This past weekend, I, along with thousands of others, attended Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. We drove down on Friday and headed to the Rally early Saturday. We got there early enough to get a great spot close to the stage, but a couple of us got shafted on a food run when the Park Police weren’t letting people back in, causing them to miss half the Rally.

I won’t bother talking too much about the Rally itself, as I’m sure if you care you’ve watched it online, but it was a lot of fun and I met plenty of other Redditors (thanks to the QR Code game the Reddit admins cooked up) and even met one of Reddit’s cofounders at the Reddit afterparty (I even got a shirt signed).

Estimates for the event put it at around 215,000 people, and I can believe it. The mall was packed, and from satellite photos, there were people a couple blocks out in either direction. I wish we’d had another day or so to explore the city, but we all had something to get back to on Monday, so after another ~12 hours in the car, we were back in Louisville (made much less monotonous thanks to decent 3G coverage along the interstate).

It’s been a long year, and a longer decade (don’t give me that crap about it being another year), but it’s coming to a close. I just got back to Louisville from my Christmas vacation in Asheville, NC. Most of my mother’s side of the family met up and we rented out a B&B for a few days (don’t worry, they had internet). The first day, we took a tour of the Biltmore House, which claims to be the “largest home in America,” and they’re probably right.

The biggest news from me is likely my new car, which you can (depending on when you’re reading this) probably still see in the Flickr stream to the right. It’s a silver 2007 Civic EX Coupe (5 speed). My old car, the 94 Saturn, is now being used by my younger brother. The Civic has a center console that I think would nicely house a carputer if I ever get around to building one. The cars been getting a few miles on it with a few back-and-forths to Lexington and the trip to Asheville and seems to be working fine. It even has a particularly nerdy startup message (again, see Flickr).

Also, I’ve moved this site back to my personal server and WordPress 2.9. Squarespace was a great service, but I just can’t afford to pay for hosting at the moment. The SS page still exists, but only for another day or so, I’ll be doing everything here now.

This year consisted of two internships at VMware and one Summer semester of classes. It saw the purchase of my latest overpowered desktop (Dragon, which is now in need of a Motherboard RMA due to a faulty temperature sensor) and my shiny 13″ MacBook Pro (Whelp, whose sensors seem to be working quite nicely). This was also the year I purchased a “proper” smartphone, the Palm Pre, which despite it’s problems is still a nice phone. I had my house robbed, which I’ve since more or less recovered from, lost two roommates, and gained another.

Overall, it’s been a good year. On the plate for 2010 is wrapping up this B.S. at school (and my degree, while I’m at it) and then deciding if I want to deal with another year of it for a Master’s degree.

I got back into Louisville this (or was it yesterday?) morning. I’m suffering a pretty bad case of jetlag, mostly due to (I think) being awake for 30 hours without sleep. I left my apartment around 4pm on the first and through a combination of Muni, then getting on the wrong – then right – BART, made it to SFO around 5pm. My flight wasn’t until 10:45pm, but thanks to an online promo code googled from my phone, I was able to get free access to T-mobile’s airport wireless internet service. 6 hours and a very expensive airport meal later ($16 for a turkey sandwich and slice of banana bread) I was on my first flight, from SFO to ATL. For some reason, I couldn’t manage to fall asleep, and the supposed in-flight wifi was nowhere to be found, so I entertained myself with a combination of iTunes music and Netflix DVDs until we landed at ATL shortly after 6am. By the time I found the correct gate at ATL (they only moved the flight on me once), I only had to wait about half an hour before my next flight. The wifi in ATL wasn’t provided by T-mo, and I didn’t feel like paying $7 for half an hour of internet access, so I continued to be cut off from the rest of the world. The flight from ATL to SDF was short and uneventful, and I think I may have even managed to nod off for a few minutes before we landed. From there, I got a ride back to my house and tried to stay awake, which I managed until I eventually fell asleep mid-afternoon (only to wake up again at 11pm). Hopefully I’ll be back on a normal sleep schedule by tomorrow…

Last weekend, my Thinkpad was having some trouble. Its battery was shot, the DVD drive was beginning to sound like a jet engine, and my hard drive was getting Disk I/O errors. In the weeks before that, I had started doing some Mac development with PyObjC, and I was wanting to get a machine in order to do some testing.

