Matthew Botos

My scripts on Userscripts.org have passed 1000 downloads! (There’s naturally another handy script to tally them for you.) Though the things I’ve written for work have solved tough problems or been used by a decent number of people, there’s something slightly more rewarding in knowing the Internet at large found a handful of Javascript tweaks I wrote and open sourced to be of value. Perhaps most satisfying, though, was seeing the open source model in action when someone sent me some enhancements.

For as much time as I spend in King of Prussia, I never think to bring my camera with me, except when I’m shopping for a camera bag.

So I took these photos from the hill above the mall in the mid-afternoon sun. Not the best lighting, but still some interesting opportunities.

View the King of Prussia Photos

My new roommate is a bit furry and likes to hide in the corner and sleep After years of people telling me I should get a cat, I finally came around to the idea on my own terms. As luck would have it, a woman at work had posted a message about her litter of Memorial Day cats looking for homes. Meadow quickly warmed to me, and me to her, though after exploring and playing with the mouse last night, she found a really good hiding spot until this morning.

Pets are tough to photograph, even with my fancy new camera - these 4 are the best out of over 50 photos. You can view them in my new Gallery2 “beta”. I just set it up over the weekend, so it’s still missing some final theming, tags, etc.

View the Kitten photos

After holding out for a long time, I finally gave in and got a digital SLR camera. Though I’ve taken a lot of good pictures with my various point and shoot cameras, I was just running into too many limitations.

I researched this one the smart way; by asking a few experts. Several long and informative lectures later, I realized I was about to tumble down the slippery slope of increasingly expensive lenses and actually having to apply some physics to my photos. The final package was a 10 megapixel Canon Digital Rebel XTi (400D) with a few extra bucks for the 18-55mm kit lens and Canon’s f1.4 50mm prime lens, plus the usual accessories.

Amazon shipped lightning fast, though apparently because they didn’t tape the box very well. Everything survived though, and I dug into the prime lens first - a little heavy, solid. The kit lens was a bit lighter, but screwing them both onto the body gave me an immediate appreciation for their different fields of view versus my point and shoot (Canon PowerShot SD630 f2.8-4.9 5.8-17.4mm). The body itself is a nice size, a good fit for my hands, and shouldn’t be too bulky for travel.

I skimmed enough of the field guide book to get started while the battery charged, and dove into playing around. The first photo I got with some real depth-of-filed was a definite wow moment, and I quickly discovered what Merle said about having to move your body much more with a fixed lens. In the afternoon shade inside and out, the camera didn’t disappoint, though it certainly made it clear I have quite a bit of learning to do!

The photos in this set are all unmodified, except for cropping my furry self-portrait. I noted some of settings; now that I actually care about them it may hasten my move to Gallery.

View the DSLR photos

Though I’ve drunk most of the Mac Kool-Aid, iPhoto still leaves me longing for Picasa. The short list of reasons are Picasa’s more automated post-processing, better tagging system, and use of image metadata for tags and captions.

Last week I stumbled across a suggestion to try CodeWeavers CrossOver Mac, and found it works great! It’s $60 for the commercial version of WINE, with a 30-day trial. Even though I’m a free software zealot, $60 to be able to process photos on the road and not have to maintain a Linux box is well worth it.

Moving the rest of my [Photo Processing Process] wasn’t too difficult of a transition between Linux and Mac OS X with its Unix underpinnings. MacPorts was able to install and upgrade the necessary packages, save from one I compiled from the tarball. Nothing like a little ./configure; make; sudo make install to brighten your day!

One thing that didn’t work was transferring Picasa’s closed database. This isn’t a big deal since most information is stored in the image headers or Picasa.ini file in each directory, but I did lose the order of the pictures in the albums. Most of my albums are sequenced to tell a story, so it’s a bit maddening to me that almost every photo package ignores this or hides it from you. I do have the order preserved in the files used to generate my web albums, though feeding this back into Picasa’s closed database is nigh impossible

Since I often have my iPod on as background while in the car or at home, I don’t really listen to the lyrics often enough. A few recent downloads seem particulary appropriate to blogging and life in general:

Snow Partol - Hands Open

But my tongue still misbehaves and it
keeps digging my own grave

It’s not as easy as willing it all to be right
Gotta be more than hoping it’s right

Anna Nalick - Breathe (2 AM)

Cause you can’t jump the track, we’re like cars on a cable,
And life’s like an hourglass, glued to the table.

2 AM and I’m still awake, writing a song
If I get it all down on paper, it’s no longer inside of me,
Threatening the life it belongs to

It’s only 1 AM, but this post has been rattling around in my head for a few days and I was just tossing and turning anyway…

Being in the Detroit area recently, I wasn’t surprised to see an endless parade of car companies and their suppliers. I was a bit surprised to see how much of a majority American cars still commanded on the road. Even with a global economy and tough times for automakers and their employees, people are still fiercely loyal. One license plate frame summed it up succinctly: “I work for Ford, I drive a Ford.”

My recent trip to Michigan for Adam and Emily’s Wedding ended up being a nice showcase of Web 2.0 technology. Leading up to the trip, I bookmarked things to see and tagged them “michigan” in del.icio.us. I used Orbitz to find out if using airline miles for the flight would be a good deal and how the selected hotel stacked up. One of the reviews provided a great tip: joining the free hotel club got you free wifi! (Plus beer and candy on arrival.)

Since I was driving, it was also handy to see where everything was on a custom Google My Map. One feature that would be nice to add is the ability to get directions form one placemark to another; add that my todo list of Greasemonkey scripts.

It worked out so well, I’m starting to do the same for next year’s snowboarding trip to Whistler: bookmarks and map.

Wackiest thing I’ve seen on eHarmony in a while:

The one thing Lucy is most passionate about: I’m most passoinate about horses and riding english and showing. I really want to meet a guy who also is passoinate about riding. I don’t care if they ride western. In the future, I hope to have a second home in Wellington or Ocala Florida for the winter months, were there are big horse shows.

I was just writing a check for local earned income tax today, and noticed that every entry in my register is either for the ski club or taxes. Everything else is paid electronicly by credit card or bill pay. Which in turn, does send out some paper checks, but without me personally having to write and mail them.

As for the remaining holdouts, the ski club gets off the hook easily. We’re a non-profit that can’t really eat 3% in processing fees, nor would our members be likely to make up the $45 difference on a $1500 trip. Our membership is also on the older side, and not everyone is on email, let alone interested in PayPal.

The tax man, though, should be a little more interested in getting his money faster. Both the IRS and the states are pretty good about accepting and encouraging e-filing. The economies of scale aren’t there for smaller local governments, but a savvy business man could make a good case for outsourcing the processing and payment. There’s also another solution for the local income tax in particular: employer withholding. It certainly gets complicated than federal and state, but any modern company selling itself as a leader in information technology *ahem* should be able to handle it