Gina's new book (Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day) will be available Monday, Dec 18th. Congrats Gina!

If you've ever read lifehacker.com, you know how good this book is going to be. As a coworker said the other day, "I like lifehacker. I really get the impression that she's trying to to help me."

Gina and were driving back from a day trip to Fire Island with Jim when I inadvertently made a wrong turn. I tried to convince Gina that I knew where I was going, and that eventually we'd hit the expressway as I was fairly certain that we were heading north. I said as an aside, "Were only in trouble if this road starts turn curve off in an unknown direction, because this has happened to me before, and I have found myself wandering around Long Island looking for a highway I know. The good thing about being lost in Long Island is that you'll either hit the expressway, or a body of water at some point." A few moments after I mentioned the road curving, the road we were on curved to the right. Gina, always a good sport, pretended like she wasn't concerned with my apparent lack of directional skills, but I could hear the fear in her voice.

What Gina did not know is that I have a secret weapon up my sleeve. I have the ultimate intelligent mapping device available to man. Its not GPS, or a Hagstrom map of Long Island, not even google maps, its my brother's phone number. He moves pianos around Long Island and the tri state area, and he has an uncanny sense of direction and a mental map of the island in his head.

ring, ring...

answering machine: We are not in to...

me: Matt, its Mark, if you're there, pick up...

click...

Matt: Hey Mark, what's up...

me: hey, guess what? I'm lost out on the Island, and I was hoping you'd point me toward the Long Island Expressway.

Matt: where you at?

me: I am on Connetquot Ave heading north, at least I hope I am heading north...but this road is ending, and I'm not sure where to...

Matt: ok, you'll see a little curve coming up on the right .

I look forward a bit and see the curve he has just talked about.

Matt: follow that curve around to the right, and in a moment you will see Vets Higway, take a left on Vets and it'll run right into the expressway.

me: great, thanks matt.

Matt: no problem...see you on Sunday.

...click

We follow the curve off to the right, and there indeed is Vets Highway, and in a few moments we hit the expressway.

There have been times when I have been driving with Matt and its seems as if we are lost. He'll ask me to look at a map to see where a road is running, or how far we are from some other road, but by the time I find what I need on the map, he has already sorted it out in his head. It's like the mental query he needs to run to locate a specific place takes a little longer sometimes, but then all of the sudden he knows exactly where we are, and the best way to get from A to Z. You can almost see the light come on in his head, and then we are off in the right direction.

Thank you for using broogle maps, have a nice day...

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

note: gina's IM handle has been altered to protect the innocent.

gina (6:43:03 PM): fred durst¹ is suing gawker²
gina (6:43:15 PM): link to gawker mocking Mr. Durst for suing
gina(6:43:34 PM): "subpoena the root password ³" was uttered
...
mwilkie00 (6:45:49 PM): I just IMed fred the root password, that should settle this...
...
mwilkie00 (6:50:03 PM): so what are you called when you are a lowly sysadmin to a media whore?
gina (6:50:30 PM): a monkey?
mwilkie00 (6:50:46 PM): a dirty little monkey...

1. Fred Durst is a rock star who video taped himself fornicating with a, what I imagine is a very regretful, woman.
2. Gawker is the current internet media company for who I am contracting as a Unix System Administrator and is being sued by Mr. Durst for publishing the dirty little video tape of himself and some poor women on its website. Why the entire universe isn't suing gawker for making said video public is a question for another day.
3. root is the master account on a unix system. A user with the root password has access to all files and data on that system, they are also quite l33t.

A bit late, but I have resolved to resolve. I know I have balked at resolutions in the past, but it is common knowledge that all said and done here is steeped in fallacy and deception.

I woke up the other day cranky and just plain ornery. I thought to myself, "What if I tried not to be such an ass today?" Then it occurred to me that I could try not to be such an ass in general.

Imagine now that I am standing on a mountain top, or some other large structure, not too high though, with a safety railing, because I'm afraid of heights, maybe a nice berm over at the park...hands raised, and my long golden locks flowing in the breeze...

"For the year 2005, I will try not to be such an ass!"

140 words ( counted by Text Area Word Counter, brought to you by the fine folks at scribbling.net )

I've been playing around with fotonotes lately, inspired by the cool stuff that Gina has been doing. She incorporated the overLIB javascript library with some back end GD code to create a dynamic html fotonotes viewer.

After looking at what Gina was doing, I thought there might be a way to create a dynamic html fotonotes viewer without using GD on the back end, and with some specialized javascript in place of overLIB. overLIB is awesome, but I wanted something a bit less heavy.

I incorporated a lot of the great ideas put forth in the comment thread of Gina's post about her viewer (and I gleaned a bit of javascript as well) to create a fotonotes viewer for the new photo album.

Here is the viewer at work from within' the gallery: Dog Park - Happy Dog

Here is a javascript include version of the viewer to allow me to post annotated images from within' this weblog.

My Father and his siblings

In the end, I'm just pickin' scraps from Gina's table, so many thanx to her and all the good people who posted comments to her entry.

update: some weird positioning problems in IE while scrolling a page with an image with notes, sorting it out...if you are using IE and want to see it work, go the the photo gallery. Also, the notes do not work in IE 5 for macintosh at all. I was able to sort out the IE on widows issue. For IE on mac, well, let's just say that browser is dead to me.

Gina reminisces about deleting important files, and changes her life for the better with backups.

Good thing I...um...have a sophisticated and...er...reliable backup system working here at home. Um, yeah.

So people, and by people I mean Gina, have mentioned that I have been quite political here at the pill as of late, and maybe even a wee bit angry. Honestly, I'm in a neurotic panic about the state of the union, and I am engulfed in an elephantine fear for the future of these United States of America, and the world for that matter. And, maybe, a tad bit angry.

And so the plea was made, less anger and more angus*. I leave it to the reader (I would like to say readers, but there is a direct correlation between loss of traffic and angry...er thoughtful political commentary here at bitterpill.org) to help define the future direction of content here at bitterpill.org**. Let the surveying begin:

* Angus is a cute and politically unaffiliated French Bulldog. However, I think secretly he is a Libertarian. Angus (the puppy of principle) photos to be found here.

** survey data will most likely be ignored, and content may actually veer in an opposite direction of the survey results out of spite.

Gina and I stand at Jay Street waiting for the F train:

Gina: I'm gonna peace out the yahoo mail, yo.

Mark: what?

Gina: I'm gonna peace out yahoo.

Mark: come again?

Gina: I'm gonna p-e-a-c-e o-u-t y-a-h-o-o mail.

Mark: I don't get ya?

Gina: I'm going to s-t-o-p u-s-i-n-g yahoo email in favor of the thunderbird email client (you big dumb cracker).

Mark: email?