FuzzyCo

There’s a bit of a to-do, in the nerdy world, about the Do Not Track setting in browsers and whether it should be on or off by default and what it should even mean if it’s on. Various privacy experts are fighting to keep us safe from marketers who want to track our every move and purchase. The danger, of course, is that once those marketers have all that information about us, they will be able to construct ads that are so specifically targeted at us each individually that we will be powerless against them and compelled to buy new products. I think this is, in the abstract, an important issue. Slippery slopes and privacy and all that. But the reason I don’t get too worked up about it is this. Merlin Mann’s bank, who knows every single dollar he spends, can’t figure out how to market to him. Gmail is always showing me completely ridiculous ads based on jokes my friends and I are sharing via email. If it ever looks like these guys are at all competent, I’ll start to get really worried. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy some Chinese real estate that, for some reason, I suddenly feel it’s necessary for me to invest in.

One of the things comment spambots do to try and sneak into a comment stream is to take some random text from somewhere on the net and then run it through a thesaurus. Occasionally, the result perhaps surpasses the original:

The amount of surrealists should it take to adjust the light light bulb? A couple of Body to keep the particular giraffe, as well as the other for you to fill up the bath along with brightly colored equipment resources.

Ah. The particular giraffe.

Each week as a new episode of the AV Club's Stand Down series comes out, a fun game is "who did Dan and Kate hide in the background?" This week's episode, the last in the series (fingers crossed, in the season?) features Natasha Leggero doing some comedy for an unappreciative audience that features several familiar faces. (And the notched ear of that "pussy" tells me that it's one Mr. Steinway.) It is true that I like ringer Ts.

Shaun and Erica once watched me struggle with the tutorial mode of one of the recent Mortal Kombat games for a good half an hour or so. The tutorial wanted me to press X-X-Y and those two swear I was pressing X-X-X-Y every time. I dunno, I think it was broken or something. The controller or the console or the game or the concept of fighting. Whatevs. Noob Fuzzy wins fallity.

Before I descend into the hives of scum and villany that are eBay and Craig’s List (or just donate them to the Brown Elephant), I thought I’d see if any of my FuzzyCo friends wanted:

• Mintola Maxxum 5xi film camera with 28-80 zoom lens (worked fine the last time I used it).
• Broken Nikon D1, body only. The last time I fired it up, it would take pictures but they all came out like static, so something is up.
• a VCR (I know, right)
• Sega Dreamcast. I’ll dig out some controllers and a game or two.
• PowerPC MacMini with a dead harddrive
• Powerbook G4 15”, 768 MB RAM, 20 GB harddrive, Mac OS X 10.5.8. The fan is a little noisy, but the screen is in great shape - actually not too bad a machine for that theoretical “just needs to check email” user.
• iBook G3, 386 MB RAM, 20 GB hd, Mac OS X 10.3.9. And it’s got that smelly problem that these white iBooks get. I used to think it was the battery, but I’ve heard it might be the glue that holds down the keyboard, but regardless, it kinda smells like BO and it gets a little worse as it warms up.
• some crappy old PC laptops. I mean, really old. They’re probably maxxed out at 256 MB of memory and can run XP really slowly or some minimal Linux distro. I’m not going to bother trying to boot them up, but they all did boot the last time I tried.

(Oh, and safest to assume that the batteries are shot on all these laptops, though they will work on power adapters.)

Long story short: for someone who takes as many photos and shoots as much video as I do, it’s long past time for me to get a DSLR camera. And Erica is really supportive of this move, which is great. But I can’t decide what to get. The first big question, I guess, is Nikon or Canon. My favorite camera ever is my Nikon Nikkormat FT that my dad gave me as a teenager, but that’s not a reason to stick with Nikon. I also have a Nikon N6006 and a broken D1, so I have a couple of Nikkor AF lens, but just a 35-135mm and a Tamron 19-35mm, so neither of those would be really pricey to replace if I went Canon.

• I really like to avoid flash, so low-light performance is important, but it seems like even the mid-range cameras are all good on that these days?
• Canon was the leader in HD video on cameras, but maybe Nikon is catching up?
• The onboard mics can’t be that great on any of these bodies, so I’m probably going to have to also invest in a external recording system, like an H4 Zoom or something?
• I’m writing a lot of statements but then putting question marks at the end?

I did a whole round of endless review reading a few months ago, prepping for putting something on my Christmas list, and my mind melted and I came up with either the Nikon D3100 or the Canon Rebel T3i. But I have no idea. Anyone have a camera they love? Someone just want to give me something :-)

It's too late for this year (well, maybe you can still pull it off on the West Coast) but put this in your calendar for next year. And the good news is that you can pull it off with a stop at a drug store on the way into work.

Start with packs of the cheesiest kids' Valentines possible—ones with stickers are good. Depending on what you go for you can get 30 for $3. Usually I avoid pop culture and go for ones like "animals" or "skateboarders" or "Fuzzy Art", but this year Twilight was too good to pass up putting in the mix. Get a reasonable-quality individually wrapped candy. This year I went with Ferrero Rocher, but if you do something like that be sure to get a nut-free alternative. Foil-wrapped hearts or Hersey's Kisses are fine too, if you're on a budget or have a huge office.

Sign the From field. If your hand is up to it, in the To field put "an awesome coworker" or something, but you can just leave it blank. I try to avoid any hint of personalization that might make giving a valentine to a coworker awkward. The vibe I'm going for is "grade school and everyone in class gets a valentine". It helps to not be creepy. Don't be creepy. Walk around the office and everyone gets a card and a candy. Instant office hero.

Am I not scared that by giving away my secret everyone will do it? No, I am not, an office full of heroes would be fine. And besides maybe then I'll get some candy in return.

Since I'm on the road, I don't have the time to do a clever blackout like all the cool sites. So just don't read anything on my site today until you've contacted your Representative and Senators about SOPA/PIPA. Do it for the children!

My delightful friend Megan is co-hosting a games-oriented podcast called the Jank Cast and she asked me come on as a guest to talk about perspective as a narrative technique. The idea was for me to babble on about my improv and filmmaking experience and see if that had any application to RPGing. Babble away I did and Episode 119 where I do so has now been posted. Thanks to the Jankers (Jankistas? Jankaroos?) for having me on.

Go Daddy has been terrible for years with their misleading upsells and lousy interface and all the misogynistic ads. And then when the elephant-killing thing came out, I started moving my domains as they got near expiring. (Marco Arment has a great post about the lock-in that domain registrars get you in and I'll freely admit they had me in that "why do it all at once" trap.) And now with the pro-SOPA thing, I'm done with Go Daddy and I initiated the transfer of my last 12 domains off of Go Daddy to Namecheap*. I don't want women and elephants to think I love them less than internet freedom, but it was just the last straw pushing me from lazy and cheap to putting my money where my mouth is. And speaking as the cheap and lazy person, this is actually a terrible time of year to move 12 domains—now I'll have an annual $120 bill due right during the holidays. See what you've made me do, stupid Go Daddy.

* Full disclosure: I have affiliate-coded that link up. My recommendations are not un-tainted by commerce.

Do you like pretending that you are The Bat-Man, beating up thugish criminals with your mighty fists? Do you like poking at your iPhone or iPad with a poking finger? Are you curious about the day job activities of my Bare compatriot Shaun? Then perhaps you would like the newly released iOS game Batman Arkham City Lockdown. Pow! Biff!

