Drewski   Coming soon in three dimensions

Hello, I am from approximately two months in the future. On 10/22 at approx 2:34am CET a tachyon field failure in the main resonating ring of the LHC causes a “temporal blowback”. Shortly thereafter, the resulting destruction of the strong nuclear force causes the world to vaporize in seconds, while a few of us near the experiment are thrown into a temporal causality loop. While the predestination event (or as we have come to call it “The Big Rewind”) hasn’t occurred yet to you, for us it is about three years in our past. I came across your site looking to see if there were any other scientists that may have theorized this phenomenon who may be of assistance in preventing it. This brings me to my point, I have repeatedly checked your site for the past five rewinds at 2:34:01 CET and it still says nope, believe me at this point the LHC has most assuredly destroyed the world. I can provide a bank account in Nigeria for the funds to be placed. I am curious to the exact amount however.

Seriously, I almost want to reply.

(via Ken)

10 phone calls (1 with a piano serenade, thanks Grandma!), 2 cards, 1 e-card (containing 4 noble truths, great gift!), 1 email (and 1 blog comment), 15 Facebook birthday wishes (earliest one 186 minutes early, thanks Steve!), 6 websites’ birthday wishes, 1 emailed birthday wish for Anton Bruckner (4 days ago :)), 1 great day off with Deanna, 2 birthday meals—one more to come, who’s up for Fogo de Chão this weekend?, 1 Margarita with lunch, 1 White Russian with dinner, 1 piece of chocolate cake, 2 scoops of ice cream, 12 party poppers to top it off. 15 photos.

And 25 years! Thanks everyone!

BIS customers now getting instant IMAP e-mail | BlackBerry Cool

It’s great to see the upgrade, especially for BIS users who have had less-than-stellar delivery times, but you have to wonder why it took so long for IMAP IDLE to be supported.

Absolutely. This is the kind of fine print that they don’t warn you about when you get a BlackBerry device. “We support your IMAP and POP email, but only by routing all traffic through our servers and delaying email. Oh, and you can’t just authenticate; you need, um, service books.”

That last detail was particularly interesting to explain to my mom today, who was about to ask for a refund on her data plan from AT&T because she hadn’t been getting email for two weeks.

Actually Mom, even though your username and password are set up to check and to synchronize your email, there’s this extra layer of authentication called service books. They basically manage the synchronization between your device and the BlackBerry servers, so your mail has probably been “sitting on their server” ready to deliver, but your device hasn’t been able to get into it.

Oh, yeah, and the service books? They will stop working. Yes, even when your password is correct.

I suppose this whole instant IMAP server upgrade is to make them more competitive in the ever-lucrative consumer market, but this is the kind of zero-day feature that any real PDA should support.

Counting down the days until I can switch to something else… something that supports real internet would be good too. Maybe by the time I’m ready ($$) to switch devices, there will even be a device (Android?) that will give me pause before immediately jumping for an iPhone. But I’m not counting on it.

Twice now, I’ve had pingbacks from Freeinfowire.com (look them up, I’m not linking to them). The first time, it was my post about Obama and Twitter, and since the article was about Obama that made sense. Sorta. It wasn’t really linking back to my article, and I suspected they were just trolling for blog posts about Obama in hopes that someone would click on them.

Well, it happened again: they linked to my article about the internet and attention, again in an article about Obama. Lame.

Google Photos Blog: Announcing Picasa 3.0 and a new version of Picasa Web Albums!

With Picasa’s announcement of the updated Web Albums site, I’ve settled on it for my own photography needs. Their “name tags” feature is incredibly well-done, I can arbitrarily tag my photos additionally, and they’ve added other compelling features that have sold me on it.

Previously, I had been using Flickr. By the time I joined, it seemed to be the premier community for photographers, and it offered the most features I wanted: licensing photos, tagging, flexible management of albums/sets, RSS feeds for nearly everything, and super-cool mash-ups with other sites.

