Author Archives: Peter

Duck, Duck, TOUR! (And More)

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Yesterday, Becky and I went on a Duck Tour with Kevin and Susie, Marcia, Beth, Hugo, and Elliott. One big happy crowd on a DUKW named “Beacon Hilda” 🙂 Our ConDUCKtor’s moniker was Johnny Baggadonitz, and he narrated our tour of Boston’s streets and waterways with his own unique blend of historic fact and, well… Italian family street smarts. While I am already familiar with much of Boston’s history and culture, I did learn a few new things:

* The Museum of Science sits on land leased from the Metropolitan District Commission for $1 per year. They have a 99 year lease, with an automatic 99 year renewal. Pretty sweet deal.
* MIT was originally located in Boston, but was later moved to Cambridge.
* The JFK Federal Building in Boston sits on top of the site of Alexander Graham Bell’s laboratory – the one in which he invented the telephone.

It was quite an enjoyable experience, and while we were at the Museum of Science, we got to see some of the outside of the Lord of the Rings exhibit. We’d definitely love to go some time before it leaves on October 24, but at $19 per person…. hmm. We’ll see.

Photos from yesterday are in our gallery – including some photos I took in the morning while Becky was working a short shift at the Otis House, and a couple of photos we took on the way in to the city at Krispy Kreme. We stopped in there for some hot, fresh donuts right off of the line. Mmmmmm…..

We also rented a couple of movies from Blockbuster this weekend. Blockbuster is currently very desperate for customers, and they sent three coupons for 99 cent movie rentals. Hey, why not? So on Saturday night we rented 50 First Dates and today we rented Hidalgo. We enjoyed both films overall, but did have a few complaints.

At its heart, 50 First Dates was a very sweet, funny movie. There were some incredibly sad parts, and I thought all of the actors did very well in their roles. Lord of the Rings vet Sean Astin as the steroid-pumping, fitness-crazed, lisp-encumbered brother was very entertaining. However, this was an Adam Sandler franchise film, and as such, was peppered with an unfortunate amount of scatological humor. We had to wince when the moronic, sophomoric jokes came up – they just didn’t fit in with the rest of the movie.

Hidalgo was great, with a good performance by another Lord of the Rings veteran, Viggo Mortenson. The action and adventure elements of the film were excellent, but our complaint was that there was simply too much violence. There were many heads lopped off, many spear impalings, and more than enough gun shots – all packed in to a PG-13 rating.

But hey, for 99 cents each… you can’t go wrong. 🙂

All of this, and there is still one day left in our weekend!

Noreascon

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Why do I not hear about these things until it’s too late? This year, the world science fiction convention is being held in Boston: Noreascon. This only happens in Boston sporadically – apparently it’s been 15 years since the last one, and the previous ones were nine years apart each. It started yesterday and runs through Monday, but it costs upwards of $50 per day to attend, or $200 for the whole convention. But wow – they’re holding the Hugo Awards here, and such notables as Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman will be there.

Speaking of Neil, I didn’t even realize this thing was going on in Boston until I read the first line of his blog entry from yesterday! I mean, I read it every day, and I know that he’s always talking about conventions he is going to attend, but I had no clue it was in Boston until now! Gahh!

I guess I’ll sign up for his author tracker – maybe they will actually be a bit more specific about his actual plans. 🙂

Too bad I can’t qualify as press to receive a press pass. 🙁

Blog Posting Stats

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So the other day I was thinking, “Self, this blog thing you post to is just a front-end to a ***MySQL|http://www.mysql.com/*** database. You know MySQL, and you know how to massage data in MySQL. So why not do something fun with it?”

So I wrote a ***dynamic reporting app|http://prwdot.org/blog_report.php*** using PHP and MySQL, which shows up-to-the minute statistics on how many total posts exist for different months, days, and hours. It’s kind of fun to look back at the stats. For example, in March 2003, we had the most posts ever – 42! Why was that? Part of it may have been the short-lived “Picture of the Day’ feature we were doing at that point. Our lowest posting month was July of 2003. That month was full of travels, visits from friends and relatives, and other such things… so less posting there. Mondays and Tuesdays are our most popular days for posting, probably since we’ve just finished off the weekend. And 10 am is the most popular hour for posting… not sure why, though. 🙂

Some of these stats are already available on our ***archives|http://prwdot.org/?p=archives*** page, but others can only be had through custom coded queries. There’s more I could do – for example, break down the statistics based on who was doing the posting, or see if there is a correlation between the length of the post and the time or date.