This is no data, it's just a snapshot (literally) of three stores on a Wednesday evening in the Westfield Century City Mall, Los Angeles, CA:

Sony Store

Microsoft Store

Apple Store (the crowd at the front makes it a bit hard to see that it was crowded the whole way back)

Last month my friend Ryan came over and we used our collective skills and tools to convert a novelty 3" six-sided die into a ring box for a proposal to his girlfriend Sylvia. We took a bunch of build photos (as one does) but I couldn't share them, of course, because that would ruin the surprise¹. Ryan and Sylvia met at a Nerds at Heart game night, so it seemed apropos.

I'm happy to report that this last week, Ryan proposed to Sylvia on the London Eye ferris wheel and she accepted. It also means that I can finally share the build photos that Ryan has now posted. Love, whatever. Power tools!

We used a circular saw to cut the die in half and that's the one thing I think I'd do differently next time²—it took quite a bit of material out and the box is now noticably non-cubic³. (Cubal? Cubicle?) I couldn't find my large clamps to secure the die for cutting, but I had the brainstorm of using packing tape to tape the die down to a board. I'm not sure I'd recommend it for large-scale production, but it seemed to hold the die safely in place enough.

The ring had come on a nice little velvet stand (seen above) and Ryan's idea was to embed that into the die for a nice presentation. We cut out a shallow indentation for the base using a sander bit on a Dremel. For the deeper indent needed on the top, we took out quite a bit of material using a drill to "swiss cheese" the die and then cut between the holes and smoothed things out with the sander bit again.

Ryan had, smartly I think, decided to avoid the complications of hinges and we joined the two halves with two dowel pieces (left over from an Ikea parts pack). I wish we had had a drill press to make the holes perfectly vertical, but I did pretty OK with my cordless drill and a steady hand, and then Ryan was able to tidy things up as he was glueing the dowels in later. Ryan also painted the interior of the die black to make it even fancier.

All told, a successful project, I think, from both a handyman and a romantic perspective. And congratulations to Ryan and Sylvia.

[1] I have very strong opinions about proposals—I think that deciding to get married should be a mutual decision and whole stereotype of a woman fretting while she waits for her man to "pop the question" is pretty raddicho. But Ryan said that he and Sylvia had already decided to get married, but that they also thought it would be fun to have a production proposal. I can get behind that, and hey, a chance to use my filter mask.

[2] You know, the next time I'm making a giant six-sided die into a ring box for a proposal. I have a feeling it's going to become a cottage industry for me.

[3] To my eye, anyway. I probably shouldn't say anything, lest I ruin this precious memory. But I have to be honest, for science.

Update: Ryan's take on the build.

I recently started editing a lot more mp4/h264 footage than I've ever had to deal with before. (As an aside, if you're getting married and looking for an interesting and innovative way to video your wedding, may I recommend Wedit.) And Final Cut Pro 7, my mainstay editing tool for years, really doesn't deal well with lots of mp4 footage. It'll let you import it, but you're going to be hitting 'Render' a lot and there are weird glitches, slow-downs, and errors.

The right way to deal with that kind of footage in FCP7 is to first transcode all of your footage to something like the Apple ProRes codec. But that process takes hours and bloats the size of the files up by a factor of 5-7x (ProRes LT or ProRes, respectively) which may just be the price of editing HD footage, but my setup isn't ideal yet for dealing with that volume of file sizes. So, what do I do?

Well, I had a vague memory that one of the touted benefits of both the "new" iMovie and of Final Cut Pro X was that they dealt with mp4 footage better. I first took a look at iMovie '11. When iMovie had it's big re-write back in 2008, I never switched over and I've always keep a copy of iMovie HD 6 around as a useful footage capture tool*. iMovie '11 did import the footage just fine, but I just didn't feel like it was going to be powerful enough of an editing tool for the kind of fine edits I was going to need to do. In any case, if I was going to go through a learning curve, I might as well spend that time on a tool that really is one of my core skills. So, I took the plunge and fired up Final Cut Pro X.

There's been a lot of outcry from professional editors about missing features in FCPX, and about how different the interface is. There was even a Conan O'Brien sketch about it. Now, those are really are two separate issues. Most of the missing features are things that really only affect editors working at post-production houses and so—places where they're only part of a big workflow**. But the differences in the interface affect anyone who has every used FCP before. It's different.

My analogy of how different the interface is, for people who aren't familiar with FCP, has been to imagine if Microsoft came out with a new version of Word and you face that blank screen and type a sentence. So far, so good and you hit 'return' to make a new paragraph… and the cursor jumped back to the beginning of the sentence. You think, there has to be a way to make a new paragraph, but no matter what menu options you pick, you just can't get a new paragraph started. That's what my first hour or so with FCPX was like. I nearly gave up and moved back to FCP7 with all of its limitations in this workflow. But I did a little Google searching and I happened to stumble across Dan on a Bouncy Castle's Youtube tutorials on FCPX. Dan is a 17-year-old filmmaker in England and his tutorials aren't comprehensive (and he's occasionally wrong, like some of his glossing over the various audio correction options) but he really helped me click into how exactly FCPX was supposed to work.

And, it's great. I can really see how this will be, once I get the muscle memory for the new way of editing down, a really fast and efficient way to edit video. There are defintely features still missing and some rough edges, but I can also see the vast improvements. Audio controls for a clip, for example, are presented in a much more accessible manner. And at $300 (+ $50 for Compressor and + $50 for Motion) it's still not a cheap program, but it's much more accessible for the prosumer than the $1500 or whatever that Final Cut Studio was.

* iMovie talks to some of my older cameras and Analog-Digital convertors that newer versions don't, and its ignoring of time codes lets it capture damaged footage that Final Cut chokes on.
** I really am feeling the lack of the MultiClip feature this week, though. Apple has promised that it'll be added back soonish.

Last night was the closing of the Belmont Burlesque Revue's (nearly) eight-year open run. Erica and I did one of our Gerdes & Reid bits, to general acclaim, and there was lots of hugging and crying and drinking during and after the show, so we weren't home until 3 am or so. So of course I was up at 7:30 and just couldn't get back to sleep. And we've got visitors in the guest room, so I couldn't play a video game or anything. So how to occupy myself?

Well, like anyone would, I dug in and decoded the Painstakingly Concealed Secret Track on MC Frontalot's Zero Day album. I'm number 205 to do so, according to the high scores board (screen shot above). And it's odd how proud I am of the minor geek skills I used in the process. And also proud of my range—hanging out with ladies what take their clothes off to just a few hours later solving super nerdy puzzles.

I won't say much more, because there are already plenty of hints in a thread on the Frontalot forums. Though in the spirit of the hints there, I'll say that when the thing finally started doing the thing, at first I thought it was a glitch and I just needed to have some patience. Maddeningly vague enough? Good.

I have a cell phone number that I've had for at least eight years—lots of old friends have it as my contact number and it's on hundreds of business cards that I've handed out over the years.

About five years ago, my work was going to start paying for a mobile phone for me, and I didn't want to have to carry two devices, and even then I'd already handed out plenty of business cards, so I ported my personal number to a device owned by my work. That was great for a number of years, but then I had a disagreement with our company's phone administrator that made me realize that in the event that work and I parted ways suddenly (which I wasn't planning on on my end, but you never know) that I might have trouble recovering that number. So I took a work phone with a work number (remember when I had that 917 number, which is a New York number of all things?) and tried to figure out what to do with my personal number.

