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April 28, 2005

When East met West (or Viceversa)

Nothing special about this shot. Just a couple of good friends (Jiho and Susan) hanging out instead of making their work.

Posted by jachong at 01:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 27, 2005

Why Do Puppies Grow?

Puppies should remain, well...puppies, at least on its size. I can give up the "playful" biting, mouthing, uncontrollable pooping and peeing, but don't take their mini size away!

Posted by jachong at 10:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 25, 2005

Someone's Always Watching You

Either is God (if you a religious person), The Cops (if you have a stack of overdue tickets), "BIG Brother" (if you haven't paid your taxes...yet). But always someone will be peeking over your shoulder or in this case, peeking from the back of the men's room at my office.

One of the benefits of accessing color-laser printers from your computer.

The source of such magnificent picture can be found here. Scary stuff can be found on that site.

Posted by jachong at 02:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Better Late Than...Nada!

After 6 long months we finally got 3 humble shots from Aida of our short trip to NY to meet Aida's fiancé: Alex.

Well worth the miles driven from Balto.

Addendum: One of the reasons we just got "3 humble shots" of ourselves was because Aida insisted that I would not need to take off my camera from under the seat, I guess she had it under control. Oh well. C´est la vie.

Posted by jachong at 01:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Real American Graffiti

Forget George Lucas' flick. This is the real urban-metro-station deal.

Who or what is "Ptt" anyway?

Posted by jachong at 09:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 24, 2005

Dogs' Legs (or Paws)

Never try to take a shot from a couple of over-excited-water-soaked puppies. You'll only get the least interesting body parts.

Posted by jachong at 07:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 21, 2005

Who let the Tiger out?

Our usual FEDEX morning delivery was special today...we got 8 days before the official World-wide launch our retail copy of Apple's latest OS (10.4 a.k.a Tiger).

What can I say, Jiho will have several days of bragging about it and I will only witness it from a legal-and-safe distance.

I'm sure that the guys at Cupertino are going to be pissed with their resellers-distributors.

PS. Hey Apple. Why I'm not getting any software updates today from Tiger? ;)

Posted by jachong at 12:56 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Project Flood Watch - Update

20 days ago I set a humble PayPal button asking for any monetary donation (Euros and Mexican Pesos are also welcome) for the repair of our somewhat wet basement... well, as you can see by the following image:

"Project Flood Watch" hasn't been a success...yet.

Oh well...

Thanks Jiho for the first and only donation!

Posted by jachong at 12:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 20, 2005

Slide-me-into-that-furry-show (on a flashy way)

Several weeks ago I discovered a small XML-based self-contained Flash module where you can create photo galleries in a snap...so I give it a try.

Ps1.
Don't complain about the type of photos I chose.

Ps2.
Be sure to have Flash Player v.7 installed, if you don't have it installed, strange things you might witnesss.

That's it. Continue to see the results.

Voilá!

Posted by jachong at 11:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 19, 2005

Updated Albums

The usual galleries are updated. By this time, you should now what are their contents and where you can find them.

Posted by jachong at 01:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 15, 2005

Scary Desktop

Today Jiho and I visited our local Apple Store to drop/pick up some geeky machinery. Over there, we witnessed what Apple Geniuses are facing everyday...

Also, as a visitor you will witness what some clients might claim they have a neat and organized desktop...

Posted by jachong at 03:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 12, 2005

Spring is finally here!

All over the city (and suburbia) you can find these type of trees (I guess they are dogwoods) blooming their somewhat pale flowers. I'm so glad that the winter is over.

Posted by jachong at 11:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 06, 2005

The "Now Playing" mistery

For several weeks I wanted to implement a section into my blog of what tracks are being played on the server's iTunes. It was not an easy task due to the lack of a plugin that can run on a OS X environment. On the PC side though, you can find a great plugin that can do all this written by Brandon Fuller.

Brace yourself...

What you need:

- OS X (10.3.8) I haven't test it with other versions os OS X
- iTunes 4.71
- Tracks WITH artwork, if you don't have the artwork of your tracks, a blank image will be displayed.
- The now defunct Kung-Tunes v2.2
- Holocore's OnDeck v.1.7

Putting the pieces together:

Launch Kung-Tunes, this will launch iTunes automatically:

- Prefences Menu/Upload window --> Set Kung-Tunes to save the extracted information locally into a whatevername.html file inside your webserver's documents folder.

- Preferences Menu/runtime:

- Timer: 0
- Check "Auto-start timer" and "Produce info file..."
- The number of extracted tracks is up to you, in my case I have just one.
- Check also the option to "Upload inactivity message..."

- Format Menu --> Prior to modify the default values of this section, I strongly suggest to build the page from "html" until "/html" that is going to display the art and track information, is more simple to visualize it in this way. A simple 4-row 1-column table will do the trick.

Row 1 --> **Insert here a "img src="album.jpg" width="130" height="130" border="1""
Row 2 --> Current Track Tag
Row 3 --> Blank (optional)
Row 4 --> Last Played Tag

**The artwork is going to be provided by Holocore's OnDeck.

Also, don't forget to include this tag:

"meta http-equiv="refresh" content="60""

This will refresh the content of the page every 60 seconds.

