In the Gonda Building of the Mayo Clinic there is a piano available. The video below is of Fran and Marlo Cowan playing a duet. They’ve been married 62 years and he was 90 in February.
Last night Sibylle and I went to the opening of Star Trek at the local theater. We haven’t been to the movies in a long time, and seeing as how the opening of Star Trek and my birthday coincided, we took the opportunity to go.
The movie was great fun, and we both enjoyed ourselves immensely. For the first time ever, in all the years I’ve been going to movies, there was applause during and after the showing. Without giving anything away, the appearance of character on screen is greeting with applause from the audience. And when the film ended and the credits started to roll, there was more applause.
Even if you aren’t a fan of the series or the previous movies, I think this one is worth seeing on the big screen. It was well acted, combined humor with a little drama, and paid appropriate homage to the original characters and to the spirit of Star Trek.
0x01: I am learning how to play piano, proving that old dogs can learn new tricks.
0x02: I was born in Brooklyn, but now I live in Manhattan. Kansas.
0x03: My favorite movie of all time is Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
0x04: I read Neal Stephonson’s “Cryptonomicon at least once a year.
0x05: There have been six cats in my life. Shalimar, Kashmir, Abby, Nekko, Taz, and Bootstrap.
0x06: I was socialized as right-handed, but believe I may really be left-handed.
0x07: I have lived in twelve cites. (Brooklyn, Elwin, Decatur, Brookston, Normal, Springfield, Vancouver, Summerville, Pawnee, Overland Park, Olathe, and Manhattan.
0x08: I have 6 websites (5 individual and 1 shared), 12 email addresses, and own three domains.
0x09: I have arthritis in my lower back, and a fallen arch in my right foot.
0x0A: Lasik surgery didn’t work for me, I started wearing trifocals less than two years after the procedure.
0x0B: I can listen to the same music over and over again.
0x0C: I have learned how to cook fish, something I never ate as a child.
0x0D: I have been to Europe three times and look forward to many more trips.
0x0E: I haven’t talked to my brother in more than two years.
0x0F: I have had, and used daily, the same primary computer for over six years.
0x10: I use serial commas.
0x11: I have great difficulty spelling and depend upon spell checkers.
0x12: I do not watch any television.
0x13: I do watch movies (on DVD) and some television content (also on DVD).
0x14: I read, on average, 75 books a year.
0x15: Usually I am in the middle of two or more books at once.
0x16: My favorite vegetable is corn.
0x17: My least favorite vegetables are all the others.
0x18: I like to do crossword puzzles.
0x19: Except for my wedding ring I don’t wear any jewelry.
0x1A: I am a strong advocate of “Net Neutrality.”
0x1B: Voting for President Obama was one of my proudest moments as an American.
0x1C: I own several copies of “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking.
0x1D: I have eight instant message personas. Nine if you count Facebook.
0x1E: Despite using only 5 or 6 fingers I can type about 55 words per minute.
0x1F: Over the course of a year I lost 50 pounds. And I’ve kept it off for two years and counting.
0x20: I prefer email to phone calls.
0x21: In three weeks I will have been out of high school for 30 years.
0x22: For only the second time in 25 plus years of working, I have more than 10 days of vacation per year.
0x23: I have owned (or leased) ten cars in my life. Plus two motorcycles and a scooter.
0x24: I once owned a DN class ice boat.
0x25: I have had my oldest Internet domain (and web site) for more than a quarter of my life.
0x26: If I couldn’t create software for computers, I’d want to create things with software; architecture or industrial design.
0x27: I have only 28 teeth, and three of those are plastic.
0x28: I’ve been to 14 rock concerts in my life.
0x29: My favorite food group is cookies.
0x2A: I cannot stand the flavor of anise.
0x2B: I eat cereal nearly every day for breakfast.
0x2C: I have three computers on my desk at home, running two operating systems, neither of which is a Windows variant.
0x2D: I believe that faith is not believing without proof but rather trusting without reservation.
0x2E: I generally take a computer (or two) with me everywhere I go.
