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!

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.

My Motorolla Droid!

As I was one of those folks anxious to get an Android phone as soon as I could swing it on Verizon, I thought I would do a little post about how it has been working out for me. So here it is, my new phone!One key thing I've enjoyed is the ability to get a widget for putting my calendar events on my home screen. I never found a good way to do this and it was one of the most useful features for me on phones I've had in the past. I have been using the Blackberry Storm, which hasn't gotten very good reviews, but I have definitely gotten used to. I did a mobile programming course over the summer where we programmed exclusively for Android so I was excited about the possibility of having a phone that I could write applications for. Anyhoo, more about the Droid. One of they key selling points for me was the fact that it was almost the same dimensions as my Storm, yet had a slide-out keyboard.
Having to use a software keyboard was one of my biggest gripes with the Storm. Even with its tactile feedback, I really liked the feel of an actual keyboard. So combine that with a similar size and I was pretty stoked! One thing I don't understand about this design of this phone is its "underbite." See any similarities?I don't really understand the need for the lip when they could have just made the screen a little larger or reduce the keyboard a little (I mean, do I really need a control pad?) Anyway, that is pretty minor, but still a little odd. Another design issue is the inclination of the phone to go from
to
without much effort at all. I've not had it a week and the back has come off as I pull it out of my pocket at least 3 times. Again, it's minor, but still worth mentioning. As I mentioned previously, this isn't my first experience with Android and they seem to be continually improving it. Currently my favorite feature is having 3 "home" screens to make my common things more accessible.Pretty snazzy! Thus far it has been very responsive and everything seems to be working great. I'm not sure if it is possible, but I haven't found a way to set a sound for individual txt messages (I can only change people's ringtones), but otherwise I'm extremely satisfied. Everything works well and sync's with Google pretty easily. I've heard that Verizon is kinda being an ass about nickel-and-diming people for little things (now a tethering charge is 30 dollars a month? Screw you Verizon), but it is still nice to have a really good smartphone with Verizon's network coverage. Oh, and here is another little video clip of the dock for applications (for those less familiar with Android). Pretty simple and clean.I may have more to come, but there are my initial impressions!

Home Project - Spice Rack

Ok, so I may not be the best at updating this lately, but at least I am better about throwing in a mobile post every once in a while so it doesn't get completely stagnant ;-) The weekend before last was pretty chill and I'm totally gonna mooch off MC's post about last weekend once we get it together. Anyhoo, as we just finished up this project I wanted to post to document the process!

As MC and I have both been cooking at decent amount in our new place, we knew we'd need a method of organization for spices and such. We saw some cool things, but none really suited our needs as well as we had hoped (or it was close but ridiculously expensive). So what better way to remedy than for me to just build us one!

I pulled some ideas about how to do it from what I had seen, but I would say a good portion of it was original creation. So first things first I had to get my tools "in order."After a few trips to Lowe's, I finally had the drill bits I needed and I started going to town!Unfortunately, I needed the holes to be a size that was between the standard steps between drill bit sizes. So then it became time to get creative! Something tells me you won't see this in "Carpentry for Dummies."So yeah, I essentially wrapped the drill bit in sandpaper (giving it just about the perfect amount of extra thickness) and "sanded" the holes to a slightly larger dimension. It actually worked better than I thought, except there were a few times that the sandpaper started smoking and I had second thoughts about the degree to which my new technique constituted a fire hazard. Luckily I made it through with no combustion occurring, though I did get the drill stuck a few times.Once I had all the holes drilled it was time to start priming!This was no ordinary primer. We had actually seen something similar used in a makeover-type show on television and I thought I would try it out...That's right, magnetic paint! I thought it would be super cool to be able to decorate it and attach things to it just like the fridge. I put on about 4 coats, but, unfortunately, it needs somewhere between 20 and 200 coats to be effective (my educated guesses). So we ended up with VERY slight magnetism, but not really enough to be useful. Oh well. So since all our appliances are white, I decided to go ahead and paint the spice rack to match then did the appropriate labeling.While it did match the appliances, it seemed a little "sterile" and we decided it needed a little something extra. We'll get to that in a minute.

