He barely moved around while I was taking pictures, even with the flash.  Using a macro, I was easily under an inch away at times.  It's hours later and he's still there, too.

The slideshow here is from my Picasa account, but the Flickr image set can be found here. I wish Flickr could do the same sort of thing so easily without any additional tools.  Oh well, this works well enough.  He was too boring to take video of and he didn't even open up his wings.

The other night, up in our top-floor office, we had one of these flapping around in a window. At first we thought it was a bat because of the size, but we quickly realized it wasn't.  It, or one like it, visited us on subsequent nights, too.

I looked up what moths eat because I was hoping maybe big moths would eat things like mosquitos. Sadly, it doesn't work that way.  If anything, they absorb moisture through their long tongues.  Many adult moths don't eat at all and some don't even have mouths.  I guess that means they aren't terribly long lived in their adult form. As a caterpillar, though, it can apparently eat 86,000 times its weight in just two months.  Too many of these can strip a tree naked.

Still, it's neat.  It's also so amazingly furry that I kept wanting to just try to pet it. I didn't. I was worried about hurting it or simply scaring it away. Trying to pet it without touching it's wings would be pretty hard. Speaking of wings, you can see in one of the images just how furry it's wings are, too.

Anyway, enjoy the pictures. :)

Update:  These moths natively exist across all of the US and Canada except Alaska, Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, and Newfoundland.  This particular moth is male because of it's large antennae.  They're used to detect female pheramones. This site has much more information.

One great feature is the ability to turn animation on and off as well as the "storm track" feature -- you can see it in the shot as the long white arrows.  These seem most accurate for figuring out of a particular piece of weather will cross your area or not.

Additionally, at their iPhone site (simply i.wund.com), they have a nice summary page for zip codes that can even animate the radar image. The whole page is nice, quick, and designed well for the iPhone. Their "tab bar" is pretty well done, too, even if it isn't a "real" one.

The iPhone site works great in Firefox but draws more accurately in Safari, of course.

Anyway, I just found these to be interesting, even if well known to others.

(Click on the image for the full version.)

In any case, on the counter, I saw a sign about downloading audio books. Naturally, I was intrigued. So, I grabbed the card and took it home so I could remember the simple site for it: http://nh.lib.overdrive.com.

So, I go there and find that there are, indeed, plenty of books for free download. Well, let's call it checking them out, actually. More on that later. On the front page was a link I had to click: "iPod and Mac users, click here".  Being an iPod user, I clicked and got this:

Our media titles, provided by OverDrive, Inc., use DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection technology from Microsoft Corporation. Unfortunately the iPod (and Mac) currently support neither DRM-protected Windows Media Audio (.wma) files nor WindowS Media Video (.wmv) files.

OverDrive, along with hundreds of online media providers, is hopeful that Apple and Microsoft can reach an agreement that would enable support for Microsoft-based DRM-protected materials on the iPod/Mac.

Quite unbelievable, actually.  Well, it's totally believable that they'll use DRM.  This isn't music, after all. But using Microsoft DRM and then claiming hundreds of media providers want Apple and Microsoft to reach an agreement? That'll never happen. For one, that's mostly because Apple (and others) are really heading down the route of DRM free.  For another, they both support a common audio book format: Audible.  Of course, that is also a proprietary DRM, so an external system using that isn't likely to happen.

Anyway, that aside, it turns out that my Nokia N95 works with Windows Media DRM. So, I can actually just download them and sync them to my phone. Nice. :)

Curiously, though, this audio book download site works just like the library. There are a limited number of copies that can be downloaded. You can place books on hold just as you would at the library, too. I downloaded one as a test after installing the required software, which was fast and easy to install -- even on Vista.  All it asked for was my library card number. It then downloaded and I got to see the restrictions.  In this case, I could listen for 7 days at which time I would assume this "copy" is returned to the "library" for others to use.

In any case, this could be a fun place to get free audio books for trips and flights and stuff.  I don't know how many other libraries do this, but the one in Santa Cruz doesn't seem to. I'm assuming companies like Audible view this sort of thing about the same as book sellers view libraries. People usually do still want to own stuff.

Libraries really are a great public resource. You can rent books, DVDs, audio books on CD (or download!) all for the great price of FREE! What could be better?

We’re thrilled to let the entire Movable Type community know about TypePad AntiSpam. It’s our new, totally free comment spam blocking service for your Movable Type blog, available as a beta test version right now, that you can enable by installing a simple, free plugin.

Powered by Movable Type’s sister service TypePad, this new AntiSpam power works for all Movable Type blogs version 3.3 or later, as well as WordPress, and connects directly to the smart Junk Folder system built in to MT. By learning and adapting over time, TypePad AntiSpam just keeps getting smarter. And because TypePad AntiSpam is Open Source, just like Movable Type itself, expert users can even run their own antispam services and tweak to their heart’s content.

