Matthew Botos

You can add a lot to WordPress with plugins; there’s even one to show your own list of plugins!

I turned 28 last week, which didn’t feel like much since I often feel more mature than my years. Normally, I’d laugh it off as another year older, but not any wiser. This year, though, I think I have gained some wisdom after struggling with some career and relationship issues.

For the most part, I had been happy in corporate America until it started to feel like I wasn’t going anywhere. Internal movement wasn’t as easy as advertised, and I had to balance the desire for more with appreciation for what I already had. I did gain a bit of the latter and realized my situation is still pretty good, while narrowing the opportunties that really would let me grow.

Relationships posed a parallel question: when is good good enough? Writing the epilogue on one relationship, trying to figure out what to look for in the next, and actually dealing with the modern dating scene in all its incarnations provided plenty of food for thought when my mind wasn’t chewing on career development. Hindsight as always provided a clearer lense, though it still took some effort to focus my picture for the future.

I’m still working on both, as well as a number of smaller life changes and goals. Hopefully at 29 I’ll be able to say my wisdom has climbed another minute notch.

With the longest day of the year approaching, a long twilight drew me outside for these pictures. To get them, I ended up lying in the grass with a mini-tripod amid the high-pitched whine of mosquitos.

View the June Dusk photos

I just installed the WP Automatic Reference Plugin, which automatically creates references to your own posts and blogroll links. For instance, here’s a link to my last post on AcroYoga. The author is Spanish, but he’s included English instructions further down the page.

I had a great time at an acroyoga workshop last night. You really have to see the pictures on thier site to get an appreciation for what it entails, but it’s a lot of fun to actually do. One of the things that always brings a smile to my face in yoga is playing around with new positions and realizing how many interesting shapes the body is capable of making. This took that to another level, adding the complimentary shapes of another person, or two, or twenty!

That’s the other big attraction; being able to work with other people. While yoga is often a syncronized group activity, it often feels like a solo pursuit. Moving in concert with someone else really adds a human touch, and creates some powerful stretches and blissful moments. The instructors created a great environment and were beautiful to watch as they demonstrated each maneuver.

When I remarked to Brian that I was still holding on to a few non-Mac pieces of software, he warned me that once you start drinking the Mac Kool-Aid, you get hooked. And I have; Spotlight (desktop search) in particular is quite handy. It doesn’t index Thunderbird mail, though, and Thunderbird also has this obnoxious, year-old bug where the cursor is always out of place, making perfectionist editing a nightmare. So with those two pushes, I made the leap to Mac’s native Mail.app.

The transition wasn’t bad; rename Thunderbird mail files to .mbox and import. Of course, that would’ve been ten times easier to script if it weren’t for the spaces in the filenames (Unix sacrilidge!).

After accumulating five years of email (and I write a lot of email!) under Netscape/Mozilla/Thunderbird, it’s interesting to realize what can be left behind. A ton of evidence from various Internet dating forays, plans and reservations from past vacations, and all the miscellaneous messages that didn’t merit a folder. Perversely, I am brining my junk mail with me to train the filter, though it did a decent job with a blind start.

With Thunderbird also goes my RSS reader, which was functional except for adding and editing feed sources. On the recommendation of some people from work I’m trying RSS Owl, which meets my current ideals of being free, open source, and multi-platform. Shameless plug: this site also has a feed.

Next month I’ll have been in this condo for five years. People sometimes ask me if I’m going to move, and I usually pause for a moment before saying no. There is a slight urge to upgrade, but three things make it a hard sell: I’ve got plenty of space, it’s just the way I want it, and the price can’t be beat in today’s market.

With two bedrooms and a basement for toys and tinkering, there’s plenty of room here for at least two people and maybe even a few critters. The only things I’m really missing here are a fireplace and a garage. More space would mostly just consume more time and money for decorating, heating, and cleaning.

A new place would also mean starting over to remake it to my liking; something I’ve finally accomplished with a bit of sweat equity here. The ability to mold this space has also made it truly a home, much more so than any of the anonymous apartments I inhabited in the past.

Finally, the housing bubble and rising interest rates have made it a great deal. With a relatively low payment relatively secure until the adjustable part of the mortgage ramps up, there’s more flexibility to invest, travel, and indulge my technolust.

So I guess I can drop the hesitation when answering the question; I doubt I’ll move until I either get married or hit 30 and decide it’s time for a change.

I get occasional outside interest in my photographs, and a few people have even suggested I try selling some. So Wired’s recent article on crowdsourcing caught my eye when it mentioned the burgeoning low-cost stock photography sites. As an amatuer photographer, it’s a tempting premise: upload a few photos with commercial appeal and occasionally collect a few bucks.

The reality, at least from taking a look at istockphoto is a little different. You have to be initially approved as a contributor and then have each photo manually approved. That tends to rule out being able to easily upload a large library with pre-attached metadata (ie. IPTC). The payout is only 20% of the $1-5 per image customers pay. And while they tout micropayments as making the system work, you won’t get a check until you’ve accumulated $100.

On the plus side, they do respect your ownership of your photos. You merely grant them a non-exclusive right to license your photos. The license allows use in advertising and commercial work, but no reselling of any product that’s primarily your photo (ie. posters, mugs, etc.).

A few other sites mentioned in the article offer more favorable payments, but similar hurdles to uploading and ultimately getting paid. Ultimately, it doesn’t seem like the infrastruture supports micropayments for microcontributions to the extent that it would be worthwhile for the more casual photographer.

My portfolio, meanwhile, will continue to be featured here exclusively, and I’ll consider reasonable offers for commercial licensing.

My ten year high school reunion last night was an interesting experience. A bit odder and more awkward than I anticipated; my social skills have grown from those days, but this still posed an extreme case. I had a few old friends to fall back on, though, and my face did genuinely light up to see some of the people that have been absent for ten years.

People largely looked the same, with a few faces transformed by pounds or years. I heard I still look about the same, from someone who looked so vibrant I couldn’t place her in memory. Many people were still in the area, and a surprising number (and some surprising individuals!) have become teachers.

Conversations mostly covered the basics; where people lived and worked, who was married and how many kids they have (the most anyone had managed was two). We tried to piece together the whereabouts of those who didn’t come, which was a vast majority of the people I always seemed to be in class with. Many are finishing med school, settling into new marriages, or in the midst of phyiscal and career moves.

Those I did see were a pleasure; the high school sweethearts from homeroom who got married and just had a son, a few gymnastics teammates who still share an easy camraderie, the Marine who’s traveled the world and come to love the life. A few teachers also stopped by, and after odd feeling of the evening, seeing them vastly out of context didn’t even phase me.

Overall, it was an odd but enjoyable time. It was great to see those who were there, and hopefully those who I spent more time with in school will make an appearance in the future.

Postscript: I dug out the yearbook when I got home to place a few faces, and was struck by the things people had written. There were some kind and really heartfelt comments I didn’t fully appreciate at the time; I can only hope I was half as gracious in what I wrote.

I recently added a ScanGauge to my car. In addition to revealing the true reason behind mysterious “check engine” light, it calculates fuel economy and other statistics while providing a real-time display of data. In the photo of the display are miles per gallon, voltage, intake air temperature, and engine load; there are several other options.

It plugs directly into the On-Board Diagnostic (OBD) 2 port under the steering wheel, so the real installation was mounting the display. Rather than pull apart the center of the dash, I cobbled together some scrap wood that holds the display in the pocket under the radio using Velcro and a stylish coat of black spray paint. The wire passes out of a hole drilled in the back of the pocket and behind the carpet to the OBD-2 port.

View the ScanGauge photos