On a side note, last year's christmas trip included an old Fincher family past time, putting together puzzles. I can't recall a single time that we visited Dad's parents where there wasn't a puzzle being worked on. So MC and I decided to take that idea and use our fairly new (to us anyway) kitchen table to put together our first puzzle in the new apartment! Don't puzzles always look a little daunting when you first lay everything out?I like putting together puzzles, but it became a serious challenge to MC. I think she may have even dreamt about the next piece she could fit together. She definitely caught some puzzle-mania! Anyhoo, as I think is fairly standard we started out trying to get the border together.Then we continued whenever we had a free moment! Getting a little closer...And done!Now you may be wondering "why is he telling me a random story about a puzzle? Wasn't this supposed to be about a spice rack!?" Don't worry, it will all make sense in a minute. So as I mentioned earlier, the spice rack looked a little bare. It's a pretty large item and having it be completely white was just too dull and bland, especially for OUR kitchen! So I had the idea that we could get a puzzle with an appropriate theme (in our case fruits and vegetables) and we could piece together some decoration (pun intended). I thought it was a cool idea because we had some fairly large blank spaces that would lend perfectly to larger completed portions of the puzzle, and then we could use appropriately sized sections to fill any spaces we wanted to fill. I did an initial template, then MC finalized the layout of the pieces. It is a little busy, but I still think it turned out pretty snazzy and definitely unique! Here she is in her entirety.And here's a close up of the measuring spoon sectionWhile it took a while from start to finish, I think it is definitely worth it to not only have the customization aspect, but also to know you made it yourself! This handyman stuff is turning out to be pretty fun! :-)

New Coffee Table!

So I posted in the past about turning my old snowboard into a coffee table. I basically threw it together in an afternoon with scrap wood I had. It wasn't super sturdy, didn't provide a lot of surface area, and had no storage, but it was a heckuva lot better than nothing! We really just wanted a simple (and cheap) placeholder until we figured out a way to get this table.

We thought it would go great with our outdoorsy theme and it was something a little bit different, but the original was overpriced and, while I've been getting into building furniture, I have neither the skills nor the tools to accomplish something like this. So more recently, we decided to keep an eye out for another alternative, and the other day at Goodwill we found it! It was actually a pair of end tables, but when pushed together (and with a little work) we saw a coffee table in the making! Here they are in position right after we brought them home.

We wanted to dress them up a little and build them a little more into our theme (even if they were already woodgrain). That and you can see there was some damage on the top that we wanted to cover up. First off, I took care of functional stuff (i.e. removing the doors and putting felt padding on the bottom to protect the floor).
Then we wanted to paint it, but thought it would be cool to paint just the top (kinda like two little trees). I thought I had taken a picture, but apparently I missed a step so you will just have to visualize that we painted the top the same color as our entertainment center :-)
While that green worked great for something covered in vines and leaves, it wasn't quite the right shade to be on its own (and a plain solid color didn't work that great either). To remedy this, we got a darker shade of green and MC sponge-painted it to give it a little more "bushy" texture. (pardon the mess in the pic)
To bring it even more in tune with nature, we got a couple decals to liven it up! You can probably see the frog and ladybug ok, but you may need to click and look at the bigger version to see the line of ants meandering across.
All-in-all we were definitely happy with how it turned out. It is nice to have the versatility of a table that can be split into two mini tables, it fits in great with the decor, and both have a decent amount of storage in the for remotes, wii-motes and such. :-) In the works is a spice rack I've been building as well, but that one still needs some work so it will have to wait until a later post. Until then I'm going to kick back, watch some TV, and prop my feet on our snazzy coffee table!

Technological Bitchings

Arrgghh!!

1. Mac's thin profile Aluminum keyboard & how they were too stupid to thoroughly test it
   
   I got one of those snazzy, thin Aluminum keyboards not that long ago. As I don't like dealing with batteries and such, and my keyboard never leaves the area near my computer, I went with the wired version. Did this a little while ago, and have only had a couple of issues.
   