I'm quite glad it supports MT 3.3. It's quite curious, though, that it works with WordPress. One could see that as yet another move on their part to grab WordPress folks by seeing how good their stuff is.  But the better way to look at it is that the better spam blocking gets across all blogs the more likely we are to see a reduction in spam attempts because the cost of entry will continue to rise.  That's a Good Thing. I'll be installing this. Why, you might ask?

As it turns out, I didn't want to lose all my previous comments when I installed Disqus. So, the posts that had comments are still using the old comment system.  That's just enough to still get a LOT of spam on my blog that I have to sort through. 

In addition, I've got some other blogs that could benefit from it.  Like Laurie's.  She'll appreciate this a lot if it really works.

But will this work? What do you think?

My experience with it was mixed.  The issue was that the signal was coming from the road. So, the easiest place to use them from was in a parking lot near the road near the "tower device."

Anyway, here's the letter I got:

Dear Sunnyvale MetroFi User,
It is with great regret that we notify you of our need to discontinue the
MetroFi FREE and MetroFi Premium services effective June 20, 2008 in
Sunnyvale. It has been our pleasure to be your provider of Internet access
and we have appreciated your support.
So that you do not find yourself without access to the Internet, please
find another service provider as soon as possible.
If you wish to remove the MSN SideGuide application from your computer once
we have discontinued services, please do the following (removal of the MSN
SideGuide prior to the discontinuation of MetroFi services will prevent
access to the MetroFi network):
1.      Go to "Start", "My Computer";
2.      Select "Add, Change or Remove Programs";
3.      Find "MSN SideGuide" in the list and select "Remove"
If you are interested in finding a FREE Wi-Fi hot spot near you, please
consider using the following link: http://www.wififreespot.com/ca.html, or
check your favorite search engine.
It has been a pleasure to serve you,
The MetroFi Team

The funny thing, of course, is that I've only used it in Concord. Convenient there, as that's where my grandma is and she doesn't have net.

So, a few months ago my wife begged for a Playmobil set. I looked over what she wanted and thought it seemed fine.  She ordered it.  When I got out here, I got to see it all set up. It was a great, happy forest scene across two pieces of furniture.

Then her brother came out to visit this weekend.  And, without prompting, made some changes.  This prompted Laurie to create a collection on Flickr, in my account, for our Playmobil Expirement. Her text on the collection sums it up best:

A tranquil forest setting comes into contact with household visitors...

So here's how it works.

We have this great Playmobil set that looks a lot like our house, yard, etc. We set it up in the spare bedroom, which will eventually be a kids room, but for now is a guest room. Then we invite our houseguests to customize it as they see fit. And we document the results in picture and video form, as well as do an exit interview to make sure we understand what we're seeing...

The normal configuration will be available later. Laurie had to reset it and we haven't had a chance to take those pictures just yet. These are more entertaining, anyway.

Anyway, I'm rambling on (that was a tag-line on my blog at one point). My point here is that I've started to use and/or join with a variety of the social networks. I've been on Flickr since early 2005 but never really used it much, for instance. 

Why the change? 

One of the biggest reasons is that I've finally gotten over the fact that the word "friend" on a social network doesn't literally mean that.  It can mean that, but more generally it just means a connection on a network.  Usually, this means you're going to follow what the person is doing or subscribe to their information in some way.  Flickr makes this more clear by calling the basic level adding the person as a "contact."  Twitter does this well by simply referring to it as "following" the person.

However, it really is the same on all of the networks, in my opinion.  That doesn't mean you can't have friends and family on them, as well, but it doesn't mean you have to limit it to that.  However, that's how I felt up until recently.  I've learned better now. :)

So, I joined up with twitter which led to joining friendfeed and a few other services.  I've also been using Flickr more and I signed up with Qik for live streaming of video from my N95.

You'll notice links will start appearing on one of the sidebars of this site soon. However, if you've read this far, here are the ones I can think of off the top of my head:

• Flickr for photos and moving images (yep, I signed up for pro)
• Qik for live streaming videos, and their archives
• Twitter for random thoughts and watching others
• friendfeed has links to everything else as well as it's own comments and links

What, no LinkedIn, Facebook, or myspace?  Nope.  Not yet.  Actually, I've got a friendster account somewhere, but that only seems to have my wife and a friend or two right now. Not sure if I'll expand that out or not.

That actually puts the social networks I'm using more within the media sharing realm and my blog for the rest. In any case, feel free to add me on any of the networks.  If your stuff isn't obviously of the spam blog nature, I'll likely return the favor. :)

However, I don't think upgrading to MT4 will help 100% considering the motivation of the spammers.  Even sorting through a few hundred isn't something I really want to do.  So, I've been evaluating Disqus for the comments. Using Disqus will provide a number of benefits. However, it also comes with a couple of negatives. First, the negatives (that's just the way I am).

