• 
  Please support me in the 2010 Ride to Conquer Cancer - last year we were able to raise $6.9 million for the Alberta Cancer Foundation - hopefully we can raise even more in 2010!

  ---

• Search for:

• Pages

  • About
    • Colophon
    • Contact
    • Curriculum Vitae
    • Presentations
  • Archives
    • Recent Comments
    • Shared Items
  • Asides
  • Photography
  • WordPress
    • Akismet Credit Inserter
    • Post Revision Display

• Categories

  • aside
  • digital photography sessions
  • fun
  • general
  • photography
  • work

• Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
  

I’m going to do something today that I have never done before. Ever since I’ve had a “work” computer, starting in 1994, I’ve never turned it/them off. I’ve always left them on as personal testing/staging servers, “just in case” I needed to grab something. It’s often been handy (and occasionally essential), being able to SSH into my work system, or run test web apps on it.

I’ve never given much thought to just how much juice must be sucked up by the systems, even when left running essentially idle evenings and weekends. Apparently, this habit costs US businesses $1.7 BILLION per year.

I really don’t care about the financial cost. My portion is likely just a few pennies per day. The University can afford that.

I do care about the incremental effect this is having on the environment, though. In Calgary, much of our juice is generated by burning natural gas. So my leaving a computer on 24/7 is actually pumping CO2 into the air, and helping suck up more of the petro goo that drives this city.

So, when I leave the office this afternoon, I’m shutting down my quad G5 for the weekend. I’ll have to modify some of my automated backup scripts, which assume they can run at 3am, but that shouldn’t cause too many problems.

I’ve avoided doing the math to see how many watts drive the quad G5 + 20″ Cinema + 17″ Dell LCD + 500GB external drive + power to USB devices…

Baby steps…

I can’t believe it’s been a whole month since I started trying out Google Reader (GR) full time. I wanted to see if I could live in a browser-based aggregator, and was curious about how far it had come since the early days.

The short version is: it’s less efficient at reading boatloads of feeds and items. But, the always-on, available-anywhere design of GR makes it worthwhile.

The long version is, well, longer. I still much of the niceties of BlogBridge (BB). Things like having a “photo gallery” view, for viewing images in feeds (I subscribe to a fair number of Flickr tag feeds, so this is quite handy). I’ve got a workaround for the star ratings that BB uses – I’ve created two “tags” in GR: “5-stars” and “4-stars” and have applied them to appropriate feeds. That definitely helps prioritize reading important stuff from all of my feeds/tags without having to hunt for them. Because it’s browser based, I can use native del.icio.us interfaces, so that feature from BB isn’t missed. The most annoying thing I’ve found with GR isn’t directly GR’s fault. I have to do a fair bit of clicking to get through all of my tags. I need to do some more work to add appropriate feeds to “5-stars”, “4-stars”, “3-stars” etc… so I can focus on levels of importance rather than subjects.

I do like the “trends” view in GR. Not because it is helpful in organizing or accessing information (it isn’t), but it’s kinda interesting in its own right. Here’s a screenshot as of 5 minutes ago:

I’m a bit surprised at just how much I’m reading. Almost 18,000 items in a month? I’d have never guessed that. Actually, almost half of that isn’t really “reading” per se, but “viewing”. Photos from Flickr. Which is why the “photo gallery” view would be great.

There are some shortcomings.

1. I’ve got a nagging feeling that by using GR, I am continuing to “feed the beast” – by teaching Google about what interests me, and by providing guidance about relationships between feeds and items.
2. There isn’t a “blogroll” or live OPML view of my tags/folders. BlogBridge lets me publish tags as live OPML documents, which is how my edublogs directory is managed. There isn’t currently a way to replicate that from within GR. Yes, I could periodically export a tag as an OPML file, and post that somewhere. Not the same.

All in all, I think I’ll keep using Google Reader for now. I’ll have to figure out how to reconcile my feed subscriptions with BB so that I can keep maintaining the edublogs directory, but that will work itself out somehow.

We’ve been looking at MyDropBox.com, trying to gather more info about their “Peer Re:Mark” peer review building block for Blackboard. It sounds rather interesting, and we’d love to try it out to evaluate for use on campus. The technology has become secondary, though, because the company has been completely unresponsive through the communication channels they provide on their website. I can only assume that the company is no longer viable, and/or that the product is vapour.

Patti tried contacting them 2 weeks ago for more information. She patiently filled out the form on their website, hoping to get some additional information about the product, maybe a demo, and perhaps a quote for deploying it on campus. No response.

