Category: Idle

Categories
Photography

Smugmug tip: Feature your favorite pictures

One of the reasons I’m a huge fan of smugmug is because they’ve made it possible for their customers to enhance and extend their web pages.


I wanted to have a gallery on my smugmug site which consisted entirely of my favorite pictures.  One of the ways I could do this was by taking each picture I like, then making a copy of it into a new, “favorites” gallery.  While this would have done the trick it also means having to manage duplicate files and I would no longer have the context of when the picture was taken.  I had to find a better way.


While trying to figure out if there was a good way to do this I stumbled across David’s automatic “recent” featured gallery. The recent gallery used JavaScript to insert a gallery of recent pictures into the smugmug web page.  I realized that with a little massaging the code could instead display a gallery based on a keyword.


Favorites


I now have the feature I desired: a gallery of all my favorite pictures which didn’t require duplicating pictures and was automatically updated.  Anytime I find a picture I like I simply add the keyword “favorites” and it is automatically included in the favorites gallery. Check out my smugmug site to see it in action.


If you are interested in doing the same thing on your smugmug site, I’ve written up complete instructions and provided downloadable JS files to cut and paste into your smugmug control panel.


Note: I really must give all credit to David for this since I really just trimmed and modified his code for this.

Categories
Life

That’s how health works

It’s stuff like this that makes e-mail fun at work.

Tim e-mailed to let the SharePoint team know he was working at home sick, this was the exchange we had…

Tim:

Hi Team,

I’m going to stay at home with the germs. I heard that it was a popular pastime for the team these past couple weeks.

Tomatoes are not to blame! Please, don’t turn against them.

And don’t worry too much about me; I took a vitamin (Flintstones COMPLETE [More COMPLETE with Choline]) , so everything should be fine.

Sincerely,
-Tim

Reeves:

Since Fred is bigger than Barney is he more nutritious?

Tim

I’d have to assume that Fred’s additional mass of chalk and artificial sweetner contributes no nutritional value.

I imagine molds of many characters, each receiving the same miniscule scoop of vitamins and minerals, moving down a conveyer to a second, varying-sized treatment of filler.

I don’t know if they do anything to even out the nutritive content. Perhaps they’re all liquids that eventually bake or cool.

When they’re formed, they go into a bottle and then I eat them.

That’s how health works.

You want to know the rest of what’s in Flintstones?

Categories
Life

This is the type of stuff I think about in the morning

I had a glass or orange juice then brushed my teeth.  Ah, refreshing.

Why does it taste horrible if I drink orange juice after I brush my teeth but it’s tasty when I brush my teeth after I drink orange juice?

Oh, turns out the orange juice I like is made by Coca Cola company… who knew?

Categories
Life

Inbox Zero!

image This is much more exciting to me than it is to the rest of the world.  I have cleared my inbox and my workload is now tracked by my task list.

Why is this good?  It now means that I’m not using my inbox to figure out what I need to do next.  Why is that bad?  Because the contents of my inbox are controlled by everyone else more than they are controlled by me… makes it hard for me to be in control of my tasks.

Now I need to actually get the stuff done.  The upside is I know what the stuff is.

Categories
Travel

You know it’s time…

Yesterday after sitting on the beach for the morning I started getting anxious.  I wanted to get home to get to work on our house and dig into projects at work.  Perfect timing, I guess it’s time to go home.

 
Paula and Reeves enjoying a fruity drink on the beach.

Categories
Travel

Ahh… vacation

As is becoming the trend lately, Paula is the first to post… so I refer you to her blog for details.

For those of you at work, don’t worry, I’ve already forgotten your names.

Categories
Music

My new favorite way to listen to music: Pandora

I love listening to music, I have gigabytes of tracks stored on my Home Media Server but there’s a catch: who has time to look through nearly twenty-thousand tracks to pick out just the right grouping of songs? 

image

Enter Pandora, a fantastic streaming music service which takes a song or artist as input and then creates a steaming radio station based off the musical “genes” of your choice (for more, see The Music Genome Project).  It’s fantastically easy, and it’s free to listen from your computer.  Try it out, you don’t even need to create an account to start listening.  Genius!

The whole experience is really quite slick.

  • Land on the home page and you’re prompted to enter a track or artist… no login to get started!
    image
  • Playing music to fit your mood is as easy as picking a song or artist.  Let’s say I’m in the mood for some Yes, type in to the box, click “create” and Pandora sez: 
    image
  • Sweet, what about the rest of the songs?  Next track is Pink Floyd:
    image
  • You can rate each song, telling Pandora to play more like it, or not play that song anymore on that station.  You can also look up why any song is playing if you’re curious.
  • While it’s free to listen to on the web you can also pay a nominal fee for Pandora goodness on your other devices.  For example, if you have a Sonos or Squeezebox you can pay $36 a year to stream custom, commercial-free radio stations around your house.

image What’s playing on the Yes station?

While Pandora is almost magical, it isn’t infallible. 

  • If you listen for a long time (several hours) you’ll start hearing repeats. 
  • Pandora sometimes seems to get its wires crossed… our Dixie Chicks station will occasionally play Corn or Guns ‘N Roses.  Huh?

It’s also worth noting that Pandora doesn’t allow you to play any song you like at any time (like Napster), but that also allows them to have pricing more like satellite radio.

Now what I’d like to see is Pandora for my own music.  Let me pick a track then have Pandora create a play list I can sync to my portable media player.

Categories
Friends

Jason continues to live in infamy

image

It looks like there’s going to be an attempt to resurrect BattleBots on ESPN, but apparently, without Jason.  Jason did point out, however,  Popular Mechanics choose to mention him before Carmen Electra in their article.  SNAP!

Categories
Cars

The new CTS-V — not sure what I think yet

I really liked the last Cadillac CTS-V and probably would have bought one if the interior didn’t feel so cheep.  I also like the tweaks they’ve made to the styling of the new CTS.  I’m not sure, however, that I like the new CTS-V.

Sure, it’s got all kinds of sexy under the hood and the interior looks much improved… but the outside looks like they made it a bit too bumpy/bulgy.  I’m sure they wanted to make it seem extra-tough… but it’s looking like they may have gone past the look of a sleek athlete and ended up with something a little more cartoon superhero.

  

I’ll reserve final judgement until I see it in person, but with 550HP & lbs/ft I suspect I’d never want to be looking at it from the outside.

via: autoblog

Categories
Life

Back in the USA

The stress of moving and changing jobs has kind of put me off blogging… so for updates I refer to you Paula’s blog.  She has been much better than I about blogging as of late. 🙂

At any rate… after a much delayed flight from Dublin to Chicago we’re relaxing in the American Airlines Admiral club.  I must say, AA is going down hill.  The aircraft here from Dublin was a total beater (our seats had no functioning lights and the channels on the AV system wouldn’t change).  The Admiral’s club is not much better, the seats all look like the upholstery hasn’t been cleaned in a decade.

Yep, delaying my flight for several hours forcing me to have a 5 hour layover makes me grumpy.

Bah!