Category: general

Crocodiles may hold the answer to HIV. (via Drudge)

A new liquid camera lens that doesn’t require electricity to activate may make cameras and cell phones leaner and meaner with sharper images. (via Slashdot)

A new infrared survey confirms the existence of a bar of stars at the center of our galaxy. (via Slashdot)

When I went to Japan for the first time in 2001, I had no idea how out of shape I was. I mean, we walked on that trip. Everywhere. I would collapse into bed each night sobbing from the pain of my blistered feet. And sometimes I was simply incapable of moving any further, and I’d have to stay behind while everyone else saw the sights. (I missed seeing Tokugawa Ieyasu’s grave because of that.)

It was humiliating.

Since then I have felt strongly that I need to be in a better physical condition so that I can truly enjoy my travels and experience everything possible. I didn’t really start doing anything about it until after my second trip to Japan in 2003 for our honeymoon; I became incredibly exhausted walking through Akihabara and realized that I hadn’t improved at all. Even now I’m not exercising much, though I know I need to. Old habits die hard. I’ve spent at least ten years training myself to sit in a chair all day.

But I want to climb Mt. Fuji, and there is no way I can pull that off the way I am right now.

My biking endurance is pretty high now (although I haven’t gone biking in awhile), but I haven’t worked on my walking at all. What I need to do is start hiking in earnest, for hours at a time. I need to build up some serious stamina. And hell, there are mountains in northern Georgia, maybe I could practice.

I don’t think I’ll ever be a serious mountaineer, scaling sheer cliffsides in snow and ice, but I would at least like to think I can hoof it up an ash-covered hillside without needing medical attention.

Our instructor on the 2001 trip, Todd Stradford, was an avid hiker who typically spent his weekends in the hills of Wisconsin (in the company of his large dogs, if I’m remembering correctly). I need to take a page from his book and spend more time in the great outdoors.

Here are some people whose testimonials have inspired me to aim for Fuji:

Jeff Laitila climbed the mountain in 2000 and 2003.

Justin Klein climbed Fuji three weeks ago. (Check out that video! And then please click his Google ads ;> Oh, and speaking of climbing volcanoes, Justin also just went to Mount Aso. I visited the Nakadake caldera in 2001.)

Andy Gray went in 2002 (I think) and again this year.

The Cynical Traveller also went this year.

I understand that Chris will be climbing it at the end of this month, but I haven’t heard more about that yet.

So, obviously, Fuji is the thing to do if you’re a gaijin, and I want to do it too!

Even hovering over the link to the website can be spoilerific, so if you don’t want to risk your enjoyment of Half-Blood Prince, don’t hover over this link, let alone follow it.

Here’s the link.

There’s some pretty interesting stuff on that site, including some clues I hadn’t noticed, and a few conclusions I didn’t think of making. I especially like the “Unanswered Questions” page.

Today’s Sluggy rules.

I love the punchline so much I’m tempted to just reproduce it here, so I can express quite clearly how well I understand the sentiment.

Instead, I’m going to force you to read the comic.

Then read this post (and the beginning of the fifth paragraph of this post) to see why I like it so much.

Overall, I like how clean and functional the new smugmug default Style (called, conveniently, “smugmug”) is. It’s easy to navigate and looks great.

However, I do take issue with the colors.

Here’s a screencap one of my galleries, in black:

And here’s the same gallery in white:

I like the blue color they use on the white scheme much better than the green on the black one, but I prefer a black background. So I decided to replace the green in the black style with the blue from the white style. While I was at it, I edited some of the buttons, adding pink highlights to them instead of green. I couldn’t seem to get the cart graphics to render properly as gifs, and I can’t upload pngs to smugmug, and I don’t feel like hosting smugmug graphics here…so I’m just leaving those as they are, with green on them. I’m also leaving the smugmug logo alone because I don’t feel like messing with it.

Here’s what my current style looks like. It’s only available in black; you’re not allowed to change it!

I could theoretically reproduce the pixelscribbles look over there, but I really don’t feel like trying to deal with that.

As of right now I seem to have an issue with the “slideshow” and “map this!” buttons disappearing, but I realize they’re still working on things right now so maybe it’s not my fault. I’m going to stop messing with it, in any case; it’s as good as it’s going to get at the moment.

And wow. Okay, browsing my own site, everything looks the same until you’re actually inside a gallery. Only then does the crazy green color come into effect.

If I can just change all that green to the blue seen on other pages, I will be happy. Time to poke around and see if I can do that.

What was supposed to be a quick, feature-rich update has turned into hours and hours of downtime. Professional photographers are losing money; the smugmug people are remaining cheerful, somehow, but they’ve all been up for over 24 hours trying to get it working.

Here’s the latest update:

For the technically curious, one of the new features required restructuring and reindexing our main image database.

Since that’s over 32,000,000 photos, we conservatively thought it would take many hours to complete.

It turns out we weren’t conservative enough, and it’s taking many many hours to complete. I suspect some sort of hardware problem we haven’t seen before, but we won’t know until it’s finished.

We think the feature will be a great one – you’ll now be able to add geography information to your photos, allowing you to view your photos overlaid on Google Maps and Google Earth. So you can quickly and easily view your latest trip to Hawaii, for example, complete with a timeline animation that moves from photo to photo in the order you shot them.

I think it’s worth mentioning that our track record for our schedule maintenance window , up to this point, has been pretty stellar. That doesn’t excuse this morning – nothing does, and we’ll take steps in the future to make sure this never happens.

Thanks again for your patience, and we’ll continue to post more as we get it.