So, I decided to see if maybe they were just blowing off peons, and only responding to “important” sounding people. So, I promoted myself to “Vice President, Educational Technology” here at UCalgary, and filled in the form myself. Several days later… No response. I guess I need to demote myself back down to “Lowly EdTech Geek”, but I kinda like the ring of VP-EdTech…

Anyway, here’s a clue for MyDropBox, who apparently don’t respond to the only communication channel they provide on their own website. When people are contacting you, asking for more information, probably trying to give you money, it’s a Good Idea™ to at least send an autoresponse email. It’s an Even Better Idea™ to actually, oh, I don’t know… RESPOND to the people who are most likely to give your company money.

I’ve been toying around with Ubuntu linux, seeing if I could make the move over to that side of things full time. It’s gotten so much better over the last couple of years, that it’s finally a viable fulltime desktop environment. The Ubuntu distro has an almost perfect balance of ease-of-use and hardcore-geek-utility. apt-get is great (but hardly user friendly).

Brian’s been working on making the switch from MacOSX to Ubuntu (or UbuntuStudio), so I’ve been thinking about it again.

Most of the apps I live in are there (Firefox is a good enough browser – even if it isn’t Safari, Thunderbird is a good enough mail app – even if it isn’t Mail.app). It’s got all of the server stuff I use either pre-installed or a simple apt-get away.

The one really killer app that is keeping me on MacOSX is Aperture. Nothing comes close on the Linux side of things. Nothing.

There are also tons of niceties in general use in MacOSX. Too many to list. And I’d miss them if I switched to Ubuntu.

Of course, with Parallels, it doesn’t have to be an either-or kind of thing. I can run Ubuntu inside MacOSX on my MacBook Pro. But, if I’m already running MacOSX, Linux is a bit redundant…

I’ve got a fully updated copy of iDVD on my MacBook Pro that refuses to cooperate. I can create a project, save it, and burn it to DVD. But, if I decide I want to quit iDVD, it borks the next time I launch it. It gets past “loading themes” and then just hangs. I can nuke my prefs, and get the “new project” dialog, but if I create a project, I get the same thing if I quit. Which makes editing an iDVD project a bit, well, problematic. I currently have to recreate the project from scratch every time I want to make a modification. Which makes the process a bit more tedious than it needs to be.

I’ve done searching on the Apple Support site. I’ve tried Googling. I’ve poked through manuals and documentation. No joy. Here’s all I get when I launch my incredibly awesome, soon-to-be-Oscar™-winning iDVD project:

The strange thing, if I click “Close”, it pauses for a few seconds, the “Unexpected Quit” dialog disappears, and the shell of the iDVD app remains. I can select menu items, and click on interface buttons (but they don’t do anything). I have to then Quit (or Force-Quit) the app to make it really go away.

Nothing in the crash log jumps out at me. I’ve uninstalled all of my InputManagers, all of the extra QuickTime codecs, anything I can think of that’s non-stock-MacOSX. No luck yet. Very frustrating.

I just passed the halfway point for my 2007 “365 photos” challenge, where I try to take at least one photo every day for the entire year 2007. I’ve actually been successful in taking a photo per day. Most days, I take many, so the hardest part is picking the “best” photo to represent the day. Other days, I don’t feel like taking a photo, or nothing interesting happens. Those are the hard days. I’ve still managed to take photos on those days, but it’s definitely a challenge.

I’m now up to 183 photos (many of which are only visible online to “friends and family” on Flickr). I’m trying to vary the types of photos I take, both in content and style, to try to stretch a bit. Not sure I’m succeeding in that, but here’s the last few weeks worth of photos:

Why do this? It’s just a bunch of boring photos of daily banality. Well, yeah. And so what? The point is to force myself to shoot more photos, whether I feel like it or not. There are a few reasons to do this, mostly related to practicing the technical stuff involved with taking photographs, so that it just becomes automatic and unthinking. I can now select aperture, exposure, ISO, focal length, etc… without having to actually think about it. I’ve also come to realize that it doesn’t really matter what camera you use – the key is to have a camera ready at hand at all times. I’ve been biking to and from work, and don’t want to lug my big LowePro AW200 backback. I’ve been bringing my little Fujifilm point-and-shoot because it’s small, and I wouldn’t lose too much sleep if it got wrecked. And as a result, it’s always been with me on my bike, and I’ve gotten several great shots I’d have missed otherwise.

I still love the hell out of my XT, and make a point of lugging it around wherever possible. The more I shoot with it, the more I appreciate just how well it works. I occasionally lust after a newer/faster camera, but it would be much more effective to invest in some better lenses (I have about half a dozen on my wish list, ranging from überwide 10-22mm, to überlong 300mm IS, to standard plastic-fantastic…)

Anyway, I’m still having a total blast with the 365photos challenge. I may not be a better photographer, artisitically speaking, but at least I’m getting more proficient, and forcing myself to delve into a bit more creativity.

← Previous Page