Tag Archives: me

  • Things I’ve been doing all weekend(s)

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    I’ve burned some serious midnight oil these past few months on a couple side projects I recently launched. I also went camping at Big Sur two weeks ago. That was fun. But back to the web projects.

    I created a philanthropic URL shortener to generate passive income for important organizations. It accepts Amazon.com URLs and appends the affiliate ID of a non-profit organization before shortening them. Anyone who follows the shortened link and buys something makes Amazon give ~ 4% of the order total to a non-profit org. The URL parser under the hood is super smart and fully ajaxed-out (while failing gracefully with javascript disabled). The goal of the site was to make it as simple and straightforward as possible to encourage people to use the service. It also generates Open Search browser plugins so Firefox and IE7+ users can replace their default Amazon search engine with a feel-good version.

    I’ve been helping a local art gallery increase their support base by building out a website. It sports a custom Drupal theme and is stupidly easy to update. They shouldn’t have a hard time keeping their content fresh. The artist boxes on the homepage load in a random order on each page refresh to prevent sibling rivalry. Unfortunately, it makes caching impossible. :/

    I spent all of half an hour setting up Gallery 2 at memedump.com. It helps me keep track of all the funny and profane things on the Internet. The website looks like crap and is loaded with crap. Thus, it makes total sense that it’s way more popular than my other projects and already reports 50,000+ page views. I later created memeaday.com for those people who want just one meme a day.

    There are a couple other things in the bucket including a video mash-up website but online video editing is, well, hellza problematic. So that one’s going to take a while.

    Lastly, my housemates and I had a blast acting out scene 330 of Star Wars: New Hope. Star Wars Uncut is a great project and you should sign up to film a scene right now. Let me know how it goes. Our shoot was a lot of fun.

    Posted in me me me, web dev and tagged , , on Oct 9, 2009 at 2:38 am #

  • I’m pegan

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    No, not pagan. Pesce-vegan. Due to some pre-disposed genetic irregularities I fear might lead to problems when I grow old, I have chosen to remove animal products, with the exception of fish, from my diet. No more mammals, eggs or dairy products.

    According to its founder, “‘veganism’ denotes a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude — as far as is possible and practical — all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals…”. Because I subscribe to a pegan diet for reasons of personal health and not ethical concerns, I probably shouldn’t borrow from the vegan name. But I am. So there.

    I think animals are great. But I think it’s okay to eat them if you understand and accept the methods by which they came to be on your plate. I also lament the day computers argue for rights aligned with animals. do animals have souls? Do machines have souls? (hellll no.)

    It’s been about three weeks and so far avoiding mammals and dairy has been extremely easy. Hilary is on-and-off vegan and most of the meals she cooks are vegan. Eating out is not a big deal because san francisco is super veggie friendly. The only time I run into problems is late at night when restaurant options are slim.

    It’s also simplified my life a lot. 50% of the supermarket is off-limits to me. I don’t spend nearly as much time grocery shopping and I’ve had to learn to cook or I starve to death — most packaged foods contain some speck of dairy. I buy fresh vegetables from the local farmer’s market and google a delicious way to prepare them. Much of chinese and japanese cuisine is vegan so I now have a great excuse to eat lunch at cha-ya once a week.

    Until I am confident my body is receiving enough protein to repair muscle tissue torn from biking, I have decided to continue eating fish. I would like to ween myself off but at this point in time I don’t feel I’m a “good enough” vegan to support regular exercise. rice protein, here I come.

    I encourage everyone to try being vegan for a week. If nothing else, it’s a great lesson in self control. Exercise your wille zur macht. if nothing else it’s always fun to try new things.

    Posted in food and tagged , , on Mar 14, 2009 at 11:48 pm #

  • I’m back. But without the map

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    Hi folks. It’s been a while. I fell off the blogging wagon because I became busy and lazy and repetitive and lazy. I also moved from Nextel to Sprint so I became mologogo-less. :( This made me very sad as I was no longer able to tell everyone where I was at all hours of the day. Google maps — you’ve been good to me, but I think we need a break.

    Since my last update, I have taken to a new place of employment. I spend my days as Webmaster of the Electronic Frontier Foundation where I help lawyers and activists cross swords with the scourge of the interwebs. It’s a great place to work. EFF has been around for eighteen years and if you’re not a member you should consider becoming one — we’re a membership supported organization. ;)

    I’ve also begun biking a lot. I commute via bicycle around seven miles (roundtrip) to and from work everyday through city traffic. It’s a lot of fun. And really dangerous at times. Which makes it fun. I ride my dad’s 1975 motobecane super mirage which is becoming exceptionally rickety and will soon be replaced by a beautiful 1982 colnago once I finish building it.

    I was debating whether I should port my old blog entries into this new blog and I decided not to. It’s nice to start anew and most of my old entries were painful to read. But that’s how it is with all old blog material. I think I’ll leave the old geoblog online for archival purposes and redirect the rss feed to this one. Yes, that will do.

    You’ve probably noticed the ridiculousness of this blog. I’ve always been fascinated by horizontal layouts but I’ve never seen a fluid horizontal layout. With the help of jQuery and a great plugin I think I’ve built a wordpress theme that will widen horizontally when necessary. It’s quite buggy at this point and makes IE6 cry. I’ll fix that over the next few days. When I get to it.

    In three weeks Travis, my housemate, and I will be traveling from Moscow to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian railway. More on that later. I am going to eat dinner now.

    Posted in me me me and tagged on Dec 11, 2008 at 8:28 pm #