Iaian7 - blog

Happy 4th!

John Einselen — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:59:49 GMT

Amid a nearly-tearful goodbye, Mark and I left the SWAP mission camp early this morning so we could make it back to northern Indiana in time for supper with friends and family. I missed the 4th or July festivities last year (stuck in Kentucky working), so was looking forward to the traditional get together even more! I stayed in the car and used my radio remote for the camera trigger to avoid the annual good-grief-there’s-burning-ash-in-my-eyes, and it worked beautifully.

Incidentally, the last shot is my favourite… somehow reminds me of a sea anemone. More photos on Flickr.com.

By the time I get home to northern Detroit, I think it will have been through 6 states, nearly 1600 miles, and over 30 hours in the car.

Cumberland Gap

John Einselen — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:15:29 GMT

While Sarah worked with the other SWAP hosts during the day, Mark and I drove down to Cumberland Gap, bringing our total number of states-driven-through-in-two-days to six (Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and finally Tennesse).

It was pretty cool! Mark and I hiked a good deal, though I suspect it wasn’t as much as I think. I’m more out of shape than I had hoped, and Mark says I complained like a middle schooler. We went across the original Cumberland Gap, along some ridges, and to several outlooks, including the tri-state point marking the point where Kentucky, Verginia, and Tennessee all touch.

I also got a particularly venomous spider bite sometime while we were hiking. Not sure exactly how, or when, a spider tried to feast upon my left side, but it wasn’t pretty. I think I ran a low-grade fever for the following 24 hours, and it hurt for days.

A much needed vacation

John Einselen — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:21:23 GMT

I think this is the first bit of time off I’ve taken this year. Much needed, but somehow just exhausting! Starting out in east Michigan, I headed over to my brother Mark’s camp in western Michigan, and we drove down to our parents place in north central Indiana.

(about 6 hours)

Spent some time with friends and family, then started on our way to meet up with Sarah Wilson, working with SWAP down in Harlan, Kentucky. She’s moving to South Korea soon, and we really wanted to get together before she left.

(3.5 hours)

Stopped in Florence, Kentucky, to have lunch with Jeremy Laughlin. Mark got me hooked on Panera Bread’s chicken salad. Just delicious!

(well over 4 hours)

Made it to Harlan without major complications, but man… slightly mountainous roads get interesting real quick! I was not aware that east and west both go south… while staying perpendicular to each other. Only in Kentucky, right?

Once we arrived in Harlan, Mark and I met up with Sarah and stopped by the lake where some of the other SWAP staff were meeting up for supper. After the lake, Sarah thought we should visit an overlook in Virginia, insisting it was just across the border, not more than 20 minutes. 50 minutes later, she was still sure it was “just around the next bend.” We stopped for gas and took some pictures, and thankfully made it to the overlook shortly after. It was definitely worth it, with a lovely vista overlooking the hills and mountains of west Virginia, just as the sun was beginning to set.

On the way back to Harlan, we stopped by a lovely little creek. The rocky stream bed was eroded smooth, into hills and valleys that provided endless footholds and slimy pools of algae and water. After a couple pictures, we went rock hopping down the stream. Probably some of the slipperiest terrain I’ve navigated, but amazing fun.

We made it back to Harlan without split skulls, so that’s good, and then drove up the mountain about 20 minutes to the SWAP camp for the night. It’s located along the top of the ridge, and the roads are absolutely terrifying. Sadly, no picture can truly capture the sudden drop off on both sides of a narrow road, and certainly not at night! Suffice to say, I’m incredibly thankful I live in a less treacherous locale.

As always, more pictures can be found on Flickr.com.

Flickr API

John Einselen — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:29:34 GMT

Several weeks ago I attempted to figure out the Flickr API, with the purpose of setting up a Textpattern plugin for easy photo blogging. 10 straight hours. No luck.

