Google Image Hits

Events, Gallery

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.

Curly Quotes for Movable Type

WordPress

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.

The 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.

  1. Install the MTRegex plugin.
  2. Create a new template module called curlyquotes with the following code:
    Code depreciated, see latest version
  3. $MTInclude module=”curlyquotes”$> to the top of all your templates.
  4. Replace all occurrences of <$MTEntryBody$> with <$MTEntryBody

    regex="1"$>    .

And you’re done! Post any questions you might have and I’ll respond ASAP.

Houston Wireless Meeting

Events, Travel

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.

Zeitgeist

Personal

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.

Sunday Slump, IMAP

Uncategorized

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.

Macro

Design, Gallery, WordPress

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:

KemahTake a second look at the horizon :), we’re actually on the big swinging rides at Kemah.

Size Matters

Gallery, Jazz

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!

PalmTalk

Events, Gallery

We filmed the first episode of PalmTalk today! It was different in some ways from what I was expecting, espescially in terms of how things flowed, but I was very impressed with some of the things they were able to do technologically with the cameras and effects. The guest, Lorraine Young, was really charismatic and had a great product to demo. All in all, I would say it was, well, a first episode. Ever seen any of the early episodes of Friends? There are definitely some things that are going to change before next week, and things are only going to change for the better, so I’m excited. I’m also curious to see how the whole thing turns out after all of the post-editing stuff they do. Anyway, I’ll see on Tuesday. The main dowside is I think I left my laptop AC adapter there, or at least I hope I did, because I can’t find it. Right now my laptop is hibernating until I get it back.

After the taping I had a very nice dinner with Sarah at one of my favorite chinese restruants, Ming’s on Montrose. After that I headed down to Kaveh Kanes, a great coffee shop downtown on Prarie with free WiFi internet access. Tonight was the monthly meeting (first Friday of the month) for people who listen to the radio show Technology Bytes, which is on Wednesday nights. I’ve heard it several times before and it’s a fun show to listen to. The people who were there were very interesting and we talked for a very long time from topics ranging from Apache 2 to Amiga to Minix to BeOS. I must admit that I was there partly by accident–I thought it was a HWUG meeting. I really enjoyed it though and afterwards I ended up going to House of Pies around 1 to continue the discussion with two unix/freebsd sysadmins I met there. It’s strange how much you can find you have in common with someone in such a short period of time. Also it was nice to meet the people who actually do the show, and you can tell they’re really technically competent and nice to talk to. Oh, and got another ‘tech support’ consulting job today, fixing a paper jam! What will I do next?

Hardware Work

Economics

It’s strange how tides can change so quickly in my business. I thought my plate was full with three seperate websites in various stages of development, but within the last 48 hours I’ve been contacted by four other clients looking for very traditional consulting work. The “going back to my roots” comment in the cloud post might be turning out truer than I expected. How I got my start in the computer business was six or seven years ago building computers from parts and selling them with razor-thin margins–and really good support. Now all I need to do is start turning a profit . . . 😉

Cloud Pictures

Gallery, Travel

When I was young I would go on trips to exotic locations and come home with nothing but pictures of the clouds in various cities, states, countries. Looking back I would say that clouds are certainly a unifying aspect of global scenery. 9-4-2002–Going back to my roots. You can never have too many cloud pictures :). Actually I really enjoyed the way the light and dark clouds contrasted in some of these pictures. Grab a full size if you feel like replacing that boring cloud backgroud that comes with Windows 95 and on. Tip: when viewing a photo you can click on it to see a really big (2048×1536) version, which usually varies from 300-600k in size.