DL

At the last moment common sense won out and I didn’t go to NY for snowboarding. I lost the money for my hotel reservations but at least I didn’t lose the weekend to boredom.

One good thing about winter is I always have a coat near by which means I can carry a small notebook wherever I go. I’ve been looking for a year round solution and I came across these notebooks made by the company that makes Molskines.

One problem I’ve found is that I tend to lose them. I’m on my third now. I don’t think I’ve lost any important notes but once I write something down I think I tend to purge my memory so I can’t be sure. I started lookling for ways to attach the notebook more securely when my girlfriend found these carabiner key chains.

Using a hole punch in the corner allows me to thread the key ring through it and even with the keyring attached the notebook still opens flat.

Now I can slip the notebook into my back pocket and clip it to my belt loop.

Pretty sweet!

I got to work this morning and decided I didn’t like the clothes I’m wearing. Individually each item is fine but I think this sweater doesn’t go with these pants. It’s rare that I think my clothes really go together, since I don’t spend that much time picking my clothes out in the morning, but they don’t often strike me as bad.

These days, my clothes selection routine goes like this. I have pants on one side of my closet and shirts on the other. I generally try to rotate them so that I don’t just wear my two or three favorites all the time. Recently worn or washed clothes go to the ends of their respective sides and the center of my closet, where my pants meet my shirts are my least recently worn. (It’s sounding a little like a smart playlist in iTunes) It would be great if my least recently worn pants matched my least recently worn shirt. I could always just grab the two items in the center and I’m done. (maybe if I had the same number of pants and shirts that would work)

I have fewer pants so I usually grab the pair that’s at the center of my closet and look for the least recently worn shirt that seems to match. That seems like a pretty low effort way to pick my clothes out, but, for whatever reason, what seems to match standing in front of my closet looks awkward later in the day.

So, being pretty geeky I thought, what about a database? I could keep a database of combos that I liked. I bet that for each pair of pants I have, there is a shirt that I once wore with it that I liked. Suppose I kept track of those combos and whenever I pulled out a pair of pants for the day I could look it up and see what shirts I liked with it.

One obvious problem is that I need to mark my clothes in some non-ambiguous way. I can’t just enter “Blue Shirt” because I probably have more than one blue shirt. Even a photograph might be difficult to make out (plus it would be a hassle to photograph my clothes).

I’m apparently not the only person to consider this:

http://www.freewarefiles.com/program_16_176_11824.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_2072439_personal-clothing-database.html

This was the first morning I found snow sticking to the streets here in Cleveland. That means it’s the inaugural day of public transportation season for me. My car will get a well deserved rest on all snowy days until spring is here.

I’ve always been amazed at the speed with which viewers would appear on pictures I uploaded to flickr. Sometimes, even late at night (I know it’s always noon somewhere) I’ll upload some photos and, as soon as the uploading is done, I’ll go look at the pictures to add them to a set or something and some pictures will already have viewers.

I don’t know how these viewers appear so quickly. Perhaps it’s just a sign of how huge flickr actually is.

I once posted some pictures of a couple friends of mine from the hessler street fair. Monday, I got back to work and I emailed her that the pictures were up there. She already knew. She said another friend of her’s had seen the picture and emailed her.

I typically put some kind of tags on my photos and I suppose many people have RSS feeds for certain tags. I wouldn’t be surprised that, after an event like hessler street fair, many people start looking for such pictures. I assume that’s how this happened.

I did solve a previous mystery related to viewers. Flickr allows you to see your photos ordered by number of views. I went to a party with a camera where most of the guests were very internet involved. I posted pictures of the party and sent the link to the invite list. Those pictures quickly became my most viewed by far.

Then, out of nowhere, a picture shot up way above the other pictures. It was a different picture from that same hessler street fair series. The weird thing is that there seemed to be absolutely nothing of interest in the picture. It was a random crowd shot. No one seemed particularly notable.

I’d link the picture here but, why give it more help?

Not only did it become my most viewed photo, but it continued to grow in views. Each week it lengthened it’s lead over the next most viewed. It’s now about triple the views of it’s next most viewed picture.

Eventually, I started googling for the name of the photo and I found that my picture was linked to from a fairly popular local blog. Mystery solved.

I assume most people come to pictures due to searches, especially tag searches. I don’t take a lot of overtly sexual pictures but I recently posted this picture of a poster that I saw on someone’s porch in Toronto.

Along with all the tags that went with the series of Toronto pictures I thought I would, partly as a joke, partly as an experiment, add the tag “Breasts”. Let’s see if that eventually moves up to my most viewed picture.

I wish I were out there

I’ve been working crazy hours trying to get a software release out the door. Hopefully it’s winding down now but the one benefit is all us developers are working in a conference room with windows. This is a 16th floor, north facing conference room with a view of lake Erie, which is pretty cool. It would be perfect if it weren’t for the federal building just north of us.

Over the last few weeks I’ve seen just about every possible summer sky including a hail storm so bad it sounded more like a gravel storm against the windows. I wish I had brought my camera in before today but here are some views from the window here.

Another plus – the air show is coming so we’re starting to see all the strange planes coming it to burke.