It's been a while

I haven't written in my blog for - like - over a year. I wonder if anyone will find this. Hi Mom, if you're reading. I have a few interesting things I've worked on recently. First of all check out the new Cubicle51 homepage. It's still very simple but now it has some style to it. I like how it turned out. It's suprising how much work it is to make something that looks so simple.

The other thing I've been doing is posting pictures to Google's new Picasaweb. Go to my Picasaweb Gallery to see my web albums from Kauai, Hakone Gardens, Truckee, and the photo class I took recently. I still have a few more albums from earlier this year that I need to publish, including my pictures from Jeremy and Amy's wedding.

Picasaweb has some really cool features. It lets you upload large pictures and they auto-size to fit in your browser. That's awesome! You can see all the detail but they also look fine on low res moniters. Google is doing good things.

Just posted pictures

I just posted some pictures from February 2005. Let me know what you think of them. This is my second gallery of pictures from 2005. I'm working on posting a small collection of photos from each month. I enjoy going back and looking at my photos from a few months ago so I can remember all the places I've been and the things I've seen. I find that when I look back at pictures I took before I can pick out the good photos without the excitement of the moment slanting my opinion.

2005 San Francisco Open

I posted pictures of Lindsey from the 2005 San Francisco Open. It's one of the larger ballroom dance competitions in this neck of the woods. She danced what they call "pro/am" where one of the competitors in a professional and the other is an amateur. Lindsey danced with her coach, Michal Kocma. There's also a couple picture of Lindsey's female coach, Roberta Sun.

Reviewing Photos

I've taken a lot of photos in the last few months and I've been working on my pipeline for processing them. Here's what I've got so far:

• Take the photos.
• Import photos with the little utility that I wrote to put the photos in my directory structure.
• Review the photos in ACDSee. I copy the ones that have something special in them to the favorites directory for each photo shoot.
• Watch my screen saver cycle through all the photos in favorites directories.
• Print some photos and put them on the walls in my office.

I usually copy about 1 in 5 photos to the favorites directory. When I Photoshop a photo I directly modify the file in the favorites directory. This way I have an original and a Photoshopped file for each photo.

 

My plan which I'm currently working on is to find a few photos each month I like and put them on my website. I just recently completed January 2005. I picked my 5 favorite photos for this web alum. I had to Photoshop most of the photos because I hadn't done it before.

 

I enjoy looking back at the photos a few months later to find the ones that I especially like. There are some that I liked when I took them, but later I've realized the photos weren't all that great.

 

I was surprised how much I'm sucked in by the screen saver of my favorites. I find my self just staring at the photos all the time. With the photos appearing randomly I'm able to find the ones that I like and I also see the ones that I want to Photoshop. 

 

I have a AllTimeFavorites directory where I put images that leave a lasting impression on me. I've only copied a few photos here so far. Now that I think about it, copying the photos a second time probably isn't a great idea because if want to Photoshop the file again, I'm not sure which to modify.

 

Well. There ya go. Tell me what you think of the January 2005 photos. I'm working on February 2005 now. It'll probably be a little bigger since most of my January photos are in my Australia alum.

Blog Month Is Over

Yea! Blog month is over! There is much rejoicing. I think I proved my point: You can do anything for a month. And a month is about as long as I can do this. I almost didn't make it, but I pulled through. The time really adds up. I spent 40-60 minutes each day writing a blog. And it takes probably 20 minutes of thought time to find a subject and some days I couldn't find anything interesting.

 

I actually did become a much better writer. You might now believe that, but I started with the bar very low and now it's a little higher. I don't think my proof reading skills got any better because my blogs are full of typos and wrong words, but it's certainly easier for me to write now. At the beginning of the month it was really slow and I suffered through forming each sentence. I learned how to just keep writing and not spend so much time on picking each word. Just keep writing. Just keep writing...

 

 

I beat my goal of 20 words per minute. I actually hit 30 words per minute one day. I'm pretty sure that I can't get much higher than that without speeding up my typing. That's about as fast as I can go and still fix some typos and proof read the blog once.

 

I missed two days this month. That's why the chart only goes to 25. The other missing day is today because I made the chart already and I'm not done with the blog.

 

Do you like that chart up there? Excel sucks at making pretty charts by default. I ending up making the chart in Excel as a new sheet. I changed all the fonts to about 18 points. I got rid of the ugly background gray. Boy is that a bad default. I changed the diamond points to circles and made them a little smaller. And here's the important part, I took a screen shot of the chart and pasted it into Photoshop. I resized the image down to 400 pixels wide. That gives it a soft, antialiased look that I like in charts.

 

Outlook is the best way I found to post to Blogger. If you set the default email font to Times New Roman 12 point it will post the blog without any <font> tags. Font tags are annoying because it screws up the formatting in Blogger and also in the RSS feeds. You also need to uncheck the "send pictures with messages" box in the HTML composing options. This makes it so that the images don't get attached to the email and posted once in the middle of the blog and once at the end. I just save the images to my webserver downstairs. This was the easy way I found to host images.

 

Well, my dedicated readers, this is my last daily blog. This is actually a good thing for you because now I can blog when I actually have something interesting to say. I'll try to blog about 4 times a month. The best way I've found to read blogs is with www.bloglines.com. That's a website where you can put all the RSS feeds for all your blogs. Then you only have to check with Bloglines to see who has posted new blogs. That's way easier than polling each of your favorite blogger's sites.

 

If you want to start your own blog the best place I found to do it was www.blogger.com. That was the only free blog website that I found where the default template wasn't completely ugly.

