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The “Crisis of Confidence” Speech by Jimmy Carter

Nov 19th, 2008
by plightbo.
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Really good read. For as much crap as Carter gets, this speech from almost 30 years ago was really spot on. His speech about government, energy, and politics is important, but so is his early identification of the infection that has completely contaminated the American culture:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

American Experience | Jimmy Carter | Primary Sources

Read the whole thing if you have time.

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Testing out Ecto

Nov 19th, 2008
by plightbo.
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I’ve been looking for a decent blog publishing tool, but every time I think about it I realize that nothing is likely to be as easy to use as the FriendFeed bookmarklet. I’m completely in love with the FriendFeed bookmarklet and it’s super simple way to add media to your comments. I wish posting to my blog were as simple!

I used to use MarsEdit (back when it was owned by the NetNewsWire guy), but now that it has been acquired and upped to version 2.0 without adding an real new features, I feel a bit raw about it all. Especially considering the 1.0 version is nowhere to be found to download, meaning my purchase is effectively wasted.

So now I’m trying out Ecto. So far it seems pretty good, but the big question will be how easy is it to insert links and pictures in to my posts. We’re about to find out:

Check out Ecto! It apparently has good support for linking to Amazon products too:


“Planet Earth – The Complete BBC Series [HD DVD]” (BBC Warner)

(Btw – I am totally waiting for the HD-DVD version of this to drop in price. I figure it has to soon, considering HD-DVD is dead)

But Ecto also claims to be able to support good media, including resizing. Let’s see how that goes. Here’s my dog:


200811190914.jpg

Well that didn’t go so well. Lame. Two problems:

  • Ecto didn’t resize/downsize the image, which was from my iPhoto library and fairly large.
  • It did automate uploading to the blog, but if it doesn’t actually insert the photo in my post that’s kind of pointless! Instead I just got a stupid link. Bummer.

Let’s try dragging an image in to the editor:

ecto-shot-tm.jpg

Wow, dragging worked way better. It gave me options to create a thumbnail, resize, downsize the quality, etc. I wonder why I wasn’t given these options when I pressed the import media button. Don’t know which button I’m talking about? Here, I’ll paste in a screen cap of that button to see if screen grabs are easy to do:

200811190900.jpg

Wow, that seems to work well too. So far Ecto is impressing me, though I wish the import media worked a bit better, but the drag and drop and pasting of images has worked really well, so I can’t complain too much.

Now for the final test: let’s upload it and see how it ultimately looks in my blog.

UPDATE: I’m modifying this post to correctly link to my dog, Chewy, mostly to figure out how to display my iPhoto pictures, but also because Chewy is rad. Here’s another cute dog, but not mine (found him via the Ecto Flickr integration, which is also rad):

Happy Dog

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Doh – Ecto Lets Me Down

Nov 19th, 2008
by plightbo.
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I thought Ecto might be perfect for me, but then I just got let down :( In my last post, the following quote, when pasted in from the original NYT article, ended up with garbled text after the apostrophe in “Toyota’s”.

It’s likely due to the fact that it’s a special character vs. a basic character and either WordPress and/or Ecto can’t handle it. So now I’m trying out Flock. It doesn’t look nearly as rich, but let’s see how this goes…
That extra burden is estimated to be more than $2,000 per car. Think what that means: Ford, for example, needs to cut $2,000 worth of features and quality out of its Taurus to compete with Toyota’s Avalon. Of course the Avalon feels like a better product — it has $2,000 more put into it. Considering this disadvantage, Detroit has done a remarkable job of designing and engineering its cars. But if this cost penalty persists, any bailout will only delay the inevitable.
Op-Ed Contributor – Let Detroit Go Bankrupt – NYTimes.com

UPDATE: Looks like Flock can only support photos that are uploaded through Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa, or Piczo, but not a self-hosted WordPress site. Bummer.

UPDATE 2: Looks like Flock does no better. Very annoying that these characters cause so many problems. Anyone know of a solution (short of having to publish the post, then view it, then manually fix any problems)?

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Added FriendFeed Widget: CSS problems persist

Nov 2nd, 2008
by plightbo.
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I just added the FriendFeed widget to my blog, as well as updating the theme to something a lot nicer. Unfortunately, some weird CSS magic is going on where the widget’s text is way too big. I’ve tried adding CSS rules with !important, but they still aren’t being honored. Anyone care to take a look and tell me what I’m doing wrong?

I’m thoroughly stumped here.

