Postcards!

On my old blog I would scan and post each postcard I received.  I have always loved sending postcards, and, of course, I love receiving them in return!  I've gathered a pretty good spread of postcards so I thought it would be cool to post them as I got them.  Only snag right now is that I can't seem to find a way to export all the postcard entries from my old blog so I can import them here.  That doesn't mean I can't keep posting the ones I get though!  I'm also going to try to make this post "sticky" so it will remain at the top, but only of the postcard category, and postcards I post will show up below.  Hopefully I can get it coordinated to do just that! As well as posting them here, I have been adding them to a map on Google Maps so I thought I would be cool to have that stay at the top as more are added as well. Hopefully I will get it all organized soon!
View Postcard Map in a larger map

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Sender: Alexis

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Sender: Dad

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Sender: Dad

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Sender: Dad

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Judge rules gene patent invalid

Recently, a Judge ruled that a gene patent on breast cancer genes was invalid. I thought I would share this because it seems to be a step in the right direction to me.  I never understood how a gene could be patented since it is discovered, not created. I understand that it can take a lot of resources to discover these types of things, but overall I think it hinders scientific progress when people have to worry about patents when researching certain areas of the genome.  I hope this leads to a lot of the other gene patents being revoked. Thoughts?

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PS3 Update = Yup, Sony still blows

Don't get me wrong, I love my PS3. But in the past, Sony repeatedly shows that they are the embodiment of the greedy corporation and it seems every time I turn around they have done something sucky. This time, in their new software update for the PS3 they have decided to remove the capability to install linux. Now, this isn't a huge deal for me, because I have yet to install linux on my box and don't necessarily have plans to. Still, they are essentially using a software update to remove an advertised feature of the PS3. So when I purchased my PS3, it was sold as having the capability t o install linux if I were to choose to do so. Many people did this (FSU Computer Science department actually has a cluster of PS3s, all running linux) and it was cool that they provided that option. Removing it is like buying a PC that advertises being great for listening to music then having a software update keep all programs from using the audio drivers (and thus, no way to create sound) I'd be surprised if there wasn't a lawsuit and, while I think it is unlikely, I would love to see Sony get their ass handed to them. Randomly decided to remove a feature that they product was advertised to have at purchase is not OK.

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Springtime 5k

We did the 10k associated with this event last year, and it was pretty brutal, even with all the training we did.  As we have not been running that much lately, we decided to opt for the 5k this year.  We also just decided to take it easy, took several walk breaks, and enjoyed running with friends.  Felt a lot better at the end of it too!  The weather was clear and cool, just about perfect for a run. Lynn and MC took off when we were getting closer to the finish line, but Brian and I held back a little.  Once we got a little closer, Brian and I kicked it into gear to finish strong and I managed to barely sneak past MC ;-) Lucky she didn't see me coming! hehe. Overall it was a nice relaxing run and fun to start getting back into running races. It probably took us ~45 seconds to actually make it to the finish line, so our true time is that much shorter than chip time. Speaking of chips, this was the first race I had been in that the chip was actually attached to the back o f the number.  Very handy! 36:46 MC - 36:47 Brian - 36:47 Lynn - 36:49

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Unexpected Visitor on a Rainy Evening

Unexpected Visitor on a Rainy Evening, originally uploaded by fincher69.

The second little froggy visitor we've had on our second-story balcony.

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Trying to incorporate my blog into Google Buzz

So I started playing around with Google Buzz after it came out, and so far is seems pretty cool. I think it definitely needs some work before it would really replace any services for me, but, being an "internet content creator" I still like to explore any new mediums that arise. Right now a lot of my production resources are dedicated to this blog/webpage (and of course to research) so I figured I would go ahead and try to tie it in to my Buzz. So far it has been a rather unsuccessful ordeal. Currently, I have the RSS feed for this blog in my Google Reader and it is placed in a folder that I've deemed Public and therefore should automatically share.  It doesn't.  I don't know why it doesn't, but I've left things in there for a day or two and they never show up, dispite them showing up in the folder and the folder showing up as Public.  So each time I post something I have to manually go in and click "share" to have it propogate to Buzz.  I'm all for automation, so this is a non-preferred scenario.  When I looked at my Connected Sites, several blogs I have on blogger showed up, so I thought I could possibly just mirror my new blog on a blogger blog for the time being.   I got this all set up, but for some reason, my new blogger blog still doesn't show up as an option when I try to add a new connected site.  So then I found this page that described how to add an outside page to conected sites. So I followed the directions in #3 and still no luck.  It could be that the Google Crawler hasn't recrawled my site yet (the site to manually make it recrawl doesn't seem to be working) and everything is set up fine and I just have to wait. We shall see. If anyone has any other ideas, feel free to pass them on!

