kev

things will be a little bright around these parts for a while. I’m in the process of updating this theme to something a little less bright, and a little less coop-like. after that, I’ll be posting thoughts and ramblings here again as opposed to flickr (although I’ll be keeping the flickr badge :) ).

posted by kev at 12:30 No Comments 

a couple weeks a friend of mine sent me a vid of fixie riders in San Francisco. It was set to a great instrumental, and said instrumental was “I’m bound to pack it up” by Aluminum.

I didn’t know (until today) that Aluminum’s self-titled album was a rework of the White Stripe’s “White Blood Cells”, performed by an orchestra.

Listen to “Fell In Love With a Girl”, and then listen to “I’m Bound To Pack It Up.”

Too cool. I like this stuff even more, now.

White Stripes - Fell in Love With a Girl

Aluminum - I’m Bound to Pack it Up

posted by kev at 18:02 (2) Comments 

so, I got in to my hotel last night at around 10:30 (I’m on the left coast, so it felt like 01:30) and had every intention of crashing. before I nodded off, I flipped on the tube, and stumbled across the premiere of “Carrier”, PBS’s new documentary that captures a tour of duty aboard the USS Nimitz, a US aircraft carrier.

the show runs ten episodes, and last night’s introduced viewers to the wide variety of people on board. the emphasis was on how the whole thing wouldn’t work unless everyone did their job, and how big the pool of “everyone” is. the interviews are pretty blunt (in a good way), and I think my favorite bit was one of the airmen explaining that because of the large number of 18-20 year olds, the amount of drama is a lot like high school.

I got sucked in, and ended up watching the whole thing. it was worth the feeling totally tired this morning, and I’ll be looking for it over the next couple months. the show also gets my nod as one of the best intros (and choices of music to set the tone - “gotta help me out”) to a program of any kind in a very long time. (the youtube quality doesn’t do it justice, but you get the idea)

posted by kev at 11:31 No Comments 

so… the nhl playoffs start tonight.

you can see how important espn thinks this is. there is not one story about the playoffs visible in the prime real estate. phil mickelson playing a par-freaking-three event with his kids is bigger news. that’s awesome.

bettman’s done a hell of a job raising awareness of the game there.

it’s so pathetic it’s funny, really.

posted by kev at 14:46 1 Comment 

UPDATE: The browser.urlbar.richResults preference checking was removed in bug 407836. Please use the oldbar addon if you want to return to Firefox 2’s style of lookups. The rest of this post is kind of moot now :)

Some people don’t like the “awesomebar” in Firefox3, which is a widget that replaced Firefox 2’s location bar’s auto-complete with a whack of new functionality. Instead of just looking at your history and matching URLs, the awesomebar goes through your history and bookmarks (and the metadata around them) while remembering which sites you visit most. So, instead of just URL matching, it suggests the sites you visit the most that are most relevant to what you’ve started to type in the location bar (and this can be keywords as well as partial URL matching - it’s nifty).

I confess, I didn’t much care for it at first, but the improvements to its learning behaviour and search routines have made me pretty damn happy. I’m not disabling it, but I’ve read a number of posts where people don’t really like/want the functionality and the slightly fatter UI elements it brings. So, I say give it a chance and it’ll grow on you, but if you really don’t like it, you can disable it.

To disable the awesomebar, you’ll need to set the boolean preference of browser.urlbar.richResults to “false”. If you’re asking yourself “how do I do that?”, then you need to do a little reading on “about:config“.

So, short and sweet for the skimmers:

Add the pref browser.urlbar.richResults as a boolean, set it to false

This pref is only checked on startup, so you’ll need to restart Firefox for it to take effect.

posted by kev at 8:20 (11) Comments 

CBC Radio 3, a radio program and satellite channel that features all-Canadian music I like, featured one of my pics today. They maintain a pool on flickr where people can submit their shots. Each day they pick a photo from this pool as their image of the day.

Mine made it today :)

It’s also the background image for their website, but only for today (if you click on the “show background” in the lower right you get the whole image).

It’s a little thing, but it’s pretty cool for me.

(the original is here)

posted by kev at 17:31 (2) Comments 

DSC01468 - alelex

dear chevrolet,

you’re doing it wrong.

like, really, really wrong.

congrats on taking an icon and turning it into a piece of rice.

I wish I could say I was surprised, but this kind of product - which the big three just can’t seem to get their heads out of - is why I finally (and not willingly) switched to an import last year.

posted by kev at 11:51 No Comments 

no doubt that hank will continue to prove he doesn’t after he receives his membership card. I’m a yankees fan (well, more a jeter fan), and I gotta say that this is the perfect response to Hank’s idiocy du jour. I’m thinking of starting a pool on when good ‘ole Hank will implode under the media and fani scrutiny in New York.

I’m thinkin’ maybe June-ish, when it starts to get really warm again, and the boobirds come home to the bleachers to nest for the summer and hatch some batteries.

posted by kev at 13:03 No Comments 

I have to say, I’ve noticed that flickr hasn’t been the same since some "optimization" changes to the databases were applied in mid-january. in addition to a few outages, which weren’t so irritating, the contact update issue seems to be getting progressively worse. I’ve noticed it’s gone from 1-3 hours to update some contact to 3-4 days. that seems like fail to me.

the admins are aware of the issue, and I can appreciate the scaling fun they must be hitting, but this is starting to get a little stupid. it’s frustrating more than anything, because there are folks I chat with through comment streams when they update.

I’m hoping they fix the problems sooner rather than later. a couple hour delay is fine, but days is silly. right now 40 contacts of mine are out of date, out of 148. one of them hasn’t updated in over a year, which surprised the crap out of me. most are over a day behind at this point.

I’m not calling for heads (like you’ll see in the forums), but it would be nice if the admins did more than say "don’t worry, we’re working on it, but it’ll be a few more weeks". I’d like to understand what the problem is, and if they fucked it up royally in january just say so (or if it’s purely a scaling issue).

anyways. sad-making.

posted by kev at 14:08 No Comments 

dear apple: about goddamn time.

there’s been an issue with macbooks and macbook pros where the first character you type gets ignored. apple’s release note states it happens when the machine comes out of an idle state, but I’ve also noticed it (a lot) on window focus changes as well.

shaver let me know this morning that the fix was in. I bitch about it a lot in IRC, because typing “eh” instead of “heh” sends the entirely wrong message.

I’ve applied the fix, and it seems to have done the trick. now I’ll have to find something new and improved to drive me nuts.

oh, also note - you must exit sw update for the firmware updater to run. sw update only downloads the installer, and the script won’t run the installer (which doesn’t require a reboot) until you exit.

posted by kev at 13:28 No Comments