Marina Tsvetaeva

i heard someone say this quote the other day online:

no one turning over our letters has
yet understood how completely and
how deeply faithless we are, which is
to say: how true we are to ourselves
-Marina Tsvetaeva

(you can find it here on Amazon.com)

i think this puts a good spin on reality and life in general for me.

gmail now supporting IMAP

this is such a long awaited feature that just pushed Gmail past the other free web mail services like Windows Live Mail and Yahoo Mail, with their larger space capacities and more "up with the times" features. Gmail's added support for IMAP now means that I can sync across my phone, Outlook on my desktop computer and any other device that supports IMAP. I'm glad to see they came up with a way to translate their tagging paradigm into the hierarchical "folder" structure that IMAP uses.

 

you can read more about this on Google's Gmail blog...

san diego fires

so, I live in san diego between the northern and southern fires. i've had to work this whole week and haven't had access to a TV. to keep as up to date as possible, i've been checking a few different sites. i thought i'd post them for other people to use:

• San Diego County Emergengy homepage: http://www.sdcountyemergency.com/
• KPBS Twitter feed:
  http://twitter.com/kpbsnews
• A Google Maps version of the fires and information (by CALFIRES):
  http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=114250687465160386813.00043d08ac31fe3357571&ie=UTF8&om=1&ll=32.924555,-116.986542&spn=0.73774,1.2854&z=10

Choosing Photo Hosting

So, I've been using Sony's Imagestation for years and I found out the other day they are closing and shutting down their servers. Their service was awesome - you pay hardly anything (a yearly fee that I can't even remember how much it was and I still consider myself right out of college - ramen baby) and you get:

• unlimited storage
• access to the original images
• and cheap prints (like $0.10/print)

When they announced they were closing, they offered to transfer all of my images (which was many gigs worth) to Shutterfly. Now, Shutterfly is a nice service, but:

• no access to original images
• expensive prints (~$0.20/print, almost double what Imagestation offered)

From this, my search for a replacement image host began. I was ready to spend some amount of money each year to host my images. I came up with the following requirements for choosing a host service:

1. Must have unlimited storage (they existed before with Imagestation and I can't go back to being limited)
2. Must take responsibility for storing the images and have backups of my data in case something happens to my backups.
3. Must have access to the original images and not just be able to do prints. If I lose my local original images, how could I ever get the originals back?

In addition to the above, I also wanted a host whose primary focus was hosting photos for consumers. I didn't want a stock photo or public image sharing host - specifically photo hosting for home users.

So, I compiled this list of top considered photo services:

Service	Yearly Cost	Cons	Extra Features
SmugMug	$39.95/year	Expensive prints;	Web2.0 galleries; Open API;
Fotki	$50/year	No open API	Upload via FTP;
Flickr	$24.95/year		Open API;

[UPDATE: 12/11/2007]

So, after thinking about it a bit, Flickr seemed to be the best option. I chose it because:

1. They have unlimited storage and bandwidth,
2. They are very popular and backed by Yahoo so they aren't going anywhere any time soon,
3. They have a very open API which allows for many different applications and means of accessing my photos.
4. It's relatively cheap - $25/year isn't bad.

You can see my public photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nedarb760/

New blogging tool

This is awesome. I found this tool one day while reading some articles on LifeHacker. It's Microsoft's Windows Live Writer. You can read about it on the Live Writer web site but it's basically a GUI for writing blog entries for a number of blogging services. Blogger is one of them and so far it seems like a really nice tool.

UPDATE: I originally installed this on a Windows XP SP2 machine and when I tried it on my Vista x64 laptop, it didn't work. The work-around can be found here. Microsoft officially does not support running any of the Live programs on 64-bit machines, but they will run in 32-bit mode. You can read more about it on the blog post I linked to.

two good reggae bands

so i've been turned on to the following two reggae bands: slightly stoopid and bedouin soundclash.
slightly stoopid is a band from ocean beach, ca, just down the road from me. i usually end up there probably once a week to head out to the bars down there. these guys blend mixes of rap, hip hop, ska and a most of all, reggae. they have some really good songs that are well-composed.
bedouin soundclash is this awesome reggae/acoustic guitar band from canada. they cite "The Police, The Clash and Bob Marley" as some of their influences, which you can hear traces of throughout their songs. i best like their "bob marley"-like acoustic songs which remind me of "redemption song" (by bob marley). i definately recommend these guys to anyone that is in love with reggae.

embed data in URLs

i read about this a little while ago and didn't realize how useful it was. you can actually embed binary data into a URL by encoding it in base-64, which makes total sense when you think about it. here's an example: . The image that you see is the base-64 encoded version of the last.fm social bookmarking/music site that i visit frequently. Mozilla Firefox and IE7, i believe, both use this icon in their search engine definition lists which are created from XML configuration files. the OpenSearch standard defines the schema for the XML, which encapsulates the image file for a search engine in a base-64 encoded field. if you get properties on the last.fm logo shown above, you'll see that it's just a character string. if you want to mess around with this some more, you should check out this tool to build base-64 encoded URIs.

happy new year!

happy new year! I went to Longboards in Pacific Beach (San Diego) last night to see a really good reggae band called The Devastators that plays there every sunday night. it was a pretty good evening filled with a lot of champagne and dancing to some pretty chill reggae. speaking of reggae, i was recently turned on to a really awesome reggae band: John Brown's Body. if you like some of the more popular reggae (bob marley, steel pulse...), then you'll love this guy.

well, that's all for now - HAPPY NEW YEAR!