Thankfully Elihu Ihms was online, and graciously started to help. In under 30 minutes, he had a working prototype, and spent the rest of the night getting a polished solution finished. I stayed up and worked out the Textpattern integration, and by the end we had a pretty decent alpha release, albeit 6 in the morning. I kinda slept through church… and then through the late service… and then through lunch.

It’s a merge of PHP and JS, allowing a user to access photostreams, individual images, and much more. Eli’s site has more information on the Flickr API integration and the PHP / javascript code usage. It’s far more useful than just the Textpattern plugin!

Tonight I spent a few more hours working out updates and feature enhancements. The result? an7_flickr – a Textpattern admin extension that adds easy Flickr blogging. Enjoy!

Server outage

John Einselen — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:40:25 GMT

My websites are down, and have been for at least a day. Well, all of them except Iaian7.com, which is still hosted on the same server I had years before switching most of my hosting to HostNine.

Evidently transformers for the master servers in Texas blew up. Once building inspections are over, and equipment accounted for… hopefully things will be back up and running. This is rather unfortunate, but especially difficult as I depend on symboleffects.com for much of my email and demo reel promotion, including online resumes!

I know random disasters like explosions can never really be anticipated, but with months of constant email server problems, and now complete inaccessibility, it certainly raises the same old question – why am I still with HostNine?

Macbook surgery

John Einselen — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:18:48 GMT

Last week my macbook died. It was happily playing an iTunes playlist, then started randomly pausing. Then freezing. Then nothing, save for the clicking noises emanating from the hard drive compartment.

TimeMachine had backed up my files early that morning, so nothing was actually lost (save for application installations, which in my short sighted wisdom, I removed from the backup list to save space!). I think I’ve learned a little after losing 2-5 years of my life just a month or two ago in a freak hard drive format. Backing up is very, very important. TimeMachine makes it easy. If you have a mac running Leopard, use it! (Though beware the caveats below)

Since the hard drive clearly had to be replaced, it was finally the perfect chance to upgrade! I would have liked to go for a nice 7200.2 Seagate drive, but found a slower, larger (and perhaps more battery efficient) Western Digital on sale. My frugal scottish genes were happy.

Drive installation, unlike Macbook Pros, is really rather wonderful. I took out the battery, detached the internal compartment guard strip, slid out the old hard drive, attached the new drive to the sliding tab mechanism, slid it back in, closed everything up, and was done. The entire process took less than 15 minutes, though it certainly helped that I had a hex bit handy, and a decent set of miniature screw drivers.

Then came the challenge – when installing Leopard, you can easily restore users off an old mac, an external hard drive, or a TimeMachine backup. However, I’d stored my time machine backups on the second internal hard drive in my G5. Which is inaccessible via network during the Leopard installation. Booting the G5 into FireWire disk mode only helped a little – the macbook backups were somehow stored in a compressed volume, and only the G5 backups were visible to the Leopard installer!

The process was circuitous (and ended up involving the Migration Assistant and multiple user accounts), so I won’t bore you with the details, save for these suggestions: back up to an external drive, and if you can, use a different drive for each computer. It could simplify the process greatly.

Now that the painless hardware upgrade and painful software install is over, everything is finally happy again. All my documents, music, videos, emails, settings, and preferences are restored, and the Macbook is humming away happily with well over 3 times the hard drive space (Vista should be happier too, I doubled it’s partition size!). While it’s not a particularly speedy drive, it should suffice till its own untimely demise, and I can upgrade to something better suited for photo editing and video work. Perhaps by then the solid state drives announced last week will be cheap enough for a mere mortal to afford.

Much less hair

John Einselen — Sun, 25 May 2008 03:51:51 GMT

Since I no longer need to be growing my hair out for a faun costume, I took the liberty of cutting my hair the morning following the movie. From several inches of curls to 1/4 inch burr. Sadly, my old hair clippers are rather dull, and only just barely made it through the ordeal. Meijer had hair trimmers on sale, and this week I finally got a new set…

So I cut my hair down to 3mm. Definitely the shortest I’ve had in many, many years, possibly ever. Shocking, I know (and as always, more on Flickr).