The famous photo of George Costanza (taken by Cosmo Kramer) on the Seinfeld show was clearly inspired by this glamor shot of Corin (circa 1980)

It is pretty easy to guess what one dog home alone does all day… sleep. But what if there are two dogs? Turns out, they seem to just sleep too. Jack, who lives up the road, came over to keep Ketzel company yesterday. Click for a time lapse video of their day (6.2 MB QuickTime).

Yesterday I found out that The Be Good Tanyas newest album, “Hello Love”, was going to be reviewed on NPR’s, “All Things Considered” (link to review).  A few minutes before the review aired (4:47 pm to be precise), I headed over to Amazon.com to see the Amazon Sales Rank for the album.  It was #244.

This morning, I checked at 8:33 and the sales rank is now #23.

DRG Maps that over 100 contributors recently helped me liberate, are starting to become available on the Internet Archive.  They are still working out some technical kinks, and I’m not sure every map has been moved over to the server yet, but for everyone that has been eager to see progress, I thought I’d share a link.

The main Internet Archive maps page is here.

I’ve gone ahead and registered libremap.org which is where the Libre Map Project will now live.  I’ll be updating it soon to point to the maps hosted on the Internet Archive.  This will allow you to search for geonames (points of interest) to find the appropriate USGS DRG map file.

Corin and I were mentioned in the travel section of last Sunday’s Boston Globe. The article was about the Vermont 251 Club: They beat a path to all 251 cities and towns in Vermont. I haven’t actually seen the print version, but on the web version the article uses one of our photos.  There’s also a “More Photos” link which has a handful of our photos.

Unfortunately, they chose not to include the photo of the anonymous mooner which they mention in the article.

We just got back from our 20 day trip the United Kingdom. Actually, we got home Thursday, then went straight to Vermont to get Ketzel, and now we are really home. I unfortunately missed the first two days of Wikimania, but Friday I was able to watch the live video stream which was in some respects better than being there.

We still have a backlog of photos for the gallery, but I uploaded a bunch in the last couple days.

Corin and I are in England. At the moment we chaperoning a trip of 17 students using Cambridge as our home base. When they return to the US, we’ll travel around the UK. It is very hot and surprisingly difficult to find a reasonably priced Internet connection considering there are a bazillion colleges here. More updates and photos soon I hope. Until then, there are a few photos of our first day in the gallery.

Here’s another homemade ski video from the archive. This one was made the year before the epic one I posted earlier. It’s only about 3 1/2 minutes, but don’t worry, there’s plenty of shaky footage and cheesy transitions.

Watch the video on Google Video or YouTube.

Corin and I saw Catie Curtis perform at, “The Center for Arts in Natick“. on Friday night. A couple more photos in the gallery.

More fun from Feed43. I just quickly created some RSS feeds for Blockbuster’s online DVD rental service (their Netflix clone).

The feeds aren’t perfect, and they may break soon if Blockbuster changes their page, but until then, if you are a Blockbuster Online subscriber here you go:

• Blockbuster - New In Theaters
• Blockbuster - New Movies Released on DVD
• Blockbuster - New on DVD
• Blockbuster - Top Online Rentals

I haven’t owned a game console since the Super Nintendo. But the Nintendo Revolution Wii actually looks like a fun way to waste time. Mostly because it reminds me of my fond memories of hours spent playing the original Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and Zelda. It will not only have new versions of each of these games, but you’ll also be able to play the originals on the system. And of course the fact that, unlike the PS3 and the XBox 360, you don’t have to sell a kidney to afford one, makes it reasonable for those of us that don’t obsess over video games. My only serious hesitation is that playing the Wii apparently makes you look really goofy. (photos from the official Wii website.)

I was a little skeptical that a light up frisbee.  I thought it might just be a gimic. However, the flashflight rocks. It is a 185 gram light up frisbee that uses LED and fiber optics to glow brightly for easy catching. I chose the disc-o which changes colors, but it is also available in red, green, and blue. Now it just needs to stop raining.

Everyone on the internets these days are doing the mentos and soda pop eruption experiment. A couple weeks ago we picked up some supplies so Corin could do it in her physics class. We used mint mentos and generic cola. With other videos on the web, the soda shoots 10-20 feet in the air. Our first try was very disappointing in comparison, only going 4 or 5 feet into the air. Apparently any type of mentos and soda should work. My only theory is that the heavy wind we had that day somehow diminished the height.

The CBC today expanded their podcast line up.  Unfortunately, Wiretap is not included.  Several of their other podcasts are also “best of” which I’ve never understood.  Podcasting is for people who like the show, but want to time-shift. Just give the listener the original show.  Maybe a “best of” in addition to the full show.  WNYC does this with Studio 360, and it is often so boiled down that it is unlistenable.

Tuesday, April 25th - 12 - 8 pm - Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s. And to think, I finally live near a Ben & Jerry’s.

