Archive for the ‘general’ Category
look, somebody knows me!
Posted by detour1999 | Filed under general
so, eli tagged me in an internet meme. apparently I’m supposed to list seven things about myself that are interesting or obscure, then tag 7 other people to do the same. This should be interesting… as I’m barely introspective enough to think of seven things people might find interesting or obscure, and I’m not sure I know seven people that haven’t already been tagged.
Hilarious.
Ok, without further ado…
-
I went to hardcore punk shows with my mom.
I used to be very involved in the punk scene in Philly, even though I am not musical in the least. I helped my mother research her doctoral dissertation about the sXe scene in Philly… that involved going to a bunch of hXc shows with my mom. Incidentally, to this day, I don’t own Minor Threat’s discography, but I have permanently borrowed my mother’s copy.
-
I used to have really long hair that confused people
I married my high school sweetheart last year, about 10 1/2 years after we graduated from high school. That is neither obscure, nor interesting. However, knowing that when she first met me she didn’t know if I was a guy or a girl is both obscure and interesting. (I was chubby and had really long hair when I was 13… it wasn’t the only time people didn’t know, though it was decidedly the most hilarious.)
-
I used to be an art nerd
When I applied to college I applied to two types of schools; those with excellent math programs (Princeton, MIT, UC Berkeley) and fine art schools (RISD). I chose math and went to UCB (for about three months then dropped out to be an options market maker on the PCX options exchange…). I stopped doing art for a couple years, and started again in 1999, at the time, I would sign all my paintings with “detour” and the year. That is where detour1999 came from. I don’t paint anymore, but the name stuck.
-
I am French
I am a citizen of the United States (and also of France.. shhh, I’m not sure if dual citizenship is allowed in the US atm.)
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I read a lot of mysteries
I read a lot of mysteries. I generally go through about 1 a week. I like them because I don’t have to think at all. I have recently started [re]reading a bunch of Agatha Christie books. I generally read as my main source of relaxation rather than TV or video games.
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I am a Quaker
I am a mostly non-practicing Quaker. I was raised Quaker and still consider myself to be an atheistic Quaker. Basically this means that I try not to be a dick, I try to value all people, and I’m non-violent. It does not mean that I eat a lot of oatmeal, or that I worship Wilford Brimley (which people have thought was what Quakerism is all about, it’s not).
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I like old watercooled volkswagens
I am a very weird old watercooled volkswagen fanatic. I have a 1991 Jetta diesel that I bought about four years ago for $450 that I drove every day for about three years. It still runs awesome even with it’s 280K miles, even though I haven’t driven it in a while. I also have a 1981 Rabbit Pick-up (aka the caddy) that will be getting a turbo diesel motor that I am rebuilding that I tore out of my other ‘91 Jetta that I scrapped. I also rebuilt an ‘84 rabbit diesel for my parents… I could go on for hours about that…
so, on to the tagging some of these people aren’t currently blogging. those people are hopefully going to start:
joe curlee - is crazy
bryan knight - we do a lot of websites together.
aaron salmon- is a great friend and makes the internet pretty.
jake nickell - he made threadless, and makes me laugh all the time.
armelle richard - my sister is amazingly awesome.
atkins meyer - is both hilarious and crazy smart.
jeffrey kalmikoff- is amazing and makes things pretty.
The rules:
- Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
- Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
- Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
- Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.
damn, that only took me like 3 weeks…
Firefox 3: thoughts and impressions.
Posted by detour1999 | Filed under general, nerdly
Well, I did my part.
I just installed the latest Firefox as part of download day.
My first thoughts (I haven’t looked at ff3 since and early beta…)
- I miss my bookmarks that all got deleted (meh.)
- I miss(ed) firebug. (getfirebug.com v.1.1 v.1.2 works just fine)
- I miss(ed) firecookie (http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firecookie/firecookie-05-beta/ v0.5 seems to work fine)
- Firefox no longer crashes fatally every time I close it. (seriously, every single time I closed it)
- Startup and shutdown are INCREDIBLY fast compared to ff2.
- I miss my themes… and mozilla.org is a little swamped right now, so I can’t get a new one. However, the default theme is really not bad at all.. I just miss my old one.
We’ll see how well it deals with being left running…
hopefully I’ll never see memory usage of 1,268,300k ever again.
I’ll update with more as I remember things.