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$700B Bailout: my letter to Congress

Sep 22nd, 2008
by plightbo.
1 comment

Tonight I wrote my representative, David Wu, of Oregon’s 1st district. It said:

I saw Peter DeFazio on KGW’s evening news pushing back on a hurried bill giving the Secretary of the Treasury such massive power in this bailout. I hope you and he can work together to represent Oregon and all Americans in the face of this massive power grab. We need proper regulation and transparency, but we also need new and innovative solutions instead of the same old partisan politics.

While Mark Cuban can find a way to get on everyone’s nerves from time to time (especially if you’re an NBA fan), he has a really good proposal that would not only open up the process to proper transparency and oversight, but also potentially gives private investors the opportunity to step in in place of the federal government.

Please read Mark’s proposal here.

Something like this should be seriously considered. Right now it seems like Washington isn’t really looking anything but the two extremes (financial crisis vs. no-oversight-bail-out). Let’s find something bette by putting technology and innovation to work and find ways to have regulation, accountability, AND efficiency all together.

Sincerely,
Patrick Lightbody

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Ning vs WidgetLaboratory: A lesson in unprofessionalism

Aug 24th, 2008
by plightbo.
2 comments

From Tech Crunch: Don’t Post The Evidence Unless It Supports Your Case.

The emails provided by WL are truly amazing. Take 3 minutes to read through them. I’ve never seen such unprofessional behavior from a company. Just the email name alone (“Evil Genius”) gives most of the story away.

I don’t know Gina Bianchi, the CEO of Ning, (I spoke with her once by phone when she was doing reference checks on a friend), but I already was a big fan given how well she’s done with Ning. But after reading her emails, I’m even more impressed with her incredible level of patience. If I were in her shoes, I would have terminated my relationship with WL a lot sooner.

Truly amazing.

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Using Guice and Mule Together

Aug 15th, 2008
by plightbo.
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I’ve been playing around with Mule lately, mostly just trying to learn and see if it’d be a fit for a little side project I’m working on (it looks like it won’t, but that’s OK). But one thing that was a bit confusing about Mule integration is that the 2.0 version is very heavily dependent on Spring. That would be nice if I used Spring, but this project uses Guice.

First I tried Google, but only came up with this. Then I tried to see how other containers (Pico, Hivemind, etc) integrated in to Mule, but it turns out those integrations were for 1.x and nothing has been built for 2.x. I’m sure there is a better solution that what I came up with, but for a quick and dirty integration this worked really well:

    <spring:bean name="foo" class="com.bar.GuiceUtil" 
                       factory-method="getGuiceInstance">
        <spring:constructor-arg>
            <spring:value>com.bar.Foo</spring:value>
        </spring:constructor-arg>
    </spring:bean>

    <model name="...">
          <service name="...">
               <inbound>
                    <inbound-endpoint address="..." />
               </inbound>
               <component>
                   <spring-object bean="foo"/>
               </component>
          </service>
     </model>

Basically, you just make a simple utility class (GuiceUtil) that holds your Guice Injector and offers a static method named getGuiceInstace:

    public static <T> T getGuiceInstance(Class<T> t) {
        return injector.getInstance(t);
    }

Now Spring is configured to created a Spring bean named “foo” that actually came from Guice. Then you simply tell Mule to use that Spring bean. I’m sure there are a lot better ways to do this (I am a complete Mule newbie and know very little of the configuration options), but this got the job done for me.

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Simplify Media launches for the iPhone – get it now!

Aug 14th, 2008
by plightbo.
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An coworker from my old company, Spoke, just launched an iPhone version of their app and you’d be silly not to get it right now.

I predict this will become one of the killer apps for the iPhone. The app is really quite simple: it lets you play your home iTunes library (all of it) and your friends libraries on your phone. It works by utilizing a desktop app that integrates with iTunes. It’s simple, effective, and super cool.

And why should you get it right now? Because it’s free for the first 100K downloads, after which it’ll cost $3.99. Get on it!

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Traveling to the SF bay area

Aug 2nd, 2008
by plightbo.
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In a few minutes I’m off to the airport. I’ll be in the San Francisco bay area (my original home) for five days, spending time with friends and family. But I’m also going to be meeting up with a lot of people and companies, trying to figure out what the best place for me to go next is.

If you’re around and want to meet up, drop me an email!

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Rendering the Segway Obsolete

Jul 16th, 2008
by plightbo.
2 comments

Bam! Third Wheel!

For anyone that ever reads (or read) Maddox (aka: thebestpageintheuniverse.net), you might appreciate what I found yesterday while in Seattle:

Yup, apparently someone actually took Maddox’s idea for rendering the Segway Human Transport obsolete seriously and sold it to the Seattle police department.

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