by Matt | Oct 30, 2007 | Personal, Web
Nagle, being the awesome guy he is, was kind enough to hook me up with an invite to ffffound yesterday. I’m actually enjoying the service quite a bit. I find it to be almost a Digg + Flickr + Pandora kind of thing. You can select images you like off the front page and add them to your own collection or you can wonder the net, find an image you like, and add it to the collective. I find it very inspiring as a photographer, to see so much good work collected all in one place.
While ffffound is incredibly awesome in concept, it does seem to have a few technical draw backs that I hope they get ironed out before coming out of their closed beta. First on my list simply has to be the very odd image size bug. When you post a huge photo to ffffound, it shrinks it down to a more post appropriate size. When you find an image that isn’t so large, it tells you that it isn’t large enough to be posted. I found this to be the problem with 99% of the images on Flickr. Some of the images from my various favorite Flickr feeds weren’t large enough for posting BUT are, on the average, larger than the reduced size that ffffound uses. If you’re going to resize everything to be approximately 420×420, why on earth would a 480×480 image be too small? For example, I find the work of Tom McFarlane to be fairly interesting, if not amazing. Almost all the images in his photostream are larger than some of the small images on the front page of ffffound, but yet I can’t share them.
What compounds this problem is the fact that on the “how to” page, no mention of photo requirements is given at all. If they’re looking for a minimum size, I’d love to know what the actual dimensions are. All the page describes is that you can click on something to fav it, and that installing the bookmarklet is recommended.
Another small technicality is that of friends/followers. Either I’m completely retarded and can’t find the option to add friends or there simply isn’t one. If there isn’t, why does it say, underneith my screen name, that “I have no followers”. There is a short list of “favorite users” towards the bottom, but that’s comprised of people who’s ffffound lists I’ve added things off of, which is great if that person constantly uploads good stuff, but sometimes it’s a one-off and I really don’t care about their list of photos in general.
The last thing, which I’m sure they’re working on, is the if/then recommendation engine. As it is, I’m being recommended this image 3 times on my “found list“. Problem is, it too is already on my list. Why would an image I’ve already added to my favorites bother showing up in the list of “things I might also like”? Of course I like it… I just added it. Do they want me to add it again or something?
Like I said at the top, it’s a great little service, one I’m going to continue to use and will probably be a decent source of inspiration down the road. They’ve got a lot of kinks to work out, but if they pull it off, it’ll be a great site.
Oh, and if you want to check out my found photo stream, here it is…
http://ffffound.com/home/doc/found/
by Matt | Oct 29, 2007 | Personal
No Casey, no striking out, just joy. By now you all know that the Sox won the series. I can hardly fathom that not only did they win in 2004, but now they’ve won again. They had never won since my grandfather had been alive, and now they’ve won twice. It’s quite a new feeling for the Nation. It feels different. Much different than 2004. There was such a huge weight on them that year. It seemed like everyone knew they were somehow doing the impossible. This year it seemed more than possible, it seemed very likely.
Who I admire most is actually Terry Francona, not only does it seem like he knows that group of guys on both a professional and personal level, but that he trusts them. He knows when pitchers are done, he knows when someone needs rest, he knows when to put someone else in and when to stick with someone. I think he’s a great “players manager” and I think the next few seasons will be equally spectacular.
I also admire two of the most senior members of the Redsox line up, Jason Varitek and Mike Lowell. Lowell came through when everyone needed him to and was just totally and completely solid in the playoffs. And Tek, well, he’s just a classy guy all around. Papelbon and Beckett are simply money on the mound, but Tek and Lowell are two of the rocks that that team is built on. Rookies look up to those guys and they really inspired and helped make the younger guys confident going into a situation like that for the first time.
Speaking of which, it’s now occurring to me just how young this team is. In a perfect world, if everyone stays together for the next few years, contracts are resigned (and they had better resign Lowell), and everyone stays healthy, we’re looking at quite a team for the next 5 years or so. They may not win the Series every year, but I have little doubts that they’ll be playoff bound on a regular basis.
Others describe the happening in RedSox nation so much better than I do. I’ll let them handle the news. All I wanted to say was how proud I am to be a Sox fan, how happy I am that they won, and how excited and privileged I’m going to be to see them play over the next few years.
GO SOX!
by Matt | Oct 27, 2007 | Personal
Someone radio DJ schmuck the other day asked the always interesting question “what would you really want to do before you die?” Most people called in and said things like “spend time with my loved ones”. I’d agree with that whole heartedly. If a giant earth crushing meteorite was heading for Texas, I’d be spending my last moments alive… ummm… horizontal. But, a more interesting question might be, what do you want to do in life, at some point, before you die. Now, this question doesn’t involve certain death. It’s more of a “if you could do anything, what would it be” kinda question. I thought about it for a little bit, and came up with a short list of things I’d like to do before I die (of old age).
