This is a cross-post from my photo blog: Pixelated. At some point later this year we’re going to Disneyland. I won’t say exactly when or for how long, but rather simply that it presented an interesting technological problem. See, I’ve always been a big advocate of the philosophy: “Why buy a big, fancy SLR camera if you’re afraid to take it on vacation?” But then, along came the question of Disneyland. I’m going there to have fun, not take photos. But I want photos. And maybe some video clips, too. And, I don’t feel like lugging a backpack with eight pounds of camera and lenses around in the warm California amusement park sprawl for a whole week. Don’t get me wrong. I’m taking the SLR. [...]

This is a cross-post from my other blog, the FooBarn. If you find these kinds of topics interesting, check out that blog too as I more regularly write about this type of thing there. The Peak of Indexed Search? I think about these types of things and occasionally I lose a little sleep: much of what I do online — professionally, at least — revolves around making information easier for people to find. Fifty years ago I would have been the guy sitting at the reference desk in the library filling out double-punched index cards for one of those little wooden-drawered card catalogs at your local public library. Today, I add metadata to documents and organize files into structurally relevant yet purely virtual trees. But [...]

While I haven’t been writing a novel this month for the infamous NaNoWrimo, I have been working on a different and still very interesting (at least, to me) creative project. Astute readers may recall that I dabbled in the creating of a web comic about a year and a half ago. It was an exercise in many ideas, not the least of which was — simply — my interest in creating a web comic. But the effort itself was also very useful in allowing me the chance to burn some serious practice hours on a real project inside of a great little piece of vector graphic software, Inkscape. For those less techie folks who read this blog, I should explain: there are pretty much two [...]

I’ve never participated in the creation or the discovery of a time capsule, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. But, that said, the idea makes me curious. Some of the things I’d been reading in the days before I wrote this post got me thinking about the notion of what we consider to be both the substance and the purpose of a time capsule. I mean, I always figured them to be kinds of treasure chests from some determined time in the past, glimpses at a nostalgic moment in history when people felt so inclined to define their existence in that particular moment through a collection of items that had a specific meaning and thus conveyed a message. And this is one [...]

Have you ever lost something and then found it again? I’m always doing that sort of thing with my data. And isn’t that to be expected? After all, with nearly eleven years of blogging under my belt, and another six or seven years on top of that with experience putting pages online, I’m bound to have a few dusty digital attics worth snooping through, right? You’d laugh at some of the things I’ve found. Roll your eyes at others. But it all seems so old and dusty (metaphorically) from where I sit… even though it isn’t really. Why is that? It might be a direct result of our generally short perspectives on the universe — in fact, I’m willing to bet it is a direct [...]

A “reloaded” post is a quick-clipped summary of a bunch of small things from the past few days. I want to write them down, but I am either lacking in (a) details or (b) time. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Enjoy. The Chopping Game I’ve been playing Minecraft again. I’d kinda been off it for a while — the summer mostly — but in the last couple weeks I’ve ventured back into the world we created last winter and I’ve been chopping my way through the new features, rule-sets, and other changes. I’ve still not figured out all the bits, though: I really need to find that wiki and spend some time look at what all the little tweaks mean. The food and nutrition [...]