Tonight myself and about 30 other local jazz musicians presented Kelly Dean with his belated 40th birthday present, an iPod. He’s really wanted one of these for the longest time and the look on his face when he got it was amazing. Things were put together relatively hastily, starting when he left for a 5 day cruise on Saturday with an idea. Got in touch with Dana Rogers and she was a huge help in contacting so many people, in fact the majority of the musicians who donated she called. Kel had a gig tonight with Erin Wright at The River Café on Montrose, which turned into a birthday celebration, culminating with the presentation of the iPod, which had been hidden inside a Vaio box :). Pictures will go up tomorrow morning. I’d like to thank the following people, a veritable who’s who list of Houston jazz:
Gallery: 9-13-2002
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Dave Barry
Dave Barry – On hallowed ground is one of the best articles I read yesterday. There was quite a range, from an utterly offensive editorial in The Daily Cougar to the dozens of touching accounts I read on different blogs.
Greyscale
A return to normalcy? Not quite, but it’s a beginning. Grief is a natural reaction to extraordinary events, it’s a protection mechanism to help us cope. However when it’s prolonged it can have the negative effect of holding us from moving forward. It’s impossible not to grieve with the images being shown on every station and website, however, things must move forward. I think that a lot of people took a step back and thought about things yesterday, and I couldn’t think of a better way to honor the memory of September 11th.
9/11 is a flashbulb memory for most everyone; every trivial detail about where we were, who we were with is burned into our memories. For my generation, this is really the first event of that kind, thankfully. I tried to think of today as a day of quiet introspection–remembrances, resolutions, emotions, and most of all, examination of today’s events. Where has the US gone since 9/11? I think reaction-ism on the part of some lawmakers has hurt the very things we’re trying to protect: our liberty, freedom, and ultimately, safety for ourselves and our progeny.
Anyway, mostly because I don’t want these things to fade in my own mind, I have set it up so on the 11th of every month the memorial (greyscale) theme will load for that day.
Gallery: 9-12-2002
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Google Image Hits
98% of the last 200 hits on swcdesign.com have been from images.google.com; I don’t often get hits from there so I decided to investigate what was causing such a ruckus and huge spike in traffic. Well it turns out a picture I made last year right around this time is on the tenth page of results for searches on “911” in Google images. On the tenth page and it hundreds of people a day have been following the link. I think it speaks a little to people’s thoughts at the moment, I know that personally I rarely go past the second page of results, especially on Google.
More importantly, it’s a somber reminder of the fast approaching anniversary of a date that at least in my mind I’ve been avoiding. Yesterday a lady told me a story about her brother who signed a lease that morning on an office in the WTC and was on his way to look at it when the first plane hit. Her other brother was forced to jump in the river when the towers collapsed. Both were okay. Every time someone mentions the event it seems I hear a new story almost too incredible for belief, but you know they’re mostly true. Still the incredible stories of survival only seem to whet my taste for real answers to the events.
Three hundred and sixty-four days later, what have we done? We’ve bombed the hell out of a third world country, caught a few underlings, spent $80 billion, took away more than a few personal liberties, and we’re now at the brink of war with an oil superpower. Very smart thing to do during a recession. I admit that I’ve always supported the Bush administration. Bush himself isn’t the most competent guy but he handled an emergency relatively well, and he surrounds himself with some of the best and brightest in the country (with the notable exception of John Ashcroft and John Poindexter). Now you have talk of Colin Powell not coming back for a second term, of course assuming that the administration makes it that far. The backlash has been brewing for weeks; people want results. Eighty billion dollars and they can’t even produce a body? The news media is pouncing in its traditional fashion, and there has been a rash of meta-news and meta-meta-news, and the world doesn’t need any more of that here. I won’t be posting Wednesday, but what I’m going to keep in my mind is that the terrorists were trying to destroy something much larger than the twin towers last year, and it’s up to everyone on a personal level to make sure they don’t succeed.
How Big?
I know at some point you’ve wondered just how big this site really is. Or not. But if you want to know how much space all those dang pictures take up check out the new feature on the Zeitgeist. All the stats on that page are live!
Gallery: 9-10-2002
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Curly Quotes for Movable Type
I’ve finally gotten around to writing the instructions for Movable Type users to implement the curlme function using Brad Choate’s MTRegex plugin. The regex is the same, just the manner that it’s being implemented is a bit different. I’ve tested this out pretty extensively across this site, and there have been no problems. In fact, it’s in action right now. Once again I would like to thank Mark Pilgrim, who inspired this all.
he best instructions I can give, since I’m not a MT user myself, are to follow the very excellent instructions I’ve summarized below, replacing the MTAddRegex tags with the new ones.
- Install the MTRegex plugin.
