mattlary's weblog

Ryan pointed me to vimeo‘s new HD programming; it’s pretty sweet.  Below is a nice time lapsed city video; you might want to go right to the vimeo site to get a larger view.

I can’t sleep.

I started three or four blog posts tonight, but decided to ditch them all.  In summary:

1. Charlie Wilson’s War was a good movie and I have forgotten everything I knew about cold war politics.
2. Calin and I went on a two week journey across the state, saw Wicked, got lost in Manhattan the next day, ended up in Brooklyn, and found a cool aquarium in CT. The rest of the last two weeks were at various Christmas celebrations, and on Friday I went back to work and found out that everything I was working on is broken.
3. Tumblr seems cool, but I don’t want to change blog systems (again).
4. Yahoo disabled my account for no apparent reason so I can’t login to flickr to upload pictures.

I guess that’s it for now.  Back to work tomorrow- nobody will be there so maybe I can get some work done.

I had the mechanic look over the car- he said it looks fine other than dirt and grass wedged under my heat shield, and that it should be safe for travel.  His professional recommendation was that I stay out of ditches from now on: “You need to remember that you have a Subaru, not a Hummer”

I wish I’d taken a picture, but I managed to get my car in a deep ditch today- Calin and I were driving home from church when the car started fishtailing. I tried to compensate and thought I was handling it pretty well, but then I saw a car coming in the opposite direction and stupidly touched the brake which caused the car to go sideways and into a steep ditch.

Maybe it was the spirit of Christmas, or the fact that I’m off work for two weeks, but I didn’t freak out, curse or anything- just calmly called AAA and they got the car out.  We were also fortunate that some church friends saw us and waited for the tow truck with us.  We also got a visit by a Monroe County Sheriff’s Deputy who kept calling me “Bubba” for some reason.

Now I just need to see if I can have the car looked at before we leave for vacation- it should be fine, but I’d still feel better if I can have someone look it over to make sure I didn’t break anything during the fall.

I’ve been pretty excited lately about QR Codes.  Basically they’re 2 Dimensional barcodes that can store data such as URLs, contact info, or anything else.  The really cool thing is that camera phones (with reader software installed) can read and decode these codes, and can then send the user to the URL contained within, or add the contact information to the user’s address book.  There are also several generators available online so anyone can create codes.  The code to the left contains the URL for this site and was quickly generated at http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

QR Codes are not new, and they’re not the only 2D codes out there, but they’ve had some success in Japan, and I think they have a lot of potential here.  From what I’ve read in passing in articles and blogs about the technology, Microsoft has been experimenting with it, as is google.

The potential for the technology is huge; I envision these codes being placed on posters, advertisements, business cards, and any place where someone might want more information.  Imagine a world where you can always find out more by just pointing your phone at a poster or something- a concert poster for example can contain a QR Code that links directly to information about the concert being advertised, or a bus stop sign could contain a QR Code that links directly to up to date schedules and route information.

Unfortunately two things will need to change for this to take off- firstly, the mobile phone manufacturers and/or service providers will need to start including this software or making it free and easy to get it- right now only a handful of phones allow users to install their own software.  The second thing that needs to change is that data plans need to be cheaper so users can utilize the URL decoding.  So keep your fingers crossed- this could be really cool!

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/tpa/409930561.html