I just got back the 20"x30" print of the panorama I shot at the top of Diamondhead (a series of photos stitched together automagically with Autostitch).

It looks absofriggin' AWESOME. I mean, wow. Completely blown away at the quality of the print. Looks like a professional poster.

I goofed when I sent the image for printing through iPhoto, though - I forgot to manually crop or pad the image, so they just cropped it to fit the aspect ratio of the print, chopping off the mansions at the foot of Diamondhead, and the hotels at Waikiki. Next time, I'll send a 4x6 aspect image, likely with white blocks at the top and bottom to pad the image so the full pano fits onto the 20"x30" print.

Sometime over the weekend, the odometer on this weblog rolled over to 6 digits. I have no idea who it was, but the 100,000th actual human visitor came by sometime in the last 72 hours. I hadn't been paying enough attention to the stats, but that's pretty cool. One heckuva milestone. I should have been paying attention, and had some kind of prize. Perhaps an "I'm an edtech geek" bumper sticker or something...

I'd been using a "tag" plugin that was kind of a hack - it used its own table, and didn't integrate with Categories, so it was double duty sometimes to properly tag stuff and categorize it.

I just stumbled across the Cat2Tag plugin, which provides a fully integrated folksonomy/tagging system that uses categories to store the tags. It creates new categories if necessary, and provides a tag cloud for tag entry - now it works almost exactly like del.icio.us does.

I've been going on about Flickr like some kind of drooling fanboy, but I've come to a point where I actually feel better having Flickr handy. I look forward to the Last 24 Hours of Interestingness. The Interestingness rss feed pushed it over the top for me, and in the last week I've seen dozens of images that are absolutely amazing - which I would have never seen without Flickr and the community that has grown up around it.

I merged my Flickr and Yahoo! accounts over the weekend. I was prompted to do it by Flickr, and didn't think too much about it. But now Flickr Gallery is borked. It's having trouble authenticating against my Yahoo! credentials.

If you're using Flickr Gallery to keep your Flickr life in sync with your WordPress life, hold off on merging accounts for now. I'm hoping there will be an update to Flickr Gallery soon (although the last update was in January 2005, so maybe I shouldn't hold my breath...) - and the tweaks I made to the html so it validates and renders properly are freely available to anyone who wants to keep hacking on the plugin. Looks like the developer's blog hasn't been updated since January either. That's not a good sign. Hope everything's ok...

After what felt like a very long weekend of debugging jGenerator, I finally figured out what was going wrong, and how to fix it. It didn't make sense at all, which is why I didn't pursue that line of investigation earlier. The library worked fine before. It hadn't changed. Then it didn't work. I was figuring that meant something outside of the library had changed, and had borked something used by jGenerator.

I've got a few ideas to help make Flickr and even cooler app.

1. On a photo page, where it lists the camera model used to take the picture, why not link that to a page with more info about the camera? Doesn't have to be an "ecommerce" tie-in, but at least a way to find out more...
2. When browsing photos in My Favorites, it would be cool if the photos were displayed in context of the favorites, as if it were a Set.
3. How about a way to search items in My Favorites - view the tag cloud for the photos, or have a search field, or something... Now that the Interestingness stuff is going full speed, I'm gathering a lot of faves.
4. RSS feed for my faves?
5. Star ratings for photos? Allow anyone to "tag" anyone's photos (including their own) with a star rating...
6. Why can't I add my own photos to My Favorites?
7. Calendar view for my faves?

That's it for now. Really digging the Interestingness stuff...

Today, Murphy made me his bitch. He totally kicked my ass and made me call him "uncle".

You may have won this round, but I'll bring it, punk.

I had promised to have a fresh build of the Mavericks website ready for final review today, but jGenerator chose this exact time to decide to pack it in. It's not working consistently, and I couldn't publish a complete section of Mavericks. I spent the entire day trying to track down the reason for an external library to suddenly refuse to work, when I believe that nothing had changed. Obviously, my assumption about nothing having changed is wrong. I know what I'm doing over the weekend.

Gizmodo posted about this new product called Uturn.

She makes this device that looks really weird that sits on your stomach. It uses ultrasound and bluetooth to find out when your bladder is full then it lets you know it's time to go piss.

It's being branded as an incontinence aid, but wouldn't something like that be handy to help with potty training? Just slap this sucker on your toddler, and when the bells and whistles start blaring, Junior knows when to pee...

Shiny Silver Cylinder

Originally uploaded by dnorman.

trying the flickr-blog tie-in...

I've never gone through the Explore section on Flickr before. I just checked it out, and holy crap! Interestingness everywhere! There are some absolutely amazing photos on Flickr!

What they've done is come up with a great way to mine user-generated data to provide a view onto their database that is much richer than any taxonomy-based scheme would allow - "interestingness" is defined on the fly by the users of the system, and the parameters change constantly.

This is completely unbelievable. 5 days after Katrina, and the first large-scale aid is just now starting to float into New Orleans. That boggles my mind. A natural disaster that is much larger in scale than 9/11 was (although the death toll is thankfully lower - for now - it's estimated to top 10,000). It seems like the West was better prepared to respond to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami than it is to provide assistance within the borders of the world's richest and most powerful nation.