Monthly Archives: January 2005

May I direct your attention…

Leave a reply

…to a few new features/links/tweaks that we’ve added recently?

  • As Becky mentioned in the previous post, we’re now linking to our good friends ***Jeremy and Angela Biggs|http://www.thebiggspicture.org/***.
  • My Linklog has been rebuilt. I’m now using ***del.icio.us|http://del.icio.us/*** to post links there. There is also an ***RSS feed|http://del.icio.us/rss/prwood*** for the Linklog, should you want to be alerted as soon as I post a new link. The Linklog will always be available from the left hand side of our page under Our Site. If you haven’t checked it out yet, head over. It’s an interesting opportunity to see the type of things that are percolating in the back of my head before they (potentially) become actual blog posts.
  • I’ve added the ability to do a Google ***Suggest|http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en***-style search on our blog entries. If you scroll down the left hand side of our page, you’ll see a search form labeled “Search Our Blog”. Try typing in a few letters of a word you’d like to search for. In a few seconds, you should see a list of possible choices pop up, and you can select the one that’s closest to your search word. You can also just do a regular search by typing in a word or words and pressing return or clicking Search. This is all possible thanks to ***Arvind|http://blog.arvind-satya.com/*** and ***Chad|http://jayseae.cxliv.org/***’s ***port|http://www.movalog.com/archives/plugins/suggest-search.php*** of the ***WP Suggest Search|http://blog.linsin.de/index.php/archives/2004/12/23/wordpress-plugin-suggest/*** plugin, which I also tweaked ***a bit|http://www.movalog.com/archives/plugins/suggest-search.php#c1254***.
  • Also related to search, I’ve cleaned up the search results page a bit. So it looks all pretty now. Yay.
  • Finally, Becky and I have collaborated to create an ***About|http://prwdot.org/?p=about*** page, something our site has been lacking for a while. We’ll probably flesh it out a bit more later, but it should be a good place to go if you don’t really know us that well.

Enjoy the new features, and let us know what you think!

Biggs News!

2 Replies

Our good friends, Jeremy and Angela, now have a blog of their very own! They have been tending it for a month or so now, cleaning it up and making it look nice, and now they are ready to be linked!

So, we’ve added them to our links list. Feel free to hop on over there sometimes and check out their site. They have a great photo gallery, cute entries and a whole lot of puns! Enjoy!

In other news, I’d like to point out all of the ‘Js’ that we have listed in our Links List. With the addition of Jeremy and Angela the total comes up to 11. I really shouldn’t be surprised. While in college most of my closest friends had names that started with J: Jennifer, Jill, Joanna, Joylene… Strange Coincidence, no?

converse Converse!

3 Replies

**note** This post is dedicated to Kristina Wilson. And if she ever reads this blog entry she’ll know exactly why!**

There is a man who rides the same train in to Boston that I do. Frequently he wears a pair of bright red Converse All*Star sneakers. I’ve noticed them because of their redness, the fact that I love wearing my Converse sneaks, and because they are a sharp contrast to his otherwise “corporate casual” attire. He seems pretty comfortable with looking a bit different.

Today, I was in for a shock as I noticed that on his left foot he was wearing his usual red sneaker and on his right foot…an identical sneaker, only in BRIGHT BLUE!

This has led me to wonder, “Did he do that on purpose?” Well, his feet did look very patriotic, so it could have been a concious choice. Or, “Did he put his shoes on in the dark?” A logical answer to the mis-matched shoe phenomena.

As neither shoe particularly “coordinated” wtih his outfit, I am led to believe that either choice above could be considered the ‘right’ choice. This will probably continue to baffle me until something more interesting comes along 🙂

Fog

Leave a reply

It has been really, really foggy today. Pretty much the whole day. The entire North Shore (and, from what I’ve heard, much of the Northeast) has been blanketed in a thick fog. I took some photos today around work and at home, and tossed them in the ***grab bag|http://gallery.prwdot.org/grab_bag***. Here are a few selections:

ggg|grab_bag/IMG_9788|Foggy view of CBD|ggg

ggg|grab_bag/IMG_9787|Foggy field at CBD|ggg

ggg|grab_bag/IMG_9790|Fog behind our apartment|ggg

Russia

3 Replies

You may have noticed that we’ve mentioned Russia in some of our blog entries over the past few years. Becky listed it as one of the countries she’d like to visit in ***this quiz|http://prwdot.org/?p=archives/001646***. We mentioned seeing the movie ***Russian Ark|http://prwdot.org/?p=archives/000711*** several times – a fascinating movie filmed in one 90-minute shot in St. Petersburg’s fabulous Hermitage. Becky posted her review of ***Nicholas and Alexandra|http://prwdot.org/?p=archives/001685***, the last Tzar and Tzarina of Russia. We have even posted ***birthday greetings|http://prwdot.org/?p=archives/001977*** for my cousin Kim, who is currently living and working in Moscow.

