If you follow metaspark via RSS you will want to move your subscription over to this new feed.

Why so rabid a user base? You have me at that one – I’m hooked and have no clue why.

I’ve been back in the USA for about 36 hours and I’m finally pretty much caught up on sleep and free of jet lag. As great of a time as I had in Berlin I’m quite glad to be home. I’ve finally got the last of the photos from the trip that are worth posting uploaded to my Berlin photoset on Flickr.

The HP event was actually really fun and informative to attend. To be honest I was a little worried that it would be a pretty mundane event announcing 5% faster this, and 8% smaller that but my fears turned out to be unfounded. HP launched both a massively improved Touchsmart as well as the stunning and lustworthy Voodoo Envy.

Another one of my 101 goals is completed and I’m left with a desire to return to Europe and explore more of what it has to offer.

It’s so good I’m writing this post while I watch a second time!

See something I like and think I might someday want to return? Click the star to bookmark it, and forget about it. If it’s something I’m likely to use frequently then another click of the star lets me add a few appropriate tags to speed up the search.

No longer do I have an organized collection of bookmarks, and a bookmarks bar crammed with common links and folders of bookmarks. With the ability to search my history and bookmarks from the address bar an entirely keyboard and search based browsing habit has evolved. A few Quicksilvr like keystrokes reveal an impressively accurate and intuitive list of what I want, culled from the URLs, tags, and titles of the visited pages.

The Firefox user interface has become minimal, The address and search bar, a list of my open tabs, and nothing else. Pure efficiency and elegance in internet consumption. I have achieved Firefox zen:

Interestingly enough it would seem that my visitors have as well. A quick look at the last few months of visitors shows that over half of my visitors have selected Firefox as their browser of choice with Internet Explorer coming in 2nd and Safari trailing in 3rd.

With the Mozilla Foundation putting so much effort into setting download records at the release of Firefox 3 I wonder how that percentage will grow in coming months both on Futurist Now as well as the internet as a whole.

Side note: yes, I see the irony in cheering for Firefox given where I work. I don’t actually see a problem with that – I think Firefox has given Internet Explorer a lot and the more recent versions of Internet Explorer have been better for the competition that Firefox and Opera have provided. I strongly believe that competition is the key to any successful market and am always happy to see multiple contenders reaching for the stars – the biggest winners in this kind of technology arms race are almost always the consumers.

As you can see the box that arrived is not terribly big. Even my wee EeePC is larger, and both are dwarfed by the 15″ Macbook Pro they alight upon. I immediately rip the box open with the only sharp implement handy.

Obviously I need a better sharp implement for my desk, or at any rate one less dangerous. Note to self: pick up giant serrated blade that will look good on a glass desk.

To help elongate my personal mysterious something experience both something’s came individually wrapped. Within seconds I had ripped into my smaller something, eager to divulge it’s contents.

A box! A tiny black box! Heart contain thyself. The box is constructed from pleather-clad cardboard and proclaims ‘Di Capri’ in embossed silver letters. What could be inside?

Cufflinks! Reasonably well put together and styled cufflinks at that. Luckily blue is my favorite color, and rectilinear forms are my favorite shapes. Worth the $10? For something #1 an enthusiastic yes. But what could the other (and ominously larger) something be?

This is either something fantastic, or something horrific.

It would seem the latter: something horrific yet delightfully soft. Either this is my new lounge wear, or the best white elephant gift for the upcoming holiday season. Worth the $10? For something #2 the verdict is a not so definite perhaps. It should be worth noting that the Something FAQ even specifically calls out the scenario of a feminine something going to a (somewhat) masculine guy so I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

End verdict: the Something Store gets a thumbs up in my book. Don’t bet the farm on them with their specifically random product delivery but for a fun way to blow $10 that’s likely less damaging to your liver than an evening out on the town check them out.

For a few more pictures of the Something Store unboxing extravaganza check out my Flickr set on the topic.

My new EeePC
I picked up one of Asus’s delightfully tiny new netbooks, the EeePC. A netbook is a new category of sub-notebook device with low end specs designed primarily for browsing the web. The EeePC clocks in at a measly 900Mz, but at 9″ and under 3 lbs it’s easy to forgive it’s specs in lieu of it’s ultimate portability. So far I’m finding it an ideal email machine for use at meetings at work, and as a great bedroom/couch machine for keeping an eye on the tubes while relaxing or watching movies.

Being entirely solid state (the EeePC 900 series comes with 12GB of flash memory rather than a hard drive with spinning platters) it’s shock resistant, and gets surprisingly good performance for it’s diminutive specs. Due to the random access nature of flash memory the EeePC boots quickly and gets great battery life (3 hours of real use). While solid state drive (SSD) technology is still not competitive in price or storage capacity to typical hard drive (HDD) technology I can see the potential and am starting to get excited about the predictions that in 2011 or so SSD will all but completely replace HDD technology in notebooks and desktops.