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Idea for blog commenting

I have no idea what it would take to implement it, but I think it would be really cool to have a commenting system for things like blogs that essentially acts like a footnote system. I think this would be especially beneficial in cases like mine where, notably in my travel posts, I have pretty long and in depth posts that cover a lot of ground. Instead of a user reading through the whole thing then posting general comments about what is most prominent in their head by the very end, users could place comments essentially inline with the text.¹ I envision it exactly like a footnote or bibliography where a user could click in the post at the point where they would like to make the comment, type the comment, then when it is submitted the appropriate number superscript is left in the text. If you noticed, I'm including an example in this very post! So the comments would still aggregate at the bottom, but could be in direct response to parts of the post. Another feature that would make this really handy would be if the blog owner had an option to use a mouseover to pop up the relevant comment. So if you put your cursor on the "footnote" number, you could see (similar to alt text for an image) the comment. I think this could add to the functionality and interactivity of a blog. I actually made this post include an example of this with a little html hacking (put your mouse over the ¹ above). Just thought I would share!

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¹This is a really cool idea!

Test post

Seeing if this automatically propagates to blogger.

Blogger test post

Because it is easier to tie stuff to google-related items. This post is just to test a plugin that will basically mirror my blog on a blogger blog. Let's see if it works.

Book Review - Winnie the Pooh

This was on our reading list, but it was really just a throwaway to give an easy onee to mark off the list. :-) I had actually never read the stories, but I had seen some of the animated versions so they were all familiar. Fun little stories about Pooh bear, good for their purpose (stories for kids). My next read isn't on the list and is a little more academic so my next review will likely be a long one!

Yelp!

As I mentioned in the San Francisco / Anniversary post, I tried Yelp! for the first time recently. It did a great job of helping us find places to eat while we were traveling and it seems like a service that would be interesting to get more involved in using. When we told MC's friend Maria about using it in San Francisco, she immediately asked us if we contributed. Of course, we had not, but then I got to thinking about it and thought I should try to put back (as Matt calls it, I'm trying to be a good little content producer). So looked back over the blog post and started writing some reviews! If I continue to actively use it (always a big "if" when it comes to me and various sites), I'll probably look into incorporating it into my site. For now I'll put it in the Projects/Geeky Stuff category. I think there are some Yelp! plug-ins I can check out. We shall see! In the meantime, anyone can check out My Yelp! Page to see what I've been reviewing.

Trying this out

So I decided to look into using WordPress as a means to host my own site. iWeb does some kinda snazzy things, but I really like the extensibility and control that seems to come with WordPress. First I'm trying to go through and organize everything in a way that I think will flow well.  Currently I am thinking most dynamic information will just flow through this main page and I will use the categories to help people sift through if they are only interested in certain aspects of what I present on here.

I will probably then use additional pages to hold more static information (info about my photography setup and interests, links to external relevant sites, etc.) I may try to get it to where the static info appears in a sidebar and the dynamic shows in the main pane, but that may be redundant given the categorical listings that will be available.  I'm sure things will change around a lot in the coming months (especially since any time I change themes I will likely have to spend a good amount of time getting everything back in order) so we will see how it goes. Since it will kinda be all over the place, I may continue posting in my livejournal AND posting here (yes, I'm a glutton for punishment) for the next little bit as a transition phase.  Hopefully there is an easy way to import things from lj one entry at a time :-)

