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.
Archive
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*
So last week I managed to get not only an ear infection, but a skin infection too. (which sounds creepier than it actually is) And I went in this morning for a followup. The skin infection is gone, but my doctor couldn’t figure out if the ear infection is actually gone (she and I think it is, since my ear doesn’t hurt) because my ear canal is so windy. She gave me a referral to an Ear/Nose/Throat doctor for a follow up. In the meantime I still have a bunch of crap in my ear because it won’t drain. 
It hasn’t affected my balance or anything but it’s just annoying to not be able to hear well out of my left ear (which is the ear I normally use when talking on the phone.
Rebecca’s mom is visiting us for a few weeks (David withdrawal was getting to her, I guess) so we’ve been showing her around the area. She’s not up for walking a lot, so mostly we do driving tours. Today we drove up to San Francisco. We crossed the Golden Gate bridge, but there were so many people there it wasn’t worth trying to find a place to park to look around. On the way back we drove up Geary and I saw the remains of the Coronet theater, where I saw Mars Attacks! on opening night. I don’t know when it closed, but it’s a shame. That theater was huge (single screen) and well taken care of when I was there. We made a small attempt at driving up Lombard to go down the windy hill, but there was just too much traffic. (to be expected) After a slow jaunt through the Wharf area (mmmm.. Ghirardelli) we took Mission to 4th and got the hell out of dodge. Dinner was at the Palo Alto Creamery in the Stanford shopping center. I highly recommend their milkshakes.
Test moblog, originally uploaded by smgoller.Yeah, so I figured I would try out flickr’s email photo to blog feature. Unfortunately my camera sucks, and there’s not much to take pictures of at 3am. Enjoy!
People really seem to be getting on the BitTorrent bandwagon these days. TorrentFreak writes that Azureus has gotten commercial funding from the same company that’s funded del.icio.us, (don’t get me started) among other things.
It’s good technology, so I’m glad they’re getting some backing. Hopefully it won’t go to their head….
So of course, I need to find tons of Wordpress plugins to customize my blog. Ones I’m using so far:
- Akismet – Comment spam control. No way I’d run without this bad boy.
- AutoMeta – Automatically generate Technorati tags based on post content. We’ll see how this one does.
- LJXP – This automatically crossposts all my blog entries to LiveJournal, with nice formatting options for linking back to my blog.
- OpenID Comments – This allows users with OpenID identities to comment on my blog without having to register.
I’m pretty happy with things so far. I’m sure I’ll add more though.
I haven’t really posted anything on the web about it yet, but on May 13, 2006 my wife Rebecca gave birth to our son, David Beckett Goller. I haven’t decided when I’ll set up a website for him, but I’m trying to avoid doing dorky crap as much as possible. At birth he was 7 pounds, 6 ounces, and 21 inches long.
He never ceases to amaze me. Right now he’s sleeping about a foot away from me in his swing, and every time I look at him I want to make sure he has every opportunity possible. He just fucking rocks. It’s that simple.
At least when it comes to data, that is. Blogging? Yeah, it’s pretty cool. I’m a part of sites like LiveJournal, Blogger, and Lord help me, MySpace, but every time I just come back to rolling my own thing.