Staticfree Blog

My dad said that it would be cool if we have a New Years party at his new place this year. I only wish to use that, however, if we (the royal 'we'!) can't find a better venue. Anyone care to help?

The car is loaded with most of my clothes, books, and tech and Rochester is giving one last dose of snow to cover it all up. I just heard the train whistling off in the distance for the last time and smile at not having to wait for it on Scottsville Road as it passes by. Of course, there will always be other trains in other places to slow my drive.

I'm off to Newton, MA (with a multiple-day layover in Rockland County to hang with Tina's family and friends) where I'll be living with my father (until I find my own place). I start work in January. Tina will follow shortly in February.

Goodbye school and Rochester; hello working life.

I am really going to miss Geekhaus.

Inspired entirely by Xkcd's recent foray into morphing images of people he knows, I decided to try my hand at it. I found xmorph in Debian and poked around using a photo of myself and a certain revolutionary who people often say I resemble.

Steve source image, Che source image.

My next little project is to get a certain beret made, so I can more effectively show my true revolutionary spirit.

I just beat college. The end bossexam was hard.

The first snow of the season falls on my last day of college classes. Yesterday, there was a thunderstorm that visited briefly. It had all the dramatics of hail and lightning, but left with the usual Rochester spittle. It's funny how weather can represent feelings (or perhaps it just affects them).

All that remains is the shuffling of paperwork and exams. Following that ... a bit of planned unknown.

Come the new year, my life starts in Boston.

So, I was cleaning out my cellcam yesterday and rediscovered these photos. They were of a piece of art work I found in a Greenline car on the MBTA in lieu of an advertisement. I've seen other bits of this artist's work drawn on parts of the T and have been hoping to find out more about them.

This was originally 3 images and was reconstructed using Autostitch.

New photos in 2005-11-04_niagra_falls/:

Tina and I went to Niagra Falls - a low-res photo narrative.

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It is the times when things are going the best that one finds themselves not writing in a journal. This is fine, generally, but it tends to leave the best parts to memory instead of being written down.

As you may guess, things are proceeding swimmingly. I'm doing well this quarter and enjoying my classes (admittedly, what is there not to enjoy about Foods of the World?). Tina and I are doing well, now living in the attic of Geekhaus.

I decided to not continue with RIT's graduate CS program and instead graduate with a BS in Computer Science this quarter (20051). Official ceremonies will be in June. I'll be heading back to Massachusetts eventually, where I'll be working in Cambridge starting in early January, 2006.

I plan to take a brief break between finishing school and working full-time somewhere. I'd like to visit people, so if you have been unvisited by me and would like that changed, contact me.

New photos in Cole/:

My brother is a goon. This is him after a few margaritas on his 22nd birthday.

I just saw a confusing sight in the train on my way to work today. The map of the Red Line in the car was missing all stops after Harvard (being Porter, Davis, and Alewife). The sign was a sticker and seemed relatively new (see below). It looks like a printing error to me, but you would think that someone would notice before putting more than one up.

You're invited to a party at my dad's house tomorrow (2005-07-23) evening, starting at around 19:00 (7:00pm). Bring friends, conversation, a funny hat if you have one, and good cheer. Please, however, let me know how many guests you'll be bringing so I can scale snacks, etc. There won't be much alcohol, but feel free to bring reasonable quantities of stuff that doesn't suck. (If you just plan on getting trashed, don't bother coming - this party is not for you.)

Contact me if you need directions to my dad's new house. The location is embedded in this post and various map services know how to find it properly.

So, I'm having a party two weeks from today (2005-07-23). It'll be at my dad's new place in Chestnut Hill. There will be people, snacks, and such. It'll go late into the night and there may be room for people to crash - just ask. Who can come?

New photos in Geekhaus/:

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I've got a new site theme. I got tired of the old clashing blue-and-brown and decided to make it a bit lighter. I think this better represents me as I am now: bolder, a bit more refined, and a bit more cheerful. It's still lacking a certain something, but I don't know what just yet. Perhaps another color to compliment all the blue.

