RM’s Thoughts

I upload my photos to my own site and have for years. I have no desire to start using flickr, or smugmug or any other photo site for that matter. I would if i were starting fresh, but I’ve just put too much time in to it to switch. A few weeks ago I found the Facebook feature that allows you to import you blog as notes. Pretty nice, but since it will only allow you to add 1 rss feed somewhat limited if you want to say, import your blog and a feed of the new albums you put in to your gallery. I coded up a trivial script the other day that proxies the KEXP Song of the Day podcast and fixes some really annoying posting date problems they seemed to have introduced as of late. (for some incomprehsible reason they don’t use a standard format in the date string and don’t even use something that is easily human readable.)

Anyway after playing around with that code (3 lines of it) I hit upon the idea of creating something similar to merge two rss feeds. There are plenty of services out there that will do this for you, but all of them I could find required me to sign up and go through a lot of process. Granted that would of been easier than writing a script to do the merge myself, but a lot less fun. So I sat down tonight to watch a couple episodes of The Wire and wrote a simple script to do what I wanted. It can be found at http://neces.com/merge_feeds.php and so long as people don’t go crazy with it anyone is welcome to use it. All that’s require is passing in a list of feeds in the url query string, something like http://…/merge_feeds.php?feeds[]=http://the-first-one&feeds[]=http://the-second-one/… Anyway seems to work reasonable well. I’ve only tested it with the two feeds I wanted to get in to facebook, but it seems to be working. It grabs the data for both feeds and then merges them in chronological order keeping things as intact as possible. The feed titles, links, etc. are kind of funky, but there’s not much that can be done (in an automated fashion) to merge all of the feeds’ individual metadata. Anyway, enjoy…this post also serves as a test of the system and it’s being slurped in to fb.

I can’t remember where or when I ran across the concept of no knead bread, but something caused me to remember it yesterday and I went in search of more information. The #1 google result is this NYTimes article/recipe. I also found the video below which does a decent job of outlining the steps involved. There’s not that much too the recipe, makes sense being the whole point, but it’s not quick. You don’t have to put much work in, but you do have to wait, 18-20 hours from the time you start until you’re eating warm fresh bread out of the oven. It’s a little cooler than ideal in my apartment so both the overnight and 2nd rise were a little less than desired/expected, but it didn’t seem to hurt the final results too much. I’d imagine the toughest part of the process for most people is going to be coming up with a heavy oven safe pot/casserole to cook it in. I ended up going with a 4 qt Corningware French White caserole with a Pyrex lid. If I had my choice I’d probably go with a cast iron dutch oven as I would expect a little better browning on the bottom of the bread and wouldn’t have to worry about it being delicate (and could crank the heat up a bit more safely,) but I was pretty happy with the results. Take a look for yourself in my Gallery

I didn’t realize it until I went to organize them, but over the past 5 years I’ve taken north of 15,000 photos, over 19G, with one of two digital cameras. The first was a Canon A70 and the second a Canon Digital Rebel XT. I’m a big fan of both of them, but gave the A70 to my mom a couple years ago. There have been many times when I’ve wanted another small/casual camera so I’m no in the market to replace it, but haven’t settled on anything yet. 15k is a lot, but I’m actually missing a few hundred based on some scripts I wrote to help find and eliminate duplicates. I now have a system for originals in place so that won’t be necessary in the future.

With that many pictures it was bordering on impossible to find what i was looking for. I’m not a Mac guy so iPhoto wasn’t an option, but there is a Linux equivalent, f-spot. I’d tried it in the past but found it to be extremely flaky/crashy when I tried to get it to deal with that many pics, but not anymore. It seems to cope with them rather well, I haven’t had a single crash in the couple of weeks of hour here and there working with them. I don’t have an exact figure, but I’ve probably spent altogether 20 or so hours tagging the photos in f-spot and that effort has paid off. It’s not perfect or a detailed as I would like, but I now have everyone and roughly everywhere/everything tagged in photos so I can jump straight (or at least close) to what I’m looking for. f-spot also has a nice time line bar that comes in handy when you know when something happened. Basically I’ve gone from having pictures of lots of things, but not way to find them, to being able to relatively quickly jump right to whatever I was looking for.

So the 20 hours is pretty ridiculous, but with any other process I’d seen it would of been 10x or 100x that (short of probably iPhoto which f-spot is likely modeled after.) 20 hours I could live with, but 200 or more I just wouldn’t of bothered, like I haven’t over the past several years. The good news is now that I have the bulk of my photos in and tagged adding new sets in will be a quick and painless process so maintaining the tags going forward will be painless.

One unexpected result of going over all of my photos was being reminded of all the places, times, and people they’re of. That was probably the best part. Surprisingly there aren’t any pictures that I don’t remember taking (or remember someone else taking.) Even so there were a lot of places, people, and events that hadn’t entered my conscious mind in quite a while. It was nice to get a pictorial reminder.

Score another one for Alton Brown, Creamy Garlic Mashed Potatoes, received rave reviews tonight along side Garrett’s leg of lamb, which also comes with a recommendation for Alhambra Halal Meats at 24th and Folsom. There’s something satisfying about making a request to a butcher and watching him walk in to the meat cooler and come out and go over to the band saw with a whole carcass, this is the place to go for meat. As for the mashed potatoes round 2 was much better than my practice attempt. The main differences were using a garlic press to puree rather than mince it and being a little more generous with the salt. I’ve never had better, though I wasn’t much of a fan of them in the past. Other highlights included Tartine bread and cake. The bread has become a fixture at our dinners.

Neces.com is the #1 result for “madam tuso” and #2 for “madame tuso” on google (and does pretty well on other search engines.) While there seems to be a lot at work in this, page rank doesn’t seem to be a factor since my site’s pagerank was 1 the last time I looked. The above searches point at this album in my gallery. Those pictures were taken when I was in Vegas for a friend’s wedding and hanging out with another friend Ivy who lived there at the time.

So why is neces.com the #1/#2 result? Well one of the major contributing factors has to be the spelling of madame, madam when I put the photos in my gallery. It seems to be a very common type-o according to google trends, about 75% of the correct madame tuso (though the data for the terms seems funky.) My only other guess is that my site is a good answer for the search terms, when I get visits from those keywords people view an average of 6 pages and spend a few minutes on my site. Granted these aren’t very busy keywords, few hundred a month, but I still think it’s cool.

So the title of this post, 67 Countries, is about the number of countries I get visits from according to Google Analytics. I have hits from 6 of the 7 continents, that’s pretty cool, not sure about Antarctica, google analytics doesn’t seem to show it :). The top country, not surprisingly is the United States. The Netherlands, United Kingdom (home of the original Madame Tuso’s,) Germany, and Sweden round out the top 5. The rest of the top 15 are dominated by, somewhat surprisingly to me, by middle eastern countries including Israel, Pakistan, and Iran, though by that point the number of hits per month have dropped off considerably.

The only other thing my site (seems) to show up often for is me. So I’ve gone international, pretty cool eh?

The worst negative ad I can remember.

And an excellent response.

The race has been called for Hagan, but results aren’t yet complete. Dole was an incumbent and projected to win until recently. I wonder how much this ad and response had to do with the outcome. It has received a lot of national coverage so I would imagine it’s all over the place in NC. Using an ad like that shows a lack of character as far as I’m concerned so regardless of reason I think it’s a good result. I feel like there’s been a lot of things along the same lines being lobbed at Obama by Republicans with for the most part the exception of McCain, Palin being the most prominent and vocal of them.