Interesting, if creepy, information from The New York Times’ article on the plane crash that killed Sen. Ted Stevens:

Mr. Stevens survived another plane crash on Dec. 4, 1978, that killed five of seven people on board, including his first wife, Ann. He was traveling on a Lear jet that crashed when landing at Anchorage International Airport, which was renamed Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport in honor of the senator in 2000.

And:

Before that 1978 crash, Mr. Stevens reportedly spoke of a premonition that he would die in a plane crash….

CTS-V, originally uploaded by JSFauxtaugraphy.

The Wall Street Journal has an entertaining review of the new Cadillac CTS-V that exclaims that the Caddy is better than its German competition.

The CTS-V is more fun to drive than the M3 or the RS 5. Importantly, I’m not saying it’s a finer, more advanced performance machine, even though the Caddy – bigger and heavier – is quicker around the Nurburgring than those two cars, and anyone who says American cars don’t handle is a pathetic hater. I’ve driven lots of performance automobiles, from Alfa 8 C Competiziones to Zondas, and I can assure you, the CTS-V – with the big racy rubber, the magnetic dampers, the limited-slip diff, the Brembo land anchors, the gut-bucket torque – gets around corners wonderfully.

Nice! I’d love to drive one and see for myself.

Gah. Deadwood is one of my all-time favorite shows. Now the “complete” series is coming out on Blu-ray. I put “complete” in quotes, since no one can really call Deadwood complete. Better to say that all the episodes HBO cared to make are in the set. Yes, I’m very bitter about Deadwood’s premature demise to this day. 😉

The set has a pretty hefty price, and one I probably won’t shell out. But if there’s a decent sale, maybe, otherwise Netflix is my best option. Either way, I’ll have to watch it and have my soul crushed once more.

I’ve finally moved this site away from Movable Type. I’ve thought quite a bit about how I was going to write my own software to scratch my itches. I started writing pretty rusty-but-serviceable Ruby code to get me there, and then I came across Jekyll. It had a lot of the same goals I had in mind when I started writing mine: it’s written in Ruby, so I’m comfortable hacking and extending it; it renders simply, to a static site structure that can be served with little fanfare; it allows me to post simply by putting a formatted text file (in Markdown, Textile or HTML) in a spot on my server. Best of all, it was farther along than mine.

I initially tried to use the bundled Movable Type migration script, and even worked on it to fix a few problems (it didn’t use the originally authored on date for posts and didn’t include a lot of metadata about the post that was available). Come to think about it, I should send a pull request—that might be useful for someone else. But I ultimately hacked up a converter I wrote to use a Movable Type export file to create the posts for Jekyll. That code is pretty specific to my case, but it could be used pretty easily by someone with a will to get a better export of their data.

Anyhow, this site is now Jekyll-powered, and I’m free to add a few things it’s missing to get me back to having the features I want here, but none that I don’t. Really, the big missing things that were here before are categories, monthly indexes and search. Search isn’t too worrying to me; since everything here is public, I’ll let Google handle the indexing. Speaking of Google, it’s the main reason that I need monthly and category index pages, since that search engine has those pages ranked pretty highly for the site and I want those URLs to resolve to something useful. The categories are a bit of a shame—the category handling in Jekyll is a low point for sure. I exported all of the categories and tags from Movable Type and have them included in each post so once I write some code to expose them, the data will show itself again.

Then I’m planning to add a few things I’ve wanted more control over, but wasn’t willing to invest the time doing on MT. I want good handling of picture-related posts. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I’ll probably come up with a way to share pictures as a type of post all by themselves, hopefully with a decent way to link up to my Flickr photostream. I also want a way to create posts that have a permanent life here from other sources of data: Twitter, Strava, etc. MT had Action Streams, and I even wrote a quick plugin to support Garmin Connect in it, but I want the data to be persistent like a post is.

Anyway, the basics are in place and now I just have to find some time to code. 🙂

Adobe has a release candidate of Lightroom 3.2 (and Camera Raw 6.2) available on Adobe Labs. On top of fixing a slew of bugs, there are a bunch of new lenses available to LR3′s Lens Correction feature. Of particular interest to me are the Nikkor 50mm AFS f/1.4 G and, surprisingly, the Zeiss Distagon T* 2/35 ZF.2. I have the ZF (not the .2), and wonder if it’ll be the same. (I know it can’t auto-detect that lens, but I still wonder if the corrections are the same.)

Also of note is a small-lens camera that has been added: the Powershot S90. Disappointingly, the Panasonic GF1 (and other Micro Four-Thirds cameras) are still not in. Still, that’s a pretty good first dot release.

Update 2010-08-10: Somehow I missed a new feature: There’s a new publish service for Facebook now too. Nice! I don’t upload pics to Facebook often enough to pay for a plugin, but I’m happy to have it there as a free, built-in service.

Fireworks Show, originally uploaded by Stmpjmpr.

Fireworks Show, originally uploaded by Stmpjmpr.

I’m not a coffee drinker, so this problem hasn’t occurred to me yet, although I guarantee that I’d vote with my wallet on this one. I almost never sit down to drink or eat in this manner without something to read, and these days that pretty much means reading on my iPad. I’d stop going to an establishment that said I couldn’t read while I drank or ate. I understand that some inconsiderate people hog all the space in a place, but I say target them and not the person catching up on some reading or email over a drink.

Here’s a review of the new OmniFocus for the iPad.

It’s out. I’ve already plunked down for it and done my daily review with it. So far, it’s better than I’d hoped, although not without (very) minor issues. Some people have been complaining about its $40 price which, while high for an iPad app, is not too high in my mind; its an extension of one of the single most important pieces of software I use. In fact, imagining OmniFocus on the iPad is one of the things that convinced me I needed one.

P072110PS-0548, originally uploaded by The White House.

Love the digital clocks and how “President” is the second of the times represented.

Wow, can you imagine having these fall into your lap? My wife is a garage sale fiend; I wonder if she’ll ever turn up a treasure trove like this.

(via @kabster728 on Twitter.)

Great-looking app. So great that they could easily have charged a couple of bucks and would probably be sitting on a decent pile of cash. A side-effect of being good and free as well as having a server-side component is that the latter is completely slammed, and it