On The Beach

Sure, it may be chilly - but who cares? The beach is still the place to be, right?

Happy Chanukah and Merry Christmas y'all.

Chutzpah Awards

Came across these links over the last few days...talk about Chutzpah!

1. "Insane" e-mail from John Boehner’s office. Long story short, Boehner's press secretary had this e-mail back and forth:

Zinnnnng!

Personally, I love the response and think that the folks over at deathandtaxesmag.com are the ones with the chutzpah - calling that "insane" is just a little overkill, no?

2. WW II needle point. Yes, apparently needlepoint can require chutzpah. Here's the needlework:

And here's the story behind it:

"After six months held by the Nazis in a prisoner of war camp, Major Alexis Casdagli was handed a piece of canvas by a fellow inmate. Pinching red and blue thread from a disintegrating pullover belonging to an elderly Cretan general, Casdagli passed the long hours in captivity by painstakingly creating a sampler in cross-stitch. Around decorative swastikas and a banal inscription saying he completed his work in December 1941, the British officer stitched a border of irregular dots and dashes. Over the next four years his work was displayed at the four camps in Germany where he was imprisoned, and his Nazi captors never once deciphered the messages threaded in Morse code:"

"God Save The King" and "F*** Hitler"

Amazing, no?

3. Siri overcompensating with abortion information. Remember that Siri abortion controversy? Someone worked up a parity on the topic that's just hilarious. For example:

See them all here. Now that's some serious chutzpah.

4. Minnesota Gay Community Apologizes to State Senator Amy Koch.

Dear Ms. Koch,

On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage. We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an “illicit affair” with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.
...

And it goes on from there. Youch and well done.

I Had A Little Dreidel - I Even Won Some Gelt With It

We attended a most excellent Chanukah party tonight. It had it all: fun folks to talk with, delicious latkes, a huge variety of deserts, whip cream(!) and yes, a rousing game of spin-the-dreidel. We left before a true winner could be declared, but I was hanging in there with a few chocolate coins left to my name. It really was tons of fun.

So go ahead, bust out a dreidel, grab some M&M's or other gambling material, and play away. If nothing else, it's a great way to teach kids the joys and sorrow of gambling.

If Christmas Were a Jewish Holiday

How did the presence of this amazing document elude me for so many years? I give you the excruciatingly accurate set of would be Jewish law if Christmas was a Jewish holiday. For example:

1. ANY SPECIES OF TREE IS KOSHER FOR USE AS A XMAS TREE, PROVIDED THAT IT HAS NEEDLES AND NOT LEAVES. IN OUR LANDS IT IS CUSTOMARY TO USE A FIR TREE.(7) IT SHOULD BE REASONABLY FRESH, BUT NOT TOO FRESH, IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PRINCIPLE "A XMAS TREE WITH NO FALLEN NEEDLES IS LIKE A SUKKAH WITH NO BUZZING BEES."

(7) If the lady of the house already has a fur, then any evergreen may be used.

2. THE TREE SHOULD BE CHOPPED DOWN SPECIFICALLY FOR USE AS A XMAS TREE; IF IT HAD BEEN CUT FOR LUMBER IT IS INVALID. IF THE TREE WAS CUT FOR GENERAL DECORATIVE PURPOSES, BUT NOT SPECIFICALLY AS A XMAS TREE, SOME AUTHORITIES ALLOW IT WHILE OTHERS ARE STRICT. A STOLEN TREE IS NOT VALID FOR THE MITZVAH.(8) FORTUNATE IS ONE WHO IS ABLE TO CHOP HIS OWN TREE HIMSELF.(9)

(8) One who cuts his own tree must make sure that he has permission from the landowner to do so. Ideally, cut only from one's own backyard. A tree taken from a reshus harabim, such as the county park (which is actually a carmelis, not a reshus harabim,) is considered as stolen and pasul.

(9) One who is unable to cut his own tree should make sure to purchase it from a reputable dealer, or one who is certified by a national kashrus organization.

And it goes on and on - it's really quite impressive. Take the section on Havdalah:

IX. HAVDALA

1. THERE ARE MANY OPINIONS REGARDING WHEN THE XMAS SEASON IS OVER.(40) BAIS HILLEL HOLDS THAT XMAS IS OVER WHEN THE LAST ITEM IN THE AFTER XMAS SALE HAS BEEN SOLD. BAIS SHAMMAI IS STRICT AND HOLDS THAT XMAS IS OVER IMMEDIATELY AT THE CONCLUSION OF THE FOOTBALL GAME.