Update:
I upgraded to ff3 on my macbook.
- Colorzilla needed to be upgraded ColorZilla v2.
- Bookmarks transferred just fine…
my life as a sitcom.
Posted by detour1999 | Filed under general, nerdly
So, I’m getting married…
For some reason there are a bunch of people that share my and my fiancees names, so I was unable to get dylanandsarah.com or any variation on that… out of frustration, I found a URL that fit my mood.
myfuckingwedding.com
awesome.
in a fit of brilliance, my wife-to-be suggested dylanlovessarah.com. Acquired and set up. Rock.
in a fit of general stupidity, I had extra invitations printed (in comic-sans…) that told people to rsvp @ myfuckingwedding.com… to send to my friends who would undoubtedly find it as hilarious as I do.
Today we found out that at least one of the “informal” rsvp cards was inadvertently sent to one of Sarah’s cousins.
Hilarity ensues.
Sometimes technology is too much for me.
Posted by detour1999 | Filed under general, nerdly
Like when I IM twitter in response to an SMS I just reveived from twitter.
To respond to the person sitting 8 feet away from me.
(and then blog about it.)
-d.
google product consintency.
Posted by detour1999 | Filed under general, google, nerdly
I use reader. A lot. I love it.
I also use gmail, which I also love.
I hate going to gmail quickly reviewing my unread email and hitting shift-a and not having it mark everything as read.
I have done so at least five times.
today.
Anyone know of a greasemonkey script that ports the reader keyboard shortcuts to gmail?
-d.
charts w/ the google chart api.
Posted by detour1999 | Filed under general, nerdly, programming
What if there was something that could merge a sad love for data (and the display thereof) and a disturbing affinity for the web and its development.
What if.
What … t f
Oh hell yes. A relatively simple API that will generate a simple .png of a chart based on data you pass it. Awesome.
so, I had some fun playing with it today.
It’s pretty damned easy to use and puts together some pretty nice results…
not too shabby, right?
Harper suggested I write a php wrapper for the api.
I told him it almost wasn’t worth it since the API is so easy to use. However, being the sad, lonely man that I am, I spent my friday night playing computers.
So, after playing with the API for a couple hours, I have some issues…
- No support for negative numbers. None. WTF?!
- Bar/Line charts only support numbers <=100
check it out:
Lame.
But, there are ways around most of these…
all data needs to be converted to a percentage. So, 1000|100|10|-10 would become 100|10|1|-1.
Negative numbers are still an issue… some people over on the Google Chart API Google Group were talking about adding a second set of data to mimic the x-axis to get the display of the negative number to kinda work.
I decided not to bother with that just yet.
So, I started working on a PHP wrapper for the API that took all of these things into consideration…
…which I should have kinda working this weekend.
-d.
first week down.
Posted by detour1999 | Filed under general, work
well. first week at the new job is done.
I can’t possibly express how excited I am for the time ahead.
There is really nothing quite like new and interesting challenges to make me excited about work.
awesome awesome awesome.
-d.
new job
Posted by detour1999 | Filed under general, work
so, yeah….
i’ve finished up the fourth day of my new job.
its kinda weird to be busy.
and kind of exciting.
more to be posted sometime when Im not about to fall asleep.
-d.
the end is nigh.
Posted by detour1999 | Filed under general, work
tomorrow is the end of my current tenure at this job.
i’ve been here for a long time (about 26.6% of my life right now…), so it’s kind of bittersweet.
good people will be missed.
new and different things starting soon.
werd.
-d.
sleep, or lack thereof.
Posted by detour1999 | Filed under general, nerdly
Couldn’t sleep last night… shocking, I know.
Rah tried to help with the following
“Try to think of 100 colors.”
it helped for about 3 seconds while I wrote this in my head:
public string[] ListColors(int numColors)
{
ArrayList colorList = new ArrayList();
for (int curColor = 0; curColor < numColors; curColor++)
{
string newColor = Convert.ToString(curColor, 16);
newColor = FormatHexColor(newColor);
colorList.Add(newColor);
}
return (string[])colorList.ToArray(typeof(string));
}
private string FormatHexColor(string newColor)
{
string retStr = "#";
int leadLength = 6-newColor.Length;
for (int a = 0; a < leadLength; a++)
{
retStr += "0";
}
retStr += newColor;
return retStr;
}
yeah, I’m kinda lame..