Archive for 2009
My First IPhone Crash
:-(
Last night I picked up my phone and pushed the Menu button. The phone flickered on for a split second and then fell dead black. The phone was completely unresponsive. I googled a bit and found a reset command: Hold down the power button and Menu button for 6 full seconds.
The phone came back to life. But hmm… every phone call I made today had poor cell phone reception :-(((. I uninstalled all the apps I had installed over the last couple days just in case those contributed to the problem. Those programs include: Falling Balls, UStream Viewer, PAC-MAN Lite, and iEphemeris Lite.
I tried pushing that reset sequence again today and the iPhone crashed or something such that it said that it would only make emergency calls. I left the phone off for 1/2 an hour while I went shopping (rather miffed and paniced that my expensive toy might be broken), turned it on again and it gave me a message like “iPhone activated [Ok]”. And now it seems to work fine.
We’ll see….
Arduino
I made my arduino blink! and flash and pulsate in a spooky, lifelike way. And it was eeeeasy! I’m very excited!
Stupid CSS
You might notice the new “Newer / Older” navigational aid on the site. See right. I tried for a frigging hour to get them to “Float:right” properly with CSS and look similar to the “Page 1 of 79” page-nav thing. Friggin frickin frick! CSS is supposed to make things easier.
The current (working but ugly) implementation just uses a Center tag.
Goodbye Samsung SGH D807
I can highly recommend my Samsung SGH D807 cell phone. It “just works”. I use the voice recorder and camera on it all the time. I had compared the sound quality with it and several different phones and this phone (and the Cingular service) were the best for my location. It’s small and the slide mechanism is sexy.
I got an iPhone 3G for Xmas so I’m letting my trusty old Samsung phone go :-(
Installed WP FancyZoom
I switched from WP Lightbox JS to WP FancyZoom. I’m pretty sure its the right decision. I really like the idea of having the lightbox plugin resize the image according to the size of the user’s screen. That way, I can post things in full resolution and not worry that when the user clicks on a thumbnail, the image will expand so much that they have no idea what they are looking at (like one of those Games Magazine Eyeball Bender). I’m trying to future-proof the blog. It would be a shame in a few years if someone looked back on this site and was disappointed that the only copy of an image I had was a reduced-resolution image.
Upon installing it, I notice that when you open images that have text in them, the text isn’t nessesarily legible; it depends on how large your browser window is (example). Hmmm.. hmmm.
I very much like that FancyZoom pre-loads the full-size image when the user mouses-over the image. It makes load-times pleasantly quicker without any fuss for the user :-)
I’ll leave FancyZoom up for a while and see how I feel about it.
In FancyZoom.js, I changed the defaults to make image display speedy like so:
var zoomSteps = 2; // Number of zoom animation frames
I hope the author isn’t too disappointed in my choices here. Setting it like so almost completely eliminates the “super sexy” zoom effect that he is proud of (read the docs, he’s really happy with it!). But it does what I want it to do and I am thankful! That single intermediary image that flashes in the window for just a few milliseconds hints at what’s going on very well without taking up too much time.
President Barak Obama
Just like that!
Saw Beach Blanket Babylon
with Charlotte (thanks to my aunt Beaner for getting me tickets last Christmas!) in November
Joyful
Silly
Strange
Specatular (in the strictest sense!)
“A Musical Medley on Ecstasy”
Upgrading to WordPress 2.7… ugh
4 days ago I wrote some prose about not upgrading to WordPress 2.7
Now Dreamhost says
Versions [of WordPress] older than 2.6.5 are known to have vulnerabilities
…
we will begin sending out emails to customers with outdated WordPress installations, asking them to upgrade
…
we may eventually require the upgrades
Grrrrr
Make a List, Check it Twice
And you’ll stay alive. What Marah has to say about making lists and going over them.