 

Later dudes.

Photo Storage and the Zen of Carpet Purchasing

Photo Storage Solved

 

Well, I think I finally solved all my photo storing issues. I now have two 200 gig hard drives in two different computers. I copied all my photos and made all the directory names consistent. I also put all my documents and code on the new hard disks too. At 4:30 AM tonight it will copy all the new files from one hard drive to the other. I was able to write a simple batch file that will copy the files with the xcopy command. I used the following command:

xcopy d:\ \\Beige\datadrive /C /D /E /Y

This will copy all the files from one computer to the other with: continuing on errors (/c), only copying new or changed files (/d), recursing subdirectories (/e),  and automatically overwriting files (/y). I put the batch file in the Windows scheduled tasks. One interesting thing to note: You have to check the "only run when logged in" check box on the scheduler. Otherwise it doesn't work on XP when you don't use a password to log in. It just silently fails when you don't check the box.

 

I made it write the output of the copy command to a file so I can look and see if it worked. That way I can tell if it's actually copying the changed files. So the whole batch files is:

date /t >> CopyDataDriveResults.txt
xcopy d:\ \\Beige\datadrive /C /D /E /Y >> CopyDataDriveResults.txt

The Zen of Carpet Purchasing

 

I went to Home Depot to purchase carpet for Marny's house. We torn out the carpet last weekend because of a not-so-pleasant septic tank issue. Taking my Dad's advice we looked into why it was backing up before we replaced the carpet. They ran a camera down the hole and found that the pipes were misaligned. They didn't think that it was going to backup again before they fix it, so it's ok to replace the carpet.

 

The best thing I did was get the Home Depot 1-2-3 of Flooring. The book told me that it way too hard to install the carpet myself. That was kinda my hunch. You need a few special tools and seeming the carpet sounds like you aren't gonna get it right on the first try. Home Depot will install the carpet for a reasonable price. Purchasing carpet at Home Depot was a fascinating experience. This nice man helped us fill out the paperwork and schedule a measuring appointment. It took him about 15 minutes to fill out the one page form and type it into the computer. Then he had to call the automated Home Depot appointment scheduling place on his phone. After he finished with that we realize that we put our home address on the form and not Marny's home address. D'oh! Chris was with us and he said, "I accidentally sent flowers to myself once. I wondered why they wanted me to enter my address on the form twice..." He said he ending up taking a picture of them for Julie. Ha. Anyway, so after screwing up the form and the appointment, the nice man had to start over from scratch. Yea. 15 more minutes waiting.

 

Lindsey apologized for the long wait to the Indian lady behind up who was waiting very patiently. She said, "It's ok. This is Home Depot. Waiting is what you do here.  I order a kitchen counter top once from Home Depot. We had to come in three days in a row and wait three hours each time." I started to feel bad for her but then I figured that she had read the same Zen book that I'm reading. She wasn't mad at us or at the nice man because were are all together the same being and it's silly to get mad at yourself. I think I like it when other people Zen at me. When we got up to leave, she said to the nice man, "I just have a simple question." Ok, now I feel bad for making her wait.

 

The appointment is Tuesday. Then about three days after that they will come back and install the carpet. It will be nice to have this all done.

 

 

My blog saved me $450

So I was talking with my Dad on the phone the other day. We were making plans to go up to Tahoe and then he mentions that's he's sorry my computer died. He suggested that maybe it was just the power supply and not the whole computer that was broken. I'm like, "Huh? How'd you know my computer was broken?" Turns out that my dad reads my blog. I think my whole family reads my blog. Hi Mom! Hi Kira and Kailey! Hi Aunt Connie!

 

Anyway, so I looked around and tried to find another computer that has a matching power supply. The size of power supplies hasn't changed recently but it seems that every few years they change the plugs on the mother board. They recently added a square 2x2 plug which supplies extra power to the video card. All the new snazzy video cards take so much power they need a special extra power cable on the mother board. The last two video cards I got also need a direct connection to the power supply because the juice from the bus wasn't enough. Seems like this issue is getting solved in two ways. But the point is that most of my older computers that I would have liked to swipe the power supply from don't have the right connectors. Luckily my second Wow box had the correct plugs so I could test if it really was the power supply that was broken.

 

I was able to get the computers close enough so that I could plug the power supply into the broken computer without taking everything apart and sure enough the computer turned on. That made me happy. Thanks Dad! Now I only needed to buy a $50 power supply and not a $500 computer. So today I went to Fry's and picked up a power supply and my computer is all good again.

 

I priced computers on Dell when I though that I might need to buy one. You can get a reasonable computer without a monitor and a non-gaming video card for $500. Man computers keep falling in price. I figured I could move the video card, monitor and memory from my dead computer over to get a WoW class machine. But turns out I don't need to do that.

 

So with all that newly saved money I played Texas hold-em. We had a poker tournament here last night. I got cleaned out. I lost all 4 four games. I was down $9 for the night. $2 dollars for each game I lost and $1 for my bet with Jeff. Jeff bet me 10 to 1 odds that Jason wouldn't show up. I didn't think he's show up either, but 10 to 1 odds? I couldn't pass that up. I even offered Jason $5 to come, but he wouldn't do it. Turns out Jason is a father now and well, fathers pretty much can't go out to poker nights. Don't they make baby sitters and wives anymore? We had 6 people last night of which 0 had kids even though most of the people we invited have kids now. Maybe we should have a poker/kid's play night...