Hi. Welcome back. Excuse the mess, this blog has been unattended for several months now, but now once again you get to enjoy a breathtaking display of literature by yours truly. Ok, it’s more like a few words coughed into my keyboard, which I’m hoping will make any sense, but I know they most likely would make all my english teachers curl into a ball and cry like newborns.
What better time than 4 in the morning to clear the cobwebs from the Wordpress backend and drop a few lines here, eh?. Specially since I have to be up in a few hours, and preferably not looking like I wish I was still in dreamland. But for some odd reason I felt the urge to bring this blog back from the dead now. I guess I’m just weird like that.
I spent last weekend (a long one, 4 days) in Chile. Holy mother of god was it a fun fun fun trip! Me and a friend spent two crazy days in the city of Valparaíso, where we partied with crazy hostel people from around the world (mostly north america really) and walked up ridiculously steep hills to see Pablo Neruda’s house. That cop wasn’t kidding when he said “but you want to take a cab up there!”. The remaining 2 days we spent in Santiago, where even more hills awaited us. We decided to walk up or down most of them. You’d think we were freaking masochists. But at least we also met a really nice fellow from New Zealand who just happened to be paragliding across south america. He and his fianceé were taking a friend for her first flight, and they asked us if we wanted to tag along. Hmm, let me think… DUH!!. I love that sort of crazy experiences.
I also got to introduce my friend to the Starbucks iced white chocolate mocha. We picked up two large ones (large as in really big, not as in the stupid Starbucks cup size names) at the airport, and I’m now thinking it may have been a bit too much, as we boarded the plane in a sugar-rush induced giggles fit. We were like stoned schoolgirls, only smellier and gnarlier and… nothing like schoolgirls really. This incident made my friend come up with the name Mocha loca, and you can imagine how much that silly thing made us laugh.
There are more pics on my Flickr, and there are some videos that I may use to bring the vlog back to life as well. Could you start seeing some more regular activity on this website? Maybe, just maybe…
The home page of this website shows most of my online activity, but the RSS feed was lagging behind; it only showed the blog posts. Both Flickr and Del.icio.us provide RSS feeds, so how hard could it be to mix the three in one big feed? Turns out not at all, thanks to Yahoo Pipes
I had heard of the service but never tried it. I never really had a use for it. I have to say the interface is extremely cool. Being a visual guy I was very impressed with how you can manage your feeds easily as a diagram, pipes included!. What I did was the following:
- Grabbed the Wordpress blog feed with the “Fetch feed” module.
- Run that through the “Regex” module, to add “Blog post:” before the title. The syntax I used (I got it from somewhere else, I have no idea about regex!) is In title replace (.*) with Blog post: $1.
- Repeated the process for both the Flickr feed and the Del.icio.us feed.
- Merged all 3 feeds with the “Union” module.
- Run that main feed through the “Sort” module, to sort all items by published date. The string I used was Sort by y:published in descending order.
- Sent that to the Pipe Output, save the pipe and run it through Feedburner, replacing my old feed.
I wanted to do an extra step, adding the link URL to the description on the del.icio.us feed, but I couldn’t find a way to do that from within Pipes. I probably could with an extra step (maybe run it through Feedburner first?) but I don’t want it to get too complicated.
So if you notice some glitches on this feed it’s because I did all this. It should be pretty seamless though.
Edit: the only problem is that the feed title links to my Yahoo Pipes page instead of my website. I think you can change that on feedburner, but I can’t find it (anyone?). If I can’t fix this I think I’ll have to drop Pipes and use only Feedburner to merge my feeds. For now it’ll be pretty much the same, but I’m planning to add another feed in the future and it would be tricky withouth Pipes.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo Pipes, Feedburner, RSS feed, RSS, RSS merge
Well, actually I have been back for 5 days now. But I haven’t had time to write anything. I wanted to have something else than the latest post showing up on the home page so I figured I’d take 5′ and write some lines.
Podcamp Boston was awesome. So was New York. This was more of a people trip than a places trip. My goal was to see people; new friends, old friends I haven’t seen since PAB, and old friends I had never met. I was going to do some name dropping but after the 4th time of realizing I was forgetting someone I decided to refrain from it. I’ll just say that it was more than worth it the 30 hour trip there and the 26 hour trip back. I’d… no, I will do it all over again!
Photo by Bob. Saturday night at the Hilton Logan, calling canadian podcasters. Lots of fun :)
I’m now communicated during my stay in the US, courtesy of Virgin Mobile (well, I did have to pay them…). Reach me at
(617) 304-5543
I also get Twitter direct messages there.
Podcamp Boston 2 is underway!!