Below are some entries I'm working on importing. I set the post date on this post to be in the future so it will stay up here for a while. :-)  I'm trying to decide if I want to import everything from my lj here (might take a while to go through and fix the tagging) or just import some easy ones (likely import reading since it only has three posts and some of my travel posts).  Since I am still under the 1gig of storage I get for free on lj, most of my pics should stay intact, though it still feels a little sketchy to be linking back to them.  Regardless, I will be using LJBook to create a pdf archive of my lj blog.  You never know what might happen to your stuff when it sits in an account that you don't use very often.  At least, that way, I'll be guaranteed to have all my past blogs posts somewhere no matter what happens to LJ. :-) Things will all come together eventually!

A Fine Sparkling Wine

A Fine Sparkling Wine, originally uploaded by fincher69.

From Domaine Chandon in Napa Valley. This was one of my favorite shots of the trip.

The bus tour overlooking San Francisco

The bus tour overlooking San Francisco, originally uploaded by fincher69.

Nothing too fancy, but I thought the lighting was kinda cool with the San Francisco backdrop.

Ghirardelli Yumminess

Ghirardelli Yumminess, originally uploaded by fincher69.

I don't usually post many pics from my Olympus (except for panoramas), but this one was too scrumptious looking to pass up.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Book Review - 1984 by George Orwell

This is another book from our reading list that I had read back in the day, but in the spirit of our reading list challenge, decided to read again. I didn't remember being too fond of it and sure enough it was not the most exciting book I've ever read (read: I was extremely proud when I made it through more than 10 pages without falling asleep). It IS an interesting concept, especially in the time in which it was written. Essentially, it is a story of an extremely controlled and restrictive society following a main character that begins to doubts the principles set forth by Big Brother. It provided an insight that made people think about different aspects of society, but, in the end, this is one of those books for which I feel Cliffs Notes were invented. Like the two and a half hour movie that you leave thinking "they definitely could have told that story in an hour," 1984 takes a long time to make the social commentary that it strives for. While a "classic," there is a good chance that this is the final time I will read this book. (unless, of course, I have a bout of insomnia that needs remedying)

Super Mega Anniversary Post (aka Another Year of Oddities and Love)

I haven't been that great about updating my blog as of late, I know. I've actually been looking around and am mostly sure that I'm going to migrate my blog and stuff to my mac mini that I've set up as a web server. Everything should be smooth if I do it before I fill up the 1 gig I get on livejournal with a free account. Anyhoo, back to the subject at hand.

2 YEARS! (well a few days more than that now) That's how long me and my sweetie have been together. We cashed in some credit card points and found some good deals and were able to coordinate a long weekend trip to San Francisco to celebrate (do we celebrate in style or what?). It will probably be pretty picture intensive, so get ready for a super post about our trip! We tried to diligently record our foods, but admittedly slacked on our wine documentation, but hopefully my sister will forgive me. ;-)

