There is a startling moment in each man’s life when he realizes that he has no idea why he is here. Naturally, he says to himself, “Self, why am I here?” I had that moment today. Why am I here? Well, I think I’ve figured it out. I am here because the university obviously doesn’t know that nobody comes to school when there are no classes, especially on Memorial Day, except for the staff and student employess, like myself, who are only here because they don’t get off for Memorial Day. Why is the school open on Memorial Day?! Banks are not open. Corporate offices are not open. The government is NOT open. But the university is open so that students who are not here can get answers to questions they are not asking, BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT HERE! I just want to go outside, lie in the sun, get a horrible sunburn and party til I pass out like the rest of America, woohoo! Ok, I don’t want to do any of those things, but I definitely do not want to be here. Thanks for asking.
Posted by ryan on May 30, 2005
I don’t know what to do with my self now that I don’t have any assignments due or tests to study for. I’m going to try to finish writing my content management system I’ve been working on and hopefully find a few people willing to pay me for my webdesigning/programming skills. In fact, if you are one of those people, drop me a line on the contact page. I also plan on not do anything more often this summer. I really miss doing that. On a side note, Josh has redesigned his site and it’s pretty sweet. I may have to redo mine now.
Posted by ryan on May 17, 2005
I’ve joined the widget making madness with this simple widget. It downloads the current Major League Baseball scores and automatically scrolls through them or gives you the option of displaying a single game. You can open multiple copies and set the to different games to track more that one without having to wait for them to come around with the scrolling.. It is basic but that’s kind of the point of widgets. If you want more stats, you can click on any game and it will take you to the game’s page on foxsports.com.
Download Scoreboard 1.2
Posted by ryan on May 8, 2005
Ok, maybe not the geekiest, because somebody actually was walking through the park one day and thought “Hmmm, I really wish I could send an email from here” and then actually made it happen. I mainly just wanted to see if there really was free wireless at this park and sure enough, there is. In fact, I’m writing this post from said park. If you are curious, I am at Rebublic Park in Austin.
Posted by ryan on May 8, 2005
I’ll give you one guess what I’ve been doing for the last 24 hours. Tiger is awesome. Spotlight is blazing fast, which makes me wonder what some reviewers were smoking. I saw a review stating that the search was not as fast as Jobs’ demo. Did they watch the demo in fast forward?! Yesterday, I searched for the word “test” and found that I had no emails with the word test in them. This was not suprising since I didn’t have any emails on my computer. So I went to Apple mail and sent myself an email with the word test in it. As soon as that email hit my outbox, it showed up on the spotlight search pane. Today a friend asked “what happens if you delete stuff? Does it still hang around for a while?” I didn’t know so I tried it. I was amazed and delighted as the email dissappeared from the spotlight search pane as soon as I deleted the email and emptied the trash (while it was in the trash, spotlight found it but it was greyed). I’d say instant is pretty fast.
Dashboard is also much more usefull then I thought. I knew it would be cool to look at, but the weather and conversion widgets are really handy. There is also a widget to post to a blog, which I could not get working with WordPress, but I think I will try to write one for WordPress, because it would be really usefull. Making widgets is really easy, since they are really just webpages with no window. In fact, you can test your widgets in Safari and use a setting that makes the window transparent. It’s crazy if you go to a text only page. You get just the text hovering over your other windows.
There are so many little improvements too, like the slide show view in Finder and Preview and the built in pdf support in Safari. Yes, I know XP has had slideshow in Explorer for years but I won’t go into how many things I found out did not have to be difficult when I got my Powerbook so that’s kind of a moot point. So many great improvements and I’m still finding them…
Posted by ryan on May 1, 2005
Today I discovered a cool piece of photoblogging software, PixelPost. I was looking for something taylored more towards a photoblog than the ghetto-rigged thing I was running from movable type. You can now leave comments on my photos, so go do that…now. Well…not on the photos of course, but about the photos. I’m going to try to have an actual description or at least a title for each photo from now on. I’ll also have EXIF data if you’re geeky enough to care. The contents definately settled during transit and a few pictures are not there anymore, but the transition was pretty painless.
Posted by ryan on April 26, 2005
My birthday is not until June, but having no camera is no soup for me, so I replaced my deceased camera with a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P150. I took the picture above this post with the camera and I love it. Not in an if-i-had-not-met-Hope-I-might-marry-it kind of way of course, but you know what I mean. It is so great it can even take self portraits, which you can see in the photos section. And it doesn’t eat batteries, it savors them like a piece of hard candy. Also, it has a manual mode which does not give a great amount of control over aperature or focus, but lets me be pretty specific about the shutter speed. In all honesty, it’s a point an click so I’m not really sure how much manual focusing I would have done and the aperature range is not that great on small cameras like this anyway, so only being able to choose between the extremes is good enough for me. I mainly just wanted the shutter speed and iso control so I could play with light effects, especially at night. I would recommend this camera to anyone looking for a great take-me-everywhere camera.
Posted by ryan on April 23, 2005
I don’t have a list of recently visited sites, but if I did this would be on it. Visit Google Fight.
Posted by ryan on April 22, 2005
I knew this day was coming, but I didn’t know it would be so soon. I was hoping you would hold out a little longer. I know towards the end I did not treat you right, and for that I’m sorry. I know told you I didn’t like you and secretly hoped to replace you, but you were as good as you could be. You would try so hard to please me… until you were exhausted with no energy to keep on trying. Now you are gone. I didn’t want it to end like this. You weren’t the best but you were always there for me. I will miss you…
Ok, now that you are probably getting really worried…my camera died today. 🙁 A moment of silence please…
Posted by ryan on April 21, 2005
… but Safari 1.3 is the bomb, and it’s only going to get better in Tiger. I’m sure you are asking yourself, why have I chosen this day to proclaim the awesomeness of a web browser? Two things happened today. I found WebDevAdditions over on Pimp my Safari and Apple released Safari 1.3 in their latest OS X update. The functionality provided by WebDevAdditions is the main reason I still used Firefox when developing, even though it’s slow as butt on the mac. And the only other thing that really annoyed me about Safari was the rendering speed. It might not even have been the speed as much as the way it rendered pages. Even when browsing pages on the same site, with common elements, the entire page would go away before being rerendered leaving me with a blank white page for a short time in between loads. This is akin to black screen you get when you change the channels on tv. Most of the time you don’t notice it or it’s slightly annoying, but at night, when you have all the lights out, it really starts to mess with your eyes. Well, Safari was the same way before now. Most of the time, I was only slightly annoyed, but when I am developing a website, I really need the crisp rendering like Camino gives me. I might be trying to tweek a layout and just want to shift things a little bit and see if I like it or even if it worked. In Camino, I could see the shift when I refreshed but in Safari, there was that wonderful white screen that took away my reference.
Anyway, Safari is now AWESOME and everything is faster than fast!
Posted by ryan on April 16, 2005