I still didn't want to carry two devices and I looked a number of possible phone forwarding solutions and finally decided that the best option was to port the number to a pay-as-you-go phone and forward that to my work number. Well, I messed up a bit, as it turns out that number-forwarding, at least on Virgin Mobile, is a feature of the phone and not the network, and I had gotten such a cheap phone that it couldn't do that feature. So for the last couple years I've had a cheap little phone sitting under my desk at home, plugged into a charger, and I'd just check it when it beeped that I had a text or a voice mail. I updated my most-used contacts with whatever current work number I'm carrying and it's been non-terrible. And I certainly don't regret the $5/month—I got a single gig from someone who had that old number that paid for the service on it's own.

But now, Google Voice finally has porting, And that is the solution I've been looking for for two years. I can use GV's features to forward my number to whatever phone I happen to have, or be near, or whatever. It gets text messages. Perfect. Yay!

But, as I was preparing to port my number over, I was thinking about all the accumulated funds I had in my Virgin Mobile account. The way these things work is that to maintain your phone line you have to keep adding money to your account at least every 90 days. So even though I'd only used about $10 in services over the two years, I had $170 in my account that was just going to disappear. Now, like I said, I don't begrudge that money at all—as the economists say, it's a sunk cost. But if there was something I could do with it…

And then I saw a question on Ask MetaFilter that made me realize—those 'text REDCROSS to 90999' charity donation things, when you have a regular phone account, they just add that $10 onto your monthly bill, but when you have pay-as-you-go, they deduct it from your balance.

So tonight I sent a good 30 or 40 texts (you have to confirm each one) giving away that $170. I went through the list at mGive and also the different celebrities at Keep a Child Alive. (A limitation seems to be that you can only donate $25 a day to any one text code, but the different celebrity names at Keep a Child Alive count separately, so I was able to give a bit more there.) I gave to cancer organizations and Child's Play and dance in Chicago and I think the NYPL. It's all a bit of a blur (I was also watching a horror movie at the same time). It's only $170. I know plenty of people, who make a lot less than I, who give more than that all the time. But darn it, I'm going to feel good about this for a moment. Yay me!

Look, just trust your Uncle Fuzzy on these two:

Log in to your Facebook account. In the upper-right corner, click on Account and then click on Account Settings. On the My Account page, find the Account Security line and click change. Check the check-box under Secure Browsing (https) and then click Save. Thanks.

Log in to your Gmail account. In the upper-right corner, click on Settings. Look for the Browser connection section and choose the Always use https radio button. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Save Changes. Gracias.

Oh, and then go back up your important documents. Because I know you haven't for a year and you're going to come crying to me when your hard drive crashes. Crimeny.

Boing Boing has a post today about the Daniel Pinkwater book Lizard Music being released in a New York Review of Books' Children's Collection edition. That's great—Lizard Music is one of my favorite books and it's one I re-read every few years. I was about to post a comment over there, pointing people to the free audiobook version available on pinkwater.com when I remembered that it had been a hair annoying to download all the chapters separately, and the tracks were labeled inconsistently… it's looking a gift-horse in the mouth, I know, BUT the audiobooks are under a BY-NC-ND 2.5 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs) Creative Commons license, which means that I can clean up those track titles, and zip all the tracks, and make it available here:

Lizard Music, by Daniel Pinkwater, read by Daniel Pinkwater - 113 MB Zip file of MP3s

There are nine other audiobooks available, but the other long one, that had the same annoyances was The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (and it's also another of my favorite books). So here you go:

The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, by Daniel Pinkwater, read by Daniel Pinkwater - 172 MB Zip file of MP3s

Enjoy!

</creepy computer voice>

If you would like to slowly play a game with me (I usually take my turns on my morning and evening commutes) I'm 'fuzzygerdes' on Words With Friends and 'fuzzy' on Strategery, both on the iPhone.

So let's say (well, I do, but still let's say) that I have a bunch of home video that I've digitized from Hi8 and VHS sources. The proper "archive" format is, obviously, the DV codec, because that's what it is right now, so it's at its highest quality and the DV codec is very well established, so I'm sure to be able to open it up well into the future. But the DV codec also takes up about 12 GBs for an hour of footage. This is about 12 hours, so far, so that'd be 120 GB just to have this footage sit around -- that's a lot of spinning disk or even DVDs (and for DVDs it'd be annoying to chop all the source video down into half-hour chunks).

Unsolicited advice from your old pal Fuzzy: get yourself a set of silverware for the office. At forty hours a week, you're going to spend 56 years of your life* at work, so you might as well feel like a human being and use a real fork. Here in Chicago we get sometimes get deep-dish pizza for a lunch meeting and it's just so sad to see people trying to discuss serious business while fighting a slab of cheese and dough with a flimsy plastic fork.

Bonus office survival tip: you've probably got a coffee mug, but if you get a nice big one, not only can you have more coffee (more coffee!) but you can microwave soup or leftovers in it.

* I didn't actually do the math. Math is hard.

Hey, the Wheelman trailer I edited has been posted. (I'm linking here to the HD version, click the "Watch in SD" button in the lower-left if your internet connection can't keep up.) The game is available for pre-order now (for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC), if you want to make Shaun happy by buying lots of copies.

Somewhere between the performance improvements of Moveable Type 4.2 and moving the database from a server running MySQL 4 to a different one running MySQL 5 I'm now able to successfully republish my entire 2,268 post blog all at once again, something I haven't been able to do since it was down in the 1,500 post range. It took 35 minutes, but it worked (and, as it was running I saw some archives that I could remove to speed it up).

This removes a false barrier I'd had in the way of knuckling down and redesigning FuzzyCo to get it up to Web 1.5 or so. That is, "why bother redesigning if I won't be able to rebuild the whole site into the new design anyway?" What's your excuse now, hotshot?

If you buy a Virgin Mobile phone to port a number to it, don't activate it before you call them to port the number. You'll be signing up for a day on hold with many different departments if you do. (And yes, that's my answer, for now, to my earlier question.)

So it looks like work is going to give me an iPhone (yay) but that they won't transfer my current number, which used to just be my personal number and that I've had for years, to it (boo). It's probably a good wake up call -- if the number is important to me (which it is), I should have it under my own control.

Here's what's important to me:

• I want to maintain my current phone number -- it's on business cards and headshots and so on and with the kind of odd jobs I do it's good for 4-year-old contacts to still be able to find me.
• I get texts as well as calls (so some sort of voice-mail only service probably won't work for me).
• I don't really want to carry two phones.

I'm not sure there's a perfect solution, but so far the best I can come up with is to port the number to a cheap service and then forward the number to my new work phone (so that I don't have to carry two phones) and then just check texts on the old number every now and then. So I guess I'm looking for cheap cell phone service that lets me call forward and, hopefully, on which texts aren't too pricey. Any better suggestions or do you know of a good service like I've described before I just start pricing it out everywhere?

Update: I went with Virgin Mobile. We'll see how this works out.

There was some confusion between spreadsheets and flowcharts, so I made a flowchart to help clarify.

Update: Matt Stratton points me to this xkcd guide to flowcharts.

So some 18 year-old in England has decided to call his crappy* Flash game page "FuzzyCo" and has even copied my intercapping and managed to set his logo in a way that looks a lot like my usual logo. (Mine is always in Gadget, his is in Myriad Pro bold.)

What he's doing isn't illegal or anything, especially because he's in a different country, but it's definitely pretty gauche in this internationally-connected Internet age. I'd send him a polite "hey dude, why're you biting my logo?" email, but he doesn't list an email address on either of the webpages he's using this name on (you'll understand if I'm loathe to give him linkage) and I don't want to sign up for the crappy free web service he using just to be able to leave him a comment.

