Rambles In The Brambles

I ran across a nice little javascript library/service called Flickrshow, which allows a publicly-available Flickr photoset to shown as a slideshow on your own webpage. I've made one up for some of our wedding pictures (after the break).

Posted by Jeff at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I will continue to play my role as shill to Google’s profitable hegemony. Their products seem to fit my informational needs. I’ve been playing around recently with two of their applications:

1. Google Maps and Google Earth. They’ve published an API for both, which makes it possible to do some really interesting stuff. I've played around with it a bit, and that probably deserves its own post.
2. Google Reader. I really just started using it, and find that it drastically reduces the time that it takes to read through my "daily" websites. It works really well for "aggregative" feeds, e.g. I have a feed that includes US patent filings by aerospace firms, which has about 50 new postings per day. The keyboard commands are critical, of course. I also like the ability to designate posts as "shared" (shift-S), and have them published to my own feed. (Notice that I’ve linked my Google Reader shared posting page to the index page of my blog, on the right-side under "shared links". That's a good way to see what I've been interested in lately, and is always up-to-date as long as I've been use Google Reader.) Perhaps one loses a bit of the unique style (colors, formatting, etc) from each blog, but I suppose that makes it easier to consume their content. I have two complaints about my RSS reader setup: I can’t use it to consume RSS feeds within my company firewall. And many sites do not publish a complete RSS feed, but only titles or the first couple of sentences.

Posted by Jeff at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As in the past, Elizabeth and I spent a pleasant (three day) Easter weekend in Los Angeles. Although there were some tax-related activities, we also spent time walking around the neighborhood, watching movies, playing at the beach, and eating food. (Pictures attached.)

	Elizabeth's mom hand-made this very nice covering for our new dresser.
	In her Easter outfit.
	Sitting down for dinner. We made some sauerkraut and sausage, as well as plenty of other goodies.
	Me at Easter dinner.
	We drank an 2002 Winner Circle Blue Roan Syrah, from Bridlewood Winery, which we had seen on a wine-tasting tour last year. It was very spicy, with a sharp almost sulphuric bite to it. I had thought that maybe it hadn't stored well, but it may be characteristic of the type of wine.
	Shot of the Santa Monica beach, which we spent some time during the weekend.
	Speaking the language of the fan.

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