The Phone is Ringing

December 12, 2009 by e; — 6 Comments

Breaking with today's trends, Kathy and I have a home phone. It's not something that we really ever use and it's probably a waste of money to have it, but it's just a few dollars a month and was an easier option than deciding that the building call box would ring to my cell phone.

Seeing how much I love over-designed and half-implemented solutions, it shouldn't surprise that this phone is a VoIP handset that connects to an Asterisk server and an Adhearsion dial plan app.

What is a surprise is that over the last 24 hours, the phone's been ringing at the oddest hours. — Continue Reading...

Three Years in Macland

December 07, 2009 by e;

I noticed this morning that three years ago today, I bought my Macbook. The laptop remains my daily computer -- and is in fact what I'm typing this post on -- though it has had the memory, hard drive and battery replaced in that span.

I made the switch after having run Linux as a desktop OS since 1997 or so. I sort of miss all the tinkering that involved, but at the same time I've enjoyed things just working much more.

Squeezing Those Bytes

December 03, 2009 by e;

Eric Richardson [Flickr]

Overnight I managed to reduce the load size of blogdowntown's home page by 400kb without changing a single line of HTML. We went from a bloated 750kb to a much more svelte 340kb.

What could make that much of a difference? The size of our JPEGs. 660kb of that load was images, a number that's way, way too high. We do load 58 images, but I was still pretty floored to see the size of some of the smallish images we were loading up.

So what was the deal? Was I just being sloppy with my image compression? No, Flickr was. — Continue Reading...

Fizziness Quotient

November 25, 2009 by e;

Subconsciously, I think we've all gotten used to a certain range for how much a standard soda fizzes when dispensed from a fountain. You leave a certain amount of room in the cup, the fizz rises, settles, and you adjust that final bit of fill accordingly.

But have you ever found a certain drink that far exceeds that normal fizziness range? It's hard to adjust.

One of my favorite downtown eateries, Mendocino Farms, just opened a second location. As part of that, they added a fountain with sodas from Boylan Bottling. They're great sodas, and they use cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup.

I'm particularly fond of the root beer, but have found myself consistently surprised by the amount of fizz. Even when I purposely under-fill, the fizz still sometimes wins. Perhaps that's the cane sugar at work.

Welcome Back

November 23, 2009 by e;

No long introductions... The site's been inactive for a little over a year, and completely down for eight months, but it's time to bring it back. After all, the blog's only one week away from turning 11, and its 10th birthday went completely unobserved.

As it was in the old days, I'll mostly be going on about random computer-ish things. These days, that may include some more journalism-ish things. Probably still a bit nerdy and uninteresting.

A minor technical note: I ended up not importing comments when I brought the archives over to the new code. I could end up doing it later, but at this point I'm thinking it's ok just to let them vanish.