Boo, sir, boo.

* I'm sorry I went there, but really, they're pretty terrible.

I get asked to film theater, standup, and improv shows fairly often, and I've seen plenty of videos of the same, and I'm going to share a tip with you that will improve your theater (etc.) videos by 45%*. We're going to learn to use manual exposure.

When you leave your camera on automatic exposure, it's dealing with averages and it sees the vast expanse of the black curtains and jacks up the overall exposure to try and get some detail in those areas -- leaving the human face, the part of the image you actually care about, completely blown out. It's even worse if everyone on stage is wearing dark clothing. I've seen videos where everyone's heads looked like they were on fire.

So what you want to do is find the manual exposure setting on your video camera. On this Sony Handycam I've got here, for example, you go into FN on the touchscreen, then EXPOSURE, select MANUAL and use the - and + buttons to set the exposure. Press OK and then X when you've got it set to step out of the menus. Just dial down the exposure until you can see detail in the face. It's subjective -- too far down and the whole image will be pretty dim.

Ideally, you can get into the space early enough and get cooperation from the tech people to take out the house lights, turn on the lights the way they'll be during the show, and position someone mid-stage to set your exposure (that's what I was doing here with the aid of the delightful Paul O'Toole). Or you might need to wait until the host is on stage. Or just dial it in pretty quickly during the start of the show.

* A fake statistic.

Shout outs to iFixit for their excellent disassembly guides, which got me in and out of Kate's iBook with a minimum of cursing and zero lost screws.

I've definitely broken commenting for my (few) commenters who use TypeKey. Regular commenting seems to be working OK, but I'm guessing I'll break it, too, before I'm finished fixing everything.

Pixish is a new website from Derek Powazek, the founder of JPG Magazine, that aims to be a marketplace to connect people who need illustrations, images, and design with artists, photographers, and designers. The site has only been public for a day now and there's already criticism that the whole thing is terribly flawed because it's spec work. Spec work is when a design client says to one or more designers, "mock up the work and maybe we'll buy it". Spec work is bad because it devalues design, spec work is bad because sometimes clients use speced work and don't pay for it, and spec work is bad because it wastes the time of professionals.

As well, the cheap nature of many of the "rewards" on Pixish has already been well-mocked.

And I agree that if someone who was going to hire a design professional instead uses Pixish, then yes, that's spec work and designers shouldn't participate (and should at least take note of that company's actions, if not following Adam Howell's suggestion to outright boycott them).

BUT I think there's still a place for Pixish. I was struck by one of the very first Assignments, posted by Derek Powazek himself. Derek is offering $100 for a tattoo design. And that price point and that level of design need is where I think Pixish could be a real benefit.

Let's say (as a real example) I'm in an improv group* that performs a couple times a month at a non-profit co-op improv theater and we think it'd be groovy to have a logo for our MySpace page and maybe print up a dozen shirts for ourselves and our six fans. I'm not going to go to a real design firm, because that's not my budget or need. I could bug my artist friends, but I've already had them design stuff for my last six groups. Now, I could go to Pixish and offer $50. And someone who is willing to work for $50 will give me a design that's worth $50, which is all I need.

And I'm not just speaking as a consumer of design. A long time ago I had a (very) small graphic design company in a smallish town. These days my full time job is as a network guy, but I keep my hand in the game by designing improv show posters** and such. I just did a job for a group where I did a poster, postcard, and show photos all for a bundle price of, guess what, $100. It's cheap, I know it's cheap, but they don't have the budget and I'm not going after higher paying jobs. Heck, I don't want the responsibility that comes with a higher paying design job. Before this it's been hard to find those kinds of jobs. So maybe I'll enter a few designs in Pixish contests assignments. And maybe I won't win them, but for me half the point is just about keeping my design skills up. Heck, that's why I entered all those side-contests and remixes on Layer Tennis.

So doesn't this devalue design, though? Well, yes, somewhat. But it's also a democratization. There are people with design needs and people with design ability and they deserve to get hooked up. It's messy. It's change. Ask the music industry -- do bands with free music on their MySpace pages devalue CDs? (Or Jonathan Coulton, to pick on another Pixish Assignmenter.)***

OK, I'm typed this out pretty fast and my thoughts on this are still geling. Partly I wrote this because neither Daring Fireball, nor Adam Howell, nor Pixish has open comments. But comments here are always open, so feel free to tell how I'm wrong.

Update: Well, they said the site was a beta and would be evolving, and I guess they mean it, because they've already removed all design assignments from the site.

Erica and I talked about this whole brouhaha on our way to dinner with friends tonight and one of the things I realized in that time is that I some of my thoughts might not actually be about Pixish as such, but about this niche I'm seeing. Ever since the desktop publishing revolution, the tools of design are in more and more hands. And more and more people are realizing that they have design needs. There have to be ways to connect those people. Colin, who commented here, has some interesting ideas about a portfolio-and-bidding based site.

It probably doesn't help that I'm in the middle of Accelerando, so I'm thinking about post-scarcity economics. Which is, of course, science fiction, as of yet.

* If you're not in Chicago with our odd improv comedy culture, think "band".
** Again, for the rest of the world think "rock show poster".
*** This is likely a very shaky analogy -- comparisons to the music industry may be the new Godwin's Law.

All credit for the Mii and the clever title go to Erica. If you want to add our next president to your Wii, just go to Check Mii Out, Posting Plaza, Popular, Search (the magnifying glass), Change (the circular arrows), and then enter the entry number 4764-4332-9025.

Update: Better image, and tshirts, available here.

But actually, no. Not really helpful at all.

The new Entourage 2008 has changed the way that custom sound sets (for the new mail sound, sending mail, etc) are stored. The old style, from Entourage 2004 and earlier, packaged up all the sounds as 'snd' resources in a single file. If you've come to the Mac OS platform in the last decade you're probably wondering what a 'resource' is, and it's understandable, because that's just not the way things are done anymore and it's getting harder and harder to even find applications to deal with resources, especially now that Leopard has killed off Classic mode.

But the good news is that the new format makes it really easy to throw together a sound set, and it's not terribly difficult to convert an old Entourage sound set.

Much more than you ever wanted to know, after the jump...

I've been fighting to get PSP video working consistently for what feels like years now, and so I'm going to document the workflows that work for me. For reference, I'm running Mac OS X 10.5.1 and I've got the latest PSP firmware, which at the moment is version 3.8.

DVD 16x9 source
Handbrake 0.9.1
Choose the PSP preset
Change Codec to "AVC/H.264 Video /AAC Audio"
Go into Picture Settings and Change Width to 480, Close
Go to Advanced Tab and type "level=3" in the x264 Advanced Option String
After encoding, place file into the /VIDEO/ folder of the PSP (no renaming required)

DVD 4x3 source
Handbrake 0.9.1
Choose the PSP preset
Change Codec to "AVC/H.264 Video /AAC Audio"
Go into Picture Settings and Change Height to 272, Close
Go to Advanced Tab and type "level=3" in the x264 Advanced Option String
After encoding, place file into the /VIDEO/ folder of the PSP (no renaming required)

AVI (or other video file) 16x9 source
ffmpegx 0.0.9x r1 (this is a version behind)
Choose the PSP H.264 preset
After encoding, place file without renaming (it'll be named MAQxxxxx.MP4) into the /MP_ROOT/100ANV01/ folder of the PSP

AVI 4x3 source
ffmpegx 0.0.9x r1 (this is a version behind)
Choose the PSP H.264 preset
Go to the Video tab and change the Video Size to 272 x 208
After encoding, place file without renaming (it'll be named MAQxxxxx.MP4) into the /MP_ROOT/100ANV01/ folder of the PSP

The last two are not ideal, but they work.
ffmpegx can be a pain to set up.