Separately, a lot of people have been using Facebook for photos (at least those of people-based events and such), namely because their person tagging is very good: boxes around faces and notifications of tagged photos. (Flickr has tagging, and you can separately add boxed notes to photos, but it has no way to connect that directly with people.) While not a photography website per se, it is certainly a great way to share photos easily.

Picasa Web Albums has been a nice project, and I had used it occasionally, but not very often. The interface hasn’t been the best, it felt very closed off from any sort of community, and it seemed to be wedded to the application Picasa (which has a pretty shoddy track record on Linux). I can (and do) manage my photos quite well via F-Spot, but there was a lot I couldn’t do without Picasa (the application).

But in one fell swoop, they’ve knocked down the competition. The name tags feature is so nice, it’s actually fun to use; in about an hour I tagged about 700 photos with my existing Gmail contacts. I’ve also tagged my photos with some other keywords, in case you really want to see what photos of roller coasters I’ve taken. Lastly, I can release my photos with Creative Commons licenses, so neat things can happen.

The sum of these features is what drives Picasa’s new Explore page. You can see popular tags, locations, and featured photos. There’s even a (mediocre) game where you guess the locations of photos.

All in all, Google has a good product and it breeds good competition in the photo website space. You can see my photos on my Picasa profile.

(PS: If it seems like I’m talking slow, that’s because I’m sapping my bandwidth uploading four albums at a time. )

You are busy. You have many demands on your time and attention. Never, under any conditions, hesitate to ignore anyone or anything that’s not making good use of your attention. Ever.

The ever-insightful Merlin Mann. The first thing I did was to stop following him on Twitter; he asked for it.

I suppose this also means I should focus my RSS reading on things that will help me learn, will enlighten me, or a selective set of quality distractions (because—let’s face it—I will read Dinosaur Comics).

I also think that Facebook fits in here somewhere—their lack of RSS meaning I just shouldn’t bother visiting their site perhaps?—but in general, I do think that a lot of the social sites are the chief computer distraction for me (and I’m guessing Merlin too, as he brought it up).

Anything else I should consider? I’m a sucker for good reading online, on a variety of topics, but I also recognize the need to limit oneself.

YouTube - Inní mér syngur vitleysingur

Not the best video ever (by a long shot), but I love this song. So joyful.

Add Andrew Conkling [to our list of contributors] - he has done so much work for so long in Bugzilla, should have been listed here long ago.

[banshee] Revision 4414.

It’s not why I help out, but it is nice to be recognized. Thanks Gabriel!

It’s really very satisfying to contribute to the Banshee project, even if it’s not code. Part of my motivation is to help out the developers so they can focus on development itself, but it’s also been a good way for me to get my foot in the door while I work on my education. I certainly plan on (one day) being able to contribute my own code to Banshee and some other projects.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying the ride.

Certainly not my favorite photo from my Europe trip, but it’s nice to see a photo of mine being used for something. Schmap’s guides are really nice, and it’s neat to be a part of that.

Untersberg Pictures via Schmap

Schmap for the iPhone

See the original on Flickr

So I’ve settled on WordPress as my blogging engine of choice, having used it variously (and been impressed) and having witnessed how quickly and well they release.

I’ve bought a host, set up Google Apps, picked a theme*, duly reread John Gruber’s comments about his design :), and I’m pretty much set.

I’ve had an interesting a boring history with blogs: I started with Blogger in 2005, switched to WordPress.com in 2007 (and promptly never updated), and then started with Tumblr in early 2008. WordPress on my own host will provide me the best options for blogging as well as a host (get it?) of other tools at my disposal.

Tumblr is pretty nice, for what it is: a no-nonsense hosted blog. It even got me blogging on a regular basis. It doesn’t do everything well though, including customized design, plugins for extra features, and integrated comments (let alone exporting your content for another blog). I like what it is, but have decided I don’t want it to be my primary blog; I want something that can better reflect my web identity.

Let me know what you think!

PS: While I’ve ensured that the RSS feed migrated from Tumblr, you may want to update to WordPress’ default feed.

*- I’ll be changing the theme’s colors promptly, but otherwise I generally like the design.