Keeping productive

Went out on my bike after a little rain this evening. Took two cameras with me and took some shots. Nothing serious. Nothing crazy. Just enjoyable.

'95-'99 Nissan Maxima: Front Oxygen Sensor Install

Yesterday, I decided to finally get rid of that nasty "Check Engine" light that's been on in my dash board for a while now. I ordered two Denso OEM-fit oxygen sensors for my 1996 Nissan Maxima from SparkPlugs.com for a total of about $108.

It took only a few hours and was a fairly simple process. If you have basic tool/automotive knowledge, the installation on my particular vehicle was pretty much a breeze.

I took photos of the whole process and created a sort-of writeup/picture story over at my Flickr page. Enjoy.

Some BarCamp Orlando 2008

I'll open with a little graph showing Orlando gas prices (based on my personal purchases) from May 2006 to May 2009. The peak is about $4.13/gal and the valley is about $1.56/gal.

Awhile back, my house, road, and neighborhood showed up in Google Maps, but have since disappeared from the database. I finally found a way to help solve that problem, here.

My friends Mark and Yossi, back in 2008, turned me on to a nation-wide phenomenon named BarCamp, which is "an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event." They came to Orlando and we all attended the 2nd annual BarCamp Orlando. I have had hand-written notes from various talks I attended sitting in my notebook for over a year now, so I think this may be a good forum to archive at least some of the interesting ones.

"Photoshop Techniques" by Mark Cambell [ArtsMC.net]

• Use a single marquee for repeatable backgrounds
• Utilize Actions for batch processes [link]
• Tutorials and etc... [link]

Misc. Links

• Aviary - Online image editing tools
• Society of Like-Minded Individuals
• Florida Creatives Group

Not much to write about that first year, but I attended this year's BarCamp Orlando 3 and it was fantastic. Check the official site for links to PowerPoint presentations, Flickr-hosted photos, and other discussions.

First Post: Yes, I've Joined the Herd

As I more and more realize how much I enjoy reading friends', family's, artists', photographers' blogs, I figure I should reciprocate if possible. My aim for this blog, if I can keep it going, is to post things that I learn, find interesting, and think others may also be interested in.

I believe that this host has given you, my reader, the opportunity to subscribe to this Blog through an RSS feed. Please, use that, because I have found it so useful in the past.

For a while now, I have been using a Firefox browser plugin called Ubiquity. It's a great, almost natural-language, plugin that allows you to streamline many of your online activities without ever leaving the keyboard. I have been interested in creating a skin for this plugin for some time and finally sat down this evening to iron out all the kinks in its CSS. I call it "Kiwi."


I'm proud of how it came out, but more so of how I managed to pull this off in an evening, especially with my coding skills being so very rusty. On a similar note, I have discovered that, in preparation of the upcoming CSS3 standards, both Mozilla and Apple's WebKit have begun to support the border-radius style, which will allow normally very rectangular tables and objects to become fluid and, in some cases, even oblong or circular. I have also found a fairly good illustrations (1, 2) of the CSS box model, which had me conceptually confused for quite the longest time.

I've requested a few CSS guidebooks from the Orange County Library with hopes of finding the time soon to revamp my personal website/portfolio. Exciting times to come.