Don MacAskill
CEO, smugmug

I’m excited about the upgrade. Really excited. The new default theme looks pretty slick and feature-rich, and I’m even starting to want to create my own CSS for my galleries. (I’m sure that once this upgrade is in place, users will be able to create all kinds of styles, and hopefully submit them to a central database where everyone can use them.)

smugmug’s getting some negative feedback due to their lack of foresight, and I hope that doesn’t hurt them too badly. I hope it does, however, inspire them to establish systems for upgrades that don’t require the site to be offline all day, and encourage them to give users–all users, not just people who’ve altered their stylesheets–a fair amount of warning before massive upgrades.

After all, shit happens.

I had lots of dreams last night that I found preferable to reality ;P One major event in my dream involved me getting a job from a woman who really needed an assistant; at first it seemed like it was going to be typical assistant stuff, but then she handed me a book called Pantone something (Pantones are standard colors used in design work), and it became obvious that I was going to be doing design work with her, too. I was so psyched.

I was also going to be starting classes at ASU the following week, and the lady–whose name was Gloria, obviously after one of the tracks on the H2 soundtrack–was very eager for me to continue my schoolwork and to arrange my work schedule to fit my school schedule. Gloria also told me to name my own salary, and she hinted at somewhere around $10/hr. (When I told Sean this in the dream, he said, “$5 is enough, really.” :>)

There was a subplot involving me driving around some city–maybe New York, because I was near Central Perk/the Friends’ characters’ apartments, and I was finally figuring out where the two places were in relation to each other, which made me very happy. ;P Anyway, my cousin Carl was there, and so was my mom. Mom had her van, and Carl had a cute little orange car that I recognized. Apparently I had purchased the car at some point, but I had never taken it home with me from Kentucky, and now someone else seemed to be handling the payments. This made me feel bad, but at the same time I was thrilled because that meant I owned a new car.

MSN’s got an article up entitled “10 Dumb Moments in Sci-Fi Cinema“. I’d like to respond to some of the sniping!

There aren’t a lot of good reasons to be a science fiction freak.

Sure, the genre gets respect, not to mention box office yield, but the poor innocent fans are still depicted as lifeless, dateless, and wearing Vulcan ears.

But, and we say this with love, sci-fi fans often deserve the reputation. Once people overhear some pale guy with wizard hair explaining how a light saber simply isn’t possible, as the exposed plasma from the device would irradiate every living organism with a 5-kilometer radius, what are people supposed to think? “Sexy?”

Um…yes, actually.

(Although that’s not my understanding of lightsaber physics…)

Did anything in “The Fifth Element” make sense? No. Did it kick ass? Yes.

Hey! It made sense…

No, really, it did! ;P

So, the same company that brings you the dark side of the force and the death star decides that tall, slow, off balance elephant thingies with laser beam-shooting tusks are the best way to ferret out the rebels from their underground fortress?

…okay, I’ll give them that one.

Seriously, the list is pretty good, and funny:

“The Fly” was a movie with the world’s easiest gimmick: Watch a guy turn into a fly. There should be more movies like this. Watch a guy turn into a lobster. Watch a guy turn into an oyster. This is what science is all about.

Yes. Yes it is!

Japanese researchers say they have created a robotic skin that can sense temperature and pressure simultaneously.

The University of Tokyo scientists say their breakthrough has the potential to improve how robots will function in the real world.

And they add that there is no need to stop at simply imitating the functions of human skin.

“It will be possible in the near future to make an electronic skin that has functions that human skin lacks,” the researchers write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Future artificial skins could incorporate sensors not only for pressure and temperature, but also for light, humidity, strain or sound, they add.

Go.

What with all the blogs crying out that Bush is being insensitive and evil for not seeing Cindy Sheehan, I assumed that he’d never spoken with her. But that’s not the case at all! Not only that, but Sheehan originally stated:

“I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis,” Cindy said after their meeting. “I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he’s a man of faith.”

And now she’s saying he was callous to her during their meeting.

What, exactly, is she trying to prove here? And why is she using her son’s death to do it?

No wonder her husband filed for divorce…

Newsweek: ‘I’m So Sorry’

I just did a lot of chores.

I started with the usual dishes. I do those pretty much every day. Empty the dishwasher, load the dishwasher, wash stuff that can’t go in the dishwasher.

When I was done with that and I’d set out the stuff I need to cook tonight’s dinner, I decided to go ahead and deal with an issue that’s been bugging me for several days: the laundry room/pantry needed to be swept and mopped out.

After the apartment guys took the washer and dryer we were renting, I discovered not only the expected dust and lint bunnies but also a lake of spilled liquid detergent that I had to scrub out by hand (I used paper towels). When I’d finally raked up the majority of the goop, I swept up what I could of the dust and then mopped the closet floor. After that I went ahead and mopped the kitchen floor too.

Then I decided to finally get the stupid laundry off the dining room table–as if doing that would somehow change the fact that my table is in chaos, pushed up against the wall so it’s out of the way for moving in a new washer and dryer and covered with all the junk that had been sitting on the original washer and dryer.

So I put the laundry away, and then I sorted all the dirty laundry into three baskets, lights, whites, and darks, so that when the new washer and dryer arrive–or when we run out of clothes and I have to force myself to go to the coin laundry behind the building–I will at least be organized in advance.

Then I rearranged the junk on the dining room table and tried to convince myself that it looked better. And then I vacuumed the floor where the apartment guys had tracked dirt and lint.

I don’t really feel a sense of accomplishment or happiness, probably because my dining room is still retarded and because none of this has solved the real problem in our lives, which is money.

Google “a house day”, and my blog appears twice in the results, currently as number 6 and number 15. The phrase, adopted from my friend Brooke, does not seem to have caught on elsewhere with Brooke’s meaning.