Additionally, I wanted to try out a new technique for theming the site: I have basic XHTML documents that live on the server and are transformed using AXKit and an XSLT stylesheet to add in the necessary content for navigation bars and hooks for the CSS. Then I've got CSS for all the actual themey bits. This should give me much more flexibility in content creation. I don't need any hooks whatsoever in the XHTML documents now (before, I used server-side includes to add in navigation) and can mungle/merge content. This makes things like my new javascript color clock work in the theme, as well as stand-alone without any extra effort.

I'm back in Newton for the summer and will be living in my dad's new place. Tina and I will be living in our own little room in the basement (much bigger than my room in Rochester) for the summer. We'll be working at our jobs at Charlesbridge Publishing and France Telecom R&D, respectively.

The new place is in Chestnut Hill and has quite a bit of old-house character to it - aka. "quirk". The main source of quirk in the house is its seemingly excessive amount of cupboards and assorted small-panels-embedded-in-walls. These panels cover anything from electrical panels to absolutely nothing (see inset). Most of them make sense though, like the ones that cover ugly technology that may need to be serviced. There are just a great deal of them overall. Many years back, a hinge salesman was smiling gleefully.

David and I have discovered a few entropy switches - that is, switches whose sole purpose appears to simply increase the universe's entropy; any other function of such a switch has been lost to time and poor rewiring. I'm hoping to acquire one of those little electrical things that beep obnoxiously in order to trace them someday.

So, again, I'm back for the summer. There will be much much hanging out going on. If you're reading this, are in Boston, and aren't some creepy stalker person, then I want to hang out with you. Tina and I will be working day jobs, so that leaves plenty of nights and weekends to engage in various recreational activities. Don't just leave messages here (even though I get them) contact me or I'll have to contact you.

If you've ever wondered, "Gee whiz, what is that Steve fella running on his tiny laptop? Shucks, it sure doesn't look like my computer back at home." then you may wish to check out my new section of software that I use. It has some descriptions of my favorite open source applications and why I'm so fond of them.

Today I discovered NeuroCam. I'm still not entirely sure what it is, but it's based out of Melbourne, AU. It appears to be some sort of demi-secret international organization; only "demi" as many of the operatives have blogs. The weirdest bit yet: I've already met one two of their operatives, although I didn't know it at the time. I think this requires further investigation...

Many people have websites that have poorly-chosen font sizes and they don't even realize it. They use the unit of measurement known as "pt", thinking that it will make font sizes more consistent. This is akin to the people who make a website design and change the foreground color, but leave the background color to be the default. In both cases, the designer made bad assumptions about the reader's configuration.

To the point

Shown here is a popular website as seen on my small laptop screen. The text on the left window is much too large for the design. Compare to the window on the right that respects the browser's default font size.

You should not use point sizes for screen font sizes. Instead, you should use pixels, as no doubt the rest of your website is designed based on pixels. If it's not pixel-based and it's relative (yay!) then let the user choose (by using the default font size and relative sizes from that). This is because screen resolutions are not all the same and users generally know best when it comes to what font size they prefer reading.

In your site's CSS, instead of font-size: 12pt use font-size: 14px. These should look roughly the same on a normal, 85 DPI screen (see below for talk on DPI) but on a high-res screen (say, 141 DPI) 12pt text is 23 pixels high! If your site design is done in pixels - that's going to be a problem.

Nifty! Google's calculator can convert from pt to px at any given DPI. Just enter "12 points in inch / 85" (try it) in the search box and it'll give you "14.1666667 inch / 85" aka "14 pixels". You can do the same thing using the *NIX units program. If you know your DPI, you can just replace "85" with the appropriate DPI.

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Updated: Claimed! Good sir Faboo will be living with us next year.