- Once you have built your page, insert the Kung-tunes tags into the proper cells of your table. Keep a close look on the usage of these, they can be a little bit confussing.

- When you're done, chop you html page and paste it into the proper sections of Kung-Tunes' Format windows, the header and footer sections are very straight forward. My Header ends with the "body" tag and my footer section starts with the "/body" tag, you know what's above and below them. The Playing, Recent and Inactivity window is filled with my now chopped table.

-Save your template and test it by pointing your browser to the page you told Kung-Tunes to save the extracted information. You should see the current track information if iTunes is running or the "inactivity message" if iTunes is paused.

Artwork, launch OnDeck and check the following

Preferences/Artwork

- Check "Look for embedded artwork"

Preferences/Information

- You don't need to modify anything here.

Preferences/Servers

- Scale to "130" (remember the tag on Kung-Tunes)
- Method --> Local
- Server Path -> to your webserver's documents folder ending with "album.jpg" (same location where kung-tunes is saving the .html file)
- The rest of the fields leave them as-is

Preferences/Behavior

- Idle sleep for 60

Function Menu

- Check just "Upload Artwork"

That's it, play a song in iTunes (preferable with artwork) and give some seconds to OnDeck to pull the image and to Kung-Tunes to generate the html. Point your browser again into the html file that Kung-Tunes generated and you should see this time the artwork being displayed along with the track information. Simple no?

This simple page can now be placed into Movable Type with a simple "iframe" tag.

As a note. OnDeck has the ability of display the track information but on my tests, OnDeck will sometimes crash when generating a html-based document.

More Extras:

If you want to have full remote control of what is being played, you can control iTunes through your browser by using DeadEnd Software's "WebRemote".

If you want also to stream what is being played, you can use Rogue Amoeba's NiceCast.

All the above software works in conjunction very well and gives you full access and control of your iTunes library...inside Movable Type.

Posted by jachong at 04:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Joy of 10:47 AM

There's nothing greater in life when you are playing with your buddies on a Wednesday at 10:47AM under 75 degrees (or 23 degrees Celsius).

Or is it?

Posted by jachong at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 04, 2005

Wishful Thinking

It's funny to see this (and others) series of posters all along Lexington's Market subway station, they have been up in the walls for several weeks now...

Honestly, I preferred the Baltimore's Police Department ads. Do you know you can make mid 30s to high 50s by working at the "force"?

Anyway, what really caught my attention were their "punch" lines, sad to see that marriage is being promoted as an investment asset or as a profitable agreement.

Cash-money baby, It ain't free hon!

Posted by jachong at 11:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 03, 2005

Chungwon's Recital Pictures

Chungwon's recital pictures are up.

For the complete series, click here.

Posted by jachong at 08:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 02, 2005

Intermitent Server

Due to the rain and thunderstorms that start falling yesterday night, I was forced to shutdown the server...

It looks that now we're just having rain, no more punishment from Thor

Oh yeah, the pier is open for business.

Posted by jachong at 11:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Karol Jozef Wojtyla

John Paul II passed away today...sad day.

It's hard to explain my feelings towards this event. I'm not a religious person, but loosing such charimastic and important personality make you feel...sad.

I do remember that on one of his 5 visits to Mexico, Roberto Carlos, a Brasilian singer-composer created a song (Amigo) that became the "soundtrack" of each of the Pope's visits to Mexico.

I'm including a one-minute preview for you to hear it, it might bring you some old memories...it might not. I'm not sure about the exact date of this song but I believe it was composed on the late 70s. Maybe someone can confirm that.

To purchase this song from the iTunes store, please click on the following image:

Posted by jachong at 04:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 01, 2005

Project "Flood Watch"

Here we go...

As you might notice from our prior posts, our basement get flooded with several gallons of water everytime we have rain. Not good.

For this reason, I decided to create a "Donation" button that will permanently reside on the right column of this blog.

This button is connected to Paypal and is ready to receive your generous donations on Mexican Pesos, Euros or US Dollars through a secure and encrypted environment. With the necessary funds (around $10,000 US dlls.) we will be able to repair our beloved and wet basement. I promise you that you will be invited for the "opening" of our basement once is dry and repaired. Unfortunately I will not be able to dedicate you a brass plaque.

PS(1). There's no mininum, your donation is NOT tax-deductible and you'll make us very happy.

PS(2). Thanks to Jiho for this lucrative idea!

Posted by jachong at 04:08 PM | Comments (0)

Go away!!

Tomorrow (Saturday) forecasters are calling for more rain on our area...that really sucks!

I guess we will have to reopen the pier.

Posted by jachong at 02:05 PM | Comments (0)

Before & After

For those who have wondered on how Bert-O will look when he becomes a "grown-up"...well, there's a picture.

Bert-O, our ultimate "poopin'" machine...

Posted by jachong at 01:56 PM | Comments (0)