Now, we finally have the chance to travel there. We’ve scheduled the time off of work. We’ve made arrangements to stay with Kim at her apartment in Moscow, and with a friend of hers in St. Petersburg. We’ve purchased travel books. And tonight, the reality of it hit home as we purchased the plane tickets.

We’ll be in Russia for the last week in April and the first week in May of this year. Part of our time will be spent in Moscow and part will be spent in St. Petersburg. Our timetable will put us in Russia for Orthodox Easter (May 1), so we hope to be able to experience a Russian Orthodox easter service. There are still a few details to work out, such as applying for visas (Russia charges US citizens $100 each for single-entry visas!) and planning our actual itinerary. But we are going! Now we just have to sit tight for three months. *sigh*

How do ya like them Apples?

Leave a reply

Released Today:

***Apple iLife ’05|http://www.apple.com/ilife/***
***Apple iPod Shuffle|http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/***
***Apple Mac Mini|http://www.apple.com/macmini/***
***Apple iWork ’05|http://www.apple.com/iwork/***

So, who’s buyin’? That is, who’s buyin’ me this stuff? 🙂

Commenting Policies

1 Reply

We have always required visitors to include, at a minimum, a name and an email address when posting comments to our site. This is done so that we can send you a personal response via email, if necessary. But up until now, we’ve always displayed your email address as part of the comment listing on each post.

Starting today, that is no longer the case. The email address you enter is no longer be displayed in the comment listing. Hopefully this will satisfy the privacy concerns of folks who don’t want their email address available to the general public and/or spam harvesters. Admittedly, I have not heard of one single complaint from someone whose email address was harvested or abused because of showing up on our blog, but just the same I’d like people to be more comfortable with leaving comments.

Of course, if you don’t even want us to know who you are, that’s fine. Just enter in any bogus name or email address, and your anonymity will be protected. Well, mostly. We’ll still know your ***IP address|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ip_address***.

Leave a comment on commenting. Go nuts!

Update
I apologize to anyone who has been getting ‘forbidden’ messages when trying to post comments to our blog or any other blogs at prwdot.org. This was due to some weird problems with the cookies Movable Type sends, in combination with a security filtering rule on my web server. I’ve turned off this rule for the time being, so hopefully you won’t run into any more problems with this.

When Rebecca met Sally

1 Reply

On January 10th 1770 a baby girl was born in Boston Massachusetts. Her folks named her Sally Foster and were pleased to have the new addition to their Loyalist family. Despite their loyalty to King George III in England the family remained in Boston throughout the impending Revolutionary War. The young Sally grew up and was trained in all the subjects and manners that a young woman should be.

As a young woman she met a fellow named Harrison. They fell in love and eventually were married. Sally was known for her hostess skills and her ability to charm everyone she met. After six years of marriage Harry and Sally were able to build their first house together. The house was a beautiful Federal creation designed by Charles Bullfinch. The Otises moved their family into 141 Cambridge Street, Boston in the Spring of 1797.

**fast forward 200ish years**

January 10, 2005- Rebecca Wood celebrates her 26th birthday. She spends her week days split between the ***North Shore YMCA|http://www.northshoreymca.org*** and the ***Harrison Gray Otis House|http://www.historicnewengland.org/visit/homes/otis.htm***. Although Rebecca has never met Sally, she feels a special connection with her. It is almost as if they are sharing a house, two hundred years separated.

So, Happy Birthday, Sally. Thanks for letting me pretend to live in your house!

Griffin SmartDeck

3 Replies

***Griffin Technology|http://www.griffintechnology.com/*** is going to be ***releasing some new products|http://www.ipodlounge.com/ipodnews_comments.php?id=6045_0_7_0_M*** at ***MWSF|http://www.macworldexpo.com/live/20/events/20SFO05A*** this week. People seem to be most interested in the AirClick, the new wireless remote for the iPod. There’s also a USB dongle which will allow you to use the AirClick remote to control your Mac. While I think it’s a pretty cool idea, those general concepts have been done before. Admittedly, the new twist is that it’s RF control, rather than IR, so you don’t need line-of-sight to aim the remote. But the general concept of remote control for your iPod and/or Mac is nothing new.

No, the new product that most interests me is the SmartDeck. This spiffy device looks just like a regular car casette adapter, but instead of simply routing the sound from the iPod to the car stereo, it also allows the iPod to interface with the casette deck’s mechanical controls. In other words, when you hit the pause button on your car’s casette deck, it stops the casette from rotating, and sends a signal down the wire to your iPod telling it to pause. When you hit fast forward, your iPod will fast forward. So on and so forth. This is extremely cool for people like me and Becky who have older cars with casette decks and no interface with which to hook up more advanced control solutions. Pricing hasn’t been announced, but my hope is that it will be priced affordably. As nice as the iPod’s controls are, they just aren’t made to be easily handled while driving. It would be much easier to stop, skip, and play on the iPod by using the casette deck controls.

Griffin, if you’re reading this, I would be more than willing to write a review of this new product… just send me one to test out (and keep). Thanks.