Are you looking for a place to live in Rochester, NY next Fall? Does the notion of housemates who brew beer (as black as coffee), stay up until dawn (not partying), and enjoy the finer points of Linux sound appealing?

Well, we (Tina, Ryan, and myself) are looking for one or two someones who fit the bill. Rent is cheap, the people are swell, and the location is fairly near RIT.

Want to know more? Contact me if you are interested.

Specs

price

$850/month rent + heat + utilities, total. About $300/mo./ea. for 4 people; $240/mo./ea. for 5.

time

Starting in the fall, but perhaps summer as well.

location

81 Barton St. Five miles north of RIT across the river from U of R. Very near an excellent park with a nice view of the river. Across the street from river trails that lead up to the city.

room

2x 10.5'x9.5' rooms, carpeted. One with a closet, the other with a dedicated 20A wall outlet. 1x window each room.

Internet

Cable (extra-fast) and DSL for redundancy. Secured WiFi access point in the center of the house. A household server with plenty of space for storing files and hosting websites.

misc. house stuff

Kitchen, 1x bath, dining room, living room, furnished attic, washer/dryer, decent-sized back yard.

people

Two geeks and a lady: Ryan, Steve, and Tina. We're reasonably clean, stay up late, and occasionally listen to loud music. We generally don't have parties, we drink responsibly and eat well.

So, apparently there's an image of me in an ad for The Scene in UMass Amherst's newspaper, The Daily Collegian. I only learned about this because some of my friends at UMass saw it and called me (and sent me the above image - thanks Dyfrgi and Miraba). The image was taken from a photo that is on my website.

The original image, shown here, was taken by Aidenn some time back via my cellcam. I did not authorize the use of this image nor did the photographer. Now, to be slightly fair, there is no copyright information on the main index page that it is on. However, throughout my website there are notes that all the content there-in is available through a creative-commons license which prohibits non-attributed commercial use of the content. Moreover, any person who puts an ad in any commercial work should at least ask permission before using images they find on the Internet.

I will be contacting the advertiser as soon as I can. Getting a call about an image haphazardly used will hopefully get them to think more about non-permissive use of Internet-found images in the future. I'm guessing that the source was a Google image search of some sort; I get many hits from that.

New photos in 2005-04_Ohio/:

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One of the main things I've discovered about Rochester is that all the good stuff is hidden. There are nice walkways along the riverside and canal - paths that go all the way from across my street to the downtown area. There are wonderful small restaurants, like First Taste Grill on Park Ave. which has amazing french toast. But, unless a local told you about them, you probably wouldn't find them.

No local told me about Artisan Works until just yesterday - and I've lived here for 5 years. This place is the Disney Land of local artistry and art collection - it's huge. I spent a number of hours there and didn't get to see all of it, let alone absorb it all in any detail. Every square foot of wall - including hallways and stairways - has art hanging on it. In one place, even the ceiling has pieces hanging from it.

There is a section they call The Workshop and Blvd. Geribaldi which has the work of the Artisan Works resident artists displayed everywhere. The resident artists have workshops there where people can see more of their work.

I was brought there by Mark Groaning who makes (amongst other things) spherical geometric figures out of metal. His work is found all around Artisan Works - mostly laser-cut metal designs, but also paintings as well.

We were very lucky and were given a tour by Louis Perticone, the director of the place. He showed us absolutely everything, including one particularly long hall there had an enormous number of master works. I was quite impressed by the Salvidor Dali collection, but liked more some of their other collections (whose info I neglected to copy down).

As the entire place is non-profit, they partially support themselves by hosting parties. Apparently there was one recently that I was told I was invited to (although having received no invitation, I'm not entirely sure if that's the case). Hopefully RIT has another event there - I'd love to go back.

The more I look into this place, the more I find that no one in Rochester seems to know it exists. It's an impressive place - certainly not something one can experience in even one visit. Tina and I will be going back sometime soon - anyone care to join us?

