8BitKid: Living Bit by Bit

I came home from out of town yesterday to a rather distressing sight: where my bike usually is locked up there was no bike. Someone stole my bike (and it seems some others in my building) from out of our garage while I was up in NorCal. They just cut the lock cable and took the u-lock and all, so there wasn’t a trace of my baby left behind. I had just gotten the bike several weeks ago as a birthday present, and was really enjoying taking my beach cruiser out around Venice.

Obviously, this made me a little angry and a little sad. I filed a report with the Santa Monica Police, but I’m not holding my breath. Instead, I’m figuring out how to get a bike that can better live without the fear of behind snatched from my possession. I am looking into getting a lightweight, folding bicycle that I can stash in my apartment. I have spent a fair bit of time scouring the web reading up on the market segment. There are some definite trade-offs, but I think I found the right bicycle that mixes, practicality, nerdiness, and portability: the Strida 5.

It features a remarkably awesome folding design and weighs under 20 lbs. I’m hoping to find some time this weekend to find a dealer in LA and take it for a spin. If anyone else has a suggestion on which path I should go down, please comment away.

I try not to delve into work here, but I wanted to share that Yahoo! has finally announced my project: the Yahoo! Application Platform, part of the Yahoo! Open Strategy aka Y!OS. Check out the video below to see the keynote from Web 2.0. Pretty exciting to finally get out of stealth and be able to chat about this.

- click here to read more about Y!OS on CNet

The main way I get all of my news updates is through RSS. I use the most-excellent Growl notification application to let me know whenever a new post comes in, and I make it a point of clearing out my feeds every day. With around 50 blog subscriptions, this can take a bit of time, but it is a great way to unwind at the end of the day.

Up until this weekend, I had been using a fantastic piece of open source freeware, Vienna, as my RSS reader. It can be configured to have a column-based browse interface, which I find the most effective, and has an elegant and light-weight user interface. Also, there is an integrated browser, which means you don’t have to leave the app to diver deeper into a post. However, as the number of blog subscriptions I read has continued to grow, Vienna has started to choke. The app began to consistently freeze up when trying to refresh the feeds, and this sometimes would cause open browser tab to be lost when the app restarted after crashing. I finally got fed up with the problem and decided to find another reader.

Luckily NewsGator has made their RSS reader, NetNewsWire, available as a free download. This app can be configured to run in a similar way as Vienna, and offers the added benefit of being able to sync your subscriptions across machines through an online account. In order to get my subscriptions out of Vienna and into NetNewsWire, I just exported the OPML file from Vienna to my desktop and then imported into NetNewsWire. My one piece of advice here would be to make sure you have read all the posts in your old reader, since OPML doesn’t preserve read/unread.

Getting into the swing of things with NetNewsWire has been a painless process. It isn’t plagued by the slowdown or crashing problems like Vienna was. The one problem is that the shortest automated refresh interval you can set is 30 minutes, which is a bit long for me. You can still refresh manually, and that is a small price to pay for stability. Plus, I dig that there is an iPhone interface through NewsGator.

So, while I am sad that I can’t be supporting open source through using Vienna, I am quite happy with NetNewsWire, but will check back in with my old friend from time to time in the hope that maybe things have changed for the better.

- click here to download NetNewsWire for Mac

Flickr recently launched video functionality for the site. To celebrate, they came down to the main Yahoo! campus to host the “Faceball Executive Showdown”. You may be wondering what Faceball is, and so please check out the official site for an explanation.

I volunteered to compete in the tournament, and after beating our CFO in the first round and someone from the widgets team in the second, I was defeated in the finals by Yahoo! cofounder, David Filo. I put up a valiant fight, and rallied back in the second set, but he was a unstoppable machine and won in the end.

Check out these pictures from competition:

First off, I have two new sites to present:

Awecelot.com
I was in a Rock Band tournament at a party one night, and we entered our band as “The Ocelots”. The person running the show misspelled our moniker, and so we were down as “The Awecelots”. I thought it sounded/looked pretty cool, and so I snagged the domain. I am not exactly sure what I will do with it, but at least I have it.

