A most excellent CSE

Most people are fooled by nerdy demeanor and don't realize I have long had the love of heavy music. I will probably be That Crazy Old Guy about forty years down the road. So, here is a custom search engine (CSE) I built that dredges up information on various hard rock and heavy metal acts. I test-drove it and was pleasantly surprised, considering I've only put in a mind-boggling three preferred search sites. You can probably thank Google more than me for whatever you retrieve. Have fun.

LibraryThing: Yeah, I've got one

Oddly enough, I had a small LibraryThing, mainly of stuff I've already read this summer. I should really add some stuff to it because it is very small and highly unrepresentative of my actual bookshelf. I also have developed a problem with reading books I don't own (ie. library books!) and it would unfair to catalog those, seeing there is already a perfectly good system in place for looking those up.

Robert Fugmann Meets Andy Warhol

I am very tempted to say I am sharing my own private collection of lost Andy Warhol treasures, but I'm actually only sharing the results of me goofing around with an image generator, the Warholizer, available to all through the FD flickr toys. Go try it yourself.

Who is Fugmann anyway? Here's a short biography and here is the HTML table demonstration (the links to the other tables don't work at the moment!) where I orginally used the "normal" photo. Oddly enough, the site where I found the original photo has totally vanished. They had no idea how much it changed my life.

Testing the retrievr application

Lake Peyto - Canada, originally uploaded by Reinhard.Pantke.

Retrievr is a great idea, but it doesn't work very well. The great idea here is that you draw something and then it matches up photos from flickr that look like it. This photo is the result of me drawing a crude landscape with a built-in simple drawing program on the retrievr home page. About half of the retrieved results were landscapes and the rest were...I don't know what. Before this attempt, I tried to draw a picture of a brown cat with big green eyes and all it returned were pictures of not cats. There was one really artistic shot (read: black and white) of a cat and that was pretty much it.
Where does retrievr excel right now? Color recognition is quite good and I presume that is where they attempt to make the matches from. Either that or I need to learn how to draw better.
What do I suggest that would make retrievr better? They tell me that save all the sketches you make, but I can't seem to find the button that let's me save the sketches to my own blog/disk/whatever. I did get to rate some spectacularly bad sketches made by other users. This means all the sketches are being saved. I can only hope that the other raters who are lucky enough to see my sketches go lightly on me. I'm a pretty easygoing person, but I hope the folks who made retrievr have covered themselves on copyright issues, because I felt like I was signing away to them my hard(ly worth the time) work on those sketches!

Flickr goodies

Shadow Traffic, originally uploaded by Telstar Logistics.

Was this picture taken from a plane? Nope. Try a building. A really tall needle-like building called One Rincon Hill in San Francisco. I've seen this thing. It is very tall (and still being built, I think). You have to be made of money to live there; it's a yuppy beehive. It is funny to think that the area used to be the kind of place you didn't want to go after dark. I remember going up to San Francisco as a lil' rugrat and being scared of the industrial wastelands in that area. Now it has been "revitalized" and "sanitized" for your convenience. AT&T (formerly Pac Bell) Park, sort of to the right of this picture is a nice place to catch a game, even when the Giants are chronic losers.

Week 2: I'm a slacker! (testing things out)

I want to apologize to my wonderful group, The X Factor, that I did not complete week #2 in time. Unfortunately an excessive number of hours at the other jobs coupled with my natural scarcity at FPL. It's looking better for next week.

So I gave birth to this thing. Fitting it should be on a Saturday night, one maybe better spent over a couple ciders at The Olde Ship. Before you even start thinking it, I want to be a record as saying cider is NOT a "chick drink". When I say "cider" I'm talking about Blackthorne, Strongbow or the much missed K, not alcohol-laced apple juice like Wyder's. Uh, anyway, I digress. Blogger is nice because it ties right into my gmail account. That means one less password to memorize. I have done some blogging on MySpace, but it is pretty weak. I want to give this thing a running start in the hopes I can break free of the cyberdorm mentality.

Web 2.0 is the greatest thing since I first tried to navigate with the unwieldy Mosaic back in 1994 (between Gopher sessions). I'm glad to have an excuse this summer to play with all of these toys and maybe get a reward, edible or audible.

If you don't know me, why not visit the reference desk on Monday night?