The Boston Marathon was today. It goes right through downtown Natick so I went to check it out and take photos. I didn’t expect much since I didn’t know anyone running the race and running doesn’t particularly interest me. I ended up being completely surprised. The Boston Marathon renewed my faith in humanity. Really. Everyone from the town was out cheering on the runners. But not in that polite cheering people do at parades way. They were sending heartfelt encouragement to all the runners and getting smiles, high fives, praise, thanks, and hugs in return. Everyone was pitching in, especially children. I saw kids:

• handing out water
• high-fiving the runners
• holding up signs of encouragement
• cheering (many runners put their name on their arm or shirt, so many people would cheer runners by name)
• playing the Rocky theme on trumpet
• telling the runners the score of the Red Sox game

It was perfect weather for running and for having a BBQ in the front yard. And thanks to it also being Patriots day in Massachusetts, the crowds were huge. I rode my bike to Wellesley and there wasn’t a single break in the crowd. Certain spots where the crowds were lighter, you could hear the patter of running shoes on the pavement which sounded like a soothing rainstorm.

Unfortunately, it was tough to get around (even the bicycle wasn’t allowed on the road). So I didn’t get to see runners struggle on the infamous heartbreak hill in Newton or people cross the finish line. Next year hopefully I’ll be more organized and find alternative routes.

See Boston Marathon 2006 photos in the gallery.

Update: Two quick movies from the marathon have finally passed inspection from the Google Video gnomes.

• View of the race from downtown Natick, MA
• Video of the Wellesley “Tunnel of Screams”.  The students of Wellesley College line up and scream for the runners.

Yesterday, BoingBoing had a post about Selfridges & Co.’s claim to the world’s most expensive sandwich. I decided to surpass trounce their claim.

I am now selling the worlds most expensive sandwich. It is two prime pieces of stone ground 100% whole wheat Freinhofer’s bread. Inside… a healthly serving of Teddie smooth natural old fashioned peanut butter and fresh (from the jar) Smuckers Strawberry Jam.

All this and a glass of fresh organic cow’s milk is yours for $8,402,876,241,412.25 (US). All profit will be used to pay the United States national debt.

For real patriots this represents a remarkable value.

After way too many hours, I’ve finally moved the redjar gallery over to my home grown set up. It is a jumble of PHP scripts (which use phpflickr), mod_rewrite rules, and a mysql database which create a custom front end to my flickr photos. I spent extra time to make all the old gallery album and photo url’s map to the new system. The image source itself is also a redjar.org url which gets rewritten to the appropriate flickr url and sent back to the browser. So except for the required link to each photo’s flickr page, there is no mention of flickr that will tie me to them. So down the road, if I decide to ditch flickr it should be possible to preserve all URL’s.

The actual page design at this point is really basic and needs to be cleaned up, but all the major features I wanted are there.

Current features:

• no extra design cruft to slow down viewing - no scrolling to see image. The photo is the focal point.
• next/previous links don’t jump around - there are a couple instances where this isn’t true but I’ll fix that soon. I really hate trying to go through an album only to have to keep moving the mouse to click the “next” link because it has moved.
• prefetch next photo - The next photo in the album is pre-fetched so that it will (hopefully) be in your browsers cache by the time you go to the next page
• pretty url’s all around - all URL’s are clean. no .php with a ton of arguments
• all URL’s are localized - no flickr.com URL’s
• caching - uses phpflickr’s built-in data caching so that flickr api calls don’t need to be made every time. I found flickr’s api response time to be really slow at times.

To-Do list:

• In addition to just new albums, make RSS feed display newly posted photos that are not part of an album
• Improve pagination
• Add pagination to Album page
• Auto generate pretty url’s based on the title of the album and the photo
• display additional meta-data including creative commons license, number of times viewed, exif data
• display comments - Flickr API doesn’t allow people to post comments, but you can display the comments that have been added through flickr.
• improve caching - currently times out after a couple hours. So the first person to view an album after the cache expires may have to wait for the flickr api calls to respond.
• display total album/photo views based on sum of flickr views and redjar.org views
• link to original photo

I just realized it is in fact possible to reorder your Flickr Photostream… if you want it bad enough. By changing the the upload date, the photo will in fact change its location in your photostream. Unfortunately, you can’t set the upload date prior to when you created your Flickr account. So if you just created your account and are uploading thousands of old photos, you can’t just set the upload date to the “taken date”. But if you specify upload date down to the second, you should be able to precisely order your photostream.

As far as I know, there are only two ways to change the upload date for a photo. The first is using the annoying Flash Organizr. Go to a single photo, click “Edit dates” and modify the “Date posted” fields.

The other option is to the use the Flickr API. Using flickr.photos.setDates you can set the upload date of photos. Better more reasonable for updating the order of hundreds or thousands of photos.