Asymptomatic

When I looked at my GoDaddy account last night, I was sure I've been on crack for the past year - 39 domains. And those are just the ones at GoDaddy. Surely there must be some projects I'm "working on" that people don't know about. Let's see what I can share.

Before I go on let me say this: Will someone please redesign GoDaddy's site? kthxbye

I've got a couple of domains for the kids. I've been trying to convince them to start a little video project, reviewing movies. I thought that a low-impact introduction to the web with a movie review site would be interesting to them. They could watch a movie and tell the camera what they think. Getting them into the idea hasn't been successful yet. I did get Abby to make a video about the cats that I have not yet put online. Whether this is something that you could do (or want to watch) regularly, I can't say. That's two domains....

As we drove to dinner today, we passed through a nearby farm field. Berta remarked that within the past week she's seen that field filled with many grazing deer. It got me thinking about how strangely we treat this wild animal.

Deer are fairly large beasts around here. They're not quite as large, but are almost as tall as a cow. In any case, they're no joke. If you run into one with a car, the car can easily be damaged beyond repair. This is in comparison to many other creatures that we have not hunted into extinction or herded for food that still wander wild in the open.

There really isn't a range of animal between, say, stray dog and deer. There aren't a whole lot of stray dogs around either, but if there were, the deer are on average at least twice as large. There are many, many smaller creatures than dogs out in the "wild", as evidenced by the all-too-plentiful roadkill, but nothing between dog and deer size. What puzzles me is that we just take this deer thing for granted....

I've had a regular Eye Fi card for a while, but I recently ordered an upgrade to the Eye Fi Explore, which is so far a pretty interesting experience.

The Eye Fi card is a simple little device. It looks and behaves mostly like a regular 2GB SD memory card, but if you go through an initialization process, the card has a single special feature that regular SD cards don't: It will upload your photos to your computer via your home wireless network.

It's a simple little thing, but it makes getting photos to your computer much less tedious than having to remove the card from the camera or hook your camera to the computer. You just leave your camera on and it transmits the photos to your PC -- Easy as pie. The software even lets you configure multiple photo sites to which it will upload your photos after they've been transferred. The upgraded Explore version of the card offers two additional features that are well worth paying the premium price. ...

For our 10th wedding anniversary, Berta and I stayed over night in Philadelphia. The interesting story is less about what we actually did than what we tried to plan.

Mostly, you wouldn't call it a plan. Friday night, we dropped the kids off at Mom's then raced home to decide what to do. It was still early enough to consider flights out of Philadelphia, provided that they were late enough.

We'd been thinking about getting away for a while, specifically to exercise our passports one more time before they expire. Berta has stamps from Mexico, and I've got stamps from France, and we both have stamps and visas for India. I thought it would be nice to be "world travelers" and add another stamp to the book before it was retired.

It's kind of strange explaining these trips we take. It's like we just need to get away for a while, and it's not about being pampered or being extravagant (although the travel might seem that way), but more about just getting away from home. And so on Friday night we simply looked for a reasonably cheap flight to anywhere that wouldn't keep us away longer than the weekend. This is harder than you might think. more

I've been working on some improvements to Pastoid lately. It started out as more of a response to the URL shorteners that keep popping up everywhere and getting all the press, which Pastoid languishes in obscurity.

For those that don't know, Pastoid is a site that serves two major functions. First, it functions as a URL shortener, like the ubiquitous TinyURL. Second, it functions as a pastebin, like pastebin.com. It has a few little extra features that set it apart, and I have a lot planned for it that will break it out as something really different and special from those other tools.

I recently updated the look of the site. It has been getting mostly negative reaction. I think people don't like the grungy purple. Maybe I'll revise it again, but it does affect the change I wanted where the sidebar is moved to the left to allow code sections to expand in the liquid layout on the right. In addition to that, I've been working on the thumbnail improvement project, which is the true impetus for this post....