As some of you may know, I use a little service called Twitter to do something that you might call micro-blogging. (Besides my Twitter profile, recent "tweets", as entries are called, also show up on the sidebar of the FuzzyCo home page.) It's easy enough to use the web interface, but I also use a Mac desktop client called Twitterific. It's a $15 app, or you can use it for free in a mode where it will display an ad once an hour.

I had a great experience with Twitterific customer service just before Christmas -- I wrote in with what I thought was a feature request and I noted in my email that they could feel free to ignore my request since I wasn't one of their paying customers--I was still using the free, ad-ridden version. I had a friendly email back from them in minutes pointing out that the feature already existed and where in the preferences I could activate it. I promised myself that once we were past the holidays and present-buying, I would go ahead and register the app.

So it was an oddly good thing today when John Gruber pointed out that some jagmo was publicizing a hack to disable the ads in the free version of Twitterific. It's terrible that this jerk is trying to steal food out of the mouths of the developers of Twitterific*, but it's good because it reminded me to get off my butt and fulfill my promise.

* All of whom are orphans who live in an eco-friendly commune.**
** Not actually true, but Icon Factory really is an odd target for a "they're the man, keeping us down" rant.

I took a few minutes last night to set up http://fuzzyco.com as my OpenID identity, using Sam Ruby's super-easy instructions*. I went the super-geeky route of setting up my own OpenID server, but his instructions could also be of service to you if you have a) your own website and b) also an account on an OpenID-enabled web service like LiveJournal, MyOpenID, Technorati, Vox, TypeKey or others. By putting two lines of code in your home page's html you can use your own URL as an OpenID signon when logging onto an OpenID service (mostly blog commenting at this point).

(What's OpenID anyway? It's a way to login to multiple websites with one login, and for you to control where that login 'lives' so that you aren't stuck under the control of any one company or service that might go out of business (or go evil).)

The next step is to modify the commenting system here at FuzzyCo to accept OpenID. Unfortunately, that's going to get dumped into the big "properly redesign the freakin' website already" project bin. It's embarassing, I tell you. This whole website is a crazy patched-together beast that's been gradually updated since my first tentative "This should be <i>italic</i>" was vi'ed into a text file on schenectady.ecn.purdue.edu back in 1994. Since then, whenever I see a shiny web technology, I just clamp it on wherever it'll fit. Recent Flickr photos on the sidebar? Sure! I think we can duct tape 'em to the headlights. And when you get off the front page, you're either in NiceMT1.0Template City** or WowHaveYouEverHeardOfCSSville. Sigh.

* Be sure to notice his updates for PHPmyID 0.7 if you're following along to setup your own OpenID server.
** With its suburb -- HeyDidYouNoticeThatYourLayoutIsCroppingOffThatPictureburg.

I've got, as you might imagine, a hefty to-do list (though I did check one big item off last night). I mean, I haven't finished editing my own wedding video, which is now a year-and-a-half-old project. But someone on the Layer Tennis forums made a comment that gave me an idea and I've got a problem where sometimes when I get these ideas and I can't rest until I get them out of my head and onto the page or screen. So... I made this dumb ol' video*. Yeah, another remix of the footage I already remixed. I'm dumb.

* Higher rez versions than the YouTube here, if you care.

Layer Tennis this week was played in video created out of Adobe After Effects, which is incredible, if nothing else, for render times and pushing sizable files around (and in fact, they did go over their 15 minute time limits a hair). The remix challenge was to take the footage and turn it into some sort of coherent story. I'm not sure how coherent it is, but I just dropped off my entry and you can check it out, if you like.

Update: Don't do any of the hackery in this entry! Jim Fowler has released ForgetMeNot 4.1 to support Safari 3.0.4. Just go download it!

Because I never finish any project, I'm in love with a little plugin for Safari* called ForgetMeNot -- it remembers what windows and tabs were open when you quit Safari and reopens them when you start back up**. I've got a ton of windows open as To-Do reminders.

Well, Apple just released Safari 3 for Mac OS X 10.4*** (it comes with the 10.4.11 update) and ForgetMeNot doesn't want to load. There's a version of ForgetMeNot just for Safari 3, but it was only tested with the Safari 3 beta and SIMBL (the plugin framework that ForgetMeNot runs under) doesn't want to load it. Further, the developer of ForgetMeNot is a grad student (go U of C!) and hasn't updated his personal blog since May, so who knows when he'll get around to updating it.

(Oliver kindly points out in the comments that Safari 3 has a "Reopen all windows from last session" command in the History menu. The only downside to that command is that it's not automatic on startup. I've only used Safari 3 for about 10 minutes, but I think I need that automatic-ness. Hence, this quest...)

But there is a way you can get ForgetMeNot 4.0 working with Safari 3.0.4. HOWEVER this technique just by-passes SIMBL's sanity check — there might be big giant bugs waiting to destroy your browser. You're probably much better off waiting for Mr. Fowler to update the software.

But if, like me, you simply must use ForgetMeNot and are not willing to wait, go to /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins, right-click on ForgetMeNot.bundle and choose "Show Package Contents". Open Contents and then open Info.plist with the text or plist editor of your choice. You want to change the values for MaxBundleVersion and MinBundleVersion from 522 to 523. Save the file (you'll likely have to authenticate with admin rights to overwrite the existing file).

Again, let me emphasize that all this does is tell SIMBL that ForgetMeNot is compatible with Safari 3.0.4. It doesn't make it so, if there are bugs. There might be bugs. They might wipe your harddrive. Don't come crying to me if that happens.

I've been running this way for… oh, ten minutes now with Safari 3.0.4 on Mac OS X 10.4.11. No problems yet!

* Yes, there are similar plugins for Firefox, I just like Safari.
** Unfortunately, it does its "remembering" when you quit Safari, so it can't help you if the application crashes.
*** And Safari 3 is the browser in Leopard (10.5) but I'm not sure when I'll be upgrading. ActiveDirectory is, basically, broken.

I'll leave this here as a pointer until I get the site search working a little more comprehensively: if you came here looking for improv games or group games, you're probably looking for the Games List on the New Improv Page.

Can you break the secret code and find the word "Encryption"?

I'm in a training class in the Loop all week, if any of my Loop-bound brothers and sisters wanted to do lunch. My one constraint is that our instructor hates to wait in line for lunch and so we're taking off from 11 am to noon.

Please feel free to tune out immediately if you have no interest in the behind-the-scenes organization of this site. Look! There's an lolcat just below this post!

OK, so I've changed the ordering of the category archives so that they descend in reverse-chronological order, just like the main page. That seems to make sense, so that if you wanted to, say, keep up on just my running adventures you could book mark that category page and check for changes by looking at the top of the page*. The question, though, is about the monthly archive pages. If you were reading those pages, for whatever reason, you'd probably want to go in chronological order, but maybe should they be in reverse-chrono order just for consistency?

Oh, and I think I'm going to do that thing where the category pages only have the full text of a post for the, say, 10 or 20 most recent posts and after that they're just exerpts. It should speed things up for posting, I guess -- do any of my regular readers actually use the category pages?

