Category: Blogs/Weblogs

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs

The Dropbox Phenomenon

DropboxLike many others, a while back I setup a free Dropbox account – what’s not to like about a free 2 GB of storage “in the cloud”?

On my Mac, Dropbox shows up as a folder in my Finder list of Places – it’s always right there. The Dropbox app starts automatically when I reboot – enabling all of this magic. The Dropbox apps on my iPhone and iPad enable me to easily access the Dropbox folder’s content – while I’m out and about.

On recent trips to both India and Ireland, I took full advantage of this mobile integration enabled by Dropbox. Before my flights, I dropped the key files of interest for my trips into folders in my Dropbox – and then accessed them ahead of time on my mobile devices, marking them as favorites (enabling local copies to be saved on the mobile device) and then read them while I was enroute. My laptop stayed stowed in the overhead compartment. A great use case! There are many others!

Somewhere along the way, I upgraded to the 50 GB option ($99/year) – as I quickly bumped up (amazingly) against the free 2 GB limit. Like many others, I’ve become a real advocate for Dropbox – it’s perfect at what it does. Elegant, simple, just works. Doesn’t get much better than that.

If you’re not yet using Dropbox, sign up here (and both of us will get even more storage in the cloud!). If you are using Dropbox, aren’t you also impressed?

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Web/Tech

Happy Birthday – Celebrating Nine Years of Blogging!

Turns out yesterday was the 9th birthday of this blog – with the earliest posts being made back on November 25, 2001. Next year, we’ll celebrate 10 years of personal blogging!

There actually were earlier posts – a quick look at the Wayback Machine shows an early page on October 19, 1998 – just a placeholder with no content! So the November 2001 date is really just a placeholder for the content I was able to bring across on to whatever platform I was using back then.

A page from August 1999 shows the actual beginnings of the blog – created back in those days using Microsoft FrontPage! So the true birthday was more likely back sometime in 1999 – but the cruft gets the way of actually seeing it!

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Photography

A New Header Graphic Image

Once or twice a year, I change the header graphic image on my blog – to something new that I find fresher than the old image! Over the last couple of days, I’ve been playing with some new Photoshop plug-ins and learning how to use them on some older photos in my library.

Earlier this afternoon, I picked a shot of the Blue Angels over the Golden Gate Bridge from last November to play around with – and was pleased with the result. The original photo was shot with my Canon 5D Mark II shooting in RAW. The photo was tweaked using PhotoMatix Pro and then adjusted in PhotoShop CS4.

Hope you also enjoy it! You can see the complete history of my earlier header graphic images here. To view more of my photography, see my Flickr photostream here.

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Health Lily Living Menlo Park

Some Musings on 2009

Looking back at my late December 2008 blog posts, I made a wish about simple and beautiful HDR photography becoming super simple – unfortunately, it hasn’t yet. I’ll restate what I said last year: “But it still feels like we’re living in a 1995 world when it comes to HDR photography.”

On the other hand, on this day last year I wrote about Walking with Chris – Chris Gulker to be precise. In mid-2008, Chris, Lily and I began a twice weekly 1.5 mile walking regimen every Tuesday and Thursday morning when our mutual schedules permitted.

We had a great time continuing our twice-weekly walks throughout 2009 – solving the world’s primary technology and political problems along the way – and very much look forward to resuming them next week – on the first Tuesday in 2010!

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Food and Drink Living

Over Ten Years of Blogging

I was recently reading one of Anil Dash’s blog posts and noticed he was about to celebrate ten years of blogging.

That caused me to go back to the Internet Archive and see if I could find any history of when I first started blogging. It looks like I put up a basic home page sometime in late 1998 and then started a basic blog in June of 1999 – just over 10 years ago. It looks like we started our Scott’s Kitchen blog in November 2005 – just about four years ago.

Hard to believe it’s been that long. Time sure flies when you’re having fun!

