Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Shiny!

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Just a quick note of thanks to Bryan, Dori, Shelley, Tvindy, Jacqueline, Johan, and probably others that I’ve forgotten. All of you have, at one point or another, either personally or through your weblogs, recommended Firefly. I just finished watching the last episode tonight…

…and damn if I’m not as excited about Serenity as the rest of you are.

Two quick questions (spoiler-free answers, please):

  1. I couldn’t find Book anywhere in the trailer. Am I just missing him, or did they not put him in for some reason? I’m sure I’ve read that all of the primary cast came back for the film.

  2. Isn’t Kaylee just one of the cutest/sexiest women ever? Admittedly, part of that may be that she’s about the closest thing to a “clone” of an earlier Whedon character (Willow, of course) who was consistently my favorite on Buffy…but even if I hadn’t had a silly fanboy tv-character crush on Willow, I’m pretty sure I’d have one for Kaylee.

Anyway, thanks for mentioning this show often enough and with high enough praise that it caught my eye. It was well worth it.

Now to see if I can get Prairie to watch the series before the movie comes out…

MT-Upcoming

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I’ve just installed Greg Knauss‘ MT-Upcoming plugin, a handy interface to events that I’ve flagged on my upcoming.org page. In the sidebar to my main page (though not on individual archive pages, if you’re reading this in an RSS reader or on the individual page you’ll need to click back to the main page to see what I’m talking about) you’ll now see a short listing of events I’m either considering or planning on attending.

(Oh, and the documentation for MT-Upcoming seems to be temporarily misplaced…if you want to install the plugin, here’s Google’s cache of the docs. Came in very handy tonight.)

In other words…yes. I’m just that desperate for a stalker following my every move around town. Life just isn’t worth living without a psychotically obsessive fan or two, after all.

iTunes “Going Up to the Country, Paint My Mailbox Blue” by Mahal, Taj from the album Folk, Gospel and Blues: Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1968, 3:37).

Goth Pride fundraiser

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Last night I made a rare mid-week visit to the Vogue, as they were having a fundraiser for the local goth community’s entry into this Sunday’s Pride parade. It gave me a chance to play a little bit with low-light photography, experimenting with various shutter speeds to see if I could get anything decent at the club.

Bad JuJu Lounge and The Vogue, Seattle, WASome shots worked better than others, of course (trial and error will do that). I brought along a monopod, which allowed me to me to go for two- to four-second exposures without too much camera shake. A tripod would have been better, but it would have been a lot bulkier and a lot more difficult to adjust quickly. The resulting shots aren’t my greatest, but I’m not unhappy with them at all — it was fun to try, and I’ve got a better idea of what settings to use the next time I get a chance for something like this.

Burlesque, Goth Pride Fundraiser, The Vogue, Seattle, WAThe one bummer was that as the actual fundraiser part of the show started late (scheduled for 10:30pm, they didn’t get going until about 11:15pm), I only got a chance to shoot three of the burlesque dancers before I had to leave. By the time I had found settings that were working pretty well (half-second exposure, front-curtain flash, focus fixed at just over two meters), the three of them were done and I needed to be getting home.

Still, it was fun to experiment with, and I got some time to bounce around on the dance floor for a bit. I’d been missing that, as the past two weekends have been too busy for me to make it out on Saturday night, and I don’t think I’ll be making it out this Saturday, either. Sunday’s the Pride parade, and Prairie and I will be heading up to watch that along with Rick and Kirsten and her husband; and on Saturday we’re planning on heading out to the Utilikilt Anniversary picnic.

The Vogue, Seattle, WA

Looks to be another busy weekend lined up. Yay for summer!

iTunes “Believer” by BT from the album Go (1999, 5:11).

Podcast 02: Difficult Listening Hour 02v2

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And here we have the second of my old collection of mix sessions that I’m putting up for download and podcast. A little longer than the last one, and a little more pop-y. There actually was a ‘v1’ of this mix (which may go up eventually), but it had a few slight flaws that I wanted to fix, and I ended up choosing a slightly different set of tracks to use (though, I may have simply introduced new flaws…so it goes). Hence, ‘v2’.

Standard disclaimer: All the mixes I’m posting were mixed ‘live’ — running a Pioneer dual CD mixer directly into my computer and recording straight to .mp3 — and have had no post-mix editing done in the computer. As such, they’re not flawless, but they’re not bad, either, if I do say so myself.

Here’s the link: Difficult Listening Hour 02v2 (1h 04m 41s, 59.5Mb). Tracks included are:

  1. Faithless ‘Salva Mea’
  2. Transister ‘Head (Hot Tracks)’
  3. Dee-Lite ‘Groove is in the Heart (Van Helden ’99)’
  4. Madonna ‘Music (Deep Dish Dot Com)’
  5. Sarah McLachlan ‘Possession (Rabbit in the Moon)’
  6. DJ Icey ‘This is How My Drummer Drums’
  7. The Crystal Method ‘Busy Child’
  8. Wink ‘Higher State of Consciousness (Itty Bitty Boozy Woozy/vs. Public Enemy)’
  9. Underworld ‘Rez’

Advantages of a Real Server

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A quick look at my traffic over the last month does a good job of illustrating the benefits to moving to a server that can actually respond at a decent speed:

Eclecticisim Traffic May-June

The day I moved is pretty obvious — the 7th of June. Prior to that, I was averaging 921 page loads a day, and it was trending downwards. Once I switched to the new server, things suddenly improved, and until the past few days, I was averaging 1,490 page loads a day. Nowhere near any of the big sites on the net, but still not too shabby.

