Today’s Crazy Idea I’m constantly coming up with ideas. Much moreso than I suspect is normal. (At any given time I have about half a dozen ideas for new businesses floating around in my head.) A lot of the times after a few minutes in my mind I’ll reject an idea for one reason or another. Other times I realize...

phototool If I had more time right now, and was more familiar with how to parse EXIF data in shell scripts, I’d write a script that could parse a directory (or set of directories) and: Weed out duplicates. (MD5 hashes would be fine.) Adjust (based on manually-inputted corrections) timestamps on photos for...

Storage Challenge I think I mentioned that everyone in Ghana ended up copying their photos to my computer. Initially I said I’d post them online for everyone.  Then I said I’d just send out a CD, realizing how many there were. Over time I changed the offer to 2 CDs. And then a DVD. Overall, I have a total...

Combo Since we’re living somewhere else now, I think I can finally say what I’ve wanted to say for a long time: The combination to our apartment last year was 12345. We didn’t pick it. And it wasn’t quite 12345, you had to press two of the numbers at the same time. It was awfully unimaginative...

Morning So a month ago I was working until 1am or so. I’d wake up around noon. Then I traveled to Ghana, which is 4 hours ahead. And we had to get up by 8 every day, sometimes earlier. There’s nothing to do at night, so we’d usually be in bed by 10:30 or so. So you can imagine how messed up...

Stupid, Stupid! Web forms should be designed to minimize data loss. Let me explain two scenarios in the past 24 hours: I spent a while getting the wording just right on my Craigslist post. I found one minor thing to fix, so I clicked back. But stupid, stupid Craigslist dynamically generates the names of the forms (probably...

Horror I’m not a big movie watcher. I probably watch half a dozen movies a year. That might be a high estimate. And probably not more than 10% of the movies I watch are horror movies. But I still like them. You have to watch scary movies alone in the dark. There’s just no other acceptable way of...

Deals Most people probably like to read the comics in the Sunday paper. I like to read the circulars. Every week there are good deals. But sometimes, there are great deals. And this week, there are several. (N.B. that most of these have rebates attached to them.) $600 buys an HP Pavilion notebook with a dual-core...

Professor On our trip to Ghana, we had ten students, two faculty members (who we basically considered students), and two professors.  We tried to pull tables together so that all fourteen of us could have our meals together, but sometimes we’d be lazy and just sit at individual tables. One morning, I had...

Step One A few e-mails later, it’s occurred to me that I never actually mentioned that I was back from Ghana. I had an incredible time, and we came back right as I was beginning to miss home, so it worked out well. JFK has got to be the worst airport on the planet. I don’t think I saw a single happy...