Well, I owe a plug, here . . . and a reminder note for myself if this happens again!
My third Canon camera has suffered a death comparable to my second Canon camera. So, I ordered myself a Christmas present today: a Fujifilm FinePix F30 — should be here Wednesday!
Anyway, one thing my second Canon camera did for a very long time was to EAT pictures I had taken. I tried multiple cards but they would just randomly get corrupted in the camera, and Canon went to great lengths to presume that the problem was with me, and not with their camera. (They got sued for doing that–yay class actions!) I am still bugged that I lost pictures of Clapham Junction and of the Eiffel Tower! Grr! Anyway, when I got to Thailand I slowed down enough to find a work-around to the problem of my second Canon: PhotoRescue! (more…)
A toe-tappingly titillating trade, which demonstrates that if you’re going to be a player hater, you should do it with a smile, and hopefully a strumming guitar, so we can be reminded of awful things while chuckling despite ourselves:
Do do do do doo dee do / Clinton got a blowjob!
ObWordPress: If you want to enable embedding of YouTube videos, disable the stupid GUI editor.
Thanks, gapingvoid for a Friday Afternoon Diversion. :)
A little while back, I had the chance to meet Jenny Yee, a fellow dot-com professional who, like me, has also recently moved to San Francisco. I was impressed by the quality of some of the portrait photography she has taken. She explained that she was working to set up a studio at her new place. I have been thinking that as I become comfortable with single life and begin looking forward to finding that special lady, it will be more and more important to look pretty: to put my best face forward.
I am still getting in to the whole projecting-a-self-image thing, and I’m not ready just yet to pay much to look glamorous, so I approached Jenny to volunteer as a “test model” to help her get up to speed with her new digs. She smiled warmly and agreed, and it is time I returned her favor by sharing the experience online. I will start with a melodramatic before-and-after, of High School Danny versus Jenny’s Web 2.0 Danny:
I smile, because while my shoulders have filled out and I have grown the goatee, in both images I see the same basic, good-natured geek. Fortunately for me: geek is now chic! (Some even feel fondly toward the old Napolean Dynamite look.)
Fun, huh? Well, so was the time spent with Jenny. (more…)
The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay
The glory that was Rome is of another day
I’ve been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan
I’m going home . . . to my city by the bay . . . . . .
I left my heart . . .
In San Francisco . . .
High on a hill . . .
It calls to me . . .
To be where little cable cars
Climb half way to the stars!
The morning fog . . .
May chill the air . . .
I don’t care!
My love waits there . . .
In San Francisco . . .
Above the blue . . .
And windy sea!
When I come home to you,
San Francisco
Your Golden Sun will Shine for me!
The song oozes longingly from his lips. And yet, the song itself is easy-going, like the city itself.
The problem, in a paragraph-shaped nutshell, as described by George Packer in The New Yorker:
It is true that the presence of American troops is a source of great tension and violence in Iraq, and that overwhelming numbers of Iraqis want them to leave. But it is also true that wherever American troop levels have been reduced–in Falluja and Mosul in 2004, in Tal Afar in 2005, in Baghdad in 2006–security has deteriorated. In the absence of adequate and impartial Iraqi forces, Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias have filled the power vacuum with a reign of terror. An American withdrawal could produce the same result on a vast scale. That is why so many Iraqis, after expressing their ardent desire to see the last foreign troops leave their country, quickly add, “But not until they clean up the mess they made.” And it is why a public-service announcement scrolling across the bottom of the screen during a recent broadcast on an Iraqi network said, “The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians not comply with the orders of the Army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”
I know that I don’t know what the solution is. I think “bring the troops home now” is irresponsible. And nobody likes “stay the course” either, any more, which is a good thing: we need to get our collective brainpower together to find some less-bad solution to the mess. (more…)
Since July, I have been working at Yelp, a hip young Internet startup located just South-of-Market in San Francisco. We provide an Internet-based Yellow Pages service that is really cool because along with basic business information, you can see reviews written by other customers, which gives you a better “feel” for a place when you’re figuring out where to go.