0x2F: I have had my nose broken, along with a thumb and the tip of my right forefinger.
0x30: The oldest posting of mine I can find online is from December 8, 1995.
This is the 5th “things about me” posting on my birthday. Previously we had: 43, 44, 46, and 47. You now know 228 things about me (counting repeats and duplicates).
With the exception of perhaps 30 minutes riding late October 2005, I haven’t ridden either of my bicycles in 12, maybe 15 years. Several of my co-workers are commuting to work via bike, and given that we live only 4.5 miles from my office, I have been thinking about what it would be like to ride to work rather than drive.
Our neighborhood is quiet and tree-lined, so riding there would be easy. There is a major 4-lane road to cross, but I can do that at a light without going out of my way. Just across from that intersection is the only true obstacle on the whole route, a sizable hill. Fortunately it borders the northeastern corner of campus and has a wide walking/running path along its entire length. If I were forced to walk the hill, I could do it in relative safety.
From the top of the hill it would be level or even slightly downhill the remainder of the way. And most of that way is bordered by walking/running paths which would keep me out of traffic.
This evening, after doing some gardening with Sibylle, I got the better of my two bikes out of the shed, inflated the tires, put on my helmet, my bicycling shoes, and set of for a couple laps of the neighborhood. It’s true that you never really forget how. Not having ridding any significant amount since well before my lower back became a concern, I don’t know how it will fare on my sporty road bike. If I am to be successful with bicycle commuting I may end up investing in something a bit more upright, perhaps with some fenders and a rack with which to carry my computer bag.
Even with some uncertainty about riding two and from work, it felt very good get on a bike and ride around the block a couple of times on the eve of my 48th birthday.
The 1:10 speed video at about 4:00 minutes looks and sounds like the real thing. Amazing accomplishment.
Previously I wrote about installing Eclipse Ganymede on Ubuntu 8.10, however retracing those steps wouldn’t work for the latest Ubuntu release, as the Synaptic package doesn’t end up in the /opt directory. However there is a very quick as easy way to get the latest Eclipse running on Jaunty Jackalope.
Recently one of my coworkers Twittered that he had uploaded some 11,000 pictures to his Flickr account. After getting over my initial shock at the sheer volume of images, I started thinking that I had a couple thousand images on my hard drive that I would like to have on Flickr too.
Using the Flickr Uploadr is problematic. First you have to select the pictures you wish to upload; a task exacerbated by the hierarchically nested directory structure that iPhoto uses to store your pictures. The Uploadr isn’t bright enough to traverse sub-directories looking for images, so you are forced to open each year/month/day combination to select images. An unenviable task with pictures spanning the last nine years on your hard drive.
A better approach would be to copy all the images you wanted to upload into one directory and then let Flickr Uploadr work against that collection. Fortunately the Unix under pinnings of Mac OS X make copying files from dozens of nested sub-directories to a single target directory simple. Using the find command with the -exec switch like so:
find . -name “*.JPG” -exec cp “{}” /path/to/new/directory ;
will search the current directory (and all of its sub-directories) for files matching the *.JPG string. And the -exec switch runs the copy (cp) command for each file found (the “{}” portion of the command). The /path/to/new/directory is delimited by the backslash-semi-colon at the end of the command.
After running this command I had a folder with over 4,600 images. Far more than I expected. The OS X operating system keeps metadata in files beginning with a dot, and my new images directory was filled with these dot-files, one for each image file. If there was an image file named 396.JPG, then there was a dot-file named .396.JPG.
Another find command, this time executing the rm (remove) command would take care of these dot-files for me:
find . -name “.*.JPG” -exec rm “{}” ;
As always when you are using rm, care should be taken to not delete more than you wish. Leaving the -exec portion of the command off, i.e., find . -name “.*.JPG” will list the file found by the find. Running that variation of the command first will help you to see what effect adding the -exec rm “{}” ; switch will have.