Saturday

Because MC couldn't take too many days off work, we decided to leave saturday morning to head out to San Fran, but we still wanted to get there early enough to take advantage of the day. So here's a funny factoid. Thursday night I went to bed a little after 2 AM. On Friday night, I set my alarm for 2 AM. Good times. :-) So we were out the door by 3 AM to head to Jacksonville (tickets are way more expensive out of Tally) to make sure we had plenty of time to make our early flight. Needless to say it was a helluva way to start the trip, but I think it was worth it even if it resulted in some sleepy travelers. All our flights went according to plan (a rarity nowadays with the airline industry) and got to San Francisco safely. Hopped in a cab and it was to our snazzy hotel we went!One of the first things on our agenda was some wedding dress related stuff, which just happened to take us down 6th street (i.e. the land of the homeless). We still made it unaccosted and since I, obviously, cannot really participate in such activities I found ways to entertain myself while MC did her thing.On a side note, I had heard of a site called Yelp that has many user reviews of restaurants and many other things. I had never really looked into it, but thought it sounded kinda interesting (and MC's friend Maria is a higher up for them and, thus, a very active user) so I had installed the app on my phone. I thought it might come in handy in San Fran so I actually created an account and tried it out. I must say it was frickin' awesome. Seeing a list of restaurants near us and all the user reviews lead us to some pretty snazzy places. The first of which was our first lunch at Saffron 685. It was a little Mediterranean place that got good reviews so we thought we would try it out and boy was that the right decision to make!After lunch we meandered back to the hotel to actually get settled in a little bit and rest before dinner. Another service that I employed a lot this trip was the Google Maps app on my phone. Unfortunately, in the process of meeting Anna, Aaron, Wil, and Kristen for dinner, we discovered that looking at the elevation change when planning a walk through San Francisco could be a helpful thing. Turns out that the first 8 blocks of the walk to Rogue (a type of satellite of the Oregon-based brewery, one of my favorites) was pretty heavily uphill. We eventually made it and enjoyed some good beers and good company. From there, we headed to Vesuvio to partake in a few more adult beverages. It was down by a pretty active strip including, according to Wil, the first topless (then first bottomless) strip club in the good ol' U.S. of A.We enjoyed the odd coincidence that Wil and his lady friend happened to be visiting at the same time we were. I was beginning to think Kristen didn't really exist. ;-)It had been a long day (approaching the 24h mark), so we bid the group adieu after drinks and hit the sack hard.

Sunday

Our actual anniversary! We made it two whole years! (and hopefully many many more to come) To celebrate we decided to do a wine tour through Napa. It made for a kinda early morning (we'll sleep when we're dead, right?) but it was going to be a full and fun day of sampling some wines! While most of you know that I'm more of a beer guy, I was still interested in learning a little more and trying some new things. We wanted to get a little food in our tummies before we set off so we hit up the Yelp! machine and found Daniel's Cafe. It was perfect and I had an amazing croissant to start off the day! We caught a taxi to the origin of our wine tour, hopped on, and began enjoying the views!Though they have a lot of fog, we still caught a nice skyline...and a good ol' San Franciscan tunnel.Seeing acres upon acres of vineyards was definitely impressive! Especially when you began to notice the variety and the guide described all the little nuances in how they were set up and how it affected the grapes and, thus, the resulting wines.Interspersed amongst the vineyard lands were many wild mustard plants. If I remember correctly, they are nitrogen rich plants and helped keep the soil fertile.
Our first stop was Domaine Chandon where they produced many sparkling wines. It was the only place that we got a full tour of and it was quite the facility!We learned that the real difference between champagne and sparkling wine is just the region from whence it comes. If it doesn't come from the Champagne region in France, it really shouldn't be called a champagne. I also learned that Extra Dry is sweeter than Brut and we learned about the origin of the term Brut. Basically the British wanted a dryer sparkling wine than the French were giving them and, being the #1 consumer of French sparkling wine, the French thought they would try to appease them (much to their displeasure I'm sure). So in the process of creating sparkling wines, sugar is added for the second fermentation. For the British, the French excluded this sugar addition resulting in a much dryer sparkling wine. The term "brut" comes from the French for "unfinished," which is how they regarded this British favorite. Anyhoo, this turned out to be my favorite stop on the tour. Not just because I tend to like sparkling wines more than regular ones, but our tourguide was pretty entertaining as well!All of these areas were beautiful, and we continued to perfect the art of self-portraiture.On the way to the next winery, I had been noticing some interesting propeller type objects out in the vineyards. Luckily, our tour guide was on top of it and explained that they are set to start up at a certain temperature and humidity and basically circulate the air around the grapes when it starts getting chilly. This protects them by giving them an extra few degrees before frost settles on them, which can really affect the grapes (who knew grapes were so sensitive?).Our next stop was the V. Sattui Winery. This was also our lunch stop (sorry no pics, we were hungry!). The food was super scrumptious, though nothing too fancy (except the wide selection of cheeses that had MC mesmerized). Our "wine mistress" (as the tour guide called them) wasn't the friendliest, but it was still a fun tasting. MC had her first port (not a fan) and a syrah that (I believe) was her favorite wine of the trip. If only they had told us while we were there that to order it from them you must order a minimum of 6 bottles. Geesh! It was still a pretty cool property and good experience.On the way out we stopped to watch the Napa Valley Wine Train pass by...then it was off to the Black Stallion Winery. It was built on some old horse stable grounds and had a pretty small output compared to the others we visited. Another interesting thing was that this winery seemed to talk more than the others about the various accolades and awards which they had recently received. This was especially interesting because this was by far and away our least favorite of the tour (and not just because we had already had a lot of wine. It got beat out easily by the fourth and final winery). Though unimpressive, it was still a very interesting experience. From there it was off the Andretti Winery (yes, of Mario Andretti the super awesome race car driver). The wines there were pretty good and the guy who served us was entertaining, but I don't think there was anything that particularly caught our fancy (except another nice photo op).The Andretti Winery was our final winery and, honestly, MC and I were pretty happy to hop on that wine tour bus!We were both a little wine'd out so I think it would have been hard for us to enjoy it had their been many more stops. The bus took us to the ferry stop so we got a little different scenery on the ride home. We saw the Golden Gate bridge (which we had driven over on at the beginning of the tour) through the fog and got a pretty good view of Alcatraz as well.Even though it was a long day, we were looking forward to a nice romantic anniversary dinner. After talking to the wine tour guide we decided to check out the Hayes Street Grill. It was a little pricey, but the food was pretty darn good.It was a wonderful evening with my sweetie and a great ending to a great 2 year celebration.

