Category Archives: Meta

About this blog — design changes, technical notes, and navel-gazing.

More On First Letters

Meta

Well I ran some regexes through all the posts in database hoping to clean them up a bit, and got rid of all the instances where I was starting with an unnecesary paragraph tag, now that it’s all taken care of automatically. I also took out some things so my RSS feed should be cleaner now, or at least if I ever offer the old stuff up for syndication. I think I’ve reached the limit of what I can do with pure SQL, so I think I’m going to patch something together in PHP one of these nights. I basically just need to do the same thing except maybe strip_tags first. Then I can modify that to find if there’s any pattern to the words I start out with. How exciting!!! Hold on to your seats:

+--------+-------+
| letter | count |
+--------+-------+
| I | 116 |
| < | 65 |
| T | 49 |
| W | 42 |
| A | 17 |
| O | 14 |
| S | 13 |
| J | 10 |
| Y | 9 |
| M | 9 |
| H | 9 |
| F | 7 |
| D | 6 |
| C | 4 |
| G | 4 |
| E | 4 |
| L | 4 |
| B | 3 |
| P | 3 |
| N | 3 |
| V | 2 |
| . | 1 |
| U | 1 |
| " | 1 |
| 9 | 1 |
+--------+-------+
25 rows in set (0.00 sec)

(Of course I don’t really think that’s exciting.)

GeoURL

Meta

If you haven’t checked it out, there’s a new (to me) service called GeoURL which allows you to put GPS coordinate meta-tags on your webpage and it will tell you who your website neighbors are. I’ve had it on my sidebar for a little while though, but I’m never sure if anyone looks at that.

A neat trick for finding out your latitude and longitude if you don’t have a GPS is to map your address on Yahoo Maps and zoom in all the way. Then in the address bar you should see your exact coordinates, or at least as close as the mapping system has you. There, now you have no excuse not to go add yourself.

All Work and No Play

Meta, Music

Currently putting the final touches on two new websites, which I hope to link to here soon. One is for a single musician, the other is for a awards ceremony for a large organization, and I find the dichotomy enjoyable. For some reason when I work on projects in twos it keeps me balanced, from the manner in which the client is dealt with to the artistic freedom each project allows. One is usually a little on either side, and in the middle is me. I seem to do this with a lot of things in life.

The next two projects are lined up already, one for another musician, this time a lovely vocalist, and the other is going to be a national resource for Catholic educators teaching about the Holocaust. Links to come when they’re ready.

School Begins Again

Education, Meta

Yesterday was a very good day, today looks like it isn’t going to be that great. My classes are really good (and small!) so far and my schedule couldn’t be better. Now instead of racing across the huge campus between classes I have leisurely strolls. My classes are at times when I never have to drive through traffic, nor must I wake up unnatuarally early.

I start each day with Human Situation, the liturature class that this semester is focusing on modernity. Then alternately I have either Intermediate Macroeconomics, which should be a breeze, or Ethics. My latest class on Mondays and Wednesdays is Politics of the Greek Theatre, which looks like it is going to be quite good, though challenging.

Still, I am amazed at how disorganized the campus is at the beginning of every semester. Parking could not be worse; the lines trail on longer than at the opening of The Two Towers; most of the important parts of the campus website are down due to the high load (you’d think they could predict when it is coming). All that, and I left my OneCard at home, which means I can’t do a lot of the things I need to do today.

There are still issues with the laptop(s), but that’s too frustrating to talk about right now. My weekend was great—more on that later.

The Birthday Post

Gallery, Meta, Travel

One more day!!!

Several people have said to me, “Matt, you live in Houston and I’m way over in [insert place], and I don’t have any money, so what can I do for you for your birthday?” Well, I’ve thought about it, and recognition is always nice. I spend a lot of time on this site, tweaking things, adding quotes, pictures, and I think overall it’s pretty dandy. Not to mention, nominations for the Bloggies are now open. Now I know what you’re thinking, who is this guy to try and be nominated for a Blogggie. Who am I? Exactly! There’s a category just for people like me called “Best-Kept-Secret Weblog.” It just takes a minute to fill out and it would be a great present to be nominated for something.

If you’re still in a voting mood after that, I can highly recommend checking out PhotoBlogs.org where photoblog sites are ranked like based on voting. For a while I was in the top 50 but lately I’ve fallen completely off the front page, but if you like any of the more than four thousand pictures in the photolog please leave me a positive vote (click the plus icon in the top right). Thank you!

If feel so dirty. Maybe I should do BlogWhore 2 ;).

Powerbook Revisited

Meta

Although I touched on the subject yesterday ever so briefly, I really can’t let another minute pass without talking about the new Powerbooks. Never have I seen so much fawning in the blog world about a single product, and I challenge anyone to find a comparable product release in the past year.

