Call off the search and rescue folks, I’m back from Acadia. All in one piece, more or less. Pay no attention to the duct tape which is currently holding my feet together. Yes, I said duct tape, and no you shouldn’t ask.
Anyway, I’ll have a full writeup on the Acadia trip (whether you like it or not) later, but in the interim the pictures are up here – nearly 80 of ’em (be thankful, there were over 150 originally). It took me almost two hours to upload the damn things last night because – due to the new camera’s far superior image quality – each shot is around 5 MBs in JPEG form. Speaking of the camera, as I said on Twitter yesterday, given that I can no longer use the camera as my scapegoat for the poor image quality, I’ll instead blame the weather which was…mercurial, to say the least.
While I had no intention of blogging anything remotely technical this week, I got a bit carried away tinkering with Flickr and Google’s My Maps this morning and felt compelled to mention it. And as long as I was at it, why not a couple of the other technical things I’ve fixed this week? I know, I know – I’m hopeless. Regardess, Google My Maps…
Google’s My Maps
Google’s My Maps is one of those announcements – like the dynamic rerouting they recently added (thx to SteveMonkey from #redmonk for letting me know about that one) – that seems to have slipped under the radar for a lot of folks, myself included. I played with it a bit, but hadn’t done much with it.
But after perusing my Flickr Acadia set this morning, I thought it might be interesting to layer a couple of images on to the same map that I used to do some of my trip planning. And you know what? It really couldn’t have been any easier. So obviously I got carried away and layered lots of pictures in there, along with some one line restaurant reviews, campground info, and so on. It’s nothing Jon Udell hasn’t done before, better, but I think it could be reasonably useful if you’re visiting Acadia for the first time.
The result of an hour or two’s worth of cut and paste (I said it was easy, but I didn’t say anything about not being tedious) is hopefully viewable here. I’ll have more to say on this later, because I think it’s relevant in non-obvious ways to the art of creating usable documentation.
Lower Casing del.icio.us
Because I’ve been using del.icio.us for so long, I’ve got a lot of cruft in my tags. Until they – or another third party – comes up with a good tag gardening tool, they’re probably going to remain rather disorganized.
There is one opportunity for a quick improvement, at least in my case: lowercasing everything. Given that the del.icio.us toolbar’s tagging extension seems to prefer lower case, I have little inclination to keep using mixed case tags except for the fact that so much of my content is tagged that way.
So rather than do the logical thing any good technologist would do, and quickly write a script to amend the situation – del.icio.us has an API, after all – I did what I always did in my developer days: got lazy and looked around for an existing fix. Worse, I didn’t even bother with a search myself, I just asked the folks in #redmonk. Donnie very kindly didn’t call me out for being lazy and pointed me here.
While the script will only get so far before it times out (Connection reset by peer (Errno::ECONNRESET)), it is slowly but surely lowercasing all of my tags. I’m through “denmark” as of this writing.
Maybe I’ll look into what’s causing the script to time out, but more likely I’ll see if someone else has already figured it out.
Pointing Grand Central at Our Toll Free
Yes, I still owe you the Grand Central acquisition writeup, and no you’re not getting it this week. But in the meantime, here’s a quick and easy way to get a toll free number pointed at your Grand Central number.
When I got out to the east coast for the summer, one of the first things I tried to do was repoint our toll free line (866.RED.MONK) – currently ringing into my office line in Denver – to my Grand Central number. It’d be yet another way I could make my actual physical location irrelevant to customers, media, and other contacts.
Unfortunately, AT&T informed me that they could not repoint a toll free line at a virtual number – i.e. something without a physical address. In a classic display of the technologists inclination to overthink the problem, I began contemplating ways to “fool” AT&T by attaching a virtual address and also emailed Grand Central for ideas (no reply).
Some of you have doubtless already thought of the solution that took me two weeks to arrive at: simply forward the Denver office line to the Grand Central number. Unable to achieve this remotely (damn you, Qwest), I prodded a friend into going over to my place yesterday and forwarding the number, and I’ll be damned if that didn’t work.
Now, when you call 866.RED.MONK, AT&T forwards you over to the physical office line 303.893.1650 maintained by Qwest who in turn forwards you over to the Grand Central line, 617.395.5685. There are more moving parts and services in there than I’d like, but it seems to work fine for now. So if you need to find me, you can now simply dial 866.RED.MONK and it will use Grand Central find me. Except when I’m on vacation, like now – at that point it will route you directly into voicemail.
Pairing My Thinkpad w/ My Nokia N75
Ever since I replaced my LG CU320 with my Nokia N75, I’ve been unable to use the phone as a modem on Linux because I couldn’t get the devices to “pair”; that is, agree to work together. After trying a variety of command line approaches, I finally installed the GNOME Bluetooth Preferences applet, set my laptop to discoverable and 5 minutes later I was paired. It’s very nice not to have to boot into Windows while at home just for internet access.
No luck yet getting the laptop to see my Jawbone headset, but baby steps.
