it seems something happened out there wherever my laloca database is stored, and content back to early ‘08 got zapped. luckily i last backed up in late june ‘09, and posting for a variety of reasons has been light since then.

google’s cache to the rescue, which has some of the missing posts between mid-feb and last june. stuff will slowly be coming back, but alas, some things may be permanently lost in the ether.

james (a.k.a. “host”) has a touch more info on how it all went *poof* – but in the end, he’s as clueless as i am.

photos from the dawn monument stroll. fake polaroid dry transfer technique on scanned paper bag. mixed results. ww2 monument is my least-disliked one.

the kindle arrived yesterday. it’s very nice, although the form factor’s a bit on the dull side – it reminds me of the generations of putty-colored PC clones that squatted on my desk until i switched to macs. the most surprising drawback so far: it took me more than an hour to find a book i wanted to download to test the thing out, during which time my beef shwarma sandwich got cold. while searching for reading material, i realized that the only time i buy books online is when i have a specific title in mind – usually for something work-related. otherwise, i browse the stacks in the bookstore, and most of my new purchases are happy accidents facilitated by the ability to thumb through books, read a few paragraphs, and ponder.

you can’t do any of that online. yes, that’s an observation for the file marked “duh,” but it wasn’t really brought home to me until last night.

first, i started browsing by author, in the hopes that some of my favorite authors’ older titles would be kindleized. no such luck. then i dug around in my brain for the name of an author i’d been considering purchasing, but never got around to. i plugged it into amazon (at this point i was searching on my laptop, not with the kindle – the device was too slow and not intuitive enough for a quick transition), looked at the few results returned, and realized none of the blurbs were interesting enough to effect a purchase. knowing that infinite jest wasn’t out for kindle, i checked a heartbreaking work of staggering genius – but it, too, has yet to be kindleized. my last-ditch effort was to browse through the top selling kindle books, whereupon i landed at the girl with the dragon tattoo. i vaguely remembered reading a review of it, so i downloaded it.

i tried reading a few pages last night, but i was tired and the interface too new. i picked it up again this morning, and to my satisfaction, found myself sinking into the book despite the foreign form-factor and somewhat annoying page transition (the screen flashes a negative image of the page you’re reading, which then quickly dissolves into a positive image of the next page). i briefly contemplated throwing it in my shoulder bag to take to work, but i didn’t order a case for the thing and there were other items in the bag that i thought could damage the device. so it’s at home, charged and waiting.

(yes, yes, yes, it’s g’s kindle, not mine. and i probably should’ve let him open the box, but i wanted to make sure it worked properly and could hold a charge. he’s not going to get home for a few more days, so it makes sense to give it a run-through while he’s away. i’ll surrender it when he gets back. i promise.)

i thoroughly dislike what appears to be a sudden rash of “snap shots” plug-in usage on area wordpress blogs. you’ve probably seen the effect, if not the script – that annoying little bit of web magic whereby the owner of a blog provides you with a popout box showing the contents of a link on the page upon mouseover. the site for the utility claims it offers “a better user experience and an entirely new source of ad inventory.” i submit that it does not (on the first count), and if you’re writing for your own pleasure, that of your friends, and perhaps the nameless, faceless masses who may stumble across your blog, ad inventory should not be up there on your list of must-haves.

in addition to being conceptually loathsome, the execution is horrid. in link-heavy posts, you must take care that your cursor does not inadvertently fall upon a link, thereby obscuring all the text around it. as most people don’t regularly park their cursor in reliably safe bit of screen real estate (such as the upper-left corner), this results in a mouse-dance of jiggering and twitching as the reader attempts to avoid the link-mines. it’s annoying, and really, does a small, nearly illegible image of the linked-to page have any effect at all on the reader’s interest in following it? i challenge anyone to show that it does – at least in a positive manner.

so to all of you who use this little plugin, i have one, simple request:

please stop.

update: a gentle reader gives the following instructions for reader-side disabling of the plugin:

Go here: http://www.snap.com/snapshots_faq.php
Click on the third FAQ item
Click “Click Here”

i’m all for reader-side fixes – they allow for greater customization all around – but if you’re like me and you clear your cookies after every browser session (okay, you’re probably not like me, and i’m probably just paranoid about my digital traces), you’ll have to do that every time you launch your browser. *sigh*

new lens + cs3 + county fair = time to play with high dynamic range stuff. so first: the original two photos. the top was metered for the shadows, the bottom, for the peaches in the sun.

then, the two get combined, and voila! high dynamic range. it’s my first attempt, so there are definite issues (like the woman who appears twice), but i think i’ll keep playing around with it.

a quick-and-dirty entry from my iPhone, just to test the new interface¹ – all seems well, and this might just get me back to moblogging (after my short-lived attempt back at the beginning of the year, when a post turned into a page and frustrated me to no end).

there’s also support for uploading photos, so i’ll have to try that as well.² still no word as to an easy alternate stylesheet for iphone viewing optimization, though. must look into that.

desktop edit: so i wrote the post on the phone and added the photo, which showed up – as you can see – at the bottom. no way to add alt or title tags to it from the iphone, and no easy way to specify where it is placed in the entry. (the phone’s continuing lamentable lack of cut-and-paste figures highly here.)

for them that’s interested, the photo is of the PAHO building, as seen from the E street trench.
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¹ it’s apparently slightly buggy, as the “save” button abruptly disappeared after i added another category. something to tell the developers.

² photo apparently uploaded, but no immediately obvious way to embed it in the post.

boy, my sense of timing could use a tuneup. two of my favorite things – information and disease¹ – now taste great together, thanks to google and the harvard medical school.

it’s healthmap. and in these days of the census bureau goofing around with the protocols for the 2010 headcount, it’s a breath of fresh air.

hmmm. they appear to have a jobs listing…²
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¹ see – i didn’t even have to create new categories for this post. that’s how near and dear those topics are to me.
² just kidding! i really like my current job!

okay, here’s my first attempt at using a Mac dictate for dictation purposes. I’ve got the dog sitting next to me, snoring, the goofy headset on my head, the sun shining outside, and a bottle of water on my desk. So far it seems to be working okay. What is strange to note is that I actually speak differently than I write. Intellectually, I know we all do this, but hey — I figured I was different. Narcissism!

Well, it apparently carriage returns when I tell it to. Although if I were to actually use the words that I spoke to get the urge to return they wouldn’t be printed I would get a new paragraph. In fact, it tried to do it right there, so I had to speak very slowly to trick it into writing the words.

So that’s it. I’m not speaking particularly differently than I would on the telephone, and it’s a bit strange sitting here looking out the window and seeing the new words appear on the screen. They show up more quickly than I would’ve expected them to based on my previous experience with ViaVoice — a program which, in my opinion, colossally sucked.

Freaky! And I suppose I’ll have to get used all of this auto capitalization. I’m really much happier with my lowercase eyes. Yes, it typed “eyes.”

you know you’ve been getting your money’s worth out of your iphone when you realize you’ve just used the two-fingered spread on your laptop monitor to zoom into a portion of the screen… and are momentarily perplexed when nothing happens.

this morning’s random bits:

• it’s apparently difficult to get rid of all the personal data on an iphone.
• xkcd introduces geohashing. geekier geocaching for the investment-inclined.
• sometimes i think people would be easier to understand if their speech had html markups.
• nick has photos from istanbul up – quite neat, even if he didn’t take his SLR. apparently his main site is down, tho. is this the end of defenestrate.org?
• bad political news: kennedy’s malignant glioma. good political news: va’s abortion law gets overturned. again.
• and a quasi-art project.

that is all for now.