Technorati Tags: Podcamp Boston 2
Thursday at around 10:30 am the shuttle picks me up to take me to the airport. I’ll arrive there at 3pm, check in, and get on board by 6pm when my flight takes off. Friday at 8am (which would be 9am at home) is when the flight arrives in NY. I’ll get my bags and go straight to catch the first shuttle to Penn Station. Once there I’ll get on the first train to Boston. There’s one at 2pm but hopefully I’ll make it to an earlier one. I should be arriving in Boston around 6pm at the latest, 32 hours after leaving home. Then I have to go straight to the hotel, hop in the shower quickly and head down to the convention center for the Podcamp kick-off.
But you know what’s the worst? I actually like this shit…
Edit: I couldn’t make a train reservation because stupid Amtrak refused to take my card. I booked a flight instead. Not much more expensive, no dragging my bags through half of NY, free wi-fi at JFK courtesy of JetBlue and the total travel time goes down to a tad uder 30 hours. Not bad at all.
Yes! Thanks to all the airmiles I racked up during the year I was able to find a flight to NY for a really low price. It had been a race between my decision to go and airfare. I decided to go, then the flights had gone up a bit, so I thought about it a bit more and decided it was still worh it, then the prices were even higher, and so on till it was just too expensive. But this sunday I found that tiny little link on the airline site. “Buy airmiles”. It had been hiding from me all this time, I swear. I clicked on it, entered the number of miles I needed and felt my eyes grow big as I saw the price. I can afford that!. In 12 hours I had all the arrangements made and the ticket bough.
This is going to rock so hard. See you at Podcamp Boston!
Technorati Tags: Podcamp Boston 2
Cleaning old drawers can be an interesting experience. That’s what I did yesterday. Among the guzillion things I tossed out (I clearly have a problem with letting go…), I found the following:
- 4 US Dollars, 2 brazilian Reais and 25 Uruguayan pesos.
- Several old photos of me. Around 1999-2000 I was F*@%ING THIN!!
- A reciept for a Walkman I bought for my birthday in 2000. I paid $99 for it. The exchange rate then was $1 ARG = $1 USD. Now it’s $3.10 ARG = $1 USD.
- A reciept and some bills from my first cell phone (photo 1). I remember I had to carry two batteries if I wanted to keep it running for a whole day. Not that it mattered, no one ever called me anyway.
- A photo I took in photo school, with a pinhole camera I built out of a shoe box. I tossed out a whole bunch of photos from then, but I had to keep this one. (photo 2)
- Several 1.44″ disks. I own two computers (one of them 5 years old) and none of them has a 1.44″ drive.
- The user manual for Need For Speed 1. They recommended a 90MHz computer. The Mac Mini I got recently is 40 times faster than that.
- Two old pair of glasses. Including my first pair. Way way bigger and nerdier than I remembered (nope, no photos of this).
- Two letters from one of my friends from photo school. Reading them now it was pretty obvious she was into me. But of course, being the big dork I am I didn’t realize at the time. *facepalm*.
- A “Give me coffee and no one gets hurt!” sticker. Now on my laptop. (photo 3)
1. 
2. 
3.
My friend Chris submitted an awesome shirt design to Threadless and it got accepted, so now he needs some votes to get it printed. You need to go vote for his design. It’s totally awesome and I totally want one.
And I know, I totally sound like a valley girl. What-ever…
Technorati Tags: threadless, Kaflooey
I just came across this story about how Virgin Mobile Australia is using flickr photos on some of their ads, and how they are now facing a law suit. From the article:
On the billboard, Alison’s friend has vanished and so has the Adidas logo on her hat. Her image is accompanied by a mocking slogan — according to the ad, Alison is the kind of loser “pen friend” (pen pal) whom subscribers will finally be able to “dump” when they get a cellphone.
Someone saw this ad on the street, took a photo and uploaded it to flickr. As he points out, the ad rightfully credits the photographer with a link, as the Creative Common license requires, but the problem now is the agency would have also needed a model release.(Well, turns out the photographer had a non-commercial license after all, but that’s another story)
But the law suit isn’t what caught my attention. It was the reaction of the photographer to this. While the model was obviously concerned about the use of her image in a demeaning way, the photographer asked:
“where was this? do you think virgin mobile will give me stuff?”
Give me a break. How about worrying how your stuff is being used instead of trying to get free stuff? And how about making sure you choose the right license type for your online content? All my online stuff is under a Creative Commons non-commercial non-deriv license. That means that, if you give me credit, you can use my images as long as it’s not for a commercial purpose, and you can’t modify them.
Are you sure you know where your photos are?
Technorati Tags: flickr, virgin mobile, creative commons