(40) Many are confused by the term "twelve days of Xmas", implying that the Xmas continues until and including January 5. Today, this view is accepted only by the Eastern Orthodox, who hold that December 26 through January 5 constitute Chol Hamoed Xmas. This view is opposed by both the Modern Orthodox and the Ultra Orthodox (and even the Non Orthodox) who hold that Xmas is only one day long, and any context which seems otherwise actually refers to the Xmas *season*.

Amazing and hilarious.

Happy Chanukah Y'all (day #2 and going strong)!

All Pumped Up

I'm trying to get back into the habit of donating blood - something I used to do on a somewhat regular basis years ago. Thing is, I'm still nervous around needles but I try not let that slow me down.

This morning's donation, like all the ones before it, was essentially painless and left me with that warm feeling of having done something meaningful for my community (or maybe that's just light-headedness + Fig Newtons?)

This morning, as in the past, I used an Inova Blood Donation center to make my deposit. They'll gladly make an appointment for you to avoid waiting. Seriously, it's a good thing to do, so go make an appointment.

Enjoy Gift Giving More - Embrace The Wrapping Process

Happy first day of Chanukah! With the big Ch (or H, I suppose), upon us and Christmas only days away, it was especially fortunate that I ran across Kelli Crowe's creative gift wrap blog entry. She has rounded up a number of cool (and thrifty) ways to make the packages you've purchased look even more appealing. Definitely more fun than focusing on trying to traditional wrapping paper to be perfectly aligned (which I can never do anyway).

Before I had seen Kelli's post, I was thinking I should do something a little different this year in the wrapping department. See, over the last year I've gotten pretty good about using reusable shopping bags, rather than bringing home and being cluttered by scores of plastic bags. So, in the same spirit of re-usability, I wondered what I could wrap my brother's gift in that he could reuse? Here's what I came up with:

Yes, that's a gift wrapped in toilet paper and tied with a dental floss bow. My half serious, half joking logic, is that he can untie the bow remove the TP, and drop them both in a ziplock bag for our next hike or camping trip. Who knows, in a tight spot, those items could be even more handy than the gift I'm giving him?

I suppose I'm going to need to get a bit more clever - after all, not every person is worthy of getting a gift wrapped in TP. Still, Kelli's inspired me to keep looking for clever gift wrapping hacks.

Website I Want: A Political Rorschach Test

A few days back, I was talking to one of my conservative friends and I asked him who his pick was in the GOP field. His response: Herman Cain. What?! How was this possible? Sure, I liked Cain's outsider appeal, and his 9-9-9 tax plan was delightfully audacious. But what about his comments about a Muslim serving in his cabinet, or his odd reading of the first amendment, or his unusual stance on abortion, or the infamous Libya interview question? Didn't these sway my friend? Nope, not really.

Which got me thinking...you've got sites like Politifact.com which try to tease apart truth from lies. And that's a good thing. But I'm curious about what people actually see when they see a clip or transcript. Which is why I think we need the a political Rorschach website. Here's how it would work:

• Website curators post a clip or transcript to the site (heck, maybe even an article or blog entry)
• Visitors come to the site perform one of two actions:
  1. They offer a one or two sentence explanation ("I see a clip that's been edited to tell a new story", "Here's proof that candidate X knows nothing about Y!")
  2. They vote on explanations that are most appealing to them

That's it. Over time, I'd think a few different explanations would converge. If all went as planned, you'd get an idea what each constituency was actually interpreting when viewing the same media.

This site isn't really about changing people's minds. Instead, it's about understanding what someone who adamantly disagrees with you can be thinking. Who knows, from there, maybe a little common ground could be found. Or not.

Who's with me?

Review: Conquering YouTube

I really didn't want to like Jay Miles' Conquering YouTube. After all, what a ridiculous title, right? I mean, how short sighted can one person be but to write a book about a single website? Only thing is, when I picked it up I accidentally flipped it to Tip #68, Camera in a Coal Mine, which talks about leveraging the small cameras most novices have by putting them in unusual spots (like in a fridge) to get a unique perspective. At that bit of wisdom, I was hooked (at least hooked enough to rent the book from the library).

Turns out, Conquering YouTube has absolutely nothing to do with YouTube. Really, the book should have been titled Techniques and Exercises You Need To Master To Start Shooing Quality Video. In Miles' defense, Conquering YouTube is wittier.

