Tag: me

doh!

i just learned that charlie had hooked me up with a complimentary pass for day one of bloggerCon which was yesterday. i had not known about it, so i did not attend. damn!!
at least, i am here now, after the usual public transport ordeal. i really need to learn how to drive.

Pioneers


i ran into ed cone and lance knobel last night.
i talked with ed about tara sue, and how she was the pioneer for political weblogs. mentioned that something interesting may soon happen with political weblogs in switzerland. lance used to run the davos meetings of the WEF, and has had a weblog for years. in years past, he used to provide very good inside coverage, something that is now sorely missed. he made me aware of some MP in the UK that really understand political weblogs, and consequently write them themselves.

memor{y, ies} for life

i’m in some ways, prone to the keep everything disease. while i do not care at all about physical stuff, and like to have my belongings fit nicely into a carry-on, i tend to hang on to digital creations and traces. it may be part of the rebuilding your existence meme. i am left today with the task of merging backups of 3 different machines i used to work on. fortunately, i adopted a fairly strict hierarchy for storage:

  • work
  • private
  • misc
  • study

with appropriate subdirectories. i have this hierarchy for imap, filesystem, bookmarks, my images, and plan to extend it to various log files in the future, like IM logs or browser histories. what would really help me is a diff tool that works across directories and lets me know where to put things. i know about the various synchronization features windows has, but they only work if you set them up beforehand from what i understand. ideally, at some point, my data will all sit somewhere in the cloud, and i can access it from any device without having to worry about synchronization.

Openoffice screws Kucinich

i have a confession to make. i almost obliterated a good chunk of kucinich supporters (well, their email addresses). i was trying to be helpful, offering to do some data mangling / cleanup tasks as a token of appreciation for henri, who graciously hosted me in san francisco.
so i sat down with the openoffice spreadsheet and went into tinkering mode. after a while, i had the procedure down, and was happily getting rid of dupes and sorting the addresses in various ways. scanning through the dataset, i noticed something odd: entire letters were missing from the alphabetically ordered list. openoffice had somehow munged ~30% of all records (~100k email addresses). fortunately, i had backups. redid the job with excel, without a glitch.

Mobile video


i am toying around with my new webcam. the quality of the pictures is nothing to write home about, and the tripod of the cam broke the second day. then again i got it for $50. i look forward to explore the combination of wifi and webcams, should add another dimension to the moblogging theme.

internet-powered journeys

i arrived in NYC this morning, after a journey that went like this: ride to palo alto caltrain from stanford university – figure out where i REALLY have to go – call cab – drive to stanford shopping center – take bus into milbrae – hop onto bart – change at west oakland – take air bart to oakland airport – hop onto jetblue plane – get off at jfk – take bus to subway – get off at 34th street – orient on the street grid – find cafe – search for wifi
most of this would not have been possible without either notebook or wifi. technology has allowed me to be much more last minute than i ever was. no long planning, figure out your journey on the road, check the net if you are lost etc. i will try to coin a phrase for this experience, “wifi enables real time travel planning, and reduces anxiety.” will do for now.
i have to run, client meeting.