Schmap

Posted on August 7, 2007 by Rob

Sendlinger Tor AreaI hadn’t heard of Schmap before, but they decided to use one of my Munich photos from Flickr in their guide. The photo they chose isn’t an especially good shot, but they only display it at a maximum width of 150 pixels, so most photos will look decent at that size.

It seems to be a great guide for tourists. It will display a map of a city, using Yahoo! Maps, with marked points of interest. You can select a destination, read a description of the area, and view a photo chosen from Flickr. Points of interest include everything from neighborhoods and parks to museums and pubs. It also has information on walking paths, cultural events, and dining recommendations. It seems like a really good resource, and I’ll try to make use of it on my next trip. It has fairly wide coverage in Europe, North America, and Oceania, but only in major cities right now.

Choosing photos from Flickr, with permission from the photographers, is a terrific idea. Not only do they have access to photos from all over the world, but they receive an enormous amount of word of mouth publicity from it. Most people are more than happy to let them use their photos, and most people, like I am today, will link to their contribution. Free photos and free marketing. Pure genuis.

Posted in Travel | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Two Fantastic Animated Shorts

Posted on August 6, 2007 by Rob

A Gentlemen’s Duel
Whoops, it appears this video was a copyright violation and was taking down. If you stumble across it in the future, have a look. It really is fantastic.
[via]

Kiwi!

[via my still weblog-less friend, Chris]

As a side note, what’s with WordPress’ awful post formatting? I moved to WordPress from Movable Type, and I’m incredibly happy with everything except its post writing forms, which is unfortunately a large part of a content management system. If you’re trying to embed an object or do anything with DIVs, it will just auto-format your post into an unintelligible mess. Here’s a tip for future CMS coders: if you’re going to offer a straight HTML entry form, do not auto-format the HTML I enter. It’s like giving someone the choice of what movie they’d like to watch, only to switch it to Glitter five minutes in. Just let me do what I want, you damn system!

Posted in Media | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Halo Short Fiction Contest: Results

Posted on August 6, 2007 by Rob

The fiction contest being held at The Clarity of Night, mentioned earlier, has now finished.

I had no idea the contest would grow to be so large. Over eighty people submitted entries, and I was really surprised by the quality of their work. Everyone was commenting on each other’s pieces, and it turned into a cool little writer’s community.

My entry didn’t place, but it did receive an honourable mention, which I suppose means I just missed out. I’m quite happy with that, after reading the rest of the entries. Overall, it was a positive experience. There were a lot of inspiring pieces, and people left quite a few encouraging comments on mine.

I’m going to keep my eye out for other contests. It’s a nice way to experiment with some shorter fiction.

Posted in Wordage | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The Joy of RSS

Posted on August 2, 2007 by Rob

RSSI know a few of my friends aren’t yet making use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, so I thought I’d write a little post to help drag them into the 21st century. Even a programmer friend of mine, a technically-savvy individual, is still using bookmarks for his news sites and comics. Bookmarks! How embarrassing!

If you frequent more than three websites, you should really be using RSS feeds. For those who haven’t heard of it, RSS allows websites to publish content to feeds that can be monitored for updates by feed readers (aggregators). If this seems confusing, don’t worry – you don’t really need to know how it works, just how to use it.

As an example, if you add looselogic.com to your feed reader, every time I write a weblog post it will automatically display in your reader as an unread entry. Once you’ve finished reading it, you can mark it as being read, much like you would within an e-mail client.

The first decision you need to make when choosing a feed reader is whether to use a web application or a local application. I prefer to use a web application for this, since you can access it from any computer and keep your settings. With a web application, if you mark everything in your feed reader as read at home, when you check it at work those entries will still be read. If you use a local application, you’ll have to install it on each computer you want to use, and they won’t be synchronized with each other.

The two web applications I’ve used are Bloglines and Google Reader. I started with Bloglines and recently moved over to Google to give it a try. Both applications are great, but I like how Google only marks the posts you’ve scrolled over as read, where as Bloglines will mark the entire feed as read as soon as you click on it. Luckily, you can export your feeds, with any directories you’ve created, into an OPML file that can be imported into other readers, so trying a few different applications is fairly painless.

Below I’ve listed how I’ve set up my RSS feeds, to give a better idea of their utility.

Announcements
Feeds of news releases from various companies.
Comics
The web comics I read. Most websites these days have both their comics and their news postings on the same feed.
Cooking
Cooking-related feeds. Mainly food weblogs that post recipes every now and then.
Education
Not the best category name, but this basically consists of feeds for random informational sites. Some examples are Word of the Day, Your Daily Art, Mirabilis.ca, and I Did Not Know That Yesterday.
Gaming
News feeds from gaming sites. Gaming news, reviews, announcements, trailers, demos, etc.
Literature
News feeds from, you guessed it, literature-themed sites. Random literature articles, book reviews, writing tips, that sort of thing.
Loose Logic
The feeds from this very site. One for the posts, just to monitor them, and one for the site’s comments.
Music
Music news and weblogs.
News
World and local news. Still trying to find the right sites to use for this, to get the most news with the least amount of spam. BBC News and CBC are two good starting points. Both sites offer a full list of feeds, from headlines and world news to local and special-topic news.
Personal
All of the non-commercial, variety weblogs I frequent and Twitter.
Personal Development
Do It Yourself, personal finance, and life hack sites. Any of that Getting Things Done, personal development hogwash.
Photography
Photography weblogs, my Flickr comments feed, and the feed for my Flickr contacts’ photos.
Randomness
Just randomness, really. Digg, Metafilter, and their ilk.
Theatre Showtimes
The showtimes for my local theatres, provided by iSnoop.net.
Travel
Travel-themed weblogs.
Video
Video weblogs, such as Ask a Ninja and It’s JerryTime. For when I’m very, very bored.
Work
Work related feeds.

