it sit for a while. I tried it in a different outlet. I tried everything, and eventually not even the status light would turn on. So, I made an appointment for the Genius Bar. Tonight, I drove up to Palo Alto for my appointment. After waiting for 20 minutes, they plugged in my Airport. I wondered if it would magically work since it was unplugged for a day. I opened my computer and it recognized the Airport. Everything was working. Ugh.
I gave Tapioca Express (or TapEx as the kids say) a hard time about a sign. Of course I didn’t give them a hard time in person. I went for public shaming.
Because of my limited culinary skills and the comfort I find in consistency, I have a habit of eating the same food every day, often for weeks in a row. In college, I ate spaghetti for dinner almost every night that I was left to cook on my own.
Recently, I had some people over for dinner, and Nelson made potstickers. I’ve been around potstickers plenty of times, but have never tried them. But I didn’t want to be rude, so I took one. I now cook potstickers (from Trader Joe’s) instead of spaghetti.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been accumulating coins, just as we all do. There are still a few scattered throughout my apartment, but I collected many of them in a plastic bag that just sat in a drawer. I planned on converting them into a more useful form of currency later. At home, my bank had one of those coin-counting machines, so I could just deposit there, but I didn’t see one in my bank out here. And I knew of Coinstar from seeing them in the stores, but I didn’t ever try that because I knew they must charge something for the service.
Nelson, the guy who knows all sorts of random things about various services, recently let us know that he’s a big fan of Coinstar, and he doesn’t get charged for it. At first, I accused him of using the infamous “pull the plug” hack to prevent the machine from connecting to the Internet. But Nelson’s a nice guy, even if he does steal bikes, so I was of course wrong to do that. What Nelson does is convert his coins into an Amazon gift certificate, which has no counting fee. Coinstar presumably gets a commission from Amazon for these transactions. Since Amazon credit is as good as cash, it sounded like a great idea to me.
Tonight, I finally carried my bag of change into the store. Here’s what I had:
Dollars: 17 (probably change from buying stamps) Quarters: 154 Dimes: 100 Nickels: 63 Pennies: 133
This brought me to a total of $69.98! I’ve already applied it to my account, and it will sit there until it comes as a nice surprise next time I place an order. Thanks, Nelson.
Reid recently imported his old Xanga entries into his blog, and I’m in the process of reading/skimming all of them in chronological order. Thanks, Reid for adding the previous/next links to the entries at my request. Great job responding to user feedback.
I figured I’d let you all know that’s what I’m up to, so you can understand why this blog may become a bit journalish as I’m influenced by Reid. Hopefully this phase will pass quickly when I finish reading about Reid’s past.
Today, I took my car in for regular maintenance, and to get the passenger door fixed so that it can be opened from the inside again. It hadn’t been working properly since someone smashed my window. I got there at 11, and they told me that the car would probably be ready around 4. I didn’t have a plan for killing time, so I decided to walk back to my apartment since it was less than two miles away. I stopped at Quiznos for lunch, which was nice since I haven’t been there in a while. I was reminded of two things during this errand:
Jason recently blogged about a new hobby — comparing photographs of physical locations to their renderings in Google Earth. I had nothing better to do tonight, so I decided to try it out myself. Instead of switching back and forth between a photo and Google Earth, I wanted to find a way to overlay an image on the program while I navigated Google’s vision of Earth. Jason suggested this may be possible using KML, but I wanted to just whip up something quickly, and didn’t feel like learning a new markup language tonight. I remembered reading about a hack that lets you keep Dashboard widgets persistent in floating windows as you work in other applications, so I decided to look for a solution using that.
The funny thing is, I’ve never written a Dashboard widget before. But I’ll tell you right now: I created what I wanted in five minutes using Dashcode, without ever launching the application before or writing a single line of code. Here’s how I did it:
I don’t know how you want to present your final comparisons, so I’ll leave that up to you. You could just take a screenshot of the whole deal if you want a transparent overlay, or you could line them up Jason-style for side-by-side comparisons. You may also notice that my widget is pretty primitive… but as I wrote earlier, it was my first time making one and I was able to do it without writing any code. Maybe someday I’ll work on one that allows you to change the photo directly from the widget. For now, you can just change the photo in Dashcode and redeploy. If you keep the same name, Dashboard should recognize it as the same widget and ask if you want to replace it.
As Jason suggested to me, if you already have your photo geotagged, that gives you a great starting point in Google Earth. I did some geotagging on Flickr a few years ago (I’m still working on updating my Picasa Web Albums data), so I thought it pretty easy for me to find something to get started with. However, I found I didn’t have very many geotagged photos of landscapes, so my options would be limited to comparing photographs to data on the 3D buildings layer (too bad I don’t have digital shots from Disney World) or Street View. I’ll have to take a closer look at my photo library and show you if I find anything cool.
Once you find out exactly where a photo should be placed, you can easily stick it into Google Earth using this software, which will generate the KML file for you.
As usual, when I talk tech please remember my disclaimer.
Recently, Nelson let me know about a piece of idiot marketing he received. It was a gift card, that if used, would enroll him in a fraud protection service for his credit card (and cost him $8 a month). I just received the same thing today. I only opened it because I’m expecting a cash-back check soon. Fortunately, if the company stays true to its word, this silliness should stop by the end of the month.
And I’m glad the most recent election is over, because my mailbox has been stuffed with a bunch political junk over the past few weeks. I’m not even registered with a party. If I did have to register for a party, I’d join the birthday party. Those are usually fun, except for the awkward singing part.
Today I read an article (after being tipped off by Santosh) about a futurist named Ray Kurzweil naming some of his predictions for the not-so-distant future. I’m not going to make any predictions, but here’s one area not covered by the article where I’d like to see major advances sooner rather than later: Transportation.
It’s obvious that we’ll make great improvements in clean energy, so I’m confident that transportation will go “green.” But something else I’d really to happen is an amazing increase in efficiency, such as the elimination of traffic jams. And mass transit isn’t always the answer. Even with gas prices where they are, I still prefer my car for most trips because it is the fastest, most convenient way to go. We need to make transportation better at all levels. Have you ever sat at a red light, and noticed that everyone else at the intersection was stopped as well? Did you feel like there were moments, if you disregarded traffic laws and safety, that you could have just gone through anyway? I do this all the time (the thinking part, not the doing!), and even though I haven’t taken math since high school, I can just feel how inefficient the current system is. The answer to the problem is simple: Humans shouldn’t drive. Computers should. Think about the amount of lives this would save with the reduction in crashes, road rage, and general stress.