While the EeePC 900 I picked up came pre-loaded with Windows XP I’ve done some experimentation with putting Ubuntu on it. As with my typical annual cycle I attempt to put some variant of Linux on my computers to see how the OS X/Windows competition is doing. This time however I was surprised – the latest Hardy Heron (8.04) release of Ubuntu is slick, polished, and works ‘out of the box’ on all the hardware I had laying around. While Ubuntu might be getting attention as a decent desktop alternative where I think it really shines is on a low end PC like the EeePC – it’s limited feature set and lean architecture work perfectly on a device with CPU and memory constraints.

Movies
Being a 3 day weekend I took the opportunity to see a couple of movies with Brien and Brian. We saw both Indiana Jones 4: The Crystal Skull, and Iron Man. Both movies were excellent (if not over the top) and fun movies to see while on holiday. I was never the hardcore fan of the Indy series that Brien was, and much to his horror I actually liked the newest one best from the series. It captured the fun essence of the earlier flicks while maintaining a fresh and modern feel even while being set in not so modern times.

Iron man also kept a modern feel, although it did so with a very modern setting. Having never read the comic book I assume I missed out on a lot of the back story, but still found the story presented in the movie touching and engaging. Having grown up idolizing gadget superhero (Hello, Inspector Gadget) it’s nice to see a modern take on a technological super-hero. Final note on the movie: I need a flying metal suit, that looks fun!

Lensbabied sneaker opus
Last but not least, a quick shot I took with my Lensbaby 2G while out on a photo walk on Saturday. I’ve been using my 18mm and 50mm primes a lot and decided to take the Lensbaby out and go for a stroll. I’m certainly glad I did as one of the resulting shots is a clear winner in my odd little abstract world.

Well, carry on then.

After my initial experimentations with personal aggregation basically failed I’ve decided to take another stab at it, but this time with a DIY bent. I registered metaspark.net and am working a complicated series of WordPress plugins to attempt to create the functionality I want.

Unfortunately it’s not entirely baked yet, but keep your eye on that domain – once I get a few RSS aggregation, twitter update, and posting date issues sorted out it should be ready to go fully live, and with style no less.

Stay tuned!

A quick glance through the collection shows I have 8 of these movies unopened in my collection so those will be first up on the viewing list:

Barry Lyndon (1975)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Juno (2007)
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Magnolia (1999)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
The Shining (1980)

Which leaves 168 remaining movies to select from, listed in the full post. If you have a suggestion of a favorite movie from below that you particularly like and think I should prioritize onto the list leave a comment and let me know!

3:10 to Yuma (2007)
8½ (1963)
A Christmas Story (1983)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
All About Eve (1950)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
American Gangster (2007)
American History X (1998)
Amores perros (2000)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Annie Hall (1977)
Battaglia di Algeri, La (1966)
Belle et la bête, La (1946)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Boot, Das (1981)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Brief Encounter (1945)
Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
C’era una volta il West (1968)
Cabinet des Dr. Caligari., Das (1920)
Casablanca (1942)
Casino (1995)
Chinatown (1974)
Cidade de Deus (2002)
Citizen Kane (1941)
City Lights (1931)
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Crash (2004/I)
Diaboliques, Les (1955)
Dial M for Murder (1954)
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Du rififi chez les hommes (1955)
Duck Soup (1933)
Ed Wood (1994)
Fargo (1996)
Frankenstein (1931)
Gandhi (1982)
Glory (1989)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
Goodfellas (1990)
Grindhouse (2007)
Harold and Maude (1971)
Harvey (1950)
Heat (1995)
High Noon (1952)
His Girl Friday (1940)
Hot Fuzz (2007)
Hotaru no haka (1988)
Ikiru (1952)
In Cold Blood (1967)
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Into the Wild (2007)
It Happened One Night (1934)
Jaws (1975)
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
Ladri di biciclette (1948)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Leben der Anderen, Das (2006)
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Lola rennt (1998)
Léon (1994)
M (1931)
Manhattan (1979)
Metropolis (1927)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Modern Times (1936)
Mou gaan dou (2002)
Mystic River (2003)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
North by Northwest (1959)
Notorious (1946)
Notti di Cabiria, Le (1957)
Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1988)
Oldboy (2003)
On the Waterfront (1954)
Once (2006)
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Out of the Past (1947)
Paths of Glory (1957)
Patton (1970)
Per qualche dollaro in più (1965)
Platoon (1986)
Quatre cents coups, Les (1959)
Raging Bull (1980)
Ran (1985)
Rashômon (1950)
Rear Window (1954)
Rebecca (1940)
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Roman Holiday (1953)
Rope (1948)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Salaire de la peur, Le (1953)
Scaphandre et le papillon, Le (2007)
Scarface (1983)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Shichinin no samurai (1954)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Sjunde inseglet, Det (1957)
Sleuth (1972)
Smultronstället (1957)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Stalag 17 (1953)
Stalker (1979)
Stand by Me (1986)
Strada, La (1954)
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Taxi Driver (1976)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
The African Queen (1951)
The Apartment (1960)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
The Big Sleep (1946)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
The Conversation (1974)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
The Deer Hunter (1978)
The Departed (2006)
The Elephant Man (1980)
The Exorcist (1973)
The General (1927)
The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
The Gold Rush (1925)
The Graduate (1967)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
The Great Dictator (1940)
The Great Escape (1963)
The Green Mile (1999)
The Hustler (1961)
The Kid (1921)
The Killing (1956)
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
The Lost Weekend (1945)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
The Pianist (2002)
The Prestige (2006)
The Searchers (1956)
The Sting (1973)
The Third Man (1949)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Touch of Evil (1958)
Umberto D. (1952)
Unforgiven (1992)
Untergang, Der (2004)
Vertigo (1958)
Vita è bella, La (1997)
Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
Wo hu cang long (2000)
Yojimbo (1961)

