Blog Master G

The last two days brought temperatures of 90 and 91 degrees here in Upstate New York. I think summer has arrived. It’s been hotter here the past two days than it’s been so far (since moving here in January, that is). That’s the thing about living here — it’s more extreme at both ends than living in California. It gets much colder in the winter and hotter in the summer, especially when the humidity is factored in.

The dogs are having a hard time with the heat, but at least it’s keeping them calm. Today looks like it’s going to be a bit cooler, so that will be a nice break before heading off to Vegas!

Last night Jen and I saw the worst movie in a really long time: Shrek 2. Toward the end, there were some isolated funny moments, but overall, it really, really sucked. Even the music was terrible. If you can help it, don’t bother seeing it.

My bro arrived in Boston this week for a business venture. I’m hoping to hang out with him next week. Hopefully he can see the apartment and the new house. It will be awesome to kick it with Pete; I haven’t seen him since December.

I still feel a bit run down after a weekend of partying like it was 1999 at Vassar. It was our 5th class reunion and it was just as fun as I’ve always heard it is. I’m very glad we went, and I had a great time reconnecting with old friends and hanging out.

Of course, as I’m sure is normal, there was some feeling of nervousness about going back and seeing everyone again, but that quickly subsided.

The campus was as beautiful as ever and some of the building renovations (and construction) that’s been done is pretty amazing. The big topic was the fact that my old dorm, Jewett, has been gutted and turned into the likes of a modern hotel. I actually like it, but it certainly doesn’t have the same character that it used to have. It seems like the general consensus among my classmates and fellow former Jewett residents was thumbs down.

Friday was the longest day and latest night. The drive to Poughkeepsie wasn’t so bad — just over two hours on the Taconic. Jen and I arrived on campus around 6pm and Jewett was our first stop. We then checked in and the rest of the weekend is a big whirlwind… so, some highlights will follow.

Dinner at Walker tents… good food, unlimited wine. Great fireworks. The Miscellany News reunion, which was a lot of fun. The Mug. The Acrop. Class parade. Announcing of class donations (Class of 1999: $17k or so in donations. At least three other classes: $1 million-plus… so I guess we have a lot to live up to!). Stroll around campus… check out the library. Interesting political science lecture in Rocky… Croquet Club cocktail party by Chicago… official class party in Raymond. Stayed in Davison. Class party in tent by Davison. More fireworks. Back to the Acrop.

Sunday brunch… say hazy goodbyes. Spend Sunday afternoon and evening feeling super over-tired. Dorm beds are very uncomfortable.

Pictures and Phil tell the rest of the story.

Click for more photos

[ Ben’s “live” recap | Phil’s Friday recap | Phil’s Saturday/Sunday recap ]

‘Fahrenheit 9/11’: Connecting With a Hard Left (washingtonpost.com): “CANNES, France — ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’ Michael Moore’s most powerful film since ‘Roger & Me,’ slices and dices President Bush’s presidency into a thousand satirical pieces. It’s a wonder the chief executive — at least, the one portrayed in this movie — doesn’t scatter to the four winds like Texas dust.”

[ Fahrenheit 9/11 Trailer ]

I’ve long been a big fan of Ofoto and have been using the site for storing and printing photos since December 2001 (before that, we used Photoworks and, briefly, Snapfish). Ofoto is, by far, the best in terms of online storage (super-fast site) and print quality.

With nearly 6,000 high-resolution photos currently stored in the Ofoto archive, I’ve often wondered how they manage to offer free storage and sharing — and only charge customers for the prints and other photo-related goodies they order.

This excellent article (Ofoto on a Roll) answers that question. Some snippets:

While Ofoto — a subsidiary of the Eastman Kodak Company — counts over 11 million members, only about 1 million have ever bought anything from the site, such as a print, calendar, or greeting card. The other 10 million members are simply posting, sharing, and viewing their photos. These activities are free, but for Ofoto, they can get expensive.

A 5-megapixel digital camera can produce 1MB JPEG files, so just a handful of photos can require sizable storage space. There are some 300 million images residing with Ofoto, and that number is growing. In 2003, the company counted several days when users uploaded more than a million JPEGs. “We have huge numbers of terabytes of storage to which we’re constantly adding,” says James Joaquin, executive vice president of Ofoto.