I wouldn’t typically have the time to read everything listed here. I’ve often, in the past, set up a similar schema using bookmarks, but it was just too cumbersome to browse through all of these websites once a day. Since setting them up using RSS feeds, it’s a breeze. I check it a few times a day, read everything that’s been updated, and I’m all caught up.

RSS feeds save me a lot of time, and I’m constantly finding more uses for them. If you subscribe to a useful feed that I haven’t mentioned, let me know!

Posted in Technology | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Halo Short Fiction Contest

Posted on July 29, 2007 by Rob

This is my entry for The Clarity of Night’s Halo Short Fiction Contest. I might enter more of these contests in the future. They’re nice writing prompts, and it’s great to get a bit of immediate feedback. It was difficult to stay under 250 words, and this is the first piece of fiction I’ve written in ages, but here it is:

Guide Me Home

The blood pools under me, soaking my ragged tunic and turning the dirt into deep red mud.

This isn’t my war. This isn’t my land. This prairie is a sea of grass that drowns me, and I long for the forest like a warm blanket on a cool night.

I had always feared the pain of being stabbed, the tearing of skin and muscle, but that fear was misplaced. The blade slid into my shoulder so easily I thought I’d imagined it.

The pain was just delayed, though, for it came when the blade was pulled out. I felt every inch of it sliding back through the wound, every imperfection of the blade, every notch and scratch in its metal, tugging at the newly exposed flesh. Through that pain, that burning, I could feel battles long past and soldiers long dead. The cold blade screamed against my searing flesh, a silent scream that left my body stiff and trembling.

I see the grove behind my cottage back home. I can feel the beams of warm sunlight shining down through the trees, illuminating the hidden particles of dust floating in the air, like cracks in a wall revealing a glimpse into another world.

A soldier falls with a cry to my right, and the sounds of the surrounding battle come crashing back over me. I lift myself from the ground and feel the hilt of my sword at my fingertips. I will not die here. I will see home again.

Posted in Wordage | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Over the Trees and Back Again

Posted on July 27, 2007 by Rob

I went for a hike last Sunday with a friend of mine, Cary. I hadn’t been hiking for a few years, so it was great to get out there and climb around a bit. We were at Goldstream Provincial Park, just outside of Victoria. A light drizzle of rain started just as we arrived, but we decided it wouldn’t bother us under the forest canopy.

Walking The Tressel

We had an old map of the park and marked off a few areas we wanted to see. Cary’s really into photography, so the main focus of the trip was to get some good shots. We started with a waterfall they call Niagara Falls. Not as spectacular as the real thing, but still impressive. We then hiked over the waterfall and onwards up the mountain until we reached a railroad tressel. The walk up was maybe 150 to 200 metres, but it was quite steep, and I was a wobbly-kneed, sweaty mess by the time we reached the top. With the rain coming down, and the heat of the day, it felt like we were lost in a sauna. A gentle fog had rolled in and settled on the tips of the surrounding trees, and even with my clothing sticking to me like cling wrap, the view was worth the climb.

Hiking always makes me feel like a kid again. As soon as I’m pushing through overgrown brush on a narrow path, away from the sounds of the city, my mind seems to jump backwards a couple decades. Suddenly I’m a silent explorer discovering an exotic rain forest and tracking a legendary treasure, a young kung-fu apprentice on a journey to find his inner power, a lost boy learning to fend for himself after being left behind on an expedition. I’m once again an eight year old boy, walking through the forest with his father, letting his imagination stretch and grow.

The tressel was the highlight of the hike for me. Cary has a thing with heights, so he stayed off it. I decided the heights didn’t bother me too much and set out to stroll across the bridge. The gaps between each wet board were just enough to poke a foot through, so each step had to be placed with care. The longer you stare down through those gaps, the less substantial that bridge seems to be. When I finally made it to the mid-point, it was like walking on cardboard. With Stand By Me running through my mind, I brought my camera out to take a photo and found my hands trembling. After snapping a rushed shot, I calmly walked back to solid ground while having a minor internal panic attack. I guess heights do bother me a bit.

We then carried on deeper into the forest to find an abandoned mine shaft, which wasn’t as impressive as I thought it would be. The walk to get there was nice, however. It was getting fairly late by the time we found the shaft, so we made our way back to civilization. On the way back down I only managed to fall on my ass twice. I will be investing in a pair of hiking boots very soon.

The humidity seemed to murder my cheap camera. and all of my photos were corrupt. The tressel photo above is one of Cary’s.

Posted in Life | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Scratch and Dent Dreams

Posted on July 26, 2007 by Rob

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Hassling the Hoff

Posted on July 24, 2007 by Rob

Hasselhoff Bop Bag

For when the stress is just too much.

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