I’m not here.

My first Google App Engine application, espressohound, has been deployed. It’s a totally barebones espresso tasting log with almost no interesting features, but it’s at least minimally useful.

I’m tired — I’ll have more to say after I sleep on it but given the total vendor lock-in and significantly locked-down Python interpreter I’d be surprised if I spent a lot more time on this (though I do really want the espresso tasting application).

Our land — one of the primary reasons we moved — slowly creeps towards summer.

I love these purple thistles.

The tulips are almost spent but still showing off.

I found this while fixing the electric fence. I’m pretty sure it’s an oyster mushroom but I’m verboten from sampling.

An open letter to Amazon about their quality control.

Dear Amazon,

Please stop trashing my books.

Your prices are almost unbeatable and that’s why a steady stream of your boxes continue to fill my recycling bin but I’ve had about enough. At least Alibris let’s me know ahead of time which book would arrived nearly destroyed so I can buy it elsewhere.

I have no real data backing this up, but it feels as though one in four books comes ruined and it’s to the point where I open each box with trepidation waiting to see which of the precious tomes will need re-purchasing. I can travel to Israel and back by ferry, taxi and plane without so much as creasing a page in a six hundred page book but you can’t seem to deliver them from a warehouse an hour and half away without folding a cover. The pain of a trashed book lives with me for days.

I’ve heard a rumor your prices are low because you stock the books rejected by other bookstores. If this is true, please let me know, so I can stop buying books with maladies I can’t tolerate. I’ll continue to buy your mp3s and cameras, but I’ll need to shop elsewhere for books. I’m the guy who looks at every book on the shelf at the bookstore and chooses the best copy — sometimes choosing none if there’s not one meeting my approval.

I know it’s not normal to care about this, but I once purchased a brand new book to adorn my bookcase and donated the dog-eared page, bent-spine version returned by a friend to the library because I couldn’t stand the sight of it. My father reads books borrowed from me in fear. To me cars can be scratched and gardens messy but books, my books, must be pristine.

Amazon, please stop trashing my books.

thanks, brian

The video and transcript of an interview I gave at QCon 2007 are now available.

This was my first time giving a recorded interview and I’m finding it very weird to watch myself talk.

In an earlier post a commenter asked for something other than grey-on-black syntax highlighting for source code.

I originally tried using the sourcecode macro at wordpress.com but it didn’t work with my theme. I then turned to TextMate but didn’t find an immediate solution but fortunately stumbled upon Pygments which was exactly what I wanted. Here’s the highlighted source for the highlight script itself:

from pygments import highlight
from pygments.lexers import PythonLexer
from pygments.formatters import HtmlFormatter

code = open(__file__).read()
print highlight(code, PythonLexer(), HtmlFormatter(
  full=False,
  style="native",
  noclasses=True,
))

I have not upgraded to use non-standard CSS so all the color is in-lined with the tags making for a bigger page download and an ugly entry in MarsEdit — I can live with this for now.

There’s been a lot of talk about the demise of the honey bee, but we’re fortunate to have a swarming yard.

I wanted to give an old lens (Tamron 28-200 f/3.8-5.6) a try on the D40 and I was mostly happy with the results. It’s not an AF-S and as such doesn’t auto-focus so it took some getting used to manually focusing — bees are not forgiving.

I’m trying to decide between Lightroom and Aperture so this photo received more post-processing time than any other I’ve taken. As you can see I still have a lot of learning to do. I want to like Aperture, but I don’t — I do, however, like Lightroom 2 β. I’ll post when I decide.

We had the good fortune this weekend to see a number of birds of prey, including quite a few Bald Eagle sightings. There is something inspiring about seeing a Bald Eagle launch from its perch and soar over-head.