I looked into getting a netbook and installing OS X on it. The Dell Mini 10v, in particular, was known to work very well with OS X, at least with Leopard (Snow Leopard has since been known to work as well). I also looked into grabbing a Mini 9 (now known as the Vostro A90) and upgrading it to a 32GB SSD and 2GB of RAM. It would have come up to around $500. I decided to sleep on it and make the decision in the morning.

I wound up going out and walking around the Marina later. Guess what neighborhood it turns out has an Apple Store?

I wandered in and started to play with a 13″ Macbook Pro. Two hours later…

Oops.

Last week, I got a call from my roommate who is currently living at my house in Louisville.  He had come home to find the house broken into and quite a few things missing, among them my TV, PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii. Fortunately, my custom built desktop computer was left behind, probably due to it being so heavy.

Unfortunately, I’m basically hosed with respect to what they did take. I had never bothered to get renter’s insurance to cover my electronics, nor did I have the serial numbers to my consoles backed up anywhere to give to the police. Obviously, this will all change for me, but you can avoid having to learn this the hard way, and for relatively cheap.

If you rent a house or apartment, look into renter’s insurance. It’s relatively cheap (probably around $10/month) and will cover your belongings if they are stolen.

Secondly, keep a record of your electronics’ serial numbers. I’ve started using Evernote for this, as any information in Evernote is synced to their servers.  Without a serial number, your chances of recovering stolen property can drop dramatically.

Finally, back up your data off-site. I was lucky enough to not have my desktop computer taken, but if it had been, that would have been several hundred gigabytes of media gone. There are a couple of easy ways to protect yourself against that. The easiest is to use a service like Carbonite, which gives you unlimited off-site backup of your data for around $50 a year. If you’d rather not pay someone to host your data for you, you can buy a couple of external hard drives and back your data up to them, but you need to be sure to store that backup in a different location that your computers, whether that’s leaving it at a friend’s place, or storing it at your office at work.

As it stands now, I’m stuck paying around $1200 if I want to replace what I lost, but if I had bothered to insure my possessions, I could be paying a $250 deductible instead.

So, FlickrShow worked great… for one album. Problem is, if you want to embed more than one slideshow in a page (possible if it was say, multiple entries on a blog), you can’t. The first element will just sit there while the other shows a spinning loading icon forever.

I figured I might be able to take a look at the source, but no such luck. The code is obfuscated to all hell. This wouldn’t be as big of a problem if the original developer wasn’t completely unreachable. I’ve tried the email on his contact page a few times: nothing.

So, it looks like I might just have to create my own implementation of this. And yes, it will be open source so that other people won’t have to deal with an (apparently) dead project. Or Flash.

When I first built this site a couple of days ago, I used some freely available flash widgets to get it up and running quickly. These widgets embedded information from a variety of sources, including Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, and Scribd. After today’s work, most of that Flash content has been removed. This serves a couple of purposes. First, it removes the need of a proprietary plugin to view the site, secondly, it makes the site more mobile-friendly as most phones don’t support Flash, and third it should speed things up a bit as Flash can be something of a resource hog from time to time. Because these features are now implemented in Javascript and CSS, they’ll also integrate better with the look and feel of the site.

My new Twitter widget was made using twitterjs (Google Code Link) and the Flickr photos below it were done by tweaking the code in Flickr’s own embedding tool. The Javascript slideshow that replaced the Flash one in an earlier post was creates with Flickrshow.

There are just two things I need to port over. First, the Last.fm charts: I could just use their image charts, but I want something a little more functional than that. Second, the embedded document system that I use to host my résumé (Scribd). This is a little tougher, as I’m having trouble figuring what to do aside from just posting the link to the PDF, which I want to avoid, as I’d rather have the content be embedded in the site and not require a download.

Both of those are projects for tomorrow, however. I need to actually get some sleep tonight as I start back at VMware in the morning.

This will be my last post on collegegeek.org, as I’m moving to a new host and a new domain name.  My new blog, hosted at SquareSpace, can be found at http://blog.zachtib.com.

This site will remain in read-only mode (no new posts or comments) for the time being, and eventually the posts will be archived somewhere on the new domain.

Thanks for reading,

Zach