Archive for June, 2008

Recycle Bin FTW 2

(The title rhymes, if you didn’t notice, assuming you expand the acronym.)

Last night I decided that I should finally scrape all of my pictures off my two 4GB cards — I still don’t have my final photo storage solution worked out, so in the meantime I’m never really quite sure where I want to put things — since I had some 971 pictures in the mix. I put them on the largest drive I have; the one I record TV to, the one hooked up to my TV, the one low enough to be within arm range of toddlers and cruising infants alike.

As always, I used Ctrl+A to select everything on the card, then dragged it over, repeating for the other card. Then I turned off the TV and walked away. If you aren’t familiar with this process, it’s worth noting that after the copy operating finishes, all the copied files remain selected. That will be vital information.

This morning, Izzie (our youngest) was playing around on the keyboard connected to said machine, and although I heard a few dings and such, I didn’t worry about it.

Just now, I turned on the LCD and immediately noticed a warning about trying to delete a read only file. Sure enough, Izzie had managed to hit the delete button — with an entire card’s worth of copied files still selected — and sent that entire card’s worth of pictures to purgatory.

So, today, I’m thankful for the recycle bin.

Going Small 3

Here’s an interesting hobby: taking real photos and making them look like they’re photos of a model. I first saw this when a coworker sent me a link to the daily dose of imagery. It was a photo of a parking lot, but I couldn’t tell whether it was real, or whether it was a model.

But apparently this picture is not alone. In fact, there are entire Flickr groups devoted to this. And it’s really rather amazing — the insanely shallow depth of field plays horrible tricks on your brain and can actually convince you that you’re looking at something miniature.

One of my favorites so far.

~Time 0

I’ve been playing around with Xubuntu on an old machine, and happened to install the latest version of Eclipse + PDT (1.0.3, IIRC?). While setting up the myriad of options I require to feel comfortable in the editor, I noticed that they’ve added the ability to strip whitespace on save. May the authors be praised!

I’m in DC 2

So, as I mentioned a while ago, I’m presenting at DC PHP ’08. It’s this week.

The presenter I’m listening to right now just reminded me why I hate MVC on the web. But I’m not going to go into it.

The conference appears to have gotten the wireless correct, at the very least. The past two conferences I’ve been to have both had extremely flaky wireless connections, which presented problems for not only the attendees, but presenters who were depending upon an internet connection.

My talk is tomorrow, so for now I just listen.