Now, this has been done before, but one of the things we’ve done really well is to help build a community spirit among the folks who write reviews on our web site. These “Yelpers” tend to be young, urban professionals who enjoy going out, and they enjoy writing about their experiences: the good, the bad, the funny, the odd. They socialize on our message boards, meet up for weekly happy hours, and we invite the “Elite” members to spectacular parties every couple of months.
I am a fan. It is more rewarding to work at a company whose service I enjoy!
Anyhow, the reason I am writing just now is to see if anyone who reads my blog is, or knows, a good Unix SysAdmin, or perhaps a great Object-Oriented web developer. The Unix position requires a senior-level, well-rounded generalist who is comfortable with Linux, tiered network infrastructure, and a the variety of challenges offered by a rapidly-growing startup. The web developer should know how to build awesome web sites, while talking to a MySQL database efficiently. There will be further detail posted online, but I would be happy to talk to friends about these positions, especially the SysAdmin, with whom I will be working very closely.
(Anyway, back to the variety of challenges on my plate for the day.)
When it comes to social networking, I prefer to interact with articulate people. Grammar is one benchmark. Style and panache go a long way too. Passion is another element of good writing. So, yeah, Yelpers will tend to embody some combination of erudition, style, panache, and passion, and that stuff makes me hot!
I like that Yelp is not MySpace. There’s a “cover charge” here and that is comfort with written self-expression.
-danny
Of course, this is my personal view. I am not speaking for my employer.
I was talking to a co-worker about how awesome the Google Personalized home page is. There’s an advanced interface where you can paste in just about any URL and get it aggregated on the page. How neat is that? Well, it would be even neater if there was a button in the web browser, so you could just visit a web site, and add it to your Google Home Page.
I got up at 6AM today, which is what I do on my good days. Not only was it rainy and cold, but since 6AM now comes at 5AM, it was fricking dark too. So I went back to bed, got up at 8:30, and drove in.
So, uhm, no daylight here, and increased fuel consumption. (If I wake up at 6 or 7, I have enough time for breakfast at home and a walk to the bus station.)
Am I the last English speaker on this planet who reads “sundried tomatoes” as “mixed tomatoes?”
People! Please! Hyphen! Sun-dash-dried . . . dried-by-the-sun! Sundried reads as “to have made sundry” and “sundry” means “miscellaneous, mixed stuff.”
So, we use Bugzilla at work, and our users are mostly comfortable with it. On the other hand, there’s a popular “ticket tracking” system that is designed to track IT-type issues, which are considerably different from, although similar to, bugs. So, I have been asking around for advice . . . one reason I like RT is that it is simple for the user to send an e-mail directly into the system. A response was “well, then you don’t get enough information to solve the problem, so making the user fill out all the information in a web interface is better.” This . . . this, is one of my peet peeves:
Ah, personally, I HATE any system that makes “reporting a bug” any more cumbersome than absolutely needed. You need to make it as easy as possible to record that “something is wrong” and then query your customer for missing data as needed. All these “customer service” forms that have ever forced me to supply 5, ten, fifty pieces of frequently irrelevant data, and then ask me to explain my problem in a tiny little window . . .
No. Tools need to accomodate customer needs, and customer needs low barrier to entry. My cynical take on requiring the user to answer twenty questions is that you gain “efficiency” by making it sufficiently cumbersome for a user to report trouble such that the user will simply tolerate all but the very biggest problems, meanwhile cursing the jackasses over in the support organization with their “talk to our dumb*ss web interface” mentality.
A good compromise is to capture the user inquiry, and then, if there’s a standard questionnaire that needs filling out, have them fill it out.
Just, ah, my 2c. :)
I am so exhausted right now. Where has all my energy gone? Grr!
Man, I’m not going to poop on the Olympics. I mean, as an American, especially one without TV, its not like I even pay attention. But someone on the radio recently explained something that has always subconsciously bugged me about the Winter Olympics.
