Author Archives: Peter

Russia

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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?

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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

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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.

Griffin SmartDeck

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***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.

Free Sierra Mist Guy

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There’s this ***Pizza Hut|http://www.pizzahut.com/*** delivery guy who’s handled our deliveries for the past four or five orders we have placed. Almost every time, he has brought along a free one liter bottle of ***Sierra Mist|http://www.sierramist.com/***, even though we didn’t ask for it. We’re fine with it, since we both like Sierra Mist. Nonetheless, I wonder. What is the deal with that? Do they just have a lot of extra Sierra Mist? He’s probably one of the most put-together and professional looking delivery men I’ve ever encountered, so I don’t know if he’s some sort of upper-level deliveryman, or did he steal it somewhere, or is it ‘bad’ Sierra Mist, or what? A couple of times he was late, and I thought it was as an apology for being late, but there have been several times where he was right on time, and he just said “Here’s a Sierra Mist for you, on the house.”

Fine, fine. I’ll just try to enjoy the free drink without any angst.

Tag Redux

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I think that I’ve solidified my position on some of the social/tagging sites that are trendy these days.

First, ***flickr|http://www.flickr.com/***. I think flickr has some cool technology for people who want to share photos. I like their tagging system, whereby you can assign multiple categories to the photos you upload, and then view your collection (or other peoples’ collections) grouped by tag. The idea of a running photo stream is cool, and their tagging combined with their RSS feeds provide neat ways to integrate your photos into a website. But for me, it’s just not necessary. We already have a huge ***gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/***. Though it doesn’t have tags, it is pretty well categorized and organized (if I do say so myself), and it’s easily searchable. Google has our gallery well indexed, and the gallery has its own search engine. Plus, it has its own RSS feed – just look for the ubiquitous orange button at the bottom of any gallery page. So flickr… if we didn’t already have a great, established photo gallery, and I was looking to get started with sharing photos on the web… I might have some use for you…

The other tagging tool that I’ve been trying out is ***del.icio.us|http://del.icio.us/***. Using a ***bookmarklet|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookmarklet*** or a Firefox extension, I can grab the URL of whatever page I’m looking at, write up a brief description of the page, and then provide a few tags to denote the categories that the page fits in to. This adds the page to my running list of links, groups it into various categories by tag, and aggregates it with links other people have posted from the same categories. del.icio.us also tracks how many people have posted a given link, so if you visit my ***del.icio.us|http://del.icio.us/prwood*** page, you can see which of the links I’ve posted have also been posted by others. Pretty sweet. Using one of the multitude of RSS feeds that are available, I’ve integrated my del.icio.us feed into my ***clipblog|http://prwdot.org/?p=clipblog***. I still use ***Bloglines|http://www.bloglines.com/*** to actually manage my blogroll and read new blog entries and news, but del.icio.us will now be the place that I stash all of the interesting links that I read. I’m still learning more about how to make better use of it.

w00t.

My Six Apart + LiveJournal FAQ

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So pretty much everyone has heard the rumors that ***Six Apart|http://www.sixapart.com/***, makers of the ***Movable Type|http://www.movabletype.org/*** software that we use here at prwdot.org, was going to buy ***LiveJournal|http://www.livejournal.com/***, a community blogging site. Well, those rumors ***are true|http://www.sixapart.com/log/2005/01/six_apart_acqui.shtml***. There are plenty of good links to be had elsewhere, so I figured I would provide some unique content here.

Q: What does this mean to prwdot.org?
A: Not a whole lot. The blogs at prwdot.org are powered by Movable Type, which is a product of Six Apart, the company that purchased LiveJournal. We won’t be switching to LiveJournal, and from the other FAQ’s that I’ve read, LiveJournal won’t be integrated into any other Six Apart products. It remains to be seen what type of ripple effects this acquisition will have on Six Apart and their other products. I know that acquisitions are often quite expensive for the purchasing company, and can set them back significantly in terms of their overall financial strength. So hopefully they can make the most out of this opportunity.

Q: Does World Wide Wood know anyone who would be affected by this?
A: Well, our friend ***Jenny Rainville|http://www.livejournal.com/users/raingirl3179/*** is a LiveJournal user. From what I understand, the benefits will be mostly positive for her. Six Apart does not have any (announced) plans to get rid of LiveJournal. From what I’ve read, they have only the best of intentions. So Jenny’s blog should stay around for the forseeable future. Maybe there’s a chance that she and other LiveJournal users would get some cool features like the ability to accept comments from people outside of LiveJournal without jumping through hoops, or other things like TrackBacks. But I don’t know about that.

Q: Where does ***Xanga|http://www.xanga.com/*** figure in to all of this?
A: Though they aren’t involved in the current Six Apart + LiveJournal deal, one can only hope that Six Apart will, in the near future, buy them out and kill off their god-awful blogging product. Seriously, with very few exceptions (e.g. ***Laura and Johnny|http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=DimbyRVin***), Xanga is just a dumping ground for crappy teeny-bopper blogs that look absolutely hideous.

Q: Did this buyout affect your ability to get to work this morning?
A: Most likely yes. When my car stalled out on the on-ramp to Route 128, and I couldn’t get it to come back to life, Six Apart was the first company I thought to call. Unfortunately, after dialing their offices numerous times, I received only busy signals. I guess they were pretty busy. In any case, my second choice, ***AAA|http://www.aaa.com/***, was able to come and tow my car to ***Auto-Dyne|http://www.auto-dyne.com/*** within 15 minutes. If there’s anything seriously wrong, though, I’m sending the bill to Six Apart. If they can afford to buy LiveJournal, they can certainly afford to repair my car.

Q: Should I take this entire blog entry with a grain of salt?
A: Just a pinch will do!

Boston Movable Type Meetup

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One week from today, January 11, is the January Boston Movable Type Meetup. If you’re interested in Movable Type, and you’re going to be in the Boston area, why not stop by? Go ***here|http://movabletype.meetup.com/15/events/3883888/*** for more information, to sign up, and to RSVP. You can also pass along this information if you think you know someone who might be interested.