When browsing Chester’s journal tonight, I came across an entry where he harnessed the power of his community to figure out the meaning of red paper numbers on cars. Reading the post reminded me that I’ve been baffled for years by the meaning of the CE mark on the back of certain products. Because I’m in the States and everyone here navel-gazes, no one I have asked has known what it means, either. I finally looked it up. (read more »)

I often imagine MIT as an institution walled-off from the norms of Western social etiquette. You know, Western social etiquette being the norm because we’re in the States and all.

In case you can’t tell, I’m on the verge of another private work rant.

The Slingbox has been getting a ton of media buzz since its introduction into the market, and it’s easy to see why. You plug the thing into your video devices at home (Tivo, cable box, DVD player, whatever), and it gives you streaming access to them from any internet connection in the world. As a frequent traveller, it would be really cool to be able to access a TiVo or something from a hotel room in Singapore. It would be even better if that TiVo were piggybacked onto a friend’s cable connection (since I have no TV signal at home). :) (read more »)

turtle @ smithsonian

After winning the Animal Antics category in the Nature’s Best 2005 Photo Contest, I waited for months for details about the accompanying exhibit in the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. I never really received firm details, but I knew the exhibit was up when friends started sending me photographs of the Screaming Turtle in the exhibit (thanks, Mike, Oliver, and Wendy!)

UPDATE Purchase a print of this image! (read more »)

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brunch in chelsea

Photos: Sarah Kemble in San Francisco, Sarah in New York, Joe and Rachel Chang, Chee-yun’s visit, portraits of work folk, and the geekiest party EVER. I am not ashamed.

 

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Normally, I love my Delkin Cardbus CF and 5-in-1 readers, but I’ve been frustrated with the 5-in-1 adapter since switching to the Fuji FinePix Z1. The Z1 uses xD cards (lame), so I purchased an Olympus 1GB xD Type M card, which works both in the camera and using a USB 2.0 xD card reader I have. The Delkin claims compatibility with xD, but when you try to use it to read my particular xD card, it never mounts as a volume (Windows XP SP2, latest Delkin driver from their website). (read more »)

Hey, guys. Private entries haven’t been showing up for the majority of registered users. I think I’ve fixed it. If you have an account, you should probably get into the habit of staying logged in. My install of Wordpress doesn’t (yet) put in private entry placeholders (which means that you won’t get notifications if you’re using RSS, either), but I’ll hack the plug-in at some point. (read more »)

Disclaimer: inane content. (read more »)

In the last week, Akismet (an excellent anti-spam-comment plug-in I use with Wordpress) has caught and filtered 6,123 spam comments in my journal here. I had to write my own anti-spam code back when I used b2, but since I had silent failure and no logging, I had no idea how many spam comments were actually being caught. 874.71 per day is a lot. I hate these people. Use Akismet. It works.

Take this test. In an hour and fifteen minutes or so, I scored 23, Peter scored 25, and Francis scored 26. In the end, we teamed up and scored 30. NO CHEATING! :)

I gave myself 1 hour for part 2, and scored 15. An’ den, Peter and I collaborated to score 18 before giving up (and going back to normally scheduled work). (read more »)

Hey, guys! I know I do this repeatedly, but it makes me happy.

If you have a moment, please leave a comment here and let me know who you are, how you found this journal, what you do, etc. A linked photo would really be nice; i’ve found that if I can associate a face with a stranger’s handle, it makes me feel like there’s more of a connection. (read more »)

I finally managed to wrangle together some friends to go to a Movado Hour event! Pat, Peter, Karine, Jen, Claire and I managed to get six seats together to see Bella Davidovich, Dimitry Sitkovetsky, and Andres Diaz perform Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio Op. 50. It’s a tough one for audiences, I think. I understand that the vast majority of the piece lives in theme and variation, but it just goes on and on and on. It would be hard for any group to make it compelling.

After the show, we went to dinner at D’or Ahn, which I can only describe as specializing in “Korean-flavored food.” We were served something that sounded like “veal feet” (mumble mumble), which we dismissed as being implausible before finding out that we had in fact just eaten veal feet.

The food is unique, but only fair in taste, and definitely not worth what we paid.

I forgot my camera. No photos for you.

My buddy Jay Hunter Morris got a llama for Christmas. He named it Tina.

That is so awesome. None of my other friends have llamas. (read more »)

scraping wax

I was in Oakland during the weekend of January 7-8, and I paid dearly for my California experience. But it was worth it.

We had a nice potluck on Saturday night even though more than half of the invited folk couldn’t make it. Earlier in the day, Elliot and Mandy came over for a nice, California brunch (ahhh, California — how I miss it), and Vienna, Heidi, Marty, Bill, Geoff, Livia, Steven, Oliver, Melanie, Cindy, Mister Chris, and Dave trickled in around dinner time for an evening of food, wine, and good conversation. (read more »)

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jen shyu

On January 5, Peter, Karine, Lorri Elder and I went out to see Jen Shyu and Origins perform at Kavehaz. I hadn’t seen Jen in quite some time, and as usual, it was nice to see her in action.

Afterwards, Lorri convinced me to get another drink, and we ended up in a bar close to her place, having just missed the end of a burlesque show. Too bad! I’ve never been to one, and it looked like it would have been interesting.

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Last night, I photographed the dress rehearsal of Osvaldo Golijov’s opera, Ainadamar (Fountain of Tears). Two other photographers and I stood in a roped-off section of the Rose Theater in the Time Warner Building and clicked away during the no-intermission opera in three acts. (read more »)

My server was compromised again last week. One of the ways the guys got in was through a SQL Injection Vulnerability in EE 1.5RC4 (Exhibit Engine). Gotta love unsupported software. It’s a good thing there’s a community of users out there on the web. I just wish there were a way to harness their power in a “push” sort of way instead of forcing people to go searching for fixes after the problems occur.

• EE1.5RC4 SQL Injection Vulnerability Fix
• Suggestions for securing EE directory through .htaccess

movado hour

I realized that I never posted photos from the second Movado Hour concert at the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation. Jennifer Frautschi and Pedja Muzijevic performed Hummel’s Fantasy for Piano, op. 18 and Schubert’s Fantasy for Violin and Piano in C Major. This time, it seemed as if a full third of the available seats had been blocked off for “important” people.

Pat Suh and I ended up sitting in a table that had (questionably) been reserved, and when Baryshnikov came over to investigate, Pat offered him a seat on her lap, which I thought was funny. He had no response. ;)

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You know you’re in a bad situation when you’re forced to upgrade to an alpha product.

Having said that, Wordpress seems to be behaving, probably because Alex King helpfully agreed to grab the latest trunk build, which I’m told contains many, many bug fixes. I tried to get access to the nightly build by signing up for the mailing list, but the link that was then sent to me went to a dead page. Wordpress is a strange beast. (read more »)