I love how the author not only gives solid advice, but assigns useful homework assignments to really get you to master the essentials (and does it in a lighthearted, yet not overly goofy way). From learning how to manually operate your video camera to advice on editing, I've got to think that this is an excellent intro to intermediate course on video creation. I'd love to see a book that uses this same approach and format to teach photography.

I definitely knew the book was have an effect on me when I started to find myself decomposing the scenes on TV. I'd find myself thinking: oh look, they used the rule of thirds there -- or, oh look, you can't see the actor speaking, I bet this clip was shot in a totally different take than the one before. Any book that can change how I see the world is a winner in my mind.

If you're interested in getting serious about movies or video, or you know someone who is, this book is the way to go.

Sugar Overload

Yesterday, I come home from shul to find a big heap of sugar cookies lovingly made and frosted by a crack team of kid bakers. And I woke up from a Shabbat nap to find two amazing gingerbread houses courtesy of David and Maryn (OK, one a house and one a Greek Temple!).

It's like sugar heaven here! And all I had to do was load and unload the dishwasher about 19 times.

What a treat!

Gotcha of the Day: Combine rows into a single cell in Excel

Last night, Shira posed me a spreadsheet quandary: how do you take a series of rows and combine them together into a single cell (say, comma separated)? After looking around, I realized that there wasn't a built in function that would do this. transpose will turn rows in columns, but it doesn't join items up in a single cell. To get this job done, I was going to have to turn to VB. Gulp.

I knew how I wanted the function work, it should behave like countif. That is, I didn't want it to combine every cell in a range, only those that matched some criteria.

Why Excel offers countif and sumif but doesn't offer concatenateif is beyond me. But, luckily it wasn't beyond MikeRickson over at ozgrid.com. He and a couple other folks provided me with a bunch of wonderful useful bits of knowledge:

1. An implementation of >concatenateif(...):

Function concatenateIf(ByVal compareRange As Range, _ 
    ByVal criteriaEQ As Variant, _ 
    ByVal stringsRange As Range, _ 
    Optional Delimiter As String, _ 
    Optional Unique As Boolean) As String 
     
    Dim stringsRRay As Variant 
    Dim compRRay As Variant 
    Dim i As Long, j As Long 
     
    Set compareRange = Application.Intersect(compareRange, _ 
    compareRange.Parent.UsedRange) 
     
    compRRay = compareRange.Value 
    stringsRRay = compareRange.Offset(stringsRange.Row - compareRange.Row, _ 
    stringsRange.Column - compareRange.Column).Value 
     
    Select Case TypeName(compRRay) 
    Case "Variant()" 
        concatenateIf = Delimiter 
        For i = 1 To UBound(compRRay, 1) 
            For j = 1 To UBound(compRRay, 2) 
                If compRRay(i, j) = criteriaEQ Then 
                    If Unique Imp (InStr(concatenateIf, Delimiter & CStr(stringsRRay(i, j)) & Delimiter) = 0) Then 
                        concatenateIf = concatenateIf & CStr(stringsRRay(i, j)) & Delimiter 
                    End If 
                End If 
            Next j 
        Next i 
        concatenateIf = Left(concatenateIf, Len(concatenateIf) - Len(Delimiter)) 
        concatenateIf = Mid(concatenateIf, Len(Delimiter) + 1) 
    Case "Double", "String", "Boolean": Rem cell.count = 1 
        If compRRay = criteriaEQ Then concatenateIf = CStr(stringsRRay) 
    Case Else 
        concatenateIf = TypeName(compRRay) 
    End Select 
End Function 

2. A simpler concat function which dispenses with the criteria concept:

Function Concat(r As Range) As String 
    Dim av  As Variant 
    Dim v   As Variant 
     
    av = Intersect(r, ActiveSheet.UsedRange) 
    For Each v In av 
        If Not IsEmpty(v) Then 
            Concat = Concat & v & "," 
        End If 
    Next 
    Concat = Left(Concat, Len(Concat) - 1) 
End Function

3. Instructions on how to set these functions up.

[The code] needs to be posted in a code module. Open the VBE (Alt+F11), and from that menu bar, do Insert > Module, and paste the code into the window that opens.

Besides providing some useful code, this forum post showed me just how easy it is to add new functions to Excel. I've written VB code before, but it's usually as a stand alone app, and not something that truly leverages the existing Excel model.

I can't remember the last time such a brief forum post was so enlightening.

