Archives for the month of: September, 2004
« Older Entries

Pre-birthday and Tivo

September 27, 04 //
9

TivoWith my birth­day around the cor­ner I’ve been scout­ing out poten­tial gift ideas for those who are more inclined to pur­chase a gift for me than a sim­ple money exchange. Some peo­ple feel that it’s imper­sonal to slip a few dol­lars into an enve­lope and oth­ers would rather take the “money route”, not know­ing what to get the per­son. The fact is, there are some peo­ple that are hard to shop for and some, like me, are excep­tion­ally easy.

Truth be told, my inter­ests fall into three cat­e­gories; books, games and movies. Games being the video game type and not nec­es­sar­ily the card­board type and books gen­er­ally hav­ing to deal with movies and fan­tasy peak my inter­est and fuel my imag­i­na­tion. My wife, how­ever, feels that video games are a com­plete waste of time unless it’s Sim­C­ity, in which case she enjoys immensely — espe­cially with the infi­nite Simoleon cheat.

For my pre-birthday this year, my wife and I took a trip to Sta­ples and pur­chased a Linksys router and adapter. After­wards we picked up a shiny new Tivo at $249 with a $100 rebate. Con­fig­ur­ing the wire­less net­work for our apart­ment was pain­less. Set­ting up the Tivo was an entirely dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. You see, the Tivo, while tout­ing its advanced dig­i­tal video record­ing tech­nol­ogy, needs a phone line to set up the chan­nel lineup and other nec­es­sary items. The prob­lem was that our apart­ment does not have a land­line, there­fore I hauled our Tivo to my inlaws, hijacked their phone and let it con­fig­ure itself overnight (a total of 5 – 8 hours since it uses the inter­nal 56k modem).

This morn­ing I picked up the Tivo, brought it back to our apart­ment and hooked it up. The rea­son it needed “x” amount of hours was to upgrade the OS and add the chan­nel lineup for the next two weeks. There is sup­pos­edly a hack where you can bypass the Guided Setup by phone and use your broad­band net­work instead, but despite nume­orus tries we couldn’t get it to work.

All said and done the unit itself works fine, per­fect even. It’s a blast set­ting up shows to tape dur­ing the day when we’re at work and com­ing home to the shows we assigned. One of the cooler fea­tures of Tivo is the Sea­son Pass, which allows you to con­fig­ure Tivo to record the entire sea­son of a spe­cific show spec­i­fy­ing whether you want reruns, first runs or both.

Aside from my vicious head cold, it’s been a great pre-Birthday for me.

Flickr

September 22, 04 //
10

Flickr ChihuahuaEver since sign­ing up with Flickr a few days ago I’ve been hav­ing a ball with this com­mu­nity dri­ven photo shar­ing web appli­ca­tion. Even though it’s still in the oblig­a­tory beta stage, it’s jammed packed with sev­eral stream­lined fea­tures. The appeal lies within its sim­plic­ity; that is the abil­ity to upload pho­tos, attach titles and descrip­tions and share them with other Flickr members.

The process of upload­ing a photo or a group of pho­tos from your com­puter or phone is as easy as pie. After log­ging into the site, where you are greeted by a chi­huahua chew­ing on a pink glove, you sim­ply browse to your group of pho­tos and select ‘Upload’, it’s as easy as that and yet the fea­tures included in this beta appli­ca­tion are not only note­wor­thy but extremely use­ful. For instance, with Flash installed a slew of fea­tures are at your dis­posal, including:

  • Add to faves. Adding the par­tic­u­lar photo to your favorites. I haven’t poked around enough to fig­ure out where the Favorites sec­tion is, but I know it’s stor­ing them somewhere.
  • Photo edit­ing. The abil­ity to edit the title and descrip­tion at any point in time and an option to rotate your photo. This only applies to your pho­tos only.
  • Blog this. This option allows you to post to your blog. Flickr sup­ports a vari­ety of blog­ging appli­ca­tions includ­ing the likes of Blog­ger, Mov­able­type, Word­press and others.
  • Notes. One of my favorite fea­tures, this allows you to leave com­ments on any photo, whether it belongs to you or not so long as the owner of the photo has enabled note tak­ing. You sim­ply drag a box, much like you would in some photo edit­ing soft­ware, to des­ig­nate a point of ref­er­ence and type your message.
  • All Sizes. Click­ing this will dis­play a vari­ety of sizes for the spe­cific photo, includ­ing an option to save the photo directly to your hard drive. The photo sizes ranges from a thumb­nail to the orig­i­nal size of the photo.

Among the fea­tures above is also the abil­ity for any­one to com­ment on your pho­tos. Typ­i­cally this results in either mad­cap or insight­ful dis­cus­sions deal­ing with the photo’s con­tent. For instance, one of my pho­tos of a lawn gnome smok­ing a pipe yielded a descrip­tion, by none other than my good friend Max Riffner wherein he described the plas­tic gnome as a “pervy stalker, lay­ing in hid­ing until the oppor­tu­nity arises to kick some­one in the shins.” With that in mind, I added a cou­ple of notes to the pic­ture high­light­ing the gnome’s hash pipe and shin-kicking boots. It’s this kind of syn­ergy that makes Flickr not only fun and diverse but addic­tive as well.

A recent addi­tion to the appli­ca­tion allows for topic-specific groups. Join­ing a group is a sim­ple as well, join­ing and cre­at­ing your own group is just a mat­ter of nam­ing the group and pro­ceed­ing to invite Flickr mem­bers to con­tribute to the dis­cus­sions tak­ing place. One such group, Dis­ney Geeks, posts pic­tures from var­i­ous parks includ­ing attrac­tions, mer­chan­dise stores and out­lets and behind the scenes employee shindigs. In the same vein, there is also Flickr Live, which is an inter­ac­tive real-time chat pro­gram built into the web appli­ca­tion itself. Log in and share pho­tos, chat with your con­tacts and con­tribute to this ever­grow­ing community.