* Of course, you can always subscribe to the FuzzyCo RSS or Atom feed in your newsreader or recent browser and always be up-to-date on all FuzzyCo goings-on.

This is kind of apropos of nothing, but I just really like the icons on the website for the Festival of Sanfermin in Pamplona, Spain (best known for the "running of the bulls" that happens during the festival). It's the work of clothing/design company Kukuxumusu, who have plenty of other cute designs. Cute!

I'm posting this here partly (mainly?) for my own benefit because, for some reason, whenever I'm trying to tell someone about a free utility they can use to figure out what's using all the space on their Mac's hard drive I can't remember the words "Disk Inventory X" for anything.

Since we're talking about comments (and not that there was any doubt around here about who's in charge), I now have my official moderator's certificate.

A dirty little semi-secret here at FuzzyCo is that I don't open Evites. Sorry if you've tried to invite me to something by that method. I've had to endure some ribbing from my friends -- "Is it that much work to click on a link?" And, frankly, the answer is kinda "yes". So I was happy to find out that it's not just me. Anil Dash, writing about Evite-competitor Socializr, says:

The fact that Evite's emails don't include the bare facts about the event you're being invited to speaks to their contempt for their users. I'm sure they had elaborate meetings years ago to justify this, but the right answer go[t] lost along the way. [emphasis his]

I've never used Socialzr, but I'm willing to encourage my friends to start using it for their group invites, if they'd like me to actually show up. (And, yes, it's all about me.)

Update: I don't have any events to invite people to, but I thought I'd put my money where my mouth is and sign up with Socializr. Seems nice so far.

After I just finished my reasonably-complex instructions on how to edit Sony Digital Camera MPEG movies on a Mac, I found out about the $30 SimpleMovieX which edits those movies just fine.

(via Daring Fireball)

Through absolutely no effort on my part, FuzzyCo is now is a green-hosted ("carbon neutral") site. Yay!

I wrote this up for Dan, so I thought I'd share. Most Sony digital still cameras can also record movies, which is great. The only problem with the videos is that they are multiplexed ("muxed") -- the audio and video are intertwined in a way that iMovie doesn't understand, so you get a silent movie if you try and edit it. After the jump, a workflow to get editable footage from a Sony digital camera using only free tools:

C'mon people, name your zip or tar files with, at least, the same few characters as the name of the file or directory that it's going to expand into. My downloads folder has a bunch of junk in it, so if I have to go hunting for your files once I've double-clicked on that archive... well, I'll be annoyed, that's what.

Loads and loads of jugglers list "rubber chickens" in the lists of ker-azy things they can juggle, but none of the major juggling suppliers sell them. And why should they, I suppose, when they're so easy to build. I realize this is of rather specialized interest, so the instructions are after the jump...

You probably didn't notice, unless you tried to leave a comment or use the search box, but the database behind all of the blogs I host here (this one, Erica's, The Wedding One, Erica's performances, my performances, the New Improv Page, and R. Buzzy) went south sometime last night. I had just finished setting up a Vox blog as a temporary measure, when Dreamhost got back to my help ticket and restored the database.

Their backup was about 24 hours old (which is better than my own most recent backup, which is 2 weeks old) so I lost a few comments from Tricia and Melissa -- sorry guys. But we're back up and running.

Sometimes, it seems, I go to great lengths to take new technology and shoe-horn it into old frames. Like the time I tried to install a CD player into my lamented 1974 Datsun 260z. Or like how I'm taking the data from a completely separate blog and cramming it into a table* at the top of my front page to make a list of upcoming performances.

But that does mean that if you're one of those hyper-modern people who uses a Blog Reader (or technically, an RSS aggregator) you can now subscribe to a feed of my upcoming shows and performances. You can also subscribe to Erica's shows, if you're a fan (and who isn't).

* Modern web designers, feel free to gasp. And then give yourself a heart-attack by going to look at my CSS file for this site and discovering that it doesn't exist. I'm really looking at getting that taken care of by 2008.

I saw the charts that Anil Dash and Tim Bray made of their blog archives, so I made one, too. I noticed that Tim has incorporated his old USENET posts into his blog structure. I thought about doing that for a few seconds and then I thought of six better things to do with my time than to recover the text of old juggling and improv questions. What I should do someday is bring some of the pre-2001 material (like getting my first tattoo in 1997) into the blog archives so it's easier to find and categorize. Oh well, I'll get to that in my copious free time.

Any of y'all using Twitter?

There's an article in New York Magazine called "Never-Ending Stories: How to fix shows like 'Lost'" about how TV producers never want to actually solve the mysteries on those kinds of shows because that would (they think) stop the delicious ratings-candy. I agree with everything the author says so hard it hurts. It's the same reason I won't read on-going superhero comics. I just like my stories to have beginnings, middles, and ends. Is that so wrong?

Watching the Japanese Mac/PC ads, even without being able to understand a single word, it's obvious that PC gets all the good lines. (The American ones are here, if you've never seen them. How is it living under that rock, anyway?)

(Via Daring Fireball)

Sausages, laws, and websites -- most people don't want really want to know how they're made. So feel free to turn your head away now.

I've been using Movable Type as my blogging engine since 1999 and, even though I'm using the latest version of the software, I've still got a lot of legacy cruft throughout my sites. For example, the individual posts of FuzzyCo and the New Improv Page are all just numbers (technically, "padded entry IDs"), like 001883.html. It's ugly, it doesn't tell you anything about the post, and it's depreciated by search engines. So I wanted to switch to a more modern system, where the above post would be a slightly more readable how_i_got_rid_of_mt_numbered_e.html.

It's easy enough to just change a setting in Movable Type and rebuild the site using new name styles, but I also didn't want to break links people (including myself) have made to old entires. There's a oft-linked solution to embed the old entry names in the entry basename, so that old entries would keep their numbered names through rebuilds and new entries would get new names. But there are two problems with this: 1) I don't want the old entries to stay ugly -- I want those numbered names to be gone, daddy, gone and 2) I understand that there limitations (bugs, even) in how MT handles customized entry basenames. What to do? htaccess! An htaccess file can (among other things) tell a webserver to redirect one filename to another and I could use a similar technique to the name-remapping solution linked above to automatically generate (most of) an htaccess file.

Order is somewhat important here, so here's the steps I went through:

1. Backup your Movable Type database. Always, always backup before you do any big changes. Backup all the time, anyway.

2. I made a new index template called "redirect" (I could have named it "htaccess", but I wanted to have to manually rename it when I was ready to put it into place, to have that degree of control).

That template contained the following:

<MTEntries lastn="99999"$>
Redirect 301 /archives/<$MTEntryID pad="6">.html http://example.com/<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1">/<$MTEntryBasename$>.html
</MTEntries>

(The middle part from "Redirect" to the second ".html" should be one long line, with no line break.)

To break this down, <MTEntries lastn="99999"$> says "do this for the last 99,999 entries". (If you have more entries than that, you'll need to adjust. Also, hats off to you.) Redirect means redirect any request for the listed file to the listed URL. 301 is a code that tells the requesting browser that this is a permanent change (302 is temporary) and search engines and well-behaved web services will update their databases, bookmarks, etc. /archives/<$MTEntryID pad="6">.html generates the current file name (the entryID, padded with zeros to make a 6 character string) (your file path may, of course, vary). http://example.com/<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1">/<$MTEntryBasename$>.html generates where the new file name is going to live. I'm switching to "primary_category/entry_basename.html", so your code may vary if you're switching to a different scheme.

