Finally, my redesign is almost done, and live as well. Whew.. setting up movabletype was a learning experience, but well worth it.

I will be entering academic life once again in about a week. Exciting stuff. Time to learn again.

Finally, a photo management system that is intelligent and useful. First, much kudos to a service that uses Flash as a tool, rather than useless visual drivel (visuals are okay, it’s just refreshing to see pragmatic Flash). Secondly, the photostream, badge, Organizr, and other tools are exactly what I want. The social networking aspect is also present. This is the modern web at it’s best.

Flickr is now in beta, and they’re morphing everyday based on user opinions. A few complaints are that you can use up your 10Mb bandwidth allowance in a pinch. They should make warnings more obvious.

I’ve started using it on my new blog (yes, will be up soon). I like the photobadge that shows recent photos on my front page. Very nice touch.

A very nice hack is Gallina. It allows blog posts via Gmail (original at swirlee). It seems like Gmail can really do everything, from blogging to doing your bills to doing your laundry. All this buzz about Gmail makes me want to get an account.

In other news, I’m almost completed moving to MovableType. The experience has been very educating and exciting. I am now beginning to see the MT light.

There’s always more clutter.

Labor day weekend came upon us. We saw a great oppurtunity to clean out our small apartment. “Easy enough”, I proclaimed. We began to sort. Papers from work, papers from bills, papers from everywhere. We must have accrued over 10 lbs. of useless paper in our file cabinet.

It always seems like the more we clean, the more clutter comes to the surface. It’s frightening to think what would happen if we ceased to organize and let everything fall into place. I suppose some people do that, but I have to wonder how they find anything.

Anyway, happy belated Labor Day!

I’ll be off to San Francisco today to enjoy the sun. It’s a rare occurance that such good weather hits the city. We’ll partake in some lounging around in the Golden Gate Park.

My job was pretty demanding during the end of last week. I’m glad the long weekend is here. Not to mention that school is going to start soon.

Stanford is now giving everyone 200Mb space on the server. Much better than Cornell’s IT services.

Still holding out on XP SP2 until things die down a little more.

Hopefully moving to MovableType soon.

Trying to stay sane about my vegetarian lifestyle.

Bill Clinton was admitted to a hospital for surgery. They say he will undergo emergency triple or quadruple bypass.

My fiancee and I made some very tasty lemon raspberry muffins the other day. We dutifully sprinkled powder sugar on the tops for an extra sweet kick. Again, we used the same batter to make chocolate marbled muffins. But alas, we accidentally sprinkled corn starch on top this time. Blech. It felt like I was eating pure thickeners (I first thought it was flour on top). She was disappointed because the muffins tops are her favorite part. Of course, a Seinfeld reference is obligatory.

Disappointedly, the candidate signal discovered the other day from SETI@home was nothing out of the ordinary. Not to sound like a cynic, but I don’t think we’re going to be finding many promising signals in the near future. It’s more likely that we’ll come into contact with ET’s via other means. Theories abound about messages in our DNA, the Earth, and numerous non-EM wave sources. The probability calculation that another civilization would be in the exact phase of evolution to emanate radio signals is quite slim. But as humans, we strive to go against such odds in the face of being lucky. Boy, are we stubborn.

I’ve been itching to redesign my blog for a long time now. It’s been
through many different versions, and now lands at the lowest common
denominator: a tweaked Blogger template. I decided not to really care
for a while, since I didn’t have time. So I kept it simple, with no
arduous decisions being made.

My goals for a redesign include

• Clean minimalist design. White space galore.
• Domain maybe? If so, then I’m moving to movableType, or something
  else that’s server side. Otherwise, I’ll stick with Blogger for the
  moment.
• Advanced photo albuming, with little upkeep needed.
• And of course, a constant stream of posts.

I’ve always wanted to provide a full serving of blogging, but I was
never disciplined enough to put time into the design of the site (both
aesthetically, and functionally) enough to keep me satisfied. I want a
site that will last, and be able to represent bits and pieces of my life
in the coming years.

Even though I mentioned Blogger as a lowest common denominator, many
people don’t give it the credit it deserves. I’ve heard from at least
two or three bloggers that they chose to hand edit their own blogs
because Blogger (or some other service) didn’t allow custom templates.
I was stunned (to say the least). Hand editing HTML on each and every
page on your own blog is quite a valiant effort, and not one I would
stick to.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of work in Cool Edit recently (actually, it’s Adobe Audition now.. sooner or later Adobe’s going to acquire all good media editors, but that’s another story).

I usually need to play small segments over and over in quick succession. This is where trouble starts brewing. It seems that my 3GHz PC has the habit of restarting when I hit repeatedly hit play in just the right sequence. Very odd indeed. I shrugged it off as a freak incident the first time. But now I realize that it happens consistently, and I’ve been conditioned to not hit that particular sequence. Argh! Has anyone come upon this problem as well?

I feel a bit like a Pavlonian dog, except my treat is not losing unsaved work. It’s a bit like when my intro to psychology professor instructed us to slurp when he held up a lemon. At the same time, he blew a whistle. Predictably, after a few trials, he would only blow the whistle, and we slurped like idiots (as if slurping when seeing a lemon wasn’t idiotic enough). Oddly enough, I did want to have a taste of that lemon…