As I men­tioned Flickr is still in beta, mean­ing they are still work­ing out var­i­ous bugs and opti­miza­tions. A free account, which will always remain free, lim­its your trans­fer amount to 10MB a month or $120 a month. On the other hand, a Pro account, which is rumored will cost between $4 or $5 a month, gives you 1GB of trans­fers a month which equals to about 12GB of stor­age space a year. The sys­tem doesn’t limit the file size, so with that in mind you could just as eas­ily upload a high-resolution photo at 1792×1200 or a lower res­o­lu­tion photo at 800×600.

I’d sug­gest set­ting up a free account and exper­i­ment with what Flickr has to offer. I guar­an­tee that you’ll be pleased with the results from this excel­lent photo shar­ing web application.

Update: In regards and in ref­er­ence to the arti­cle above, here is my Flickr gallery: kartooner’s flickr gallery.

High School Counselors

September 19, 04 //
13

“You’ll never grad­u­ate from a four year col­lege.” Those words, albeit harsh and abrupt, were given to me by my high school coun­selor, her response to my deci­sion to drop my Alge­bra 2 class in favor of tak­ing Ceram­ics 101.

I remem­ber the day like it was yes­ter­day; a light wind swept through the cam­pus as I strode to the Guid­ance office to tell my coun­selor about my deci­sion. When I reached the office door I had a flash­back to my early years of education.

I’ve never been excep­tional at Math. Dur­ing my grade school years, my fam­ily moved a few times in those crit­i­cal years where stu­dents learn how to add, sub­tract and mul­ti­ply. When I was around 7 years old my par­ents divorced which had a pro­found effect on me, both men­tally and emo­tion­ally. The men­tal aspect affected my abil­ity to learn math­e­mat­ics along­side my class­mates, wherein inevitably I would fall behind.

I owe it to my grand­mother who did try her best to keep my “wits about me”. When school wasn’t in ses­sion she would home school my brother and I. Many times this meant wak­ing up early in the morn­ing, sit­ting down at the table and work­ing through 25 or so Math prob­lems after break­fast. Which reminds me, did you ever read the back of the cereal boxes?

Any­ways, when the words “You’ll never grad­u­ate from a four year col­lege” slipped from my coun­selors mouth and smacked me in the side of the face I looked back to the times where I tried my best to learn the mechan­ics of Math. Despite my attempts to resur­face what I had learned in grade school, Alge­bra and Geom­e­try got the bet­ter of me, to the point where I decided to drop Alge­bra 2 (of which I was fail­ing mis­er­ably) and replace it with Ceram­ics my senior year.

My coun­selor, a petite Span­ish woman with a slouch, peered through her thick glasses peck­ing at the key­board, grunt­ing under her breath. She slid open a drawer in her desk, retrieved a piece of paper and pushed it towards me. “You real­ize this might effect your over­all GPA? Drop­ping a class, espe­cially Alge­bra 2, will hurt you later on in life.”, she said try­ing to warn me of impend­ing doom on my part. I nod­ded and signed the Class Release paper, fill­ing in the replace­ment course with Ceram­ics. She clipped the paper to my file and added, “One more thing. The Ceram­ics class is full, which means you’ll have to enroll as a T.A. or Teach­ers Assis­tant”. At that point it didn’t mat­ter, so long as it wasn’t Math I was con­tent with what­ever sit­u­a­tion lie ahead.

At the end of our lengthy and drawn out con­ver­sa­tion, as I walked out of the door­way, she reminded me once more, “You’ll never…”, but she never was able to fin­ish because I walked away. When I got to my Ceram­ics class, fully pre­pared to assist the teacher, I won­dered if other high school coun­selors were as “encour­ag­ing” as mine.

Look­ing back I can’t wait to prove that lady wrong. I have every intent to obtain my degree and send Mrs. Orso a let­ter describ­ing how I avoided her advice, but thank her at the very least for pro­vid­ing an exam­ple of what a bad coun­selor can be. After­all, these are peo­ple who are paid to guide our chil­dren through­out their aca­d­e­mic careers, not with words to crip­ple their aspi­ra­tions, but advice to pur­sue suc­cess with every intent to become a bet­ter person.

Version One: Fingerpaint

September 15, 04 //
14

I’ve noticed a recent trend among web devel­op­ers releas­ing their first gen­er­a­tion web designs for his­tor­i­cal and resource pur­poses. In my opin­ion this shows that every­one has an evo­lu­tional process when it comes to design, be it web-related or not. For exam­ple, Dave Shea of Mez­zoblue, doc­u­ments his site’s aes­thetic (and log­i­cal) evo­lu­tion in A Dif­fer­ent Kind of Perma­link.

Fol­low­ing this trend, and real­iz­ing its implicit sig­nif­i­cance, I’ve shown you my first web site enti­tled EMWare Pro­duc­tions, scrapped from Archive.org’s Way­back Machine.

That said, I’d also like to show you the orig­i­nal kar​tooner​.com site, of which I deem Fin­ger­paint. It might not sound as robust as Pro­ton but for me it’s some­thing to reflect upon and real­ize where I was, design-wise, 3 or 4 years ago to where I am now.

kartooner.com [version 1]

« Older Entries
SEO Company, Directory Submission, Phone Cards, Calling Cards, International Calling Cards