July 23, 2004
It's a tiny, tiny baby boy
day 15: yet another finger grab
Photo by snowdeal.
For the past three days i have been hitting refresh on a blog periodically to check for new entries. No, there is no lottery involved. And i do not know the blog's owner at all. And i haven't even ever heard of the blog until Tuesday.
But it's a heartbreaking and sad and happy and exhilarating and everyimaginableadjectivethatyoucanthinkof blog. It's a young dad's blog about his prematurely born baby son's progress and fight for his life and his future. Little Eric had to be born at 24 weeks of his Mom's pregnancy to save both of their lives. (Both of them are OK now.)
Go, read the blog, and bookmark it: snowdeal.org You will learn a lot, about a lot of things. About why such things happen. About the odds of survival when you were conceived 24 weeks ago and weight 0.6 kilos. About what doctors can do to such tiny babies. (E.g. they can close a hole in their heart just by giivng medications. Isn't that amazing?) About how sweet and human a baby this small can be. About how at first you cry and feel sorry for them and then realize how amazing their story is and how, you should be happy for them now, and not feel sorry at all. Things like that. And more.
PS: Oh, and that woman in Budapest? That's me. I am sending a postcard (along with all the good thoughts that I can). Are you? (The address is posted on that entry. Eric needs company in that strange NICU unit!)
July 22, 2004
Site revamp
I spent about 10 hours today rearranging this website. And voila, a new layout for the main page, a new blog (the sidelinks blog on the right), a new place for the photoblog, and general maintenance like removing the comments forms from old entries. Here is a list of the main changes:
Less comments - even though i have MTBlacklist on, i get a lot of comment spam and i got tired of having to delete them every day. So i decided to only open comments on a case-by-case basis and close all old entries for comments. I set up a mail form where you can send email if you have something cool/interesting/important to say to me.
More links - I save a lot of links in this blog that don't need much witty commentary, so i set up a sidelinks feature. The cool thing is that once i set up the Linklog archives properly (i just have to design the templates) the links will have category and date archives, so they will act like a bookmark system as well as a blog.
More photos - like i said yesterday, Flickr promises to be just the tool i needed to be able to finally have a frequently updated photoblog. The old photo category in the personal blog served as the photoblog until yesterday, but it was such a nuisance to post photos to it - resizing, cropping, uploading, inserting, layouting - that i just didn't feel like spending the time necessary to post a proper photo entry. (Which explains why the last proper photoblogging entry in that category is dated November 04, 2003...). So now, look out photoblogging world, here i come! The latest 10 photos will be listed in the center column on the front page here, linked to my photostream page at Flickr.
Plus, i decided to put the latest entry from my mktg blog on the front page as well. Now the page really reflects what this site is - and has been - all about: it's a personal blog, a link repository, a photoblog, and a marketing blog all in one. My sandbox.
I leave the comments open on this entry for now, please let me know what you think of the new layout! :)
July 21, 2004
My new flickr photoblog
Self portrait mirrored
Uploaded to my Flickr photostream.
A couple of months ago i looked at Flickr, the photo community thingamabob made by the cool folks at Ludicorp (who are responsible for my GNE addiction (see sidebar boxes)). I was unimpressed by the complicated interface - lots of features crammed into a website and some rules i didn't like. e.g if i uploaded a photo and made it public so that i can blog it from there it would instantly by available for every other flickr user and i could not undo that - i wasn't allowed to make it private again. So i left flickr and continued to sit on my heaps of photos.
Today, i gave it another try. And boy, did they revamp the whole thing since then. There are a zillion new features, the whole thing is much more usable and they dropped the stupid public or private for eternity requirement.
So, ladies and gents, let me introduce to you my new photoblog, powered by flickr!
Notice the links on the right side menu:
» Calendar view - this will give you a calendar of the last 5 weeks with one photo highlighted per day.
» idared's tags - this is one of the coolest features. Each photo can be tagged with words that act like a folder from then on, you click on a tag and you will see each photo that is tagged with that word. And, you can see all the photos tagged with that word from ALL Flickr users as well. Sounds confusing? Look at this page of the 150 most popular tags and you'll understand!
And, Flickr supports posting to MT blogs, so i will post some of the photos here as well to entice you into checking out the photoblog.
(PS: This is step one of the big blog revamp. I am reengineering this whole site because the one blog format doesn't work for me. Stay tuned.)
July 06, 2004
Urban planning and transportation blog
I should really set up a remaindered links log to store these found links...
Beyond Brilliance, Beyond Stupidity: positive and negative "developments in transportation, urban planning, design, the environment, the internet and many other vaguely related areas".
July 05, 2004
Quick notes from BlogTalk
My offtopic observations from BlogTalk 2.0, the weblog conference in Vienna:
Put a bunch of bloggers in a room with power outlets and wifi access, and voila, no matter how interesting the talk, they will be instantly multitasking: IM'ing, blogging, working, emailing, and doing whoknowswhatelse.
I was sitting in the fourth row of seats. In the three rows in front of me, each about 12 seats wide, i counted 28 laptops. Many macs, although i think PCs were still the majority.
Give the conference an international angle, invite speakers from different countries and voila, the audience will get to taste the many local versions of Windows. (I saw two speakers, one had Norwegian, the other Spanish Windows.)
And... because everybody's blogging it, there is plenty of material online already to read for those not able to attend. And collaborative notes from the sessions (Wiki). And photos.