That said, I’m completely entranced. The ads are top-notch; the specs are flawless; the screen looks gorgeous; the operating system is everything I’ve ever wanted. I’m so deep in the reality-distortion field I don’t even remember what it was like on the outside anymore. I want to iSync my T68 and iPod and publish my iCal while listening to iTunes and I can’t imagine any other way I’d want it. Bluetooth! 802.11g!

A note on the screen, until relatively recently my laptop had the largest screen of any laptop, ever. Then toshiba released one the same size, and even with higher resolution. (I’ve had a similar Toshiba in the past though, and it was really unpleasant to use though.) I wasn’t phased, but now this comes along. Not only is it thinner and lighter, it has a larger screen and the OS is based on one I have grown to love deeply, despite the lack of any Windows-equivalent GUI. Now I just need to think of a way to scrounge up $3300 fast, before something else comes out.

Here We Go Again

Meta

Well the geniuses at Best Buy think it’s something wrong with the battery, which if so is fortunate because under the extended warranty they just replace the battery. However when they pulled up the information for the extended warranty, it showed up as expiring in 2000. Which, as the guy put it, is “odd because you bought the laptop in 2001.” Indeed. So part of tomorrow will be spent on the phone trying to straighten this out.

That said, I had some excellent chinese food at Hunan River with Josh, Lucas, and Rebecca. I think we had Tso’s chicken, sweet and sour chicken, some noodle stuff (Josh?), and sweet peas and water chestnuts. All quite good.

Finally I’ve got the new business card design ready to go. I’ve shown it to a few people and the responses have all been good, so I’m going to go ahead and print up a batch tomorrow and see how people respond to it in paper form.

Productive Day

Meta, Travel

I’ve been working with Becca at Kaveh Kanes for a while now, and I feel like a lot has been accomplished. Almost done with a new website, and I haven’t done one from scratch in a while so it’s felt good. Of course now I have to go and take my laptop which they never fixed back to Best Buy. What a drag! Hopefully they’ll be more helpful this time. Laptops are more trouble then they’re worth. Except this one.

Habit

Meta

Aristotle said that excellence is not an act, but a habit. So is blogging. Over the holidays I’ve been away, busy, out, and I’ve fallen out of the habit of sitting down at the computer and writing the things that are important to me. My online time has only diminished somewhat, but my blogging time has diminished a great deal.

What the hiatus lacked in writing, I hope to make up in pictures. I have about five hundred pictures, in various stages of being posted, from the holidays. Once they’re all up I’ll post some highlights.

Zero Year Reunion

Gallery, Meta, Music

Last night was great fun as a lot of the seniors who are in town for the holiday, and many who are in town anyway, met up at Diedrich’s an later Katz’s. It was really enjoyable seeing so many people who I often talk to online but haven’t seen for too long. The “Winter holidays” sometimes politically uncorrectly categorized as “Christmas” coming up should be even better. If you’re interested the pictures are now up.

Speaking of pictures, have been flooded with emails, calls, and just general in-person complaining concerning the updates to the photolog, or rather the lack thereof. The team here at Photomatt.net was experiencing some technical diffulculties, but things are under control now and I’ve caught up with a couple of the days I had missed before. We apologize for the lapse in updates. You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Speaking of programming, okay, not really, but if you want a taste of how fast the new server is, browse over to mullenweg.com and click around. Isn’t that snappy? Also you may not have noticed, but the front page of this site used to take as much as two seconds to process, and now it is delivered to your browser less than half a second from request time. Other less heavy pages, like any of the jazz quotes the load time is neglibible. That just goes to show that the front page stands for quite a bit of optimization though, and I’m going to work on that a bit this weekend. Okay, that’s it!

Speaking of . . .

Dave Holland Concert

Events, Meta, Music

Last night was wonderful; I got to attend the Da Camera Dave Holland concert I had been wanting to see with Sarah thanks to some last-minute tickets from my uncle. The concert was really great, and as an added bonus I got to see Joe, who I haven’t seen in a bit. Afterward we had some great BBQ at Harlon’s, where they also had some good music. Anyway my day thus far has mostly consisted of getting everything moved over to the new server. Actually there is only one account left on the old server, and you’re looking at it. Because of its size (over two gigabytes), PhotoMatt.net is simply too big to move over the way I moved everything else over. I might just have to do it the old fashioned way. Actually, if you can read this you’re already on the new server. Howdy.