So, for those who haven't heard, I recently was accepted into RIT's Computer Science BS/MS program. The program extends normal undergraduate studies and provides a MS degree in one extra year. It's sounding like it'll be a lot of fun, as I'll be able to continue my various RIT-related activities as well as go on and study nifty CS stuff. Practically speaking, however, this means that I get to partake of yet another of Rochester's beautiful winters. The good with the bad.

Tina will most likely be staying with me for that year here in Rochester, though we're not sure with whom else. Geekhaus shall be our home as, well, it's fairly cheap and full of geeks. Who can resist? If you're a person, you smell nice, you don't enjoy playing bad pop music loudly, and are looking for a nice place to live next winter, with a fast 'net connection - contact me. I can't guarantee an opening just yet, but soon enough there will be.

I am on my winter break. After a successful quarter, I want to get away from Rochester for a bit. So, I'll be visiting Boston/Newton until next Sunday. I'm first going to stop by Amherst and see people there, but will definitely be in Newton by the end of the week.

If you want to meet up or if you'll be around - just contact me. I should be reachable via cell and/or email for most of my trip.

I wrote a Blosxom plugin that lets you geotag - that is, associate something with a specific geographic (latitude/longitude) coordinate - a post on your weblog using plain-text entry. It uses Google's excellent new maps feature to do the location lookup.

Blosxom Geotagger plugin

Now that it doesn't require great effort to geotag my posts, I will be doing so more often. You can click on the light-green "M" to get a satellite map of whatever I may be talking about.

Though this post has nothing to do with my current location, I've tagged it with the location of Geekhaus - for show.

At Geekhaus, we have an electric stove that is very fond of producing smoke. Most likely, that's due to its age and general uncleanliness, but that's besides the point: it sets off our smoke detector frequently. Thankfully, our smoke detector has a cute little button (which we jovially entitled "STFU") that silences it for a short period of time. Alas, this is located on the detector itself, so it's often hard to reach.

So, what does a slightly intoxicated geek do at 2:00am? Run up to his room, rummage around for telephone wire, his Dremel and soldering iron and install a remote STFU button. It's mounted on the doorframe, right next to the stove for convenient silencing while cooking. And it is this reason, amongst many others, that I love living in this house.

I made an RSS 1.1 plugin / flavour for Blosxom. It's got the basic functionality to make a valid RSS 1.1 feed (well, valid at least at the time of writing this). I should be updating it as the spec. gets finalized, though it's not versioned. I'll put a notice on the page regarding update times.

This winter, I have experienced two things things in Rochester that I never have before:

1. Shoveling out my car (I only recently got one).
2. Seeing numerous people bicycle by in -20°C weather.

After an hour or so of #1, I realized why #2 exists: you don't have to shovel out, scrape off, or otherwise dewinterify your bicycle. Of course the major drawback of that being that most bicycles don't have heated seats or something to keep your face from freezing off.

For the longest time, I've had a very silly song of unknown origin called "Moscau" on my hard drive. I wasn't sure what language it was in, or what the lyrics were other than that they were singing about Moscow in a rather discoy, mock-Russian way. Well, thanks to a commenter on my Disco Moscow post I have more info (thanks Greg!).

The artist is a German band called Dschinghis Khan. The song is Moskau, track number 1 on their 1979, self-titled album. The lyrics (local mirror, poor Babelfish German-to-English translation) seem to praise Moscow. I'm still a bit unsure if it's sarcastic or not, particularly as there are lyrics like:

Come we dance on the table
Until the table breaks down

Whatever the case, there are traces of the group on the web:

• Greg pointed out one of the most amazing music videos I've seen in a long time.
• thebronsteins.com has a copy of a video of one of their live performances
• As pointed out in the above site, you can buy their "best of" CD on Amazon
• my pugglechump entry which has most of these links.
• An excellent German fan site devoted to Dschinghis Khan. Make sure to check out the photo galleries. Some of those photos there are astounding.
• 2005-03-21: Boingboing discovered this video today. There's another link to a copy of the Moskau video there.