Matthew Botos

I’ve been quite diligent about tagging my photos, though with so many, even the “favorites” are up to 189 photos. So I finally went through those and tried to pick about 20 of my “best“. It’s all based on my opinion, of course, but nominations to add/delete any of them are welcome.

It’s also interesting to look at the most viewed photos as an exercise in popularity versus quality. Most of the heavily viewed photos come from search results for technical topics I’ve documented; eliminating those lets more”real” photos rise to the top, though still only a few I’d consider really good shots.

With an audience of search engine users instead of photography buffs, passive metrics like view counts aren’t as useful as they are for Flickr’s interestingness measure. It also affirms my decision to skip a ratings system. As I’ve noticed with some sites at work, low traffic and participation don’t make enough of a difference between the signal and the noise, and a single active user can control up to 10% of the votes. (Just one of the many ways in which I manipulate the corporate machine )

As a satisfied seven-year customer of Netbank, I was surprised to hear the FDIC Shuts Down NetBank Due to Defaults. For an Internet-only bank, they’ve been quite solid while paying above-average interest rates. They also offered free online bill paying while local banks were still trying to make a quick buck on it. Unfortunately, it seems they got sucked into the housing bubble and wrote too many bad mortgages.

It is a bit disconcerting to read about it online instead of getting an email from Netbank itself. They do seem to have a decent transition plan; logging into my account brought up a message that by Sunday night transactions would resume under ING’s ownership. That’s a quick turnaround over the weekend and convenient since I would’ve moved my money to ING anyway. Speaking of which, you don’t think of that $100,000 FDIC insurance much these days, but it certainly saved a bunch of people’s money yesterday.

From a technical point of view, I was curious how they could manage to move such a large financial system in two days and on a weekend no less. The simple solution, though, is likely a non-technical one: it’s all the same hardware, software, and people, just operating under different owners.

With so many free and inexpensive sources of photos, it’s tough to make amateur photography into a profitable side business, but there are still riches to be found on a smaller scale.

My dad has had several photos published in textbooks and journals - including one he sent me today in German! He’s also gotten numerous emails from experts who managed to identify the odd species of plants and animals in his macro work.

I don’t attract quite that caliber of attention, though I have been flattered by the occasional email to use one of my photos. Yesterday, someone liked this one from Jackson Hole enough to ask for a print, making the day a little brighter.

It doesn’t surprise me that someone is tracking bloggers by location, but I was a little surprised to see Why Boston is Bloggiest reveal Philadelphia as a very close second. I guess I’ve been doing my part!

My trust of warranties has long evaporated to a mandate of caveat emptor; many have shrunk to just under the statistical breaking point in reliability & obsolescence and things are so tightly integrated or poorly constructed that repairs are a losing proposition. With that mindset, I was happy to have been proven wrong on a few occasions recently.

As luck would have it, I broke both of my pairs of glasses in one weekend. First, my Rudy Project sunglasses, which have survived almost three years of harrowing mountain biking, fell from their perch atop my head on Saturday and broke where the temple attaches to the frame.

I went to their website to email them about buying replacement parts and was surprised to find a three year frame warranty that actually still covered my glasses, for a $20 fee. They also have a great lens replacement guarantee; $20 gets you $50 replacement lenses if yours become scratched. The turnaround was fantastic: 15 days door-to-door, including shipping time, got me a completely new frame and two sets of lenses for just $40! You can bet Rudy will be at the top of my list next time I’m looking for sport glasses.

My everyday glasses were defeated after four years by an overly-friendly dog, who managed to chip the supposedly high-strength polycarbonate lenses where they attach to the frame. Sterling Optical in the mall is the one local place that grinds and drills them same day, and I haven’t been overly impressed by them in the past. But after I showed them the damage and asked about warranty coverage for my eight-month old lenses, they ground me a replacement the same day, free of charge.

It’s been a very nice change from the typical “throw it away and take out your wallet” experiences I’ve had with most other items, and goes a long way towards forging customer loyalty.

IMBA has put out a call for support and comments on Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ Bureau of Forestry new resource plan. This department manages many state parks and forests, including French Creek. IMBA also provided some good talking points and statistics:

Mountain biking is extremely popular in Pennsylvania. In 2003, 1,677,060 Pennsylvanians rode their bicycles off-road at least once. This is 17.6% of the total adult population in our state. (Outdoor Industry Foundation, 2004)

Bicycling (on- and off-road) contributes $4.8 billion annually and 44,000 jobs to the Middle Atlantic region (NJ, NY, PA). (Outdoor Industry Foundation, 2007)

You can read about the plan, view the schedule of public meetings, and submit comments online at the Bureau of Forestry’s site.

For the second time in a week; my Macbook up and decided to hide all my files. After spending most of last Sunday repairing its first aneurysm, I thought I had narrowly made it out of the woods. Then, on an otherwise mellow Saturday afternoon, it rebooted for a system update and undid all my work!

Fortunately, the data wasn’t gone, just trapped once again it a hidden, encrypted sparseimage file FileVault that was no longer associated with any of the accounts on the machine. Not wanting to take any more chances, I waited until the next morning to pick up an external drive to make a full copy of the file before doing anything else. (The intervening hours also included Bob’s bachelor party and a nice Sunday-morning hangover.) (more…)

One of the interesting and apparently more popular Facebook applications is Where I’ve Been. Here’s my current map; blue places I’ve been to, red I’ve lived in, and green are still to come (click for a bigger version):

The actual application is a bit easier to use with zooming and mouse-over descriptions of places, though since it’s not externally accessible, I’ve just grabbed small and big versions for here and my travel page.

 xkcd takes an amusing look at the math of the dating pool:

My Macbook had a major aneurysm this morning; after locking up, it refused to log me back in, giving an error message of “You are unable to log in to the user account [name] at this time”. One discussion suggested a simple password reset, another more pessimistically cited a reinstall of OS X. Since the password reset didn’t work, I suspected corruption in my FileVault-encrypted hard drive. Unfortunately, the only instructions to repair it required another user account on the machine, and I found no way to create one from the install/repair disk. (more…)