Why keep giving away so much space? For Ofoto, storage is a loss leader. “The more photos users send us,” says Joaquin, “the more they share, the more we print.”

The goal is to get more of the 10 million share-only users to join the 1 million paying users. To encourage them, Ofoto has made some careful decisions. For example, it shuns tape backup for storing old photographs. Everything — from the vacation snapshot you uploaded yesterday to the family portrait you shot four years ago — is stored on hard drives.

$2 buys you a lot more than a gallon of gas. See why:

This is also in line with my belief that rising gas prices are a good thing. Those of us who don’t drive urban assault vehicles won’t go broke. And maybe all you H2 drivers will think twice next time you spend close to a Benjamin to fill up your damn 32-gallon-tank-having, environment-destroying, 8-10-mile-per-gallon-getting, I-must-crush-everyone-in-my-path, two-parking-space-hogging, threat-to-everyone-else-on-the-road, unnecessary, made-for-the-military-and-not-civilian use piece of machinery.

And for the record, an H2, with its 32-gallon tank, gets about the same mileage per tank that I get with the tank in my car that’s nearly a third that size (12 gallons). So not only is it a third cheaper for me to drive the same distance, but I’m destroying the environment at merely a third of the pace of you H2 drivers.

There’s something for you to be proud of when your grandchildren can’t leave the house without oxygen masks.

[ Hummer demand is down | Sunday NYTimes story | SUV sales fall 15 percent | Island Press ]

Seen recently on a bumper sticker:

ReDefeat Bush

There are also some pretty incredible and maddening figures on this site:

Cost of the War in Iraq

Here’s the latest, very important campaign from MoveOn.org:

Dear MoveOn member,

We all remember the election of 2000. Because of faulty and
mismanaged election systems, George W. Bush won Florida’s electoral
votes and the presidency. And now look at the mess we’re in.

People demanded improvements, and now states are spending millions to
buy new voting machines. So far, so good. But many key states,
including Florida, Ohio and other battlegrounds, are installing “black
box” voting machines — computer voting terminals that don’t produce a
paper ballot.

Without a paper ballot, there’s no way to know if our votes are
counted correctly. Also, computers are vulnerable to malfunction —
how often does yours freeze up?

It’s time to take action to protect our votes. Join our call for
Voter-Verified Paper Ballots, at:

http://www.moveon.org/protectourvotes/

If ATMs and gas pumps can print receipts, then voting terminals can
print paper ballots. Every voter should be able to make sure that his
or her vote will count as it was cast, by verifying a paper ballot that
can be audited and re-counted. And wherever electronic voting
terminals are used, backup paper ballots should also be available, so
no voters will be turned away from the polling place if the terminals
aren’t working.

Over the past few weeks, MoveOn members have been calling legislators
and officials in many states to demand Voter-Verified Paper Ballots.
And along with other citizen’s groups, large and small, we have won
important victories.

A month ago, our side won its biggest victory yet. California
Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified 14,000 black box voting
terminals made by Diebold Inc., and said that this November, every
California voter will be able to vote on a paper ballot.

Every voter in every state should have the same right — to verify
that his or her vote was recorded correctly, with full confidence
that it will be counted correctly. We shouldn’t have to hand our
elections over to manufacturers like Diebold and blindly trust them
with the results.

This is not about partisan politics. It’s about the foundation of our
democracy: our votes. There’s no reason Americans should have
anything less than the most accessible, secure and reliable voting
system possible.

Join our campaign by clicking this link:

http://www.moveon.org/protectourvotes/

Thank you, for everything you do.

P.S. The guy who runs Diebold, Walden O’Dell, is one of the biggest contributors to the Bush campaign and has publicly said that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

Stop the madness.

Since beginning the process of buying my first home, I’ve had at least a few friends ask me for input on how the process works — where to begin, what to look for, etc. As a first-time buyer myself, I’m the first to admit that it’s an overwhelming process. But I love this stuff.

I’ve done a ton of research — read books, created spreadsheets, have learned some great strategies — and I’m certain this is only the beginning of the learning. For me, I’ve always learned best by doing — getting in there and getting my hands dirty.

