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Blast from the past. Doing some email testing & dredged up my old netscape.net address. Had to re-activate it, and the handful of messages I probably saved way back in the day were gone, and now it’s aim.com instead…but it’s still got my years-outdated contact list, including people I haven’t interacted with in a decade.

As near as I can tell, I put together the list when I was in college, and never updated it. It’s still got all the old uci.edu and geocities.com addresses.

Oh, wow…there’s a pager number in there! (Remember those?)

Originally posted on Google+

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We’ve had a couple of storms run through Los Angeles over the past week. Last Friday, I went up to the top of a parking structure after work to look at the clouds, and stayed to watch a double rainbow and the play of light at sunset.

This was the view that surprised me the most: Bright orange (a little more magenta in real life than it looks here in the photo) on the underside of the clouds, but plain gray on the sides.

Continue reading →

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Some interesting technology articles I’ve found over the last few weeks.

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Those of you who know me well, or have been to a restaurant with me, probably know I have food allergies: some serious, some moderate, and some mild. I like to think I do a decent job of navigating the minefield that is the modern food industry, and striking a balance between not getting myself killed and not hiding away in my house like a shut-in.

I carry emergency medication whenever I eat somewhere. I don’t go out for Thai food or visit restaurants that hand out peanuts like chips and salsa. I check ingredients in the grocery store, and I ask the waiter about them when I order food. If I can’t eat one item on the menu, I look for another dish that I can.

Even so, sometimes something slips through (most recently: this past Saturday) and I have to spend an anxious couple of hours hoping that the medication I’ve taken will be enough, that I’ll keep breathing and won’t have to jab myself with an auto-injector (or have someone else do it) and go to the ER. Thankfully, it’s been years since I’ve had a reaction bad enough to send me to the hospital.

I’ve also got a not-quite-one-year-old son. I’d like to spare him from having to deal with all that, if I can. And if I can’t, and he develops serious allergies like I have, I’d like to help smooth the path for him as he learns how to live with them — or, better yet, help find a cure.

So I’m participating in the FAAN Walk for Food Allergy to raise money for research and education, and I hope you’ll sponsor me. Continue reading →

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Some interesting links I’ve seen over the last few weeks.

  • Twitter Click Research: What types of tweets get the most clicks? (via @danilolee)
  • The half-life of a shared link is 3 hours on Twitter, Facebook, email or instant messaging…but twice that on Youtube.(via Mashable)
  • YouTube Founders Aim to Revamp Delicious (NY Times) – I’ve used Delicious for years mainly as a cross-platform bookmarking service, not so much as a social link sharing service, but these days I mainly use XMarks. (via Techcitement)
  • OAuth Needs Partial Authorization – as Alex King points out , many sites that let you log in using your Twitter, Facebook, or other accounts ask for too much access to your account. If I’m not going to use the service to post status updates, it shouldn’t require permission to post updates in my name.

On a related note, I’ve set up on Klout and PeerIndex, mainly out of curiosity. Their topic analysis needs a bit of work, though. Klout was convinced that my Speed Force accounts were influential about Washington, DC (rather than DC Comics) and, inexplicably, ducks. PeerIndex seems to think I post a lot about breakfast cereal.

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By now, you’ve heard that Netflix is splitting their business in two: one for streaming movies over the internet, which will keep the name, and one for renting DVDs by mail, which will be called Qwikster.

Edit: As I described it on Google+ last week:

Dairy farms get together to raise prices, putting the squeeze on your local grocery store. The local store raises their prices to cover their higher costs. People blame the grocery store.

Then the grocery store responds by spinning off a separate store. One store will only sell milk in cardboard cartons and cheese. The other store will only sell milk in plastic bottles or yogurt. This is, of course, to make your life easier.

Anyway.

Here are links to several funny (and a couple of serious) takes on the situation.