Sean’s House

I’m on Facebook now, for real. I refuse to play Mafia Wars, however. It’s just wrong. I’ve also made a commitment to use OpenID wherever I can. It just makes more sense to me. I’ve also established a Google Profile now, so searching for “Sean Goller” shows my profile at the bottom of the first page of results. Facebook is first, and it’s not me because there’s another Sean Goller. (who’s been on Facebook longer, I think) Not sure what to do about that. Almost all of the rest of the page is me, though.

So I’m trying out a bunch of different social networking sites. Twitter is interesting. FriendFeed is more interesting because it exposes you to friends-of-friends more “efficiently”. (for lack of a better term) I just got my invite for Skydeck, and I’m not so sure about this one. You download a browser extension. You give it your phone number and your login info for your cell carrier’s billing site. It logs in and scrapes your call log. This seems kind of ghetto to me. If people are signing up in droves for Mint and happily providing them with access to their banks, why not just hang onto the info? I guess if they don’t have the security infrastructure, but only being able to update your info from a specific browser isn’t going to cut it. To be fair, I don’t necessarily believe that Skydeck has much of choice though.

The other problem I see is the whole “social network” part of it. There needs to be a huge amount of critical mass for that part to take off, and it’s not quite as compelling as other sites. Until that happens though, Skydeck will just be a pretty neat call log analysis tool.

I’ve been following Lunch 2.0 for awhile now, but I had gotten the idea that it was for people who worked at “Web 2.0″ companies to talk about “Web 2.0″ type stuff. So I never actually signed up, and just followed along vicariously. However, recently (after hibernating, apparently) they started things up again and the first lunch is at LinkedIn, a social networking site I’ve been playing with in the past few months. In talking to my co-workers, they mentioned how they felt a lot of pressure to accept invitations from co-workers, even ones they didn’t really care for. I can understand that, especially if they’re current co-workers. That having been said, I’m trying to only accept invites from people that I interact(ed) with reasonably often.

So without really thinking about it, I posted to the Lunch 2.0 blog saying I’d be there. After I did it though, I (erroneously) posted again, saying I probably wouldn’t because of my impression of the “rules”. But Terry quickly set me straight about how things worked. Hopefully this will encourage more lurkers to show up at these events.

I wanted to believe it was cool. I really did. Nope, sorry. The iPhone is a bunch of hooey. Why? The phone is only available with a 2 year contract from Cingular. $600 for the 8GB version, $500 for the 4GB version. So yeah, weak storage capacity. 8GB max? GIVE ME A BREAK. And the worst? No way to install software onto it. What’s the point in making a huge deal out of it running Mac OS X if you can’t even install anything on it? I am so disappointed.

Ideally, what I want is an iPod with the same screen and interface, and a 60 or 80GB drive in it. I don’t care about the phone, I don’t care about the camera. Wifi and browsing would be cool, but not required. I really think Apple shot themselves in the foot with this one.

So I started playing with office 2007 today. Outlook is pretty interesting. Now I’m playing with Word, which has blog editing support, and groks Wordpress. I’m scared. We’ll see how well this works.

Just noticed this. Work has been really busy lately.

When I heard that Sony had announced a standalone GPS logger, the GPS-CS1, I was hopeful and fearful at the same time, especially once I saw it would be bundled with software that was only “guaranteed to work with Sony Cameras”. Well, I picked one up today, and I can safely say that Sony did it right. When you plug it into your computer, it shows up as a USB flash disk, with a GPS subdirectory. Inside that directory are a series of text files that are NMEA GPS logs. Everything is logged in GMT, including the timestamps on the files. (which makes sense when you think about it).

I downloaded a demo of RoboGEO, a commercial win32 geotagging program, as it was the first program I found. After deleting the first line of the test log file I made (sony puts in a line to identify the log file came from its device) RoboGEO was able to import the resulting NMEA file with no problems and tag the quick shots I made in the parking lot. According to the manual, it will record a location every 15 seconds, and battery life is approximately 360 hours on a single AA battery. From that you should get about 86,400 time/location records.

The device itself looks pretty nice too, with a carabiner included so you can hang it off your backpack or camera bag. That having been said, it’s not anything-proof. Not waterproof, water-resistant, dustproof, hot car for extended periods of time proof, magneticproof, dog slobber proof, you name it, Sony says to keep this thing away from it. So, the bottom line is if you’re looking for a (albeit expensive at $150) simple standalone GPS logger that will work (with minor tweaking) with pretty much any geotagging software out there, I don’t think you can beat this thing.

Update: The GPS Image Tracker software that comes with it will work with any JPEG pictures. However, it doesn’t properly account for DST, but you can adjust the timezone for any gps log that’s been imported.

So I’ve been trying to keep electronic copies of all my bills and legal documents, and I’ve been using an Epson scanner I bought a few years back. But it’s a flatbed with no feeder option, so it’s hard to get motivated to scan everything in. And once you get behind, there’s no catching up. This past weekend, however, Fry’s had the Brother MFC-420CN on sale for $99. (It’s normally $129) It’s pretty much what you would expect from a low-end all-in-one (print, copy, fax, scan) except for two minor details: It has a sheet feeder, and has ethernet built in. To be honest, I don’t care about the printing, faxing or copying so much, but a sheet-fed network-based scanner for $100 is a pretty sweet deal. I’ve been using it with Acrobat 7 and its OCR capabilities with good success.

So, found this on boing boing. Cory talks about an entry on the Disney Blog about how the new fingerprint scanners could be used for Evil(tm) by Walt Disney World and that they could possibly share their data with the government. Now, I’m a huge privacy advocate, but fingerprint scanners have been at WDW since at least 1997, (the first time I was there) so I’m wondering why a big fuss is being made over it. It’s good that they mention you can still get in the park if you refuse to use them (which is what I did) but always presenting the worst case scenario (Disney and the NSA are in cahoots!) gets a little old after awhile. It’s not like people *have* to go to Walt Disney World for fun. But if you do go, make a statement and refuse to use the reader. If enough people do it, then they’ll stop utilizing it. That’s the only realistic way to stop them from doing it.

I’m not quite sure why, but I’m trying this out. As part of my purchase of NFL Head Coach by EA, I got a free commisioner’s package to their fantasy football product. This lets me set up a league that people can join to play. Normally it costs $50 to do this, and I’m not quite sure why you would, because that seems like an awful lot. Anyway, if you don’t know what Fantasy Football is, it’s basically organized math. You end up with a roster of existing NFL players, and each week you specify which players are participating. After their real-life games are played, the statistics are tallied and compared with whomever you’re playing against that week in the league. Whomever got the most points wins the game for that week. It’s free so I’ll try it. *shrug*