It’s been suggested that the ex-Expos be renamed the Grays after the old Washington Negro League team (though I prefer “The Washington Monuments”). What is a gray?
The SI unit for the energy absorbed from ionizing radiation, equal to one joule per kilogram.
Go Grays!
just a quick plug for two great tools for managing online photos.
Flickr is a free service that has lots and lots of goodies. You can upload photos, send them in via email or cameraphone, and post them to a Flickr blog and/or have then automatically sent out to your webpage. They also have a nice community setup where you can have all of your friends’ photos collected for easy viewing. It really is a neat service, and if I refer five people they’ll give me three months of Flickr Pro for free, so let me know if you want to try it and I’ll send you an invitation.
I also highly recommend TypePad. In addition to being a full-featured weblog service based on Movable Type, it has a good suite of photo tools and great support for posting from a mobile phone. To use photos it’ll cost you $8.95 a month, but it really is worth it if you’re looking for a good place to publish writing and photos (and they’re running a lifetime 10% off deal right now).
I sent this letter to the editor of the Washington Post today:
DC Mayor Anthony A. Williams recently stated that he will use eminent domain if necessary to clear room for a baseball stadium. The Fifth Amendment clearly states that private property may only be taken for public use. Building a stadium to house a professional baseball team is not a public use. Were the land to be used as a public park, or for a local school, eminent domain might be appropriate. DC should not tax its businesses to pay for a stadium to be used by another business, and its citizens shouldn’t have to give up their homes just because professional baseball doesn’t want to pay a fair market price.
Props to Gabriel for attuning me to this issue (and for hanging out with me this weekend).
Now that I’m using Gmail as my primary mail provider, I’ve gone searching for a few utilities to make it work more like a desktop client.
The two biggest gripes I have with webmail are that it doesn’t work with mailto: links and that you have to check manually to see if you have mail. I’ve found good solutions for both of these issues. At work on my PC I use Google’s own Gmail Notifier, which pops up a little dialog by the system tray. It also lets you associate it to mailto: links, but seems to get confused if you also use Outlook for another account. For MacOS X I’m really liking gCount. It sits in your menu bar and turns red and optionally plays a sound when you get new mail. To make gCount your default mail handler you’ll need to open Apple’s Mail, go to its General Preferences, and select it instead of Mail.
I considered using Gmail Loader to import all my old mail, but decided against it because the mail doesn’t get imported with the right date and I think it’ll only be a matter of time before Google implements an import function (they already have for contacts).
In the interest of saving money I’ve decided to let my .mac account lapse when it expires next month. Please consider my Gmail account to be my primary address for the time being.
I very much prefer client email to web-based, but unless someone wants to throw some venture capital my way (I have tons of ideas) so that I can quit my job and work from home, webmail works better when moving from my work PC to my iMac to Katherine’s PowerBook.
Okay, so I get that Han’s a hero and Lucas didn’t want him to be killing people in cold blood, but even after the re-done scene was re-done, how could Greedo possibly miss from that range?
I sent the following letter to the editor of the Washington Post today:
I’m disappointed with the Washington Post’s poor job of proctoring today’s Live Online discussion with Star Wars Trilogy DVD producer Van Ling. I would have liked to learn something about how one produces a DVD from one of the best in the business. Instead the Post repeatedly let in complaints on topics he had nothing to do with like the movies’ content and their audio mixing. In the interest of not wasting Mr. Ling’s time the Post should have rejected off-topic questions.
There’s a gag in Chasing Amy about comic book inkers. It’s funny if you know what they’re talking about. For most comic books, the artwork is drawn first by the penciller, then given to the inker to go over the work and add form and defintion to it. It’s an important process, in part just because it takes most of a month to pencil one issue so it’s hard for a penciller to ink his own work and meet his deadlines. Once the inker is done it gets colored, these days usually also involving some computer special effects like gradiants. Getting back to Chasing Amy, the joke is that all inkers do is trace the pencils, so they’re really just tracers. The Pulse has nice examples of the process from an issue of Identity Crisis that shows how imporant each step is. Pencils are by Rags Morales.
I’ve so far been very good about not getting new games until I beat the ones I have, but Katherine and I loved the first one so much that when Pikmin 2 came out we had to pick it up. It’s been very strange going back and forth between it and Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow.
I got around to setting up PGP on my iMac today. Email doesn’t have very much built-in security, so without a system like PGP there’s no way to know that the message you’re getting from someone is actually from who it’s supposed to be from and says what it’s supposed to say. Here’s how to set it up to work with Mail:
Of course, this will only work for me when I’m using my home computer and not my Gmail account, but at least I have it set up now.