With the above code in place I was able to say:

 =concatenateif(A:A, "=100", C:C, ", ")

(Where column A (A:A) contained a bunch of numbers, and column C contained the text I wanted to join up with ", ".)

Pocket Dump: Winter Edition

It's been a while since I've done a pocket dump, so here's the latest snapshot of what's in my pockets. A few items have changed due to the weather, and the need to be more jeans friendly (less bulging is a good thing, right?).

I'd love to know what your EDC is -- do share in the comments.

In my pants pockets:

• A CPR mask and gloves smooshed and taped between two business cards. What good is being CPR certified if you aren't ready for action, right? The business cards approach seems to be the smallest possible way to carry the items.
• A Pilot G2 pen. Still my favorite writing instrument.
• A Schrade Tactical Pen. This currently replaces my Alpha Innovations Stylus Kubaton. I like that it does extra duty as a pen, and is nice and solid. If the Alpha Innovations stylus worked with my G2 I may prefer it better.
• Android G2. This guy is really beat up, but it's still holding its own.
• Regular old wallet. A couple extra safety pins (for repairs), a paper clip (for whatever) and stickers (to entertain kids) are in it. Other than that, there's nothing unusual about it.
• A hanky. My probably most used EDC item.
• Keyring that hasn't changed much since I last inventoried it. Still love everything on it, and find it all useful. The compass came in handy getting oriented on our last trip, the USB drive held backup copies of my passport and other travel documents, the pill fob saved Shira during a headache (thanks to the headache medicine within), I could go on, but you get the point.
• A P-51 can opener and Derma-Safe razor blade rubber banded together. This little setup has replaced my Swiss Army knife for daily carry. It's much slimmer in the pants, which prompted me to try it. So far, I'm really impressed. The P-51 has come in handy a number of times, the Derma-Safe is super sharp. The rubber bands have probably gotten the most use, as I'll take them off and use them for various odds and ends. I love that the setup is basically disposable if I end up at place where I can't bring a knife. There are still times when a Swiss Army knife makes the most sense, but for EDC, this little combo is working.
• A cheapy 3x5 notepad. Absolutely essential.

Gone is the lanyard - I never got any use out of it.

In my jacket pockets:

It's almost winter time, which means wearing jacket, which means *more pockets*. Whoo! Here's what's been floating around in my coat:

• Brandless knit hat from REI. Your mom always told you to wear a hat, right? Listen to mom.
• Seirus Gloves from REI. I love these guys. Super lightweight, allow for lots of dexterity, yet are wind resistant and keep you warm.
• A Buff. The ultimate neck warmer + balaclava + whatever else you can think of. Love this guy.
• A Mini-Bic Lighter. When it's cold out, it just seems right to carry around a way to make fire instantly.
• An urban survival kit packed in, of course, an Altoids tin. It's got headphones for G2, quarters for the meter, dental floss and more.
• Sea to Summit day pack. Another frequently used item. Definitely don't underestimate this guy.

So, nu? What's in your pockets?

Up Close and Personal: Playing with Digital Concepts Macro Filter Set

Chanukah came early this year, as a gift from my Sister and Brother-in-law showed up a few days ago. Sure, I could have been an adult about it and waited for the holiday, but what fun would that be? They bought me two items off my wishlist, the Digital Concepts 1 2 4 10 Close-Up Macro Filter Set and a remote shutter release, both for my relatively new EOS T3i.

I'm quite impressed with both items. The closeup filter (basically, magnifying glasses) Polaroid branded item, and not some off brand product. The lenses look solid to me, and the case is impressive too; not some after thought cheapy item you might expect.

There's not much to the shutter release, but it worked perfectly out of the box with the camera.

I had the new toys, but I didn't have any idea what I wanted to photograph. Then it occurred to me, I may have just the right set of items from our recent trip. Whenever I travel, I usually pick up various somewhat interesting pebbles from where I've been. I've been doing this for years, and have (a) never taken the time to label anything and (b) never really found a use for the rocks. But, as souvenirs go, a rock from the top of Table Mountain or Robben Island seems precious to me.

They're small and I have new close-up equipment - I thought they'd be a great fit. Alas, I'm totally underwhelmed by how the photos turned out. Though, I blame that not on the new equipment but on my poor composition skills. Still, in the interest of sharing at least some results, here they are.

With close up lenses like these, very narrow depth of field is to be expected. So, I cranked down the aperture as far as I could, and used my new shutter release to trigger the camera. that way, I would reduce the chances of camera shake.