Plato’s Forms

Education, Meta

Well today I turned in my third and final paper for my Human Situation class, and it’s the one I put the most thought and effort into. My first paper for the class dealt with an economic analysis of the first books of the Bible, and I was happy with the way it turned out. The second paper was a last-minute affair that was forgettable, and after it I decided that I would put all future papers on the site in order to force me to work harder on everything. Now that the “next paper” is done, I’m happy with it how it turned out in the end, but I’m not sure if I want to post it here. Would anyone even read it? It’s not terribly long, but still much longer than the average Joe-intenet’s online attention span. Anyway the subject of this paper was an expansion to Plato’s Theory of Forms to account for naturally occuring groups. Exciting stuff ;). We’ll see what the teacher thinks by the end of the week . . .

New Schedule

Meta

I am very happy about my schedule for next semester. Get this:

  • Earliest class at noon on Monday and Wednesday, 10 AM on Tuesday and Thursday
  • Latest class ends at 4, well before traffic really gets going
  • All of my classes are pretty close to each other physically, something I didn’t know about last semester
  • I don’t have any gaps in my schedule, like the 4 hour one I have this semester
  • Nothing on Fridays! Yes, that means three day weekends. All the time.
  • I’m taking classes I’m more interested in, not just prerequisites

Next semester is going to be so sweet. 🙂

New Links

Meta

My blogroll is starting to collect dust, and the only excuse I can give for not updating it recently is because I’m in the process of making a pretty comprehensive links page that will hopefully take my gargatuan favorites menu down to a manageable size and have all the links I’ve been meaing to add lately. Watch this space!

New From Happy Cog

Meta

It’s no secret to many people that Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the fathers of the web and was in fact my first inspiration once I got into web design. The busiest man in NY, has recently “launched” two major websites, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture. Now to be completely honest, when I saw the Searchlight site, I was dismayed. Was this the same designer whose writing I have followed for years? Every other site he has done is unmistakably Zeldman, not so much in a particular aesthetic but in the attention to detail and functionality, both of which I think the Fox site lack. However the AIfIA site is absolutely gorgeous. Check it out for a wonderful example of cutting edge CSS design and a sublimely superb user experience.

UPDATE: Well thanks to some helpful comments I have noticed the serious mistake I made with confusing Zeldman’s endorsement of the site with his actually being behind it. My apologies to those who this mistake slighted and I hope they take this as an honest mistake which, in a way, is also a strong compliment. Time to give credit where it is due. Christina, author of a book I have heard about in different circles but haven’t gotten to yet, points out that Erin Malone is the designer behind the new AIfIA. In a roundabout way, one of the things I realized when writing this correction is I know very little about this “Information Architecture” thing everyone is talking about. Even my evaluation was relatively superficial because even while I looked at the underlying code behind the site, I didn’t really attempt to quantify what made the site so pleasant and usable, which I wrote of to the “Zeldman touch.” I see my ignorance on the subject (of IA) as an opportunity for growth, and to that end the AIfIA site has been a great resource so far, I guess a testament to its purpose. Also a little googling led me to, amoung other things, an interesting tutorial at Webmonkey. More on this as I learn. I’m also very inclined to check out the two books written by the two kind enough to point out my earlier mistake.

Weekend Roundup

Gallery, Meta, Music

Well, now that it’s officially over, I must say that was a really excellent weekend that even the amazonian weather couldn’t dampen. It got started strong on Friday with a little car dancing, good food, a sarcastic ATM, and a trampoline.

Saturday got a late start, and it turned out the gig I was looking forward to got rained out. However I did get to meet some new people out in Spring Valley and had a wonderful homemade dinner. There are pictures too but someone *cough*Sarah*cough* absconded with my digital camera, so I’ll have to wait to see if any of them came out. Also got to help someone with their computer, which is always a good feeling. Sometimes I have bad streaks where people seem to come to me with the strangest problems that I really don’t have a clue how to take care of. Then I drove through the rain to hear “the group Mike sings with,” otherwise known as Lager Rhythms. The show was really technically excellent and entertaining, and I got to sit by Christine which was excellent because I got the feeling we both had been similarly exposed to Schoolhouse Rock, we were cracking up at the same times. Afterward I tagged along with Kathy, Elaine and Kenny, Hanna, Robert, and the blog-less Joe and Mandy to a neat place called Catbirds, where they had really excellent music. They were playing really classic jazz stuff, mostly stuff I had heard before but a few gems that were new to me, including one I know was Ella Fitzgerald but I forgot to ask the DJ what album it was off of. Our relatively large group was seated outside, which was fine for the cool weather but a little inconvenient once it started pouring again. I’d like to see them some more but unfortunately I won’t be able to make it out to the Renaissance Festival next weekend because of HPUG. However, if you are going to be in town though, be sure to check out the meeting at 1 PM next Saturday because we’re going to have almost every kind of Treo known to man and a ton of cool Bluetooth gadgets that Jason is bringing.

Where does that leave Sunday? Recovering. And it’s already almost four in the morning!