BigSixSocialClub.com
For those of you who know me well, you know I am in a dominos club bearing the name of the URL mentioned above. The Big Six Social Club convenes every week to throw bones, and we now have chapters in Silver Lake, Washington D.C., and New Haven.

Yahoo! Media Player
Finally, I have launched the new version of my Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress Plugin. This new version allows you to input your Amazon Affiliate ID to monetize referrals from your site.

- click here to get Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress Plugin v1.1

So on Sunday I went to celebrate Easter at my friends’, Steve and Kristin’s, house. While it for some reason involved an unusual amount of sombrero wearing, it also brought that standard excellent food, candy, and fun. In addition, they gave me my birthday present (we celebrated the week before; I was born on the “Ides of March”). Kristin made this most awesome throwback piece for me, and I was giddy when I got it. Now to find the wall space…

This Saturday I witnessed two fantastically ridiculous events in Downtown LA: the “Pillow Fight Day” flash-mob at Pershing Square and a gigantic, block-long water slide set up for a Dodge commercial.  Check out the Flickr slideshow below to see the silliness that ensued…

As I was leaving the office the other day I was perusing the radio and stumbled across this excellent playlist courtesy of Santa Clara University’s KSCU. It was an incredibly spot-on selection given my mood, and really made the afternoon commute enjoyable. Many thanks to the DJ who exerted excellent taste and also played my request. Below is the snippet of the set recreated from memory (DJ, please feel free to correct me).

Elliott Smith: Rose Parade (thankscaptainobvious.net)
Jose Gonzales: Heartbeats
The Mountain Goats: No Children (my request)
Belle & Sebastian: Wrapped Up in Books (vaguespace.net)
Jens Lekman: Your Arms Around Me (bestfootforward.info)

Well, the Jens Lekman song might have actually been different. That was the point at which I got out of range of the station and the fuzziness forced me to switch the dial…

Shortly thereafter I found myself in the Haight-Ashbury area and felt inspired to swing by the Amoeba Music in San Francisco. While there I picked up two new albums. Check out songs from each below:

The Russian Futurists - Paul Simon, from “Our Thickness” (herohill.com)
Saturday Looks Good to Me - The Americans, from “Fill Up the Room”

If you just upgraded to Safari 3.1, you may have noticed that the Yahoo! Media Player is crashing the browser. This is due to a change in the latest version of Safari, and is being addressed and should be fixed ASAP (EDIT: this problem was fixed and pushed to the stable build as Wednesday afternoon, 3/19).

In the meantime, if you try to deactivate the current plugin (v0.3), you may encounter a problem. This is a non-fatal error, and your admin panel should return to normal through just hitting the “back” button on your browser. However, I have found and corrected the bug, so please download and install the new version.

- Download the Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress Plugin v0.4 with bug fix

Every week I venture up to the corporate mothership in NorCal, and so I spend a fair bit of time in rental cars. I’ve worked it out with Avis so that I get a Prius whenever there is one available, but occasionally they throw me a curveball. This was one of those weeks. When I got to the rental car lot at the San Jose Airport, I found this white Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible waiting for me. Luckily, it was a gorgeous day; definitely top-down weather.

Growing up, my dad always had convertibles (which he has now augmented with a motorcycle), and so I have a visceral love for drop-tops. Once I got the top down and hit the road, I was able to put the car through its paces on the 101. The seating position is a little low for my taste, but it did feel cozy. The steering was a bit loose, although the handling in general felt nimble. I don’t have the peppiest engine in the model they gave me, but it still had a pleasant acceleration curve that gets more zest in the higher gears. In general, I definitely enjoyed darting about the roads while en route to Sunnyvale.

Well, this week certainly started off on the right foot, and I’m looking forward to spending spring with some more fun rentals.