Posts from May 2003

Thunderstorm

We had a great thunderstorm this morning around 5am. With lightning and everything! (They're rare out here on the west coast.)

Word

I'm mad at Word.

Note to self: Word won't ever ask you if you want to close the document. It's asking you if you want to save the document. (Big difference.) And most likely, you do want to save the document. Especially if you've been working on it feverishly for the last five hours. Don't ever answer no to saving changes; there will be no way to recover your hours of work despite the promises of ...enhanced reliability and data recovery tools. The AutoRecover files will vanish the instant you click no—along with your feeling that this is going to be a good day with lots of progress.

Oregon Notes

More Corvallis propaganda: this fair city won one of two gold-medals given by the League of American Bicyclists for being a bike-friendly city. The other winning city was Palo Alto, CA. Right now my bike is closer to Palo Alto than Corvallis. I'll have to fix that soon.

And this is a great lesson about Portland's architecture: The Rise and Fall of Modernism in Portland by Michael J. Totten. [via Anil]

Newport pictures

Click for more...

Up picture

up

Terror Alert!

As the terror alert level goes up, I think it's important to think about the psychology of terrorist alarms (pdf). This essay analyzes the terror warnings from a psychological perspective. It was written by a professor at Stanford.

Sea lion pictures

Sea Lions in Newport...

sea lions

sea lions

Wedding dress picture

hanging dress

I couldn't take my camera to my own wedding—so I don't have any pictures I can post. But it was a well-documented event and a great day. Matt posted a wedding mopho.

Sailing on the Willamette Picture

Sailing on the Willamette
On the Willamette River

Fountain Picture

fountain

Mt. Hood and Portland picture

Portland and Mt. Hood
Mt. Hood and Portland

Fox Tower and flowers picture

flowers

Freenet Con

FreeNetworks Conference 2003. Cory Doctorow and Tim O'Reilly will be speaking there. And I think the conference will be interesting on a sociological level alone. I mean, what happens when you gather together a bunch of wireless hackers in Las Vegas?

And here's an in-depth description of the Wireless AP in a light fixture that Rob and Adam were showing at eTech.

Charger found!

No worries, found my charger. Charging will commence soon. As you were.

Mophos on Hold

I lost my cell phone charger, so mophos (and cell phone calls) won't be coming in for a bit.

Weblog Bookwatch

Just stumbled across an article (Deep Thinking about Weblogs) that mentions Weblog Bookwatch in its Weblogs and commerce section:
Their book list is compiled by a computer program that sifts the titles out of weblog posts across the Internet and ranks them by popularity. Once the final line of code for this program was written, the marginal cost for linking to fresh, kickback-generating sales became zero.
What the author doesn't know is that the kickback (Amazon affiliate fees) from Weblog Bookwatch is roughly $10-$20 per quarter. That's not exactly covering the costs of maintaining it. But he is right, it's a way to aggregate information fairly effortlessly (once the code is stable) that could theoretically lead to paying for its own bandwidth with enough visitors. Right now, more bandwidth is spent searching weblogs than serving up links of books with affiliate tags. If that ratio was reversed the commerce angle might be there.

I'm blogging this

I'm blogging this.

Historic Oregon brands

Interesting look at Oregon history through the brands of local products: Sold in Oregon. [via di-pole Moment]

Tulips on the Windowsill Picture

tulips on the windowsill

I lied. I had one left.

Done with Flower Pictures

I'm all out of flower pictures.

Unopened Flower Picture

unopened flower

Purple Flower Picture

purple flower