onfocus

O'Reilly Hacks authors Rael Dornfest and Rob Flickenger will be speaking at Powell's Technical Books in Portland tonight. If you want to pick up tips on working with Google, Mac OS X, Linux, 802.11b, (and other hacks topics) stop by. It will be a fun talk.

Here's an amazing collection of historic Portland postcards. [via Portland Communique] It's too bad those lighted arches over 3rd avenue are gone.

sk and I went for a little hike Saturday morning at McDowell Creek near Lebanon (map). Here are a few photos.


Majestic Falls at McDowell Creek

I just updated ORblogs.com, a site that lists Oregon weblogs. I even added a FAQ. You know a site is getting serious when you add a FAQ. The update adds some new features like sorting, mapping, and latest-posting.

I stitched together these pictures from a walk today. This park is about 5 minutes from where we live, and we just discovered it a couple days ago. On a less hazy day we should be able to see some peaks in the cascades really well from this hill. (Pay no attention to the UFO in the left-hand corner.)


The view from Chip Ross Park



Setting aside the memorial aspect, plaques like this make me think of the plaque Carl Sagan designed for Pioneer 10 that's hurtling through space. I can imagine the designers of the plaque above said, "How do we explain the relative height of geographic features to aliens?"

This alternate suggestion for the Pioneer 10 plaque by Tufte always makes me laugh.

As Rael mentioned, the book I've been working on—Amazon Hacks—has gone from orange to yellow. Now I'll make the transition from intense daily (and nightly) writing/editing, to less frequent editing as it goes through production. It'll be a big shift, and I can finally look up from Word (now hitting save more frequently) to other applications. Hopefully it means I'll get back into the swing of posting here more often.

Even with the long hours lately it's been a very fun project to work on. I've met a lot of people doing cool stuff with Amazon's API and Associates Program, learned a lot about programming Web Services with tools and languages I don't normally work with (Perl, Python, and Mozilla especially), and had a chance to convey my excitement about what Amazon is building. And to top it all off, it was great working with Rael, and I hope we can collaborate again in the future.

In related news, Amazon Hacks and Weblog Bookwatch were mentioned briefly in the Guardian the other day: The third era starts here.

We had a great thunderstorm this morning around 5am. With lightning and everything! (They're rare out here on the west coast.)

I'm mad at Word.

Note to self: Word won't ever ask you if you want to close the document. It's asking you if you want to save the document. (Big difference.) And most likely, you do want to save the document. Especially if you've been working on it feverishly for the last five hours. Don't ever answer no to saving changes; there will be no way to recover your hours of work despite the promises of ...enhanced reliability and data recovery tools. The AutoRecover files will vanish the instant you click no—along with your feeling that this is going to be a good day with lots of progress.

More Corvallis propaganda: this fair city won one of two gold-medals given by the League of American Bicyclists for being a bike-friendly city. The other winning city was Palo Alto, CA. Right now my bike is closer to Palo Alto than Corvallis. I'll have to fix that soon.

And this is a great lesson about Portland's architecture: The Rise and Fall of Modernism in Portland by Michael J. Totten. [via Anil]