Update:Removed Amelie and Spirited Away from the list as I didn’t recognize their non-translated titles. Bad Sparky – BAD!

Next off I met David, one of the sweetest men on the planet. I’ve spent practically the entire last week and a half with him and I couldn’t be happier about it. It’s one of those intense whirlwind relationships that seems to go at a million miles an hour – fun stuff while it lasts and heres hoping that it will last a very long time!

Finally Skype got to meet David’s roommates 12 week old pit bull puppy Porter. The two of them have been beating up on each other every other day or so and having a blast at it. David is a really active guy and thanks to his influence Skype’s activity level has roughly doubled. He seems happier for it and I hope to keep him active like this as long as he can keep up.

Without further ado: http://sparktography.tumblr.com/

Update: Tumblr ended up being close to what I want, but not quite it. Tumblr will only allow short form content and won’t import long format blog posts. I also noticed it copies Flickr photos locally and re-compresses them which adds a slight color cast and loses the tack-sharpness that so much effort goes into on the front end.

Anyone know of a better aggregation service with similar features that I could check out? Leave a note in the comments with a link to it. If I don’t find anything readymade I guess I’ll have to roll up my sleeves and make something.

*wonder, wonderment, and wonderfulness not guaranteed. All Sparky all the time has been known to cause health complications in certain situations. If you experience a Sparky lasting more than 4 hours consult with a physician immediately.

The article also points out that the iPhone is far from dominant with only 2.2% of the total US cellphone market, although if you ask me that’s a pretty impressive feat having not been on the market a full year and costing $500. I find it interesting that the iPhone beats out all Windows Mobile phones (none of which even show up in the top 25), and is rapidly gaining on RIM’s Blackberry devices.

The entire user experience is re-envisioned to be more flashy – much more fun to use. The fact that the AppleTV can now independently sync podcasts, buy music and TV shows on the iTunes media store, and rent movies makes for a most delectable icing on an already moist and delicious media cake.

For some strange reason I decided upon Hairspray as test of the new HD rental service. The rental experience was a breeze – two clicks of the remote (plus a one-time password entry) and the HD movie was playing with surprisingly good quality within two minutes.

I went into Hairspray with low expectations and came away impressed. The movie is fun, engaging, and oddly thought provoking. Don’t get me wrong – it’s completely campy and over the top, but really well executed. The music and choreography is well thought out and the cinematographer did a great job of showcasing some of the dance moves without distracting the viewer with too much camera movement.

Featuring fantastic performances by John Travolta, Christopher Walken (it had been so long since I’d seen the Weapon of Choice music video I’d almost forgot how good a dancer he is), and new to film actress Nikki Blonsky who leads the film with confidence and flair.

For the record: John Travola in drag is just plain wrong, but wrong in the kind of way that I can get behind. Travolta in drag for President 08!

The show covers everything from the more immediate effects in the days and weeks following our disappearance, and continues on for 100′s and 1,000′s of years showing the effects of natures reclamation and the collapse of the great works of man. The special effects are surprisingly well done and do a great job of illustrating how important day to day maintenance and a good coat of paint are at keeping the global landmarks of today from turning into rusted heaps of metal.