   
   
   • They decided to be "cool" and "different" and remap the Function keys at the top of the keyboard. The new layout itself isn't horrible, but they left out the expose for a single application button and the show desktop, and moved them around. So when I want to access my dashboard on my macbook, I hit F12. When I want to on my iMac I hit F3. I could remap some of them, but they don't provide an easy way to map any keys to volume controls. To make this even more of a pain, they actually printed icons on the keys to represent a lot of the functions, so even if I could remap things, I would have to hit the mute key on my macbook to access Expose (since F3 brings up Expose on my desktop). So I'm stuck with either have two different button configurations and accurate key icons, or remapping them on one of the computers, having the icons not be actually indicative of the function on those keys, and would have to use my mouse to open my sound settings to be able to adjust the volume. Really, Apple? REALLY?! For a company that prides itself on design, this is a UI turd. (User Interface for you non-CS types)
   
   
   • In addition to mucking up the F keys, they somehow made the keyboard so it is recognized later in the boot process. While this may not seem like much of an issue, I have used Boot Camp to dual-boot my computer with windows. While I despise Windows, I do run into occasions where I find it necessary (e.g. the idiots at RIM only provide Blackberry Management software for Windows so I can't adequately backup/restore/upgrade my Storm without it). Just so happens, this time shift in keyboard recognition handily shifts it to AFTER you must hold down the option key to bring up the boot menu. So I can hold down any keys I want, it isn't even going to check them until it has gone ahead and decided to boot the default OS. In OSX, I can choose Windows to be my default, then restart, and vice versa in Windows. After some digging I found that you can use the remote that comes with it, hold down menu, and that brings it up. So they recognize the little remote that is just for playing media before the OS is booted, but not the keyboard? WTF mate? This is an APPLE keyboard on and APPLE computer using APPLE software to dual boot. They make all their own hardware!? How hard can it be to test something before you release it? I used to think it'd be cool to work at Apple, but with the quality of employees they seem to currently have on staff, I am beginning to have my doubts.
   
   


2. My second techy rant has to do with my Blackberry Storm. Apparently they have an Idiot-for-idiot hiring deal with Apple. They put 1 frickin' gigabyte of memory on the phone (which sounds awesome) then arbitrarily divide up in a completely nonuseful way. So I have a gig on board, and it comes with an 8gig microSD card. What takes up the most room on a phone nowadays? Media. So I have 8gigs to store movies, audio, ringtones, pictures, etc. Do you think I will need to store any of that on my phone? Of frickin' course not. On the phone I will have my contacts, calendar, applications and that's about it. So I have a gig at my disposal right? NOPE. The dingleberries at RIM decided I shouldn't really have too many applications so I'm limited to like 100 megs (don't feel like looking up the exact figure) of space for applications and the rest is for personal data. Do you know how many contacts and calendar events I would need to fill frickin' 900 megabytes of space? That is the most back-ass-ridiculous way to divide that space. Why divide it at all? Why do you need to limit the amount of space I can use for applications and personal data? If I want 700 megs of apps and 2 of personal stuff, so be it. If I don't want to install any apps but want to keep the entire phonebook in my cell phone (just in case) that should be my choice. An arbitrary, nay stupid, division of memory is not helpful to anyone. And to make it worse, they won't even allow their own stuff to cross the boundary! I'm trying to update the software, and it wants to only use application space to hold the update and any install files. Of course I don't have 20 megs worth of space, but I DO have 850 worthless megs of "personal storage." God these guys suck.
   

So that's the end of my rantings. This should not be that difficult. It's no wonder our economy sucks when big corps like RIM and Apple charge an arm and a leg for underdesigned crap.

Ok, I'm adding one more... WHY WON'T NESTED ORDERED LISTS WORK IN LJ! I've been trying to just make the two sub-rants of the first rant automatically be a and b, but it just ignores any indicators and always makes them 1 and 2. Sometimes technology can really be a bitch.