As a blog owner, I want control over the comments. Using Disqus, I have full control over the comments but they aren't in my database. According, the a FAQ, though, with the MovableType plugin, the contents will be rendered via the API from the server side, so I don't have to worry about search results or anything like that.

If Disqus goes away, or even just goes down, so would my comments. For my blog, that's not critical but it would be quite annoying.  They've recently had such an outage and have responded to it quite well, in my opinion. Still, It's a risk.

Disqus also requires a form of login. Well, even if it doesn't require a login, I want to require a login, so this negative would apply regardless of using Disqus or not.  In any case, this will raise the bar for people commenting.  I've definitely gotten a reasonable share of real anonymous comments.  Do I really want those? Maybe not, but they have added to the conversations. Requiring, however, is the key to spam reductions and the key to increase the value of the comments. Disqus supports many systems so I'm confident that folks will have some place they can log in to, assuming they'll trust Disqus.

The positives for me, however, outweigh the negatives.

The biggest positive, of course, is the fact that switching to Disqus should virtually eliminate comment spam.  That means that I can probably turn off 100% moderation and let the comments flow in real-time.  I'm suspecting this will help attract even more comments.

Next, Disqus is often adding new features.  Most recently, they paired with Seesmic to provide video comments. That's pretty cool, if a bit goofy. I'm not sure how will video comments will do in the long run. They already have things like threaded comments, social sharing of comments, and many other things.

Finally, by using Disqus, I'm offloading nearly all of the load of comments (or even spam attempts) on to the Disqus servers. This should reduce the load on my own server and help it scale better (if I ever do get a popular post, for instance).

So, I'm starting to try to use Disqus on my site. Naturally, I've run in to some problems. It would appear that Disqus doesn't work on MovableType when dynamic templates are turned on. If I switch to static templates, the Disqus comment system draws correctly. If it's dynamic, that doesn't work unless there is already a Disqus comment present. So, I know it's close and most likely just a minor bug.

Still, the dynamic templates make publishing a new post much, much faster.  I don't have to worry about load under comment storms (usually caused by spammers on this site) when using static templates, though. So, I'm not sure if I wait for it to be fixed or switch over to static templates until it's working and watch the load on the system. Or, perhaps, upgrading to MT4 will fix the problem.

In any case, until I figure out which direction I'm going to take, comments may or may not work at all. :)

So, I figured I would go over to msnbc to check out more info about it. The top story, though, wasn't about the quake. Instead, it was about a large storm that went through a few states killing a couple of dozen people.

What a night, huh?

The quake, on the other hand, was supposedly felt from Beijing to as far south as Hanoi.  That's a rather large radius, especially to not make top spot on news sites. 

Don't get me wrong; the storm is probably more correctly the top news.  That's really the part that's sad. It's even the same on Google News, which is supposedly all automatically generated.

Anyway, I'm off to find happy news. Does that exist anymore?

First, check what your current settings are for positioning.  These are found pretty deep down in the menus at: "Menu->Tools->Settings->General->Positioning->Positioning Methods".  Is GPS on? Is assisted GPS on? What about Network Based?

Network based will work much like the iPhone currently works.  It'll get you the general area, and might be close by accident.  GPS is the true GPS.  Assisted GPS, however, is what didn't work for me.  Until I added Nokia's positioning server.  This setting is under Positioning->Positioning Server->Server address.  I made mine "supl.nokia.com" and now I can get a very accurate position indoors. 

If your phone didn't need this or already had a setting, let us know what it is.  Mine, which I just got from Amazon a week ago, didn't have any of this set up at all.

Also, if you want to tag images in a lighter way than ShoZu, try out Nokia's beta application, Location Tagger. The site implies this will eventually be in the firmware, but for now it's a beta application that runs in the background.

Don't I have an Apple iPhone?  Why yes, I do!  It's a very sad iPhone now, too, but it's not nearly as lonely -- I'm carrying both around.

But isn't the iPhone the best phone out there?  Yes, it absolutely is.  There's no doubt about that.  It's not a perfect phone, but it really is the best.  And by best, I mean the easiest and most intuitive to use.  Even the on-screen keyboard is typically easier to use than most physical keyboards (how many of those do you see with a ".com" button or single click access to just about every symbol?).

So, why is it that you now have a Nokia N95? First let me tell you about SIM cards...

For a dozen or so years, I had Verizon (formerly GTE Wireless) service.  As you know (well, most of you),  Verizon uses CDMA.  Each phone has a unique ESN (or now, MEID), to identify the handset on the network and tell Verizon who you are and allow the network to route calls to your phone.  If you changed a phone you either called Verizon or went online to change the ESN on your account.  This is fast and simple.