One other little tidbit: the cork in the photos was one that I found at the Cape of Good Hope. If you can't find a message in a bottle, you can at least find the cork that belonged to it (or, to the people who were drinking on the beach last night).

Like I said: I'm really impressed by the macro filters. Definitely a lot more polished product than one might expect for the relatively low close.

DCA

Meeting Georgia

Today I met Georgia. Georgia is perfect. Georgia is also a little over two weeks old, and the first born of one of my best friend's from High School.

How did this happen? How did we go from sitting around on a Saturday night watching cruddy movies and playing charades (yes, I was running with quite the roudy crowd in high school!), to sitting around discussing sleep strategies and day care options with my friend and her BABY?!

Yeah, this one has hit me hard.

But Georgia is so cute. And my friend and her husband seem to have it so together. They just make it look so easy.

Anyway, Georgia, when you're old enough, I'll play charades with you and tell you all the stories about your mommy growing up she probably doesn't want you to know. I can't wait.

Twinners +1 - Visiting the "Fish Museum"

Today we made our way to the Boston Aquarium, where Elana, the Kids, Shira and Myself took in the "fish museum" (the kids wanted another visit to the Children's Museum, so we promised them the Fish Museum instead).

The personalities of the kids were out in force today. Fearless Chana was perturbed that she wasn't allowed to swim in the tanks with the fish, and all but climbed into the sting ray and (baby) shark tank. Dovid, our intellectual one, was delighted to count star fish and study the sting rays, but had zero interest in touching anything (heck, he didn't want to put his hands in the Dyson hand dryers, for fear that he might not get them back when it was done making all that noise!). And Tzipora was memorized by the giant fish swimming by, and was soaking it all up.

Shira and I felt especially proud that a little over a week ago we were at Boulder's Beach, where one (or more?) of the penguins featured at the aquarium were from.

Speaking of fun activities, yesterday, on our Shabbat walk, we poked our heads into one of the fire station's near the house. One of the firemen on duty eagerly invited us in and suggested we show the kids around the trucks. They even started up one of the engines and got the lights going. Of course, the whole thing was a bit overwhelming for the kids, but they did work up the courage to approach the truck and ended up having a great time. And I was right along with them, soaking it all in. Score one for the Boston FD, they couldn't have been more welcoming to the kiddies. I'd suggest dropping by your local station to see if they're as nice.

Would you believe we took more photos today? Yeah, just a few. These kids are just so dang cute.

Twinners +1 - Visting the Boston Children's Museum

Wow, what a day! We got into Boston this morning, and have been whooping it up with the Twins +1 all day. The main event was a trip to the Boston's Children Museum (which is more activity center, than traditional museum - but it was all awesome).

The Twins couldn't get enough of the water table, and Tzipora was totally drumming to Latin beats in the baby room. I think I probably enjoyed the construction room more than the kids. I even let them sit in the Bobcat, instead of pushing them out of the way so I could monopolize. See how mature I am?

Nobody, including myself, wanted to go home, but alas, Shabbat was approaching and we had a very full day.

Here's a few of the 400+ photos we shot of the kids that day. The new camera plus wonderful subjects sure makes for lots of photos.

Gotcha of the Day: Porting a WordPress Blog to Magento's Blogging Plugin

Magento has a pretty sweet Blogging plugin that one of my clients wanted to use. No problem, right? Except for one itty bitty catch, they've been blogging in WordPress and sure would love to port over their content.

Unfortunately, the Magento Blogging plugin doesn't offer any sort of importing capability, so I was going to need to get creative.

After a bit of poking around, I finally settled on a strategy: I would load both the WordPress and Magento databases into the same mysql server instance, and run SQL queries that would SELECT from WordPress tables and INSERT into Magento tables.

The strategy turned out to work surprisingly well. The queries (described below) weren't that tricky to write, and while it took a little practice to get all the data inserted properly, once I got the recipe right, the import went smoothly.

One word of caution: Magento will refuse to operate if you manage to insert duplicate IDs in the blogging or category tables. I solved this by making sure that before importing I cleared out whatever was in the Magento blogging database. This worked well because my client didn't have any articles written yet (only test stuff they wouldn't mind losing). In other words, mind the DELETE statements below - understand what they are doing before you run them :-).