So, once again, many thanks to Rain City Story for hosting me!

That spike over the last few days (up to 2,820 page loads yesterday) is almost entirely due to people looking for pictures of the Fremont Solstice Parade, arriving either from Google searches or links to my picture pages from other sites. Lots of pervs out there looking for pictures of naked bikers, would be my guess…and good for them!

I wholeheartedly approve of pervs in most situations — moreso when it drives a traffic spike to my site. ;)

iTunes “We Care A Lot” by Faith No More from the album Never Mind the Mainstream (1987, 4:05).

Pledge of Allegiance

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A young kid was suspended from school for one day when, while everyone else in the classroom was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, he recited his own pledge of allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.

Good for him, I say — and good for his mom for laughing in the principal’s face when she was told what her boy had done.

(via Boing Boing)

Fame

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Last night when I went down to check my snail mail, another of the residents in my apartment building was checking his. I was heading back to the elevator when he spoke up. “Hey — aren’t you Eclecticism?”

Turns out he’d stumbled across my site a while ago looking for pictures of the Jensonia Hotel fire, and has stopped by from time to time (recently enough to have seen some of the Fremont Parade pictures), and recognized me from my photos and my kilt.

Pretty fun, actually. So far, that makes the second time someone in the “real world” has recognized me from my site (the first being one of the regulars at the Vogue). I’m famous! ;)

Free Wi-Fi for my apartment?

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Last month, the City of Seattle launched a program to bring free Wi-Fi access to several prominent areas around Seattle. The initial launch was in Columbia City and the University District, but other parks planned to go online include downtown’s Westlake, Victor Steinbrueck, Occidental, and Freeway parks.

Progress is obviously being made, as today on my way home for lunch I saw a work crew installing one of the Wi-Fi antennas on a lamppost on the 8th Avenue bridge over Freeway Park. Now I’m starting to wonder if my building just might end up with free Wi-Fi access provided by the City of Seattle. Here’s a look at the local layout:

Freeway Park Wi-Fi

Freeway Park is (roughly) outlined in red. The antenna I saw being installed is marked in yellow (I’m sure there must be more scattered around the park), and my apartment building is outlined in green. Now, I don’t know quite how much coverage beyond the borders of Freeway Park the antennas will provide, but just eyeballing it, I’d say that there’s at least a chance that my building might be covered.

Of course, the downside is that none of my computers are Wi-Fi enabled, so it wouldn’t do me any good. Still, I have a few friends with iBooks that occasionally stop by, so this might be a good thing for them.

iTunes “Now That I Have You” by Information Society from the album Hack (1990, 5:03).

Flickr Badge in Weblog Posts

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Flickr recently introduced a new badge generator with a lot of new features, including the ability to restrict the photos displayed to a certain set or group pool.

I started experimenting with whether it was possible to place badges into my weblog posts where appropriate. For instance, a post about a specific event could include a badge displaying photos from that event’s Flickr photo set or group pool.

My first attempts met with some trouble. The code that the Flickr badge generator creates comes in two sections: the CSS for style, and the HTML code for the badge. Unfortunately, the CSS block was causing issues, breaking validation (under XHTML Transitional, you can’t have a block inside a element) and doing something else that resulted in a random string of characters displaying instead of the badge.

After trying a few different forms of badge, though, I found that as long as I kept the same color and background choices (in step four of the HTML badge creator), the CSS code always stayed the same, and it was only variables in the Javascript call to Flickr that determined which photos were displayed.

So, I chose the style options that I wanted, created a badge, and put the CSS code into my stylesheet. I then took just the HTML code, dropped it into a post, and bingo — everything displays fine. As an example, here’s a random selection of images from the Utilikilts group pool:

www.flickr.com

Other advantages — because the CSS now lives in the stylesheet, you can create different color combinations for different stylesheets (if you use a stylesheet switcher), and your Flickr badges will blend in with the rest of the design no matter which design you choose.

Not a mind-blowing tip, sure, but could be useful from time to time.

Offshoring

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Some things from last night’s Weblogger meetup that just popped into my head.

While Jake was interviewing Chas and I, the topic of offshoring came up. I then decided that the next time I go on vacation, I’m going to turn guest-blogging duties over to one of my regular readers that lives overseas. That way, I’ll be offshoring my blog.

Later I was standing outside with Kristin and Ian, and they commented on my Daring Fireball t-shirt, saying that they needed to make their own (their own site t-shirts, that is, not make their own bootleg Daring Fireball t-shirts, though that got some laughs). They figured that they could probably pay local kids a dollar a shirt to do some nice ghetto-style silkscreening. This led to a mix of child labor/sweat shop/offshoring jokes, culminating in my declaration that, “We only abuse local children!”

Politically correct? No.

Funny?

Definitely.

iTunes “B-Boy Stance (Freestylers Revenge)” by Freestylers feat. Tenor Fly from the album Plastic Compilation Vol. II (1997, 6:50).