Thursday morning the light was amazing for a minute or two, and I snapped a few pictures off the deck.
I just ran into them while filing away the digital debris of the last week, and decided to update the blog header “while I’m at it.”
Pike Place Market, Game Zone, a gory matinee movie, and now we’re in Redmond playing Xbox. Who has more fun?
Nephew Phil is here for the weekend. While helping him install World of Warcraft on my work PC (God help us all), I’ve been learning about the Flash animations that are popular with 6-foot 13-year-olds who wear size-16 shoes.
I’ve been so busy this week. If you’ve sent me personal email, I haven’t seen it yet. But we had an Open XML workshop that was fun (more on that later on the work blog), and I recorded a couple of videos yesterday with my friends Wouter (shown here) and Julien. We set up the Xbox room over in Building 20 as “Doug’s World,” as a nod to Wayne’s World.
I’ll post the videos soon. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help noticing how much Wouter and I look like Wayne and Garth. Especially Wouter.
What resolution is best for images on blogs? Everyone has an opinion, and mine is that 1024×768 is ideal. That’s the resolution I use whenever I put up a series of pictures, or for the full-detail versions of thumbnails.
I used 640×480 consistently up through 2001, and I used to brag on my About page that “no page on Mahugh.com is larger than 100K total.” Then in 2002 I decided to go to 1024×768 because I wanted to show more detail and higher-resolution monitors were becoming more common. And fewer people use modems now, especially in developed countries. So the file size of up to 300K for a typical 1024×768 photograph isn’t an issue any more for most people.
This evening I was playing around with my blog stats for the first time in quite a while, and I looked at browser resolution. It turns out that the empirical data confirms that 1024×768 is still ideal:
1024×768 images are ideal for the single largest segment of visitors, and fit nicely on the next most common resolution as well. Another way to look at optimum image size is “what percentage of visitors are downloading a level of detail that they can’t see on their screen without scrolling?” That’s just the 800×600 (5%) and the 240×320 (1%) — so only 6% of visitors would benefit from reducing the resolution from what I’ve been using.
I’ll stick with 1024×768 for now.
I decided to make today truly work-free from dawn to dusk. Heck, everything-free; I’m due for a re-charge. So we slept in really late, slipped out to Columbia City for lunch, and have been lounging around at home reading and not doing much of anything. Haven’t had a day like this in a long time. Feels good.
The book I’m currently reading is “Blackwater: the rise of the world’s most powerful mercenary army.” I’ll write it up when I’m done, so won’t say much about it yet. It’s about guys in black t-shirts, so I felt a personal connection. If you’d rather just watch the movie, most of the chapters are on YouTube.
Speaking of war-on-terror topics, Karen Greenberg has a fun piece on how to write about Guantanamo over on TomDispatch.
Time for another beverage, I think. The night is young.
The night that they had the fireworks celebration for the departing Queen Mary, Gray and I had dinner outside a restaurant/bar near this sculpture.
The President’s trip to Sao Paulo, as told by various news organizations as of this evening:
No time to write anything today, but I liked these images so decided to post links to them. Enjoy!
I’ve always been a tidy-inbox type, but I was starting to fall well behind at the end of last year. I spent November working long hours before a trip to Paris. “I’ll get caught up on email over the holidays,” I thought in early December, when I returned from Paris with things a bit out of control.
Then we had a 6-day power outage, relatives here over the holidays (fun, but not much email time), and suddenly mid-January was upon us, email still a mess, and then … Wikigate. A new level of email madness, following by an extremely busy trip to India, a short stay at home (including an internal conference at which I spoke and other distractions), then a trip to Australia.
During Wikigate, I just gave up on getting anything other than the top X handled each day. When you get X emails a day, handling the top X is called “being responsive.” But on a day when you get 100X emails, handling the top X leaves a lot of people feeling ignored. And once you get used to ignoring lots of people, that can snowball
Anyway, as of this morning at 10:00 my email in-box had 1588 items. These were all non-spam: messages addressed to me or messages I had copied from a DL’s folder to my in-box because I felt I should act on them.
I spent all afternoon and evening taking a pass through every message in the in-box, responding to those that just needed a quick response, deleting some outright, filing archival ones into folders, and so on. Most of the responses I sent out started with things like “My apologies for the long delay in responding, but I’ve been traveling more than usual and have fallen far behind on email.”
I now have 349 emails in my in-box, all ones that require more than a few seconds to handle. Tomorrow’s another exciting day.