I’ve also set up the script so that you can see the stats for other blogs on the prwdot.org domain. Enjoy!

Firefox Site Update

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Check out the new ***Mozilla.org|http://www.mozilla.org/*** website! Featuring EZ-Download of their awesome web browser, ***Firefox|http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/***. Though ***Safari|http://www.apple.com/safari/*** is still my personal choice on the Mac platform, I think Firefox is the best choice on any other platform. Especially on Windows. And especially instead of Internet Explorer.

I must say, I am very excited to see that only 52.9% of our site visitors are using IE! The rest of our visitors are split fairly evenly between Firefox, Mozilla, and Safari.

And for the other 52.9% of you – ***Browse Happy!|http://browsehappy.com/***

Three Days of iPod

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After having the new ***iPod|http://www.apple.com/ipod/*** for three days, here’s what I have to say about it:

First, I skipped three generations of iPod when I did this upgrade. So many of the features that are “new” to me are really from one of the previous generations.

It’s great to have 20 GB of space to store music in. I had just reached the 5 GB limit on my old iPod, but I think 20 GB will do fine for a while. I have 6.08 GB on there right now.

I like how the iPod automatically pauses when the headphone jack is unplugged, and unpauses when plugged back in. This makes it easy to take it from the car in to work, and vice versa.

The touch/click wheel is cool. The 1G iPod had an actual scrolling wheel that could come off easily, and did many times in my case.

There’s a ‘music quiz’ game which is kind of fun. It chooses random songs from the iPod, and gives you a short clip from each one. As it’s playing, you have to choose from a list of possible song titles. Fun way to pass the time. There are also three other games – Solitaire, Parachute, and Bricks… also good diversions.

The backlight fades in and out, rather than just snapping on and off. A nice, if pointless and time wasting touch. 🙂

Though the height and width of the device are the same as the first generation, the thickness is significantly less. Check out these comparisons:

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iPod versus casette|ppp

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iPod versus iPod|ppp

I think we have a winner!

A Reason To Ditch Friendster

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Well, I haven’t been much of a fan of ***Friendster|http://www.friendster.com/*** since I first started using it, but now I have a good cause for which to ditch them.

***Jeremy Zawodny|http://jeremy.zawodny.com/*** ***writes that Joyce Park was fired from Friendster|http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/002498.html*** because of certain details she posted in her blog. She has made a concerted effort not to blog about anything that isn’t public record, but apparently some of the technical details she posted in her blog were disagreeable to her employer.

Anyway, you can ***read her side of the story|http://troutgirl.com/blog/index.php?/archives/46_Shitcanned.html***, and then ***delete your Friendster account|http://www.friendster.com/cancelaccount.php***, as I have already done.

If you’re looking for another social networking site, might I suggest ***Orkut|http://www.orkut.com/***? If you would like to be an Orkut member, just let me know – I’ll send you an invite. Orkut’s a more featureful service anyway – that is, when they aren’t overloaded. 🙂

Has The Gmail Rage Passed?

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So it looks like just about everybody who wants one has a Gmail account now.

I now have six Gmail invitations to give out! If you currently use something like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, or some other free email provider, why not give it a try? You might like it. Just let me know if you want one.

Maximize Your Gmail

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Ohhhhh boy. I knew this would happen sooner or later:

GmailFS: The Gmail Filesystem

For the less-techie crowd, this is basically a way to use your free, one gigabyte Gmail account as though it were a disk inside your own computer. But only on Linux at this point, as far as I can tell.

We’ll see how long it takes before Google tries to shut this guy down.

Goodbye, Hello

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The combination of a broken FireWire port, potentially expensive repairs, “old” age (over 2.5 years), diminished storage capacity, and a limited time 0% APR offer on our credit card helped us to decide that it was time to purchase a new Apple iPod.

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Apple 20GB 4th Gen iPod|ppp

We bought it at the Rockingham Park Apple Store in beautiful, tax-free New Hampshire. It’s all synced up with the latest tunes, as well as calendar and contact information via iSync.

iPodResQ buys used iPods in any condition, so hopefully we can get a few bucks out of the old one.

Here’s to many more years of on-the-go music!

Full photo gallery can be found here.