In any case, I’m not one to toot my own horn, but I think I’ve gained some knowledge that could benefit others — especially younger people looking to purchase their first home. It’s a daunting, but rewarding prospect, and one more easily achieved when armed with the right tools.

Having worked in the e-learning industry the past five or so years, I’ve spent a lot of time with online training content, but have thus far steered clear of creating my own. I’m considering venturing down that road.

I’m curious about what kind of response I might get to such a venture. Sure, there are tons of resources out there, but I think what would differentiate mine would be a sense of personality and that my “training” would be based on personal experience rather than on generic guidebook pointers.

So please do let me know what you think about this. I think it might be fun for me not only to chronicle my experience of home ownership, but to spread the knowledge for others to learn from, too.

Here we are, at the end of a long, action-packed three-day weekend. Jen and I spent Friday through Sunday in New York City, running from party to party and park to park.

After waking up at 6:30am Friday morning, working full days, and traveling by auto and train to Grand Central, we met up with Karen and Joti in Brooklyn before cruising on over to Zach’s party, attended by a number of Vassar alums, including a few friends I hadn’t seen since graduation. We stayed out till about 2 or 3 or so.

Saturday some more friends came over and we had a picnic in Prospect Park before preparing for the party at Karen and Joti’s that night. Another night of fun and debauchery, with a special late-night appearance by Dan. (I’m glad we finally managed to hang out after so many failed attempts both in the city and here in Saratoga.)

Sunday after breakfast from Bergen’s Bagels, Jen and I boarded the 7th Ave. subway in Brooklyn and high-tailed it for the island of Manhattan. We emerged from the underground at the 14th St. stop at Union Square, where we rendezvoused with Heather and Saahil, jumped in a cab, and had some dim sum at the ridiculously good and shockingly cheap (less than $6 per person) Harmony Palace Restaurant in Chinatown (92 Mott St. at Canal). We relaxed the afternoon away in Washington Square Park (where a band played, one man swallowed fire, and another man gave out free hugs).

We capped off this banner Memorial Day Weekend by going furniture shopping today and putting a down payment on our first-ever grown-up furniture (the kind that we won’t have to build ourselves and is part of a big collection from which we can pick other pieces to add to our house over time). We’re very excited about our first three pieces.

Mozilla creates better software than Microsoft, there’s no question about that. Yet somehow I always find myself stuck in a world of Internet Explorer and Outlook. That’s because, like most folks, much of the corporate world and the software and systems built around it are Microsoft-centric.

I’ve had Firefox 0.8 installed on my PC for a while, and use it mostly for compatibility testing. I keep trying to get myself to use it in place of IE, since it’s a superior browser in so many ways (speed, ease of use, tabbed browsing, etc.). The problem, of course, is that a lot of my day-to-day work happens leveraging bookmarks I have stored in my Yahoo account and access via the Yahoo Toolbar, available (sadly) only for IE.

[Related posts: Mozilla Firebird | Google Toolbar 2.0]

I’m also an avid Pine user. The problem with using Pine, of course, is that it’s dependent on your connection to your server, which is dependent on your Internet connection. If there’s any kind of lag, it can be frustrating trying to type a message. Sometimes a connection may even drop, forcing me to reconnect to server, login, resume message, etc.

I love Apple Mail, but can only use that on my Mac, of course. And Outlook just isn’t good for IMAP email.

So it occurs to me that Mozilla must do mail right. I’ve always known this in the back of my mind (and heard from others), but for one reason or another haven’t really acted on it. Until today.

Along comes Mozilla Thunderbird, the open-source power mail app. It’s very similar to Apple Mail, with full support for multiple IMAP accounts, junk mail filters, etc. “Mozilla Thunderbird is a powerful open-source mail and news client, supporting advanced junk mail detection and other useful features.”

I like it. As with other Mozilla products, it’s blazingly fast, simple, and loaded with a wealth of customization options (send message as both plain text and HTML, reply to message and put cursor at top or at bottom of quoted text, and more).

Pine will continue to be my primary mail client, but I like having a windows-based GUI alternative to Pine — for more easily sending attachments (vs. having to FTP to my Web server, then attaching via Pine), downloading attachments, viewing HTML mail, and the like — when necessary.

Thunderbird seems to be the best candidate for the job when I’m on my PC.