3. Save and rebuild the template. Note where the file is generated.

4. Go to Settings >> Publishing and under Archive Mapping change the Individual Entry Archive to use your chosen naming scheme. Save changes. (If, like me, you're doing this because you've been using MT for a long time, you may want to go to Settings >> New Entry Defaults and change Basename Length up from the old default of 15 to the new default of 30.) Rebuild your site. Check that everything is working with the new naming scheme.

5. When you're sure everything is working, move/rename the redirect file to .htaccess (the leading dot is important). Don't replace any exisiting .htaccess file! The possible complexities of your local web setup are beyond the scope of this post. (Have I disclaimed enough?)

(I also changed my Category and Date-based Archive name schemes at the same time, but there were so relatively few of them that I just constructed the htaccess entries with some simple grepping in BBedit. I suppose it'd be possible to do something similar to the above for them as well, though.)

I've only made the change to the New Improv Page so far, and I'm going to pound on it for a few days to make sure there isn't anything I've missed before I change over FuzzyCo, but I thought this method was worth sharing.

Cool -- I just updated MovableType to the latest version and finally moved from a flat-file database to MySQL (welcome to the year 2001!) and remarkably, it all seems to have gone smoothly.

Thanks to the genius minds at Metroblogging HQ there's now a little widget over on the right-hand side of my front page (somewhere in all that mess) that shows the last 5 posts I've made on the Chicago Metroblog.

I'm moving fuzzyco.com between registrars over the weekend. In theory, it should be a seamless move, as the underlying hosting isn't changing. In practice, fingers crossed...

I just learned from a teacher friend of mine that they're teaching kids these days to cough or sneeze into the crook of their elbow. Which makes a ton of sense as soon as you think about it for two seconds -- "cover your mouth when you sneeze" is fine as far as it goes, but then you're just going to go put those grubby, germ covered hands all over everything. Crook of the elbow. Wave of the future. Pass it on.

My friend Kyle has starting blogging. You may remember Kyle from such stories as "Kyle made a t-shirt" and "Kyle tells you TV".

Erica and I have a little Animal Crossing: Wild World town called Cutiburg and our friend code is 3479-5957-5475 if you want to visit us over wifi. If that makes no sense to you, then please pretend I said nothing and we can continue to pretend I'm an adult.

Since we're on the topic, Yoz Grahame, who was one of the technical consultants for The IT Crowd, has up a simple* photo quiz about the set of the show.

* Simple for those of you who start sentences with "back in my day we only had 64K of memory, uphill both ways..."

Roy: Yeah, you do know how a button works, don't you? No, not on clothes. No, there you go, I just heard it come on. No, that's the music you hear when it comes on. No, that's the music you hear when... I'm sorry, are you from the past?

The favorite new sitcom around the office is The IT Crowd, a British sitcom from the creators of Father Ted about a small IT department. (Hey Fuzzy, you don't live in Britain, how are you watching this show? Oh, there are ways.)

Hi-larious stuff, even if you're not a super geek. (Though, don't worry if you are a super geek -- real geeks were involved.)

And now my friend Kyle has made a T-shirt inspired by one of his favorite lines from the show. Available in geek-friendly black as well.

Update: BoingBoing linked to the shirts and Cory Doctorow called them "amazing fan-tees".

I don't usually post about technical stuff here, but Apple doesn't have this on their site and I just figured it out on my own, so I wanted to share.

If you have XSAN 1.1 installed on OS X Server and you uninstall it by running the "Uninstall XSAN.pkg" that came on the CD, after the required restart Server Admin will report in red that you have an "Invalid Serial Number". If you look at the Settings tab, under your completely valid serial number it will note "Invalid serial number: could not check license with daemon."

Apple acknowledges the problem, but their only solution is to call Apple Care. When I did so, the Server tech I talked to had no idea of any solution and said she'd escalate it to Engineering and they'd get back to me in 3 - 4 days.

So here's what you do: Reinstall XSAN 1.1. This will restore the system components that are needed to validate your serial number. Download the XSAN 1.2 Uninstaller. (I actually updated to XSAN 1.2, thinking that would give me the 1.2 Uninstaller, which it didn't, but I think the 1.2 Uninstaller will uninstall 1.1 also -- but I don't want to reinstall everything to check.)

Ta Da! XSAN uninstalled, valid serial number, no three day wait. Why that's too complicated for Apple to document, I'm not sure.

I found this picture at Thanksgiving in a stack of family pictures. Mom says we never had a TV stand like that, so we're not sure whose house this was at. The photo is (presumably) by Don Gerdes.

While I was trying to clean up the color a little, iTunes random-play threw up Henry Rollins, Talk Is Cheap Vol. 4, "I Can't Get Behind That", about Hank recording a track with William Shatner for Shatner's Ben Folds-produced album Has Been. Ooooh... synchronicity.

Things I absolutely do not need, but have decided I absolutely must have: a Kazooka electric kazoo and a $20 ukulele.

Listen, Phisher community, I've put up with a lot of terrible grammar from y'all, and a lot of emails from "banks" I don't even bank with (how successful is a world-wide phishing attack on the Second National Bank of Aberdeen, Pennsylvania going to be, anyway). But you really should make sure you're correctly spelling the name of the bank you're trying to convince me needs me to "update my information". I mean, Wells Frago?

I'll admit -- I'm a little obsessed right now -- I'm playing Tony Hawk Underground 2: Remix on my PSP on the train and Tony Hawk Underground at home (pictured, my skater "Fuzzy"). A lot.

Found in the dressing room at the Improv Kitchen.

Update: Matt Martin points out that this is almost certainly inspired by the Toothpaste for Dinner cartoon panflute flowchart.

I moved FuzzyCo a while ago to fix the connection problems we were having, so to get me the universe had to turn off the power to a whole city.

Personally, I'd go with a GIF for line art like that.

To paraphrase the Geto Boys: Damn it feels good to be a geeksta. Biking is fun and all, but biking with numbers... yeah boyee.

Home to work: 7.24 miles
Max speed: 18.3 m/h
Moving Avg: 13.2 m/h
Time taken: 32:40

Two kinds of geekery here: technical and mixological. I disabled Trackback on the site a week ago -- Trackback is such a great idea, but the only Trackback pings I've gotten for months have been nasty, nasty spam. On Friday, Making Light announced that they also have disabled it, and, as a side note, gave a link to the recipe for the Sazerac -- a venerable New Orleans cocktail. Well, that led to a trip to Sam's Wine & Spirits over the weekend who, not surprisingly, had all of the somewhat-obscure ingredients to make the cocktail. There's nothing I like better than buying three or four 750 ml bottles to make one cocktail -- the back of the liquor cabinet is littered with an army of 7/8 full bottles leftover from similar experiments. In any case, Sunday night after a long day of packing and moving (thanks Jin and Shaun) and sorting and building and rehearsals, Erica and I sat down to a fancy Southern meal - KFC and Sazeracs. Delish.

Megan took her website away from me yesterday -- which is fine, it's hers and she told me she was going to be hiring a real web designer and I just threw it up and I don't have time to really do it right and (whisper) I'm not that great a web designer and (even quieter whisper) I haven't had time (in the last 4 years) to learn CSS, which I know would make my webdesign sooo much smarter and better and easier. So, like I just said, it's fine. Buuuuuut... whenever I hand a project off to someone else, there's always this twinge of "ohhh... I could make time to do this project right. I could invent a new day of the week and then I'd have loads of time to redesign this website!" And that's what I'm feeling right now.

