My sister Catherine just got graduated from college, has some money in the bank already, and is about to start her first job. She’s already starting to think about investing, which is great, so I pulled together some links from my del.icio.us collection for her:
What would you add or remove from the list?
Turning 30 is intimidating because it’s supposed to be a milestone: you look back at the fun times and early accomplishments of your 20’s as you look towards settling into a more serious life in your 30’s. Of course, 30 is a pretty arbitrary age for any accomplishment, so perhaps it’s better spent just taking stock of the last decade and the next to come.
It’s pretty cool to see one of my former projects, the Unity enterprise social suite, getting plenty of coverage at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. (Naturally, the news came to me through the social grapevine of my del.icio.us network.) I was involved in the first year or so of the project, and it looks like it’s really evolved - this photo by David Terrar gives you a hint.
As noted in the articles, it was a big undertaking with lots of technical challenges. Sharepoint seems a little overemphasized; we also built a handful of custom web applications, feed infrastructure (ATOM as well as RSS), Google Search Appliance integration (one of my contributions), NewsGator Enterprise, and security.
Of course, the bigger challenge in any enterprise is cultural adoption by employees and management. To that end, deploying enterprise 2.0 takes passionate advocates from project management to grassroots early adopters. The Unity team has carved a solid beachhead there, so it’ll be exciting to see how it continues to grow!
Pretty much the first thing you learn as a homeowner is toilet debugging and repair. After 7 years, I’ve now moved onto advanced stealth toilet engineering.
My toilets flushed and filled loudly - to the tune of 70 dB on a sound-level meter sitting a few feet away on the sink. Tweaking the fill hose and float didn’t do much, so I purchased new “whisper-quiet” fill stacks. I was a bit skeptical since there was nothing to say how or why they earned that designation, but it actually proved to be true advertising. They loudest part of the flush is now 6 dB lower, and the fill is a pleasant gurgle 12 dB less than the old one. Not bad for $10 a piece!
This week’s Assignment: Sharp on DPS made me realize that the resized photos in my gallery always loose the sharpness they originally had. Thankfully, that problem has already been solved in Gallery2; this post explains how to automatically sharpen images on resize. Once that’s in place, you can dump the cache of existing images by deleting your g2data/derivatives folder.
Here’s a quick example of a normal and processed resize using the 0.2 setting from the above post:
Studio photographers and even the mug shot artists at the DMV shoot tethered to a computer, so why can’t you with your fancy DSLR? Here’s a rundown of some options for Mac users and their performance:
Canon’s included software does allow for remote control of a tethered camera; control the settings, click the shutter, and the file immediately downloads to the computer. Or at least as immediately as USB 2.0 allows: roughly 8 seconds for RAW and 3 seconds for a large, high-quality JPG. The complimentary Canon image viewer will watch the incoming directory and display a thumbnail; clicking that gives you a medium-size preview, which can then be maximized to fit the screen with more clicks.
You’ve climbed to the top of Google, or at least to the first page. Now how do you make sure you get that click through to your site?
Quick, describe your site in 155 characters or less - that’s how much of your meta description is going to be displayed below your (already optimized) site title. Here’s what I came up with:
Nature, sports, & event photographer for hire in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. Blogs on the intersection of technology & modern life.
In Wordpress, you can set this in Admin > Settings > Description. In Gallery2, it will be the description of your album, which you can override in the theme if needed. Google may take a week or two to reflect the changes.
Sustained $4 a gallon gas is one of the new signs of the apocalypse, meaning it’s time to question the ancient Japanese wisdom of my Maxima’s owner’s manual: “Premium fuel recommended”.
My now vestigial mechanical engineering degree had been able to follow the logic: a high compression engine needs purer fuel to run at peak efficiency, otherwise the engine electronics would just dial it back to a less efficient level. Cheaper gas would just be offset by fewer miles per gallon.
As much as love watching my holdings in energy stocks go up, I decided it was time to put this to the test: would I really get fewer miles out of non-premium gas? My admittedly loose testing methodology: two tanks of typical driving measuring cumulative miles per gallon on a ScanGauge.
The results: 22 mpg on premium, 21 mpg on regular. That 1 mpg is well within my margin of error, particularly given that I did more highway driving on the premium tank. I’ll keep watching the numbers to see if there’s a longer-term decline, but for now regular fill-ups are going to ease the pain at the pump a bit. How does your mileage vary?
At least according to CDC research:
More people are hurt snowboarding than any other outdoor activity, accounting for a quarter of emergency room visits, according to the first national study to estimate recreational injuries. Nearly 26 percent of the injures were from snowboarding followed by sledding (11 percent); hiking (6 percent); mountain biking, personal watercraft, water skiing or tubing (4 percent); fishing (3 percent) and swimming (2 percent).
I’ve taken plenty of lumps biking and boarding, but the worst I’ve racked up was a few stitches on the bike. As for broken bones, my only fracture was a collarbone in a game of flag football 
Here’s a video of a fun talk photographer Joe McNally gave at Google:
del.icio.us/mbotos