Woodpress

I recently bought MacGyver on DVD. Part of the charm is the outdated high tech gadgets. We’ve only watched two episodes so far. From those, this is the most remarkable (to me) example of outdated high tech.

I kinda suspect that one was funny even at the time.

This is my four year old daughter playing on a slide at Chuck-E-Cheese’s a few days ago.

When I got home from work today, I found my two youngest kids in the yard, covered in mud. I took a few pictures. Most of them turned out blurry, even though I used the flash. I’m still not very happy with the Pentax Optio W30.

For about the past year, I’ve been using Visual Studio for a lot of my development work. I really like to use vi as a text editor, but IDEs like Visual Studio provide valuable functionality that isn’t present in vim. I tend to switch between vim and the IDE, depending on the sort of editing I’m doing.

Fortunately, a friend recently pointed out ViEmu — it’s a Visual Studio plugin that does an outstanding job of providing Vim functionality without breaking Visual Studio.

After using it for a couple days, I found a few issues that impacted my use patterns, and mentioned them to the author. He was very responsive, and provided an update within days.

For vi/vim users who also use Visual Studio, I highly recommend ViEmu. Now I want a plugin for Firefox/Thunderbird. :)

(I also recommend vim/ViEmu for developers who use laptop keyboards and find themselves frequently slowed down when looking for home/end/pgup/pgdn/insert/delete.)

I saw this car on the freeway while riding to work one day.

I have a friend who uses the nickname “howdy” so I try to take a picture any time I see “howdy” on something.

Rolling Rock beer has bizarre stuff printed on the back of the bottle, apparently worthy of its own wikipedia article:

I’ve finally resolved the technical difficulties that resulted in woodpress being temporarily unavailable. It appears that MySQL 5.0.36 was incompatible with the version of libc I had installed, but Debian Sarge unstable’s dependencies didn’t reflect that. To upgrade to the latest libc, I had to also upgrade the kernel.

Today my Pentax Option W30 arrived in the mail. So far most of my pictures have come out grainy or washed out. Probably because I’ve been experimenting in poor indoor lighting, or attempting macro shots with flash.

A few days ago I read an impressively thorough digitalcamerainfo.com review of the camera based on limited experimentation on a show floor. I’ve spent some time exploring the camera’s interface and reading the manual, and I have a couple minor corrections to that review:

1. Although it may appear from the camera’s interface that the “Auto” ISO mode will result in ISO 400, the ISO does actually vary. I believe the “Auto400” indicator means that auto ISO will not exceed 400.
2. By default, ISO is reset when the camera is powered off, but it is possible to make the camera remember the ISO setting. There is a “memory” menu that contains a list of checkboxes for settings to preserve through a power cycle. The “memory” setting includes many options, and seems useful.

Overall, the interface seems pretty straightforward. So far the biggest weakness in comparison to my DSC-T1 is an on-camera focus lamp. The biggest surprise benefit over the DSC-T1 is manual focus capability.

The biggest down-side I knew about before buying the W30 was that it uses Quicktime motion JPEG for video. I would’ve preferred mpeg4 or mpeg1.