In general, loading up two databases and SELECT/INSERT'ing between them is an approach I've found can work exceedingly well. After I implemented this solution, I remembered that months back I did something similar with WordPress and ExpressionEngine. Sure, I could have exported WordPress to RSS or CSV and written custom code to import it, but why bother with all that parsing when the database already has things structured so well?

Here's the import script. Note I've got two databases, one named wordpress and one named magento. For no particular reason, I'm changing magento at the top of the script and explicitly pulling from wordpress.

USE magento;

-- Target: aw_blog
DELETE FROM aw_blog; -- Careful!  Start off by deleting all our data

-- Magic happens here: fill up Magento's (aw_blog) post table from WordPress
INSERT INTO aw_blog(post_id, title, post_content, status, created_time, update_time, identifier,
                    user, update_user, meta_keywords, meta_description, comments, tags, short_content)
 SELECT
    p.ID,
    p.post_title,
    p.post_content,
    1,
    p.post_date,
    p.post_date,
    p.post_name,
    a.user_nicename,
    a.user_nicename,
    '',
    '',
    0,
    '',
    p.post_excerpt
  FROM wordpress.wp_posts p JOIN wordpress.wp_users a ON p.post_author = a.ID
  WHERE
    p.post_type = 'post'        AND
    p.post_status = 'publish';

-- The hard work is done. Now we need to fill up a few more tables with corresponding
-- IDs. Without these tables, Magento gets confused and won't be able to find posts.

-- Target: aw_blog_post_cat
DELETE FROM aw_blog_post_cat;

INSERT INTO aw_blog_post_cat(cat_id, post_id)
  SELECT DISTINCT 1, post_id FROM aw_blog;

-- Target: aw_blog_store
DELETE FROM aw_blog_store;

INSERT INTO aw_blog_store(post_id, store_id)
  SELECT DISTINCT post_id, 0 FROM aw_blog;

-- All Done!

Handy Running Tool: eGear Guardian Strobe Light

Now that it gets dark at 2pm (OK, closer to 4:30pm, I suppose), I feel like I should take some extra steps to be visible while running. A couple of the routes I take use bike paths which can be pretty dang dark.

After doing a bit of shopping on Amazon, I took the plunge and purchased a Guardian eGear Signal Light. It promised to be compact and bright. I was so happy with it, that I immediately turned around and bought a couple more colors.

Here's what they look like:

(The second photos is taken with the lights on top of a 3x5" notepad to show scale.)

I really like the design of these guys:

• The twist-to-turn-on mechanism is fairly tight, so I don't worry about accidentally turning them on or off.
• They are waterproof and somewhat drop-proof (3 meters?). I've taken them out in the rain and dropped them from waist height, and so far, no issues.
• They're really lightweight (a bit more on that below) and do easily clip to anything
• You can reverse the batteries to switch from a strobe light to a standard flash light. This makes for a simple design, and provides a nice little backup.
• They aren't terribly expensive

I find that I can clip one light to the front of my hat, another to the back, and head off into the dark without even noticing the lights are there. Here's what the setup looks like:

As for areas of improvement, I was going to mention that of the three lights I received, the green one came with a simpler clip than the others. It's smooth and resembles a money clip, while the other colors have an improved design, including a lip that catches on clothing to be more secure, and a hole in the back which also looks useful. I was ready to write up a warning that you should make sure to get the newer clip. Thing is, this morning I sent an e-mail to eGear and asked them about the clip difference. Within an hour, I got a response back and a promise to send me an updated clip style for no charge.

So, now I'm even more impressed, because eGear's customer service came through so well.

I suppose the only real con is that I don't have a good way of measuring and comparing how effective this strobe is against what else is out there. For my purposes, which is mostly piece of mind, the lights work well. But, I can't really say that they will outperform other lighting options. I just know their awfully convenient (and they do have a claim of 2 mile visibility, for whatever that's worth).

If you're running in the dark, I say give 'em a try.

Artist of the Day: Carlos Alberto Quadrini

Stumbled over Carlos Alberto Quadrini over at sound cloud.com, where he's got some most excellent sessions posted. He's been helping me rock (or chill?) out all day. Here, give one a listen:

QUADRINI - JOURNEY OF HOUSE VOL.4 – BRAZILIAN SUMMER - DECEMBER 2011 by QUADRINI

A Moment of Bragging: Running a 6 Miler

Last night, in the rain and dark, Shira and I did a 6 mile run through Arlington, including a run up Walter "Heart Attack" Reed hill.

