Tech

Hotel wireless is sweet. Ariane and I are in Penticton this weekend helping clean out my great great aunts apartment. I checked many of the penticton hotels for highspeed but couldn't really find anything, most just say "data ports" which means the phone has an extra port for your modem (<sarcasm>woo hoo</sarcasm>). So I just gave up and stayed at the best western (it's like this little best western motel). So I turn on my laptop tonight, and BOOM, I'm connected. It's sweet. Wireless internet is sweet.

Coincidentally enough, this article was linked to on slashdot on thursday (I saw it shortly after my last post):
Warm Offices Linked to Fewer Typing Errors and Higher Productivity.

It basically states that some company did a study, and employees will be approximately 10% less efficient at 20 degrees celsius than they will be at 25. I would guess that my efficiency had probably dropped to by about 85% at the temp I was working at. Now, I don't know if the ergonomics lab at Cornell is funded by the Gas or Electric companies, but I believe it nontheless.

And just to follow up to my last entry, I had to work in the CS atrium with all the silly engineers all morning friday, but then they totally cranked up the heat at around noon... it was sweet, like 30 degrees in there after about an hour... nice.

Last weekend I was taking a couple pics of the garage sale and so I had my camera in my pocket. Some of you may have already known that my camera was acting up a little, but no matter if you didn't, because I bumped it against the wall, effectively ending the life of the camera. I got one last picture out of it, but now it doesn't want to turn on properly. After 1586 photos taken all over Europe and Canada I have to say Rest In Peace good old, not so trusty, Kodac DX3600 digital camera, you were there for me when I needed you... some times.

I had been planning on buying a new camera anyway, so I wasn't too heart broken. After a somewhat annoying (and patience testing) experience at future shopped, I walked away happy with a shiny new Canon PowerShot A85:

I wanted a camera that could take pictures at a higher resolution, at night, and have control over most of the functions such as shutter speed and whatnot. So far I'm pretty happy with it, but I still need to learn how to use most of the functions.

A guy at work sent me a link comparing digital versus film photographs. I haven't had a chance to read it all yet but what I have read has been pretty interesting.
Digital cameras vs. film

Another thing I've been working on is this "26 Things". Leslie sent me the link a while ago but I've only just had a chance to look at it. What it is is a photographic scavenger hunt. You have to take pictures of all 26 items on the list. So far I've gotten about half, some old, some new.

My 26 things photo gallery.

So Leslie emailed me the other day asking for some help with setting up a blog for her that would let her run a photo blog, I guess her current blogger didn't allow for images. So we decided to setup blosxom. I had been meaning to base one of my projects at work on blosxom's plugin architecture, only blosxom is a perl script and I'm doing my work in python. So after looking at blosxom a bit more I was thinking about how hard it might be to re-write it comletely in python, and I had some free time this weekend so... I translated the code into python.

Shrubxery is a basic blogging system adapted from blosxom. The main idea is that the blogger is only a single, simple script that can basically only display text files, which are the blog entries. But the plugins give the blogger its power, and the plugin architecture allows the plugins to be powerful. It's pretty cool, really.

I started a sourceforge project here and the shrubxery home page is here. I'm still writing most of the documentation.

btw, did I mention that I plan on replacing this movable type install (that's what all the buffmuther blogs run off of) with the shrubxery...?

It's studies like this that make the entire research community look like a bunch of idiots. I think if anyone's addicted to the internet it would be me. But I've gone cold turkey off the internet for two weeks before without any problems. The only symptoms I suffered were annoyance because I could upload my freaking photos or let people know how my trip was going.

> "it was incredibly difficult to recruit participants for this study, as people weren't willing to be without the internet for two weeks"

No shit, eh? Considering that most peoples work (especially the people who they would be considered internet adicts) requires them to use the internet. It's like saying it was difficult to recruit people for my study because people weren't willing to be without their desk or table for two weeks. Unless you pay me as much as I would've made in that two weeks, and then some, why should I do your study?

But at least the reg still did the story with their usual good british humour:
> "I'm starting to miss emailing my friends - I feel out of the loop," she said unloopedly.