onfocus

For those of you who have been sending cards and letters asking for more pics of the puppy (you know who you are), here's a recent photo.



She's pretty much done growing now at six months, and we thought she would be much bigger when we got her. It's hard to tell from this picture, but she's very tiny. (About 13 inches at the shoulder. That means she would need the extra-extra small lifejacket for a boat trip, unlike rafting eddie.) We're very happy with her—she's a great dog.

Hurry over to Waxy's Bandwidth Blowout and download the TV pilot you were never meant to see. It has Owen Wilson as a talking motorcycle and Jack Black as a man who is three times smarter than the world's smartest man. For real.

Posting has stopped because I'm on vacation. I'll be back in front of a computer on Thursday.

MediaDailyNews: Blog readers defy stereotypes : "It turns out that 61 percent of blog readers who participated in the survey are over 30 years of age. Almost 30 percent are between the ages of 31 and 40, while over 37 percent span the ages of 41-60. And nearly 40 percent have a household income of $90K and above." [via anil]

The article about weblogs was in the paper this weekend, Adventures in blogging: "Hundreds of people know that Paul Bausch has a dog named Luna, likes photography and technology, and went for a hike at Silver Creek Falls a couple weeks ago. He told them all about it without ever leaving his home in Corvallis."

On the local weblogs front, I got an email from the laboratory of Dr. Boris Thinky announcing his new weblog: Thinkum: The Boris Blog. (Another great Bigha production.) They're giving away gmail accounts over there.

Further on the local weblogs front, I helped Julie Flanery put up a website for her dog training business: Wonder Dogs. We've been working with her to train Luna, and it's amazing to watch Julie in action with dogs. She started a weblog as part of her site, Wonder Dogs News & Updates.

Last week I chatted with Jenn Rouse from the Corvallis Gazette Times. We talked about weblogs, what they mean, my time at Blogger, a site I run called ORblogs, and where weblogs may be headed. When she mentioned to her editors that she was going to do a story on "blogging", they said, "what specifically about logging?" So it seems there's still some work to do to get people to understand what weblogs are.

As research for her article she started her own weblog—Jen's Notes—with Blogger to see how it all works. One of her first posts, Interview with pb, summarized some things we talked about that didn't make it into her article. (A great reason journalists should keep weblogs on the side—more depth!) Her article about weblogs should be in Sunday's Gazette-Times.

I heard through the Portland Bloggers grapevine that Linus Torvalds is moving to Portland in a couple weeks. He said, "The plan was to try to acclimatize and have time to grow webbed feet (although I'm told there are implants available) by moving during the summer." Given enough webbed feet, all puddles are shallow. More on Linus Torvalds.

This weekend I made some changes to my photolog. On the backend there's now a database keeping some meta-info about each picture. (Previously, it was using the filesystem only.) On the frontend, some of the photos now have a [details] link after the title that leads to a page with the meta info for that particular photo. For example:

• Today's Photo
• Details of Today's Photo

I'm adding some of the metadata like title and keywords by hand. But some of it is automatically included by parsing the exif data embedded within the image. Exif data includes technical details about the shot: exposure time, focal length, aperture setting, etc. To get the exif info I'm using a program called exiftags. (jhead is another good exif data extractor that I found while putting this together.) I'm hoping that having this technical data about the shot a click away from each photo will help me remember what works and what doesn't.

101 Ways to Improve Your News Site. This is full of great ideas.

Get Anil an iPod: Nigritude Ultramarine. He'd link to your crazy Google contest.

According to John Udell, ISBNs are changing from 10 to 13 characters in 2005. (I have a bunch of code based on 10-character ISBNs that I'll need to update.) More info.

Matt posted a couple pictures of Luna: one at rest, one at full speed. When she gets excited she runs in big loops around the yard at top speed. She really needs animals to herd, but she'll have to get by with frisbees.

I took some photos of the moon tonight:



I had help with the exposure settings from Hack #96: Shoot The Moon in Digital Photography Hacks. I know I'm biased because I put together a book in the Hacks series, but I really found this book entertaining and useful (read most of it tonight). Unlike most Hacks books it has full color, glossy pages and is filled with illustrations. I don't know if it's because I'm used to the Hacks format—or because I'm the target market—but I feel like I got more practical advice from this photography book than any other I own. I wish there would have been more web/photography stuff (EXIF parsing, programatic resizing, etc.) but I realize this is a book for photographers, not coders.

I'm not happy with this level of detail in the photo, and I'd like to get an adapter so I can hook my camera to my telescope. I want to see craters in my moon photos. (Here's a picture of the moon I took in 2002 by holding my camera up to the telescope eyepiece. The adapter should work better.)

A local Corvallis company Bigha (makers of high quality recumbent bikes) just started a weblog: The Bigha Blog. Every business should do this. Ernest put the weblog together, and he posted about a hike at Silver Falls we went on a week ago. You may remember him from this photo where he's probably not thinking about bikes and weblogs.

And at The Bigha Blog I found a link to a satisfied customer talking about his experience with the company on his weblog. It pays to be nice to weblog authors—they post the good and the bad for the world to read.