She was such a trooper. I do believe, it's the longest distance she's ever ran (no hiking, that's another story altogether...).

Go her!

(And I didn't do so bad myself, thank you very much.)

View Shira and Ben's 6 Miler in a larger map

Facebook Turns Off Automatic Note Importing, I Cope

Years ago, I figured out my key to Facebook -- it makes an awesome distribution channel for the stuff I write. When I publish the same content in both Facebook and the web, I get totally different insights from the different audiences.

Facebook used to make this easy, you just setup your blog to be imported as notes. It wasn't perfect, but it automatically made content I public to the web available to my friends in Facebook.

I returned from traveling a few days ago, logged into Facebook and was met with a surprise: importing of notes is no longer supported.

I'm sure the Facebook people had good reasons for doing this (perhaps to avoid duplicate content? Or to deal with all the crappy content folks imported?), but for users like myself, this is a pain. More importantly, I had a pretty good deal going with Facebook: they'd pull in and publish my notes, and in return, when folks commented on my stories, I was pulled back to them to interact. Seemed like a win-win.

But, all is not lost. Here's how I was able to work around this. First off, I signed up with Networked Blogs and added my blog to my profile. I then clicked on the syndication link and said that I wanted the blog syndicated to Facebook.

Now, when I publish new posts (like, hopefully, this one!) it shows up on my wall.

My friends in Facebook land can easily see what I'm chatting about, and I don't have to worry about doing a manual import.

Happy Blogging!

Smile, it's Tuesday

A few items to make you smile:

First, the best Rick Perry ad ever. Seriously, this may be one of my favorite political ads of all time:

Secondly, a little Star Wars humor. It's old school enough, so even I get it:

Via: See Mike Draw.

And finally, I'm not sure I can quite explain it, but I found this list of First Grade Problems to be surprisingly funny. Here's an example:

Ahhh, the dreaded indoor recess.

Steve Jobs Nails It

I don't claim to be particularly in tune with what Steve Jobs stood for and the like, but he nails it in this video clip:

Definitely worth taking the time to watch and ponder that one.

Via: RichardsNotes.com

Cape Town Travel Gear That Worked

Only an hour and a half left in our 19 hours of flying. We're in the home stretch! As long as our Cape Town trip is still on my mind, I thought I'd take a few minutes to jot down what travel gear worked. In no particular order...

• Samsung N150 Netbook - Man I love traveling with this guy. I must have gotten 6 hours or more of battery life squeezed out of this little guy on the trip to Cape Town. And having Internet access in our room was huge - it made finding driving directions, confirming attractions, and just checking the weather trivial.
• Sea to Summit Foldable Backpack - this guy rocked. Not only did it work well as a carry on bag, but I used it to schlep stuff all over cape town. Nearly every day I would leave with the bag almost empty, and return with it almost full. How the seams, straps and zipper stay together is beyond me, but they do.
• Canon T3i DSLR - this guy was great to travel with. I suppose, thanks to him, I stuck out more than ever as a tourist, but the photos were worth it. I found that the battery lasted forever, and the standard 18-55mm lens that came with the camera worked quite well.
• Table top Tripod - I'll have to lookup the brand of this little tripod when I get home [update: it's Sima ST-10T]. This little gem was small enough to fit in a pants pocket, yet sturdy enough to reliably hold the T3i. Many a self portrait was made with this guy. I also brought along a clamp type tripod [update: it's a Pedco UltraClamp] which also worked well, though I found myself using the table top one a little more frequently. Still, between the two solutions, I almost always had us covered and the weight and price wise, they can't be beat.
• Fodors Guide Book - every trip I think to myself this is the trip I'll go fully digital for, and every trip I'm thankful I have an actual guide book of the city with me. We found restaurants to go to, specific drives to take, and generally felt more prepared because of this book. And there's something about the convenience of earmarking pages, and trivially flipping to them that make the physical book worth it. This time, we bought an Africa guide book on Half.com and used a razor blad to slice out just the Cape Town section. A couple of staples and a binder clip later, and I had an efficient guidebook solution. Still, it killed me to actually shred a book, even though I know it was for a good cause.
• Travel Blanket - this one was a winner for Shira. She brought a large'ish fleece travel blanket and it totally made her trip more comfortable. Unlike me, she's not a fan of the questionably clean blankets that airlines provide.
• Sleep Mask - Ahhh, the humble sleep mask. Is there a better travel product given its weight and cost? If you're not traveling with one of these in your pocket, then you're totally missing out.
• Overdrive (Android app) - I was able to check out 10 library books, some audio, some text, and store them on my G2. Most of the books went unread, but that's OK. I just liked knowing that I had plenty of options in the reading / entertaining department. I can see my new routine before heading off on a trip is going to be to check out a slew of books the day before we leave.
• REI Travel Pants - I'm going to have to look up the specific model of these guys, because they rock (and I've rarely felt a pair of pants could actually rock) [update: the model name appears to be REI Adventures Pants]. Not only are they comfortable, provide an extra couple of pockets to reliably store your passport, have zippers on the back pockets and dry quickly (I washed them in the shower a couple of times, and they easily dried overnight) but they don't quite look like classic cargo travel pants (at least, not to me). They aren't dress pants, but I'm convinced I could use them in a dressier context if the situation demanded it.
• Sit & Solve: Brain Boosting IQ Tests - this is a pocket sized book of brain teasers, and was an excellent addition to the carry on. For those times when a cell phone can't be used (like taxi and takeoff time), or when you've just got a few minutes to kill (waiting in a long security line), you can whip this guy out and work on a problem or two. Some problems succumbed easily, others I stewed on for hours. I also found that there were times when my brain was just too fried to read, but chewing on a puzzle was enjoyable.