– Play a musical instrument in front of a live audience.
– Design a video game.
– Get really drunk in Scotland with a group of my friends.
– Drive in a professional race (not NASCAR), stunt course, or high speed police chase.
But the biggie, the thing I’ve always wanted to do more than anything, that keeps popping into my mind every time I turn on the radio/TV….
PIRATE RADIO
I don’t really know why. I guess it’s the whole letting your voice be heard thing. With a healthy dose of “sticking it to the man” thrown in for good measure. What would be even better is that if, somehow, my pirate radio broadcast inspired a second American revolution. It would be great. We could dismantle the credit bureau industry, smash anything with high fructose corn syrup, run the rich out of town, beat up some congressional lobbiests, restore a few liberties and have a massive BBQ on the front lawn of the white house.
But, if pirate radio doesn’t work out… well, it’s got to be a run for President. You’ve got to be 40 right? So, right this second, I’m officially declaring my candidacy for the 2020 elections. Perry for President in 2020.
What would my platform be?
“When I’m President, I will firmly kick, square in the ball sack, the heads of any major corporations that are leeching off of this country. I will fight, in an exhibition boxing match, any leader of a foreign nation that opposes us. I will invite over for ice cream, any leader of a foreign nation that supports us. I will surprise any leader of a foreign nation that’s plotting against us by inviting them for ice cream then beating them in a surprise exhibition boxing match. My domestic policy? Get a job. My foreign policy? Fuck you, we’re not accepting any more imports. Americans will use 99% American made goods, eat food that grows on trees or walks around on American soil. Everyone will have fiber, the internet kind, and lots of it. We invented the internet, there’s no reason I should have to wait for a video of someone getting kicked in the ball sack. Oh yeah, one last thing… free pie for everyone.”
If that doesn’t get some votes, I don’t know what would.
Anyway…
Back to the point. Pirate radio. Anyone has a transmitter? Seriously though, what would you do, at some point in life, if you could?
by Matt | Oct 26, 2007 | Culture, Web
That’s what setting up an ical remote calendar feels like. Mozilla Sunbird and Thunderbird (with the Lightning plugin) are supposed to “publish to a remote server via FTP” when you hit the “publish calendar” button. Unfortunatly for those of us in the real word, it doesn’t work like that. Not only does it not work, but there are no instructions on how to make it work. So, I start poking around the server and the calendar application, wondering what the hell I’m suppose to do. I finally figured it out, but only after giving myself a migraine in the process. In case you’re wondering, here’s how…
-Download and install Sunbird, or Thunderbird and the Lightning plugin.
-Start either program and make a new blank calendar. For this example, we’ll call ours “Work Schedule”.
-Right click on the calendar and select “export”.
-Save you calendar as an *ics file. Remember not to use uppercase letters or spaces.
-Open up an FTP client of your choosing and connect to wherever you’re going to be remotely storing your calendar.
-Upload your blank calendar, in this case named simply “work.ics” to a safe directory ABOVE your web directory (above www)
-CHMOD the calendar file to 777 and close your FTP client.
-Open Sunbird/TB again and select File -> Subscribe to remote calendar.
-For the location, put in “ftp://ftp_username:ftp_password@yourserver.com/work.ics”
-If all goes well, you should be subscribed to a readable/writeable blank remote calendar.
Also, you can now safely delete the default “Home” calendar now that you have a second one. Both programs require at least one calendar by default. Try it out, add a few items and see how it goes. As of the latest version of SB/TB, the changes to your calendar should be uploaded/updated automatically. If you have multiple users updating the same calendar, it would be wise to right click the calendar and select “refresh calendar” before making any changes.
Matt out.
by Matt | Oct 24, 2007 | Games
Apparently the term “save skate video” isn’t quite exact enough to make finding any sort of help on the subject likely. All I was trying to do is save the embedded flash movie to a more useable format. NONE of the 400 billion firefox extensions for saving flash movies worked. It seems that the dark overlords of EA Games decided to deeply entrench their movie playing goodness deep inside a rediculous number of nested windows and players. What you’re seeing in the post before this is merely the top layer. That grabs some ASP page, which in tern grabs the player, which grabs the movie. That’s all fine and dandy for embedding video, it works quite well. However, since EA in their infinite wisdom has limited the total number of video clips a user can upload into their system before erasing old ones, that makes it fairly hard to build up a collection. So, for no other reason than petty vanity, I tried to SAVE on of these videos. That simply isn’t happening. Looking to Google for help didn’t turn out so well either. Thankfully, that’s where community sites come in. Buried deep down in community forums is where internet travelers like myself find the juiciest bits of information. In this case it was a link to the Skate Reel Video Converter from the nice folks at Skate.This. Now I can save my videos as any one of the popular video formats with minimal fuss. Huzzah.
Recent Comments