Monday

This morning Yelp! steered us to the Honey Honey Cafe & Crepery and it was SUPER good!

MC's

Mine

By this point in the trip, we had logged many hilly miles around San Francisco and MC wanted to ride the cable car, so we moseyed to the nearest stop and hopped aboard!We took it all the way to the end of the line, just short of Fisherman's WharfAfter checking out some of the local merchants, we decided to take a walk over towards Pier 39 to really get into something touristy. And boy were we not disappointed! We thought about checking out the aquarium, but 15 bucks a head was a little steep. We did get to visit a good friend of ours though!We checked out some of the various shops in the area, then decided to see if the sea lions were hanging out that day (it wasn't too cold, but with clouds and lots of wind it got cool in a hurry!) Sure enough, they were lounging about as always and even putting on a little performance for MC and me.Since we had a coupon that we acquired after buying our souvenirs, we decided to check out the Fog Harbor Fish House for lunch. We decided to keep it pretty simple and enjoyed a nice view of the waterfront while we dined. From there we walked over to the famous Ghirardelli Square!We had an awesome ice cream spread that included some obligatory Ghirardelli chocolate and it was, of course, delectable. We then we decided we needed to burn some of those calories by hiking up some more hills! Did I mention that you can have a little fun with the panorama mode on many cameras?We made it to the top of the crazily curvy and crooked Lombard Street (second in crookedness only to Wall Street, according to our wine tour guide) and crooked it was!Luckily there was a cablecar stop nearby so we were able to catch that to get us the rest of the way back to the hotel. After a little regroup, we decided to hit some of the nearby shopping then rested a little before walking to the "French Quarter" (i.e. one street). There we were meeting back up with Anna, Aaron, Wil and Kristen for dinner at a fancy French restaurant, Plouf. I had a ginger encrusted sablefish that was one of the most interesting dishes I have had in a long time (in a very good way). It wasn't just ginger, but similar to gingerbread that coated the fish resulting in a very interesting amalgam of flavors. Old man Wil was getting a little beat so we bid him and Kristen farewell and headed to a bar for a few more drinks with Aaron and Anna. We had a long travel day the next day so we wrapped things up and headed back to the Hilton for a final night of San Francisco rest.

Tuesday

Tuesday we got up, again sampled some croissant from the nearby Daniel's Cafe, then hopped in our snazzy Lincoln (that we didn't know the hotel would have available for less than the cost of a cab) to head to the airport. Goodbye San Francisco!

All-in-all it was an amazing trip and an amazing way to celebrate two years with an amazing girl. If only we had the money to have trips like this more often. Perhaps one day! ;-) Happy 2 years my love!Final shot courtesy of Wilson Onstott