After removing the dot-files, I had approximately 2,300 images left, which seemed like the right amount. Starting Flickr Uploadr, I selected all the images in my new directory and waited. And waited. And waited. It took Flickr Uploadr a very long time to import all the images to its interface, before I could adjust the upload settings and start the upload process.
Once I had created a new set, and marked the images to be private, I started the upload. Within minutes Flickr Uploadr crashed. Subsequent re-starts also crashed. Finally I managed to click on the “remove all” button and empty the tool of images to be uploaded. I then tried uploading only smaller sets of images, say 500 at a time. This initially appeared to be working, but again the Uploadr crashed. Doggedly rerunning the utility I finally managed to upload all my images.
Signing into my Flickr account, and opening the new set I had created for these images I discovered that I had uploaded the thumbnail image size and not the full image size. 2,200 of them.
Some investigating in one of the iPhoto image directories revealed that there were two copies of each picture, one a thumbnail and one the full-sized image. The thumbnail has the file extension .jpg, while the full-sized image ends with .JPG. Unix based operating systems are cAse sEnsITive. .jpg and .JPG are not the same. I am used to using lowercase letters for file extensions, so when the find command above, using “*.jpg” for the search pattern return what appeared to be the right number of images, I didn’t realize that I had gotten the thumbnails only.
After deleting 2,279 images from Flickr, which takes a really long time, I wasn’t looking forward to struggling with the balky Flickr Uploadr utility again, especially since the full-size images would big considerably large (i.e. much slower loading) than the thumbnails. Through Google I discovered a Lifehacker article on a command line utility to upload images to Flickr. My hope was that by eliminating the extra layers of complexity, and the memory requirements, of the GUI Uploadr, I would have better luck.
In short the command line utility, a pair of Python scripts, worked like a champ. It uploaded 2,299 images with only 22 failures, for a total of 2,279 new pictures in my Flickr account. If I were to do this again, here are the steps I would follow from start to finish. These steps assume that you have read the Lifehacker article, and downloaded the necessary Python scripts.
First create a directory to temporarily hold the images you wish to upload:
mkdir ~/images
Next, switch to your iPhoto Library and copy all the full sized images to the new images directory:
cd ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/
find . -name “*.JPG” -exec cp “{}” ~/images ;
Since this find command will also capture all the OS X meta files (dot files) run this command to remove them:
cd ~/images
find . -name “.*.JPG” -exec rm “{}” ;
Now you should have a directory filled with all the full sized images from your iPhoto library. The next step is to run the Python upload script. Make sure to follow the configuration instructions listed in the Lifehacker article. And be aware that on the first running of this script you will have to sign into your Flickr account and authorize the Python script so it can access your account. Since all the parameters are specified in the script itself the final command is rather simple. In my case I saved the utility to my bin folder:
cd ~/bin
python uploadr.py
The script will display a success (or problem) line for each file it operates against. Running the command as I’ve shown above will dump these messages to your console. If you wanted to save them for posterity you could run the command like this:
python uploadr.py > log.txt
which would produce a text file with the output for you.
Now I have 2,279 images to tag, comment on, add titles to, et cetera. Unfortunately there isn’t a utility, command line or otherwise, to do that for me.
Earlier this week I downloaded the new Twitter client from {13 Bold} called Bluebird. While the client only runs on Mac OS X 10.5, meaning I only use it at work (my home machine are all 10.4.11 due to their aging G4 processors), I like the way it works. I especially like the theming capability that is built in.
Working from one of the provided themes, and using the PlasticCodeWrap theme for TextMate as an inspiration, I created a new theme called PlasticWrap for Bluebird. It sports a dark background, uses colors to distinguish between regular tweets, your tweets, and responses to your tweets. It also bumps up the size of the avatars displayed.
Download the ZIP archive, expand it, and copy the PlasticWrap.bbtheme file to ~/Library/Application Support/Bluebird and restart Bluebird to refresh its list of themes. (You may have to create the Bluebird directory if it doesn’t already exist.
Updated: Here’s a screen shot of the theme in action.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “plasticWrap.png” }}
Tell all your friends. Enjoy.
Via Kottke.org