other sites of mine.

Apparently, my LiveJournal has been one of my best-kept secrets for the last 3 years. My wife is the latest among friends and family to ask me about it with a certain amount of surprise.

I have a MySpace account, too. I should probably get that out in the open again, even though I didn’t think I was hiding it. (Check the elsewhere page for more poorly-hidden secrets.)

Anyhow, this came up because I’ve started using LJ as a place to archive my Twitter stream via a service called LoudTwitter. LoudTwitter batches tweets and lets you post them into blogs, much like del.icio.us. Since I’ve already tried that experiment and didn’t like the result, I used my dormant LJ as a Twitter archive.

I think it works pretty well — easier to read historically, certainly — but would like to know what you think about it.

I’m trying another experiment: Appendix A.

I want this site to be clean, tidy, with a high signal-to-noise ratio. But that desire sometimes often nearly always conflicts with my desire to share a whole bunch of neat stuff with you. The desire to centralize online stuff can distort one’s focus. So, I’m trying out a separate Tumblr site (yes, again) to post those links, removed from the main flow of this site.

The name comes from one of my favorite books, which makes copious use of appendices. I think nearly half of the book is appendices and footnotes, and some of them are better than the source material! So, I figured it was about time for my own addendum.

It’s only a few days old, but I’d love to know what you think about it.

I launched a new website today, Sent from my iPhone. It’s on the new v3 Tumblr platform, and is intended to be a photographic equivalent to Twitter. For whatever that’s worth.

Working with Tumblr, I can really see the appeal of the platform. It’s seriously easy to use. I spent a little bit of time tinkering with designs, and the underpinnings are similarly easy to work with.

I’ve added the photos on to the main page (now on version 7.12!), but will keep them out of the main feeds. I recognize that short-form photography — is that even a term? — is not for everyone.

Anyhow, enjoy.

First, after a long hiatus, Flotsam and Jetsam makes a triumphant (if short) return with The iPhone Widower.

Second, you may be interested to know that my mom sells more iPhones than I do; it’s The Early Adopter Paradox, over at Nobody Wants a Styl.us.

And finally, I let my Flickr pro account expire and am looking at other options again. Please let me know if this inconveniences you (as the full-size photographs will no longer be available for download. Flickr gets you like that.)

You should probably go read ICEing Your iPhone over at Nobody Wants a Styl.us, even if you don’t have an iPhone.

New Flotsam is up: stickers.

(I sure don’t post there very often, do I?)

Dear ext3,

I’d like to thank you for the fantastic improvements you’ve introduced over ext2, like your ability to render deleted files completely unrecoverable due to your wonderful ability to zero out all of the inodes.

I understand that this helps you recover better from crashes. Congratulations!

I also understand that this makes all of those pesky user errors, where someone types the wrong rm -Rf command, which never happens, absolute. When a user makes a change on an ext3 system, that change is made! Huzzah! And you’re the default on most new Linux installs! Good for you. Glad to see you’re getting ahead in the world.

It’s probably a good thing that they don’t mention that files are unrecoverable from you when they install you, right? I mean, that would be embarassing. And we can’t have that!

Now, instead of using all of those ext2 utilities - you know, those ones that all those linux distros swear will still work with you - I can learn to make peace with watching loved ones lose years of work in such a way that even throwing thousands of dollars at the problem will not solve! Now I get to learn how to scrape the binary off a disk, once we determine what the header and footer of obscure astronomical data files are and talk to the very nice developer of PhotoRec to please add them into the supported filetypes.

Because, you know, I really was getting kinda bored, what with the life and job and family and whatnot.

Thanks again!

Cheers,
Brett

P.S. I‘m switching everyone I know to HFS+ or ZFS. Even FAT32 is lookin’ pretty good in my book now. But don’t take it personally!

(Crossposted to my LiveJournal, because sometimes I actually do want comments and advice. That’s why I have a LiveJournal.)

Flotsam: little boy.

New Bookdragon Tale: Murder in Mesopotamia.

New Bookdragon Tales: The Truth About Everything.

New Bookdragon: The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power

Bookdragon: Unfinished Tales, Part I

New Blue Lamp Cafe: Sweet Potatoes

Bookdragon: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Bookdragon: The Guardians of the West.

New flotsam, with continued apologies to my wonderful wife: dry monkey.

New Flotsam: switch.

Mostly-new Flotsam: today.

New Flotsam: victory!, wherein I teach Trip his first four-letter word.

Long overdue, but I finally had some time this weekend to pick out some of my favorite photos of my family.

New Flotsam: gardening III.

New Flotsam: hello, world.

New flotsam: whoosh.

A funny thing happened a few hours later; when talking to my boss, he made that exact noise over the phone. It’s like a secret handshake of fatherhood or something.

New Flotsam: plus.

New Flotsam: revelation.

New Flotsam: more gardening pictures.

New Flotsam: the garden wall.

Now, if you will excuse me, I will go take a nice hot shower.

New Flotsam: message.