- Create a new template module called
curlyquoteswith the following code:
Code depreciated, see latest version - $MTInclude module="curlyquotes"$> to the top of all your templates.
- Replace all occurences of
<$MTEntryBody$>with<$MTEntryBody.
regex="1"$>
And your done! Post any questions you might have and I’ll respond ASAP.
Houston Wireless Meeting
Just wanted to let everyone know that the Houston Wireless Users Group is meeting tomorow at Kaveh Kanes. Here’s the announcement from Barrett:
Tuesday September 10th is the second Tuesday of the month…which
means…it’s meeting time again! Steven/Erewhon will be speaking about
video via 802.11b and a neighborhood-wide “wireless security mesh”
starting at 7:30 PM @ Kaveh Kanes. This is our first presentation on
the application of 802.11b technology outside of simply extending
Internet access. It should be fun.
MySQL Fork
It seems that as of today, I think, MySQL 4 is now going to be available in two flavors, Pro and Classic. The Pro version will have transaction support, while Classic is a “version optimized for raw speed without transactions.” It took me a few minutes to find explinations of each, here’s their product information page.
You Know It’s Late When . . .
You start thinking $ indicates the start of a string and ^ means the end in your regular expressions. (It’s actually the opposite.)
Zeitgeist
The Zeitgeist for this site is now officially online, though it still needs some work. My plan is to add a new statistic to it every night for two weeks, so check it often to see what’s new. It’s great practice for my SQL and PHP skills, and I highly recommend making your own if you would like to hone your programming chops. I also have a similar page over at Mullenweg.com that gives some interesting info gleaned from our genealogical database, though I must admit the life expentancy data isn’t heartening! If you have any ideas for possible statistics for this site leave a comment and I promise I’ll implement every feasible idea.
Gallery: 9-9-2002
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Sunday Slump, IMAP
Sunday is the day when my love/hate relationship with email really comes to forefront in my mind. On Sundays my email is slow, in the sense that I don’t get much of it. Every other day of the week I can barely keep up with the volume that comes through, and I recently un-subscribed from all the lists I used to be on. I don’t get much email on Sunday, so I send a lot out. Still in the back of my mind is the hell that is Monday morning, when email pours in from everywhere and it takes me days to recover. Oh well–can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
Speaking of email, I am in the process of switching all my mail from POP3 to IMAP, which means transferring about 240mb of messages to the server. What’s nice about this though is that I’ll be able to access all of my mail, archives and everything, from any location. I wish I had done this years ago! It’s so much more convenient not having to worry about synchronization problems, and it’s given me a chance to develop a very robust filing system. I had to rethink things a little because with the IMAP server I’m using you can’t have something have sub-folders and have individual items in it. Overall I feel more secure about things because now even if my computer crashes and burns I still have all my important communications on my bulletproof server (knock on wood). If anyone is interested in moving to IMAP mail let me know. FYI, Spyder Hosting now offers it with all their accounts. Also if you tell them I sent you a nice discount might come your way.
Bob the Angry Flower
How better to learn about the proper use of apostrophes then from an angry flower? An appropiate follow-up to the smart quote script I just posted :).
Macro
Through Kymberlie I found a very cool photo contest at photojunkie that I’ve decided to enter. The theme of the contest is “Macro,” which is one of my favorite features on my camera. I have a ton of macro shots, so thinking of what to do was a challenge. The first thought that came to my mind was a face, and I had a particular model in mind but she isn’t available this Sunday, so I dove into the photolog to find one that suits. Kudos to Bridget. Without further ado, here it is:
Take a second look at the horizon :), we’re actually on the big swinging rides at Kemah.
Size Matters
Earlier today I was browsing last month’s server logs and noticed something remarkable: 11,465 hits from Googlebot in August. I was flattered, but how could this be? I didn’t even get a PageRank till about a week ago, so what was the lovely Googlebot doing all that time? Anyway I started to think about it and in terms of sheer quantity of pages, this site is massive. It is entirely possible that those hits could have been just a standard site crawl. Just running the numbers in my head, there are about 9500 pages under the Photolog (~3050 images, 3 pages each, albums), a couple of hundred JazzQuotes, a couple of pages under Toys, and then all of the actual blog content, and you could easily have over ten thousand pages on this site. Of course I never think of it that way because it’s all dynamic. Wait till I start putting the site stats up, it’s very interesting. Whew!
PhotoMatt Zeitgeist
A small preview of things to come. Deep down inside, every site wants to have a little Google in them. Right now I just have metadata about the posts themselves but I’m working on generating some interesting statistics on the site’s visitors, which we seem to be getting quite a few of.
Just Rewards
Don’t you just love it when everyone’s favorite recording industry association is hacked to serve illegal MP3 files?