Dyepot, Teapot

Monday was the latest installment of an ongoing Flickr project/event called A Day in the Life. The participants take all take photos on a given day while going about their normal business. This is the first time I’ve participated, and it was a lot of fun. You can see my photos here.

I also felt the need to play around with iMovie and GarageBand more, so I made a video about it too.

Tags: dilomar06, day in the life

In order to fully document my upcoming travel, I bought myself a new camera (Canon Powershot 450) and a digital voice recorder (Olympus something-or-other). Both have been tested and work beautifully.

The digital recorder saves its files in WMA format, which is a pain because then I have to convert them to something more useful, but I think it will be just fine for capturing the shouting and singing of choirs of soccer fans. The camera kicks ass. I even made a little movie of my cat with the video setting (did you know it only takes 7 seconds to fill a 16 MB card?), but Speakeasy doesn’t seem friendly to letting people download such things from my website, so you’ll have to email me if you want a copy, unless someone can suggest a place to host it (I’m too tired/lazy to sign up with something like YouTube right now).

You should email me about the video. It’s really funny.

Edit: I uploaded the video to the Internet Archive and you can access it here.

Tags: cameras, recording, travel, cats

I registered a domain name to point at my personal website yesterday: http://www.lifeofaudrey.com. I thought it sounded like a good name for a podcast or something. I hope this is dorky in a charming way, not cringeworthy. But registration is so cheap these days, who cares?

I went through GoDaddy, because they seem to have a good rep and prices and such, but I was pleasantly suprised to get a follow-up phone call from a customer service rep thanking me for becoming a customer and checking in to see if I had questions. That was a nice thing to find on my voicemail.

Tags: websites

The feed aggregator is about ready for use (it doesn’t have any of the cool features I intend to include in place, but the basic job of displaying a user-selected set of feeds is covered), but it is sadly lacking a name. I’ve been trying to think of something that a) does not sound like one of the myriad aggregators already available and b) in some way references sorting, categorizing, or interesting collections of things, but am not having much luck. Any suggestions?

Tags: naming, feed aggregators

I’ve gotten obsessed enough with some of my current projects that any spare time not spent working on something starts to feel wrong. I think I may be hitting my limit, though, as evidenced by this evening, when quietly sitting around knitting and listening to podcasts turned into feeling really lonely and isolated about what I’m working on. I’m sure I’ll shake it off once I get some sleep, but meanwhile I want to make note of a couple of things that have been getting under my skin.

1) I grew up in Portland, and I have spent all but ten years of my life here. It’s a great place. There is a reason people move here even when they don’t have a job lined up, or even know anyone in town. But sometimes I feel stifled, like I know every story you could possibly tell about this place and I want to hear something new. It makes me feel dislocated, like it’s so familiar I don’t really belong. Even though I’ve met a lot of really cool people since I moved back.

2) Where are the female tech entrepreneurs? A month or two ago I realized that for all the interesting blogs I was reading about technology, web development, etc, only one was written by a woman. Mashup camp => no female developers. All those crazy web 2.0 start-up announcements => no female developers. Once I started noticing this, I began adding any blogs I could find that were written by women doing interesting independent software development, but there’s not a lot out there. The more I work on programming projects, the more this bothers me. I’m not that strongly attached to gender as identity, but it still feels awkward to think of going to the local Ruby or Perl programmers’ social at a brewpub when all of the people on the mailing lists for said groups seem to be male.

3) The feed aggregator is coming along. I am in love with Rails. I can really see the appeal of Ruby, though I’m still figuring it out and kind of clumsy about how to write code that does what I want. This is what it looks like right now:

Those links in the sidebar with the different blog names don’t currently link to anything useful, but I think I’ll be able to fix that tomorrow. I’m trying to use :render action to show only the posts for a given blog, and it’s generating the sort of errors that suggest I’ve asked my code to do something that makes no sense.

Half an hour ago I turned down an offer to go have a drink with friends in part because I was feeling too mopey to be sociable, but writing this actually helped a lot, so I think I’ll call and make sure they’ll be there long enough for me to walk over. Though I should probably stick to hot cocoa.

Tags: geek