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs TypePad Web/Tech Weblogs WordPress

WordCampSF 2009 – The WordPress Community

I attended WordCampSF 2009, the WordPress community gathering, in San Francisco today – and had a great time (pictures)! Held at the Rutter Conference Center at the new UCSF Mission Bay campus, this was a most impressive turnout of the WordPress community for an all-day session of talks about blogging, having fun and, yes, about all things WordPress. Eventually, the videos from today’s talks are to be available on WordPress.tv.

wcsf-smallbutton.pngI’ve been a long-time TypePad blogger and fan. This blog, my personal website, started out originally in FrontPage back in the 1998 timeframe then moved through Manila and Radio Userland to Typepad when it launched in 2003. Recently, at work, we launched a new blog – PaymentsViews.com – and decided to try using WordPress for the first time. Bringing up PaymentsViews was a great experience – thus my newfound interest in all things WordPress and in wanting to attend today’s conference! The $25 all-in conference price made it a no brainer to attend!

Continue reading “WordCampSF 2009 – The WordPress Community”
Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Photography Weblogs

Added Slimbox2 to This Blog for Better Image Presentation

While sitting out on the back deck this gloriously beautiful Spring afternoon, I started looking at a new Mac backup utility named Persistance.  I noticed that its screen images had that nice feature where when you clicked on them a new window would open showing a larger image against a black background.  This effect has been around for some time – but seeing it again motivated me to add it to this blog – so I did.

I chose Slimbox2 by Christophe Beyls – the latest optimized version of the original Lightbox2 Javascript package by Lokesh Dhakar.<p>Installation consists of creating two new directories (css and js) and uploading a total of six files.  You then need to modify the head portion of your templates to include the Javascript and CSS files along with Jquery.  

Once those additions have been made to your templates, you can then start using Slimbox2 on your images – by including rel=”lightbox” in the reference tag.  You can see the effect in action by clicking on any of the three images included in this post from my photo/painting outing with Don Neff.


Donald Neff painting at Stanford University

Here’s another example – using a thumbnail of Don which, when clicked on, opens up to the larger image. Pretty cool!

There – now I’ve documented the change so when I try to remember how to use it again I can find this post easily!

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs iPhone 3G Web/Tech Weblogs

Creating an iPhone-friendly Home Page for a TypePad Blog

photo.jpg

Over on our Payments News blog, I’ve created an iPhone (and iPod touch) friendly version of our home page. The URL to view the iPhone version is http://paymentsnews.com/m. Here’s more about how I did it.

Basically, the process involved building on a basic template that the Six Apart folks have provided in one of their support items titled Tip: Creating a Mobile Friendly Weblog. We use TypePad’s Advanced Templates for Payments News so the process involved creating a new index template just for the iPhone page. The article contains the basic version of the index template that I started with.

Continue reading “Creating an iPhone-friendly Home Page for a TypePad Blog”
Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Mac Photography Photography - Canon 5D Mark II Work

Yours Truly Cranking Away at My MacBook Pro

Carol Coye Benson, one of my partners who manages our Glenbrook Payments Boot Camp program, hired a local professional photographer (Damon Tarver) to come into our session two weeks ago in Santa Clara. Tonight, she sent along the photos – wow, Damon did a wonderful job!

One of his pictures captured me in a very typical pose – cranking away on my MacBook Pro, probably updating either Payments News or this blog in real-time! This particular photo came from his EOS-1D Mark II shot at f/2.8, 165mm focal length at 1/100 shutter speed.

sjl-at-mac.jpg

As an aside, he was a Canon shooter like me – with Canon EOS 1’s – both an EOS-1D Mark II and an EOS-1D Mark III. I had fun talking to him at our wine and cheese reception (we do this at the end of the first day of the Boot Camp to unwind and let everyone get to know each other).

The Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens that he used to shoot me is truly an amazing lens – see my Rick Steves’ Iran photos for more examples.

Turns out we are both sort of lusting after the Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM Zoom to round out our lens kits!

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Business

Learning about Startups

Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, startups are part of the day to day evolution of business. In my consulting practice, we’re fortunate to meet with entrepreneurs regularly as they test out their ideas on grey beards like me (beware of my “tyranny of the experts” rant!)

Two good friends of mine are in the midst of pursuing new startups – one (Paul Rosenfeld) as an entrepreneur building a mobile marketing company called FanMinder. The other (Marty Zwilling) is building a consultancy called Startup Professionals that works with entrepreneurs and helps them move more quickly to success.

I first met Paul several years ago while he was at Intuit. Marty and I worked together many years ago at IBM and, more recently, at First Data. Both Paul and Marty are now actively blogging about their startup experiences – and it’s been fun for me to read and learn from their writings.