Stuff

Where to begin?

Well, I suppose I can start with the iPod camera connected that I tried out today for the first time. The person who lent me the tiny device swears by it and I must say I’m fairly impressed.
It is slow as molasses of course (to borrow a phrase from Rui) due to my camera’s blazing fast (not!) USB 1 connector but it does get the job done (i.e., it stores the files pristine and doesn’t muck around with them).
The thing that would make it better for me would be to be able to read the JPEG which is embedded in my Canon-RAW files and display it the same way it does for JPEG photos, but that’s somewhat unnecessary for my purposes. I think it does it for the Canon EOS 20D photos but not for my 10D.
So when I get my own connector I’ll basically gain an external storage device (external to the camera, that is), which I always carry around with me anyway, with a fair amount of free space in it (my 60G iPod still has around 13G free). Good for those occasions when I go out and don’t want to take the laptop with me. Hey, it can happen!

Visio, Xfig, Open Office Draw and friends: byte my shinny metal err… OK, that’s the wrong phrase here but well… Some things just feel better done the old fashioned way and planning furniture arrangement for a new home is one of them.
Taking the ruler and drawing out everything, cutting the furniture prototypes out of yellow post-it paper… I stopped just short of drawing the main features of the room in china ink. It feels great to do something like this with something other than a mouse or a digitizer board.
Guess I’m just an old-geezer me…

On an unrelated note: Adobe Lightroom really, really rocks!

On an even more unrelated note: expect some action on the portuguese PERL arena anytime soon. Things are afoot which should be exciting for anyone interested in the community aspect of the language. Hum… Does this phrase sound weird to me only? Oh well…

See? What other title could I get this post? Well, I could think of something better, were I not half dead from a two-week spree of hard problems at work and tripping on a great big migraine.
So there!

Skiing closer to home

I found a place to ski nearer to home, in Spain, which looks very promising.

Contrary to Portugal’s only offering (Serra da Estrela) which has several drawbacks —most importantly the miniscule nature of the trails— this one appears to have decent skiable slopes and is only about 5 hours or so from Lisbon.

I’m trying to set up a weekend trip there to test it out. It seems I may stop being constrained to one week a year of snow fun. Yay!

Going to the doctor is good for you

In more ways than one…

Today I went to the doctor for my biyearly allergies checkup and, as usual, I got stuck in the waiting room for hours.

The good part about it was that I took my laptop and cell phone with me and I ended up finishing the serializer part of the Flickr-Tools project.
It can now get the full photo collection of a user, in chunks, and give it out as a serializer to the user, without him being aware that much fetching is (potentially) going on in the background.

Now all that I’m lacking is the support for the new authentication method (essentially I need to read up on the whole frob passing stuff and I need a way for users to do the first authentication) and I’ll release it to the world.

What’s that I hear? “But wasn’t that supposed to be done weeks ago?” well yes but you know, I love the swoshing sound of deadlines going past so much that I’d do just about anything to get it… :-)