lifebsideben

I live within walking distance of a whole lot of restaurants–probably at least a dozen. We haven’t eaten at probably half of them, as there are some we just really like and always return to. But as a public service to you, the reader (and I mean that close to in the singular sense–I know I don’t get a lot of traffic ), I’m planning a new project: visit and review every restaurant within walking distance of our place, in 2006. Actually as we’re contemplating looking to buy a house, and there’s almost zero chance of us affording something in our current ‘hood, maybe the goal should be within 6 months. That’s the plan anyhow. The first step for organized people might be to make a list of all the eateries within that radius (say, .5 mile)… but that’s no fun. We’ll just keep going places, until we exhaust the possibilities. Now, there is a very real possibility that this will make my plan to cut down on what I eat more difficult, but I’m willing to take on that challenge, in the name of science… or food criticism… or, just in the name of enjoying life!

First up is going to be the new prime rib joint on Burlingame Avenue, I think it’s called “Prime on the Avenue” or something similar. We were walking by tonight while out for a stroll and got reservations for tomorrow night. Onward!

Tags: food, review

I was consistently getting 30-second load times for the WordPress admin ‘dashboard’, which is totally unacceptable. I decided to actually try and fix this, first by searching around a bit, and found for example this thread which is other users complaining as well, but mostly about WP1.5. After some experimentation (about 5 minutes at most), I discovered it was the “Planet WordPress” RSS feed pulling that was causing the big delay. Commenting that out gets me consistently sub-100ms for rendering (I’m assuming the other feeds it pulls are cached at that point.) Nice. Anyhow, if you want to do the same thing, there’s two ways to do it that are fairly simple with quick changes to wp-admin/index.php:

1. Comment out the line (#146 in mine) that reads $rss = @fetch_rss(’http://planet.wordpress.org/feed/’);or
2. (This works better, IMO, even thought the code looks like it should work fine with #1 above) Comment out the entire section for Planet WordPress updates. I.e., stick a “/*” at line 146, and a “*/” around line 165 (just after the closing curly brace).

Absolutely, positively, in 2.x of WP, I’d love to see the dashboard content be controllable by options in the admin section.

Tags: wordpress

The new WordPress 2 codebase is supposedly a completely new backend, but my upgrade last night went without a hitch. Impressive. I guess this is largely in part due to my installation being pretty much stock, but even so, nice. I do slightly wonder if I’m missing an index on some of the tables in the DB though, not necessarily from WP2 but even before, my “admin dashboard” has been painfully slow to load. A problem for another day, however.

I’m sort of digging the new TinyMCE wysiwyg editor integration, although I must admit I was also getting pretty used to the Xinha Here! functionality. Not sure I’m totally ready to switch yet, but I’m giving it a try. I love the dhtml sections in the ‘write’ screen, so I can close the ones I don’t usually use, and reorder them to reflect my priorities. Nice work! Also, the new preview mode, while not critical for me and my simplistic theme, is nice to have. I’m definitely liking the better media upload/browse widget, although it’s vaguely unintuitive at first, and I wish it browsed all of the images in my assets folder, not just the newly-uploaded one(s). Also, I’d really like to see you able to put in a URL to an image and have it suck that down… sure there’s potential for copyright infringement, but for stuff like the logo above, I’d rather not deep link to their image, and I doubt they mind me copying it! Maybe an enhancement coming in the future, though.

Overall… so far, so good! Nice work, guys!

Tags: wordpress, wysiwyg

I got a bunch of goodies for Hanukkah this year, so thought I’d share for those of ya that might care:

Books:

• The Areas of My Expertise, by John Hodgman; this book is hilarious
• The Google Story, by David Vise and Mark Malseed
• Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
• Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, by Suketu Mehta
• Unuseless Japanese Inventions, by Kenji Kawakami
• Catch a Fish, Throw a Ball, Fly a Kite by Jeffrey Lee

Toys & miscellany:

• Birduzasu, a Neo-Kaiju figure by Tim Biskup
• PSP Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories for PSP
• A LED-festooned spinning top with sound (”Laser Tech Top“)
• A bouncing star-shaped rubber thingy with color cycling LEDs inside
• A huge scented candle

Gift to myself:

• Espresso machine (DeLonghi EC701 Espresso Maker–hasn’t gotten the best reviews, but got a great price on it at Bed Bath & Beyond, and used one of their ubiquitous coupons… so far, so good.)

So pretty much, I’d better start taking the train to work more religiously so I can get to reading all this stuff! At least it’s a lot easier to get the brain functioning with a nice café con leche before I head out!

Tags: Hanukkah, holidays

In this article at Wired about digital projection of films and anti-piracy measures, Brad Hunt of the MPAA is quoted as saying:

“We’re not trying to describe specifically what is being done, because the effectiveness of these technologies is based on a lack of knowledge.”

Ah, the old “security through obscurity” tactic. That always works so well… not. But hey, don’t tell the MPAA; their continued ignorance is probably an overall good thing: the more shitty movies get pirated, the less likely people will pay to go see them, the more likely quality movies are to be made, for which people DO pay for. I have seen a bootleg or two in my time, largely because with a 17-month-old, I don’t get many opportunities to go to the movies, and I want to see some things before the DVD is released. Movies I like, I buy the DVDs for. Many other people are the same way, I’m sure. (Actually, a lot of folks are probably renting the dvds and not buying them, via Netflix or Blockbuster, but I tend to like to own movies that are worth watching, especially if there’s extras on the disc.)

Aside from that silliness above, the article basically just says there will be a time & location stamp in the film. Big whoop. I suspect (a) this won’t survive through the projection->camcorder->encoding (and possibly ->reencoding) process, and (b) most pirates just don’t care. Until you have to show ID and have your picture taken going into the theater, I don’t see this being much of a deterrent. Better plan: have ushers (remember them?) or security folks observe people in the theater, and spot people with camcorders. But wait, this would cost the theaters money, and is likely difficult to acheive 100% success, which is almost needed, due to the multiplication factor innate to piracy.

But hey, maybe it’ll stop the low-tech pirates hawking cheap dvds at swap meets and on the corner. Maybe…. but internet-based/p2p piracy, I seriously doubt it’ll have any effect. You know what would work? Making quality movies, giving something extra to the theater experience (interactivity? better value? purchase the DVD at a discount on the way out?), and treating your customers with respect instead of apathy, disdain, and mistrust.

Tags: big_business, dvd, movies, MPAA, piracy, security