Cape Town Adventure - Day 9

For our last day in Cape Town, we wanted to try to finish up with something a little unique to South Africa. We wanted to try to get a glimpse of what a shack-town looks like. I definitely don't have the facts on this yet, but apparently there's a tradition among migratory workers to stake out open land and turn it into an impromptu village. This mixed with the policies of Apartheid, where blacks weren't allowed to live in cities, helped create some densely packed areas of extreme poverty.

Anyway, we were told that under no circumstances were we to visit a shack town without extensive supervision. Heck, we weren't even allowed to drive to one to meet a guide. So, we did the next best thing and hopped on the City Sight Seeing bus, which has an arrangement with Imizamo Yethu Township, to offer tours.

The township tour was an odd mix of emotions. On one hand, you're surrounded by extreme poverty and people who are trying to make a better life for themselves and their children (there's a movement, for example, to build houses to replace the shacks and setup a local school). On the other hand, people were quite friendly, the mood was upbeat and generally there was pride for the little settlement.

Our guide talked about the township in terms of a struggle to right the social inbalance in the region (less than a kilometer from Imizamo Yetho are homes of the super rich in Cape Town, who have better facilities for their horses than these people have for their children). Our taxi driver talked about how the government has attempted to replace the shack towns with real houses, but there are those that like living rent free and so they keep popping up. And then there was the book in the bookstore that glorfied shack-towns as a sort of down-home simpler living (oh look, the children have no real toys so they invent games and are wonderfully friendly) that we should be just a little envious of. In other words, it's a complicated social issue that has no easy answers.

After our Township tour, we had an excellent lunch at Haut Bay. I finally had fish and chips, while Shira had sushi - man deep fried fish is a winner.

From Haut Bay we made our way back to the city center and spent the rest of the day soaking in the last few sites that we could from walking around.

I started this blog post as we were about to board our plane, and it's now been about 8 hours of flying. We've almost covered the length of Africa, though according to the flight map, we have just a little bit more to go.

So, what can I say about Cape Town? In general, it is a wonderful place. As I commented to Shira a number of times: this place is awesome, they measure distances in kilometers and prices in Rand. That means that everything is closer than it seems, and you can divide all the prices by 8 (I can't remember the last time I was at a major city where I could do that!). Cape Town has interesting musueums and history, amazing natural sights to see (Table Mountain, Cape Point, fynbos in the wild) and wonderfully friendly people. We ate quite well here, never having a problem finding vegetarian options to pick from.

For the most part, we felt secure in the city. In a brilliant move to help address the massive unemployment of the country, there's a job known as Parking Marshal that pretty much anyone can take on. Essentially, a person watches over a number of parking spaces on the street. When you park in one of these spaces, they'll "watch over your car" and you tip them when you leave. This flips the mindset of these potentially unemployed from possibly harming you or your car, to protecting both. In fact, the security-as-job-for-the-unemployed really worked quite well, as it means that there were frequently friendly faces around. We did run into some aggressive pan handlers, which made for a tense encounter or two, but that was as rough as things got.

Cape Town really is a must see city. It definitely belongs on your must-visit list.

See all photos from our last day.