While the concept is neat there is one thing about Life After People that bugs me: the lack of people. While the whole premise of the show is about what would happen if people vanished in an instant I can’t think of a good scenario which would bring this about. There are no dead bodies, no damage, nothing to explain it in the show – people (although not their pets or any other animals) just vanish. There are plenty of ways that people could vanish from the earth, but none of them would leave no trace of our destruction like the show proposes.

All in all a highly recommended watch though – check it out if you like thought-play, engineering, or ecology! Such a visceral depiction of mans greatest achievements and technology facing the true test of time really does provoke thought and give the brain something to chew on.

What makes Traskpro so great? What do I do with it?

• Manage projects at work
• Keep track of all the little details
• Brainstorm ideas
• Create shopping lists
• Plan maintenance projects around my condo
• Capture ideas for creative photography
• Track car maintenance needs
• Know who has borrowed one of my DVD’s
• List my goals the next 1, 2, 5 and 10 years
• Maintain a list of expenses for reimbursement

Amazing ehh – give it a whirl or check out the Traskpro blog – you can do all these things and more! With Traskpro’s flexible design you can track almost any kind of information – all for free!

Now what would a big Traskpro advert like this be without a few power user tips? Traskpro uses the URL to determine what tag you are viewing – this means that you can bookmark frequently used tags for quick access. I am able to use this feature by setting my internet home page to my “work” tag at work, my “personal” tag at home, and the high priority view on my iPhone – whenever I open a browser I immediately see a highly contextual view of tasks related to my current environment.

Further to URL bookmarking when setting a sort preference the sort preference is added to the next page view URL. This allows you to bookmark not only a specific tag, but also to make it so whenever visiting the bookmark the sorting options can be left intact – useful for power users looking to really take control of a large list of tasks.

I can configure the number of tweets to display – how many do readers find useful? If I just put a single one it shows real-time context without visually overpowering the main content column. On the other hand more gives a better context of what I’m doing, but adds a huge block of text to the sidebar.

Most notably I took a lot of hacky if loops to select SQL queries and moved them into a net-new function which builds the queries based in inputs so the code is both easier to read and easier to maintain long term. I also moved a lot of in-line functionality to within functions which has made long term maintainability and new feature development a breeze.

Not only does this re-factoring provide more readable code, but having everything generalized into functions made adding a few new features a breeze. For instance I just added a capture feature to Traskpro for capturing more than one task (and tag array) at once. This makes capturing action items in a meeting brain dead simple and removes the need for a round trip to the server between each individual addition. Because of the functions for adding/editings tasks, or adding tags to tasks this new feature was developed in a far more efficient fashion – rather than building from scratch I could re-use code.

Simple stuff I know, but not developing for a living really does give me appreciation for elegant, maintainable, and readable code.

Aside from the car life has been good. Traskpro has his a solid and stable 0.9 (and graduated from alpha to beta) and is rocking my task list right and left. I even have acquired a few other heavy users which is oddly gratifying. I’ve still got 31 remaining features/tweaks to make, but those can happen gradually over the next few weeks as I continue to ramp up on JavaScript.

Also in the world of good things Scott came over last night. He hadn’t experienced a proper viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End so we did dinner and a showing of that. As silly and overly-Disney as the film is I really do enjoy watching it. I really do hope that big budget swashbucklers never die – they are just so much fun to experience.

Right – back to work now. I have to finish up a ton of stuff today and tomorrow to be ready to take off a few days to be home for Christmas!

I have spent the last couple of days analyzing and designing my user scenarios and figuring out exactly how best to implement a task tracking solution so that it’s as flexible as possible and requires the fewest number of actions to operate. The Traskpro specification is now complete for version 0.1 and I started to dive into coding tonight. Having spent my first few days planning is making a huge difference – coding is easier this way and I suspect the end result will be a lot cleaner.

I’ve started my development with MAMP (PHP/MySQL on the Mac), but am toying with switching over to Ruby on Rails at some point. For now I’d rather stick to a language I’m more comfortable with given that I have a big learning curve ahead for SQL which I haven’t touched in ages.

More to come – I need to get a few more of my classes built out and then get to bed. I have two more days of ‘day job’ ahead before the much needed weekend arrives.

Thankfully Lenovo was quite gracious about it and sent a new stick via 2 day air and I got it installed. Aside from perhaps an overly-aggressive feedback cycle they managed to impress me with their customer service. I just received and installed the RAM module and a quick 10 minute pass of MemTest86 revealed no errors and so far Vista seems much more stable. Here’s hoping that the stability continues – as best as Windows can provide.

Via Photododo

On the plus side I picked up an Airport Extreme to replace my slowly dying Linksys Gigabit-N router. The Airport Extreme has blown my socks off – not only is it drop dead simple to configure, but my Macbook Pro Lanshark connects at 300Mbps and gets 21MB/sec actual throughput at 1.4ms latency. Impressive!