However, it's no where near as fast or as simple and the Subscriber Identity Module, SIM, card. In order to get my new Nokia N95 working when I opened the box, I did the following:

1. Found a paper clip
2. Opened the door of the iPhone for the SIM card
3. Placed the SIM card in the N95
4. Put the battery in the N95
5. Turned on the N95

That's it.  It really just works.  Prepaid plans all have a $20 option for unlimited data, whether an iPhone or not.  So, the data just works, too, and it works with 3G and 3.5G (as the N95 likes to call HSDPA).

In any case, I spent years watching new phones come out on GSM carriers and looking at them with envy.  Now that I have a SIM card, I can just plop it in to any unlocked or AT&T GSM phone that I want to try out.  Pretty cool! 

Alright, now that I've cleared that up, you might still want to know why I have an N95, especially since I still totally like my Apple iPhone.

It's simple, really.  The following list is all of the things that the N95 has or can do that are either better than the iPhone or that the iPhone doesn't do or have at all. This list is not ordered (and if you find an order, you probably know too much about how my brain searches and retrieves things).

1. Video support
2. 5 megapixel camera
3. An led flash for the camera
4. Camera auto focus
5. A front camera for video chat and calling
6. Stereo speakers
7. Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP)
8. Bluetooth keyboard (HID)
9. Real GPS
10. Flush mounted headset jack
11. Infrared (IR)
12. Removable memory card slot (microSDHC)
13. SIP client
14. Full 3G support (and 3.5G! Hah!)
15. App support (alright, I've got my iPhone hacked, but still)
16. Phone-wide search
17. USB mass storage mode
18. Bluetooth syncing
19. DLNA/UPnP support
20. Voice commands (via headset)
21. FM Radio
22. Flash Lite 2.0
23. J2ME support
24. Streaming support (audio and video, up and down)
25. Standard removable battery

Alright, well, that's just the quick list off the top of my head.  Now you know.  It can basically do everything. It doesn't have a touch screen, though.  It's browser renders the same as the iPhone (WebKit based, I'm told) but is definitely different -- more like Opera Mobile (which I can also install on it easily).

I've also gotten to using it more with Flickr, Picasa, Qik, and YouTube because of the applications that are available and the utility they provide for adding easy upload options.

So, with all that, I'm now carrying two phones and one SIM card. :)

I'm constantly seeing how even relatively savvy people watch these services on their laptop but state that because it's still a so-called lean-forward experience that they don't use them much.  Why is this?  Both of our TVs have VGA input, with a standard DB25 connector.  They're just LCD monitors that have a physical resolution of 1920x1080, which may even be lower than your laptops display (many 15+ inch displays have 1920x1200 displays). I tend to leave a VGA cable hanging out so all I have to do is plug it in to the machine.  In Windows XP, you'll probably have to tell it a monitor is plugged in but in Vista it just figures it out and goes.  Then you I just play the video full screen on the TV display.  Simple.

Yet, very few people seem to do this.  It can't get much easier than that short of a dedicate HTPC or set top box that can handle the video. So, why don't more people do it?

Even if their TVs don't have VGA input, DVI and HDMI are relatively common on TVs and are also starting to become common place on computers and even laptops (I've got a three year old laptop here that has DVI).

To me, doing this seems like the perfect way to not have to pay for cable or DVR service.  Add Netflix to the mix, and you've got all the HD titles you can rent available to you in a day or two (arguably faster than some download services).

What's stopping you? Is it that you browse while watching TV?  I can still do that -- the show is on the second screen and doesn't use all the power of even my 2 Ghz Core 2 to play.  (My iPhone also works brilliantly for browsing in front of the TV.)

I'm leaving the company I've been with for 6.5 years.  I've been there a long time and for a variety of reasons, it's time for me to move on. I still have a couple of weeks left, of course.  I'm expecting it to be a relatively busy couple of weeks, so who knows how much I'll be here. 

And then what am I doing? Yeah, that's what everyone is asking.  And that's what I'm not talking about. If you know me and my Gmail address, then you can email me and ask questions, of course, and I'll say what I can.

Enough for now... I'm tired. It's been a long day.

I have many, many drafts started and ready to go though.  So much stuff happening, both at work and at home. So much I just can't talk about.

I've been wanting to post about iPhone stuff, virtualization stuff, Apple stuff, Google stuff, car stuff, home stuff, and maybe even work stuff.  Just to scratch the surface.

So, why haven't I?

I'll respond with a simple question, "Where does the time go?"

I expect I'll start posting more soon, but no promises. 

(Oh, and if you've commented in the last couple of month I probably missed it in a flood of spam comments.  I gotta get updated to the latest MT. And soon.)