He said that the Summer Games are the real Olympics, because sports like running are something that people throughout the world can compete in. The Winter Olympics self-select for those who have access to Winter, or, more likely, those who have access to copius amounts of air conditioning. I mean, Michelle Kwan, who thoroughly rocks . . . she’s from L.A. She lives in a desert! And, her parents would drive her, in a car, which most people don’t have, to an ice rink, which most people don’t have, and she competes in the “sport” of ice skating, which, however gratifying to watch, is more of an “artistic physical endeavor” than a “sport” . . .
And ice skating is more democratic than stuff like skiing, which is an activity pretty much reserved for the upper middle class of developed Northern countries. I . . . well, I have just enough flatlander proleteriat pinko in me that I have always avoided opportunities to finally go skiing. Not like I’m about to storm the ski slopes and burn down the cabins or whatever, it is just that the whole thing is ever so slightly too bourgeois for my blood. (And I am an upper-income culture snob who doesn’t own a TV.)
. . . the summer Olympics, these are the ones where the barefoot Africans show up from impoverished countries you have never heard of to take home Gold Medals, because however poor their backgrounds, there is no denying that they can run fast. We have high-precision clocks that say so.
All the same, I’ll give the Winter Olympics its due . . . a lot of people from a lot of countries get together to compete, in the Olympic spirit. And since they staggered the Winter games into the years between the summer games, it is kind of a nice “side show” to tide the fans over ’til the next every-fourth-year event.
“There’s two kinds of vendors in this world, my friend. There are those that, when I ask for a quote, send me an Excel spreadsheet, and those that are likely to get my business.”
It is more complicated than that, but:
If I check “I prefer to be contacted by e-mail” on the form, don’t call me.
If I have already filled out my company’s name, you are not allowed to mis-spell it.
If you are a Data Center company named “Colo(Whatever)” then don’t send me a quote for “collocation” services. Paper documents are collated, servers are co-located.
If I ask for 1 unit of bandwidth, don’t raise your price by sneaking in a second unit of bandwidth.
Dude, who offers Data Center tours twice a week?
SysAdmins don’t always have ready access to Microsoft Excel, and Word documents can break when you e-mail them to a customer running a different version. Nobody wants to pay “Err: 5” for services. Text or PDF or death!!
Don’t get me wrong, I mean, I love shopping at IKEA . . . the drive to the mega-store, the search for parking, the endless meandering through furniture and accoutrements, only to find yourself facing the stark reality of a giant warehouse, asking yourself if the Black-Brown BILLY bookshelf, which looks so black in the warehouse, is really the same color you were looking at in the showroom, and standing in line, wondering just what kind of crap they put in a 50c hot dog. But once you pay, and you’re rolling out the door, you know you’re not far from the actual joy of wrangling your heavy flat-packed furniture up the stairs and getting busy with the allen wrench.
But yesterday . . . well, I have officially given up on the Emeryville, CA IKEA. Here is my tale, as told in the call-and-response format that passes for “customer service” via the “Internet” these days: (more…)
So, I discovered yesterday, that if one goes to Google, and types i am lame, then my web site is the first hit. Don’t that make me feel special?
But I didn’t drag you here for my inverse ego thing, here’s some cool videos that I have seen recently: Internet Musical — World of Warcraft Monsters praise the Internet, in song. Best. Video. Ever! Climbing Russian Kids — Man, talk about making good use of a post-utopian wasteland. Hollywood should steal these kids for stuntmen. Sushi Documentary — Everything you shouldn’t know about sushi. Devil Dogs — Lucian Reed went to Iraq to take photographs. This video is a valuable glimpse at how our folks are doing over there.
I have decided that Google Video is mostly tolerable. It’s not standard CODECs in files . . . probably they have some decent reasons, but unlike RealVideo, or QuickTime, they don’t require you to install spyware on your computer and watch the video in a little 2″ window. So, well, okay, maybe forcing you to stream . . . why? Maybe that is somewhat evil, but it is definitely less evil than “Video on the Internet” that has come before, and easier for the masses than Bittorrent . . . though it’d be neat . . . give it time . . .