FuzzyCo has been going up and down like a yo-yo on a bungie cord on a rollercoaster. And we're not sure why, yet. Your patience is appreciated.

The tech blog Gizmodo runs a periodic feature called "What's in your gadget bag?" where they ask tech figures like Cory Doctorow, Glenn Fleishman and ... Dave Barry what kind of gear they haul around with them. A few hundred users of the Flickr photo sharing service are using the tag whatsinyourbag to share the same information with each other. I figured it'd be a good chance to clean out my bag to take everything out, take a picture, and join the crowd.

From left to right

Timbuk2 Commute bag with Strap Pad and iPod case
bills
Sniff tissues
checkbook
spare business cards and Playground discount coupons
Stereo headphones for Treo 600
no-W button from Dan
keys with garage door opener
Game Boy Advance SP (Fire Emblem inside)
extra GBA games: Advance Wars 2, Super Puzzle Fighter II, Donkey Kong Country, Warioland 4, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
Sony DSC-U30 digital camera
ibuprofen & ibuprofen/pseudophedrine
Maglite Solitaire flashlight
iPod (20 GB) with Sennheiser MX400 headphones
Macally Podwave mini-speakers for iPod
Griffin iTalk microphone for iPod (I never use it)
PocketDock 6-pin Firewire and line-level adapter for iPod
lens cleaner cloth for glasses
spare batteries for digital camera
spare MemoryStick for digital camera
spare SD memory card for Treo 600
Handsfree headset for Treo 600
Glide dental floss
Garmin Geko 201 GPS (which has an exposed power button, so it always gets turned on in my bag, so it's always dead)
SmartDisk 30 GB Firewire harddrive
Moleskine pocket notebook
RCA to S-Video adapter for Powerbook
ziplock bag of change (got my bag a second look the last time I went through airport security)
Halls Defense Vitamin C lozenges
Sony 256 MB USB Drive
Kensington 256 MB USB Drive
Headphone adapter for Game Boy Advance SP
Stereo headphone adapter for Treo 600
Pens, mostly Uniball varieties and Sharpies
Treo 600 PDA/phone (I did a whole post about the software I have installed on it)

I used to carry a Gerber Recoil Auto-Plier and/or a Leatherman Juice S2 multi-tool everywhere, but I keep taking them out of the bag to fly and then forgetting to put them back in.

And of course there's a book in there. Right now I'm reading Jeff Griggs' memoir of Del Close, Guru.

http://j-walkblog.com/blog/index/P18861/

Sean Bonner asks what software he should be looking for the Treo 650 he (whistle, look at feet) might get for his birthday. I'll answer here with a list of what I have on my Treo 600:

AA Flights -- American Airlines is my company's standard airline, so I figured it'd be useful to have the timetables with me. Hasn't been useful yet, but you never know. (And I know it'll be even less useful to Sean.)

AIM -- it's nowhere near as nice as the AIM client on the Sidekick, but you can download a Palm version of AIM from AOL.uk

BackupBuddyVFS -- I was religiously syncing my Palm everyday, and then it died and lost all its data while I was on the road and so I couldn't restore for days until I got home. So I got BackupBuddyVFS Pro and the Palm auto-backs up every night at midnight to the SD card.

Bejeweled! and Bookworm -- hours of fun

Blocks -- Tetris for Erica.

DopeWars -- you know, I never really got into this game, but I keep reinstalling it on every Palm I get.

FileZ -- for moving files to and from the SD memory card.

Galax -- I love me some Galaxian.

Kinoma -- a video player. The Pro version of the player plays mp4 files.

Klondike -- I'm pretty sure this came free with the Treo. I think it's a law that all platforms ship with a free version of Solitare.

MetrO -- a free, extensible public transport guide.

MovieRecorder & SoundRecorder -- I've never really used them. But I might!

mp3ringer -- because it is VERY important that I have Banana Phone as my ringtone. (I think I read that the 650 will have mp3 ringtone functionality built-in.)

NesEm & Phoinix -- I installed these, but I never really use them since I carry my GBA everywhere anyway.

PalmaSutra -- a naughty classic.

PocketTunes -- I mainly got this to make mp3 ringtones work, because I have an iPod.

pssh -- so I can SSH into fuzzyco.com to read my mail in PINE.

Qset -- to adjust the compression quality of jpegs produced by the built-in camera.

SFCave -- the world's simplest action game.

SnapperMail -- I only bought SnapperMail because the built-in Treo Mail app doesn't let you send an email without checking your email. I check with pssh, when I want to send an email I just want to quickly SEND it. I bought the Enterprise version because it does IMAP under the (see AA Flights, above) just-on-case theory.

Spaceward Ho! -- I used to play Spaceward Ho! for hours and hours and hours on my old Mac SE and IIsi -- often both, because it was the first multi-player game I ever played.

Strip -- to hold my passwords.

Vagablog -- promises to be a mobile blogging solution. I haven't gotten it to work yet.

VeriChat -- I'd probably use this if I used more than just AIM. But I don't. I should probably free up the space and delete it.

Web (Blazer 3.0) -- I just use the built-in browser and it's pretty OK.

I don't use Hand/RSS, because I just browse to Bloglines and they have a mobile-optimized version.

Hardware:
I got a 512 MB SD card for cheap with a rebate and it holds my backups and some time-shifted sitcoms for watching with Kinoma. And the combo USB cable/charger is much nicer to carry on the road than the cable with the wall wart.

In course of looking for the URLs for these products, I found a couple of other "what's on my Treo" lists and I'll probably be adding some of their listed apps soon.

After this one plane ride, I think I'm giving MarsEdit a big thumbs up. I've composed my last three entries in it and it's slick and easy.

Erica and I had a great Thanksgiving in Austin (well, Round Rock/Pflugerville) with my family. I have super-cute pictures of my super-cute niece and nephew I need to share with you. (Yes, need.)

And Kenan installed iTunes Watcher and then scrapped that and set up with Audioscrobbler and I thought, yeah it'd be cool to have a lil' thing on the sidebar here that says what I've been listening to, even if it means finally learning a little PHP to make it happen, so I got myself an Audioscrobbler account just in time for their servers to all blowup. So, OK, maybe iTunes Watcher is more suited to my needs, anyway... and the whole Thought Anomalies website was down (it's back up now). Grrr. Just frustrating. (What I have been listening to, I'll tell you, is a bunch of Pete Miser. Oh, and this morning Accordion Tribe's Boeves Psalm came up on random on my iPod and I rewound it and played it 4 times in a row. (I originally found it at Music For Robots.))

So I gave up on iTunes for the moment and I thought I'd work on being able to post to FuzzyCo from my Treo. I found a ton of scripts and it took me a couple hours to figure out that each one did about 85% of what I wanted and that I was going to have to pick one and modify it to suit my needs and by then it was time to go have dinner with my honey. So all together a frustrating time. Why aren't things exactly arranged for my convenience!?

And then Shaun and I are busy working on our sketch show for Chicago Sketch Fest (Sunday, January 9 at 5:30 pm!). Except that he's been out of town and sick and I'm sick and about to go out of town.

Oh yeah, I'm gonna be in Philadelphia all next week. I'll be in training all day, but I have Tuesday to Thursday night free. Is there anything fun to do in Philadelphia?

I was going to write up a geeky little post about why I had finally moved from a Danger Hiptop/T-Mobile Sidekick I to a PalmOne Treo 600, but then I summarized it in a comment answering Sean's questions about phone/PDA combos.