12Dec / 2006

And so it is

I caught an excellent Damien Rice concert last night at the Orpheum. The Swell Season were a funny and great opening act and Damien rocked out to a heavy metal version of The Blower’s Daughter that I thought was amazing. However by the look on the faces of most everyone else in the audience they seemed shocked by it, I think most people came to hear him play The Blower’s Daughter just like it was in Closer.

Damien Rice @ The Orpheum in Boston

Last.fm and Tourb.us are doing a pretty good job of letting me know what shows are in town. Plus they don’t spam me with emails I can’t opt out of. Tonight I might catch Cirkestra playing at the Middle East Upstairs, they were also featured on WBUR this morning.

Both last.fm and tourb.us give RSS feeds of your “Events I’m attending” list which I’m hoping Mugshot will hook into soon so friends can swarm around interest in going to a show they might not have know was happening. I clicked that I was a maybe for the Damien Rice show months ago but didn’t know who else would be interested in going to see him.

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08Dec / 2006

Mashing Google Calendar and GNOME

I never used to be much of a calendar person, usually I’m late to everything and never know if I’m free for a weekend or not. But since Google calendar came out I started using it pretty regularly and I think it’s actually improved my ability to be punctual and organized… well probably not, but anyway.

My Google Calendar

One major benefit I find to using this calendar versus one on my local system is that I can have GNOME import my calendar locally via the iCal and still access and use the calendar via the web interface any other time.

To set it up I went to the manage calendar page for my personal calendar. I had to right click copy the link location since they don’t give the iCal link in webcal: url format. Then open a terminal and type this, replacing $URL with the url you copied for your iCal.

/usr/libexec/evolution-webcal $URL

My Personal Calendar Manage Page

And that’s about it, the little webcal dialog will ask you silly questions about your web calendar settings and it’s imported into evolution-data-server. I don’t even use evolution anymore, but the calendar portion works just the same. I only ever view my calendar out of the calendar widget, all my updates and additions are done in Google calendar.

My Calendar Widget

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06Dec / 2006

A Premium Night at the Movies

Miguel: There’s possibly an economic solution to avoid your movie watching problem.

Those are students who don’t have money and you’re a working professional who does. You might like to try the Premium Movie Theater out in Framingham. Ticket prices are 13 and 18 for Matinee and regular respectively. You need to be 21+ to get in and they serve food and drinks you can take into the film with you. Plus it’s outside the city where no student would really travel for a movie.

I don’t go there very often because the overall cost is pretty expensive, but if I really want to enjoy a movie quietly (i.e. you’re not watching snakes on a plane) it’s a good place to go. Of course they do only have a limited selection of movies as well as often require reservations. Not worth quitting your spy job over, but it’s still good.

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05Dec / 2006

Upload and Share on the go (without all that hassle)

I’ve been encouraging lots of people lately to get setup using various services from their mobile phones… because it’s fun. If you have a mobile phone with an ok camera and some data access you can do it too.

Look at me I’m working from the OLPC offices today

Here’s how I’m working it.

I added both my YouTube and Flickr accounts to my Mugshot Page and Mugshot does the polling of my accounts notifying people when I upload new things. With Flickr you can upload by email and with YouTube you can setup a mobile profile. Tada, now when I upload a new photo or video I don’t have to worry that they have the right phone or cell plan to see my stuff. And Mugshot just makes it so everyone else doesn’t need a corresponding account at all the places I have, or that they log into them regularly to see what changed.

I hope owners dont really look like their dogs

And I brought my dog to work

For a while I was trying to send camera photos around using SMS, but it never seemed to work. If someone was on a different network or phone didn’t allow photos or evil monkeys stole the message it wouldn’t seem to be delivered. However when I upload it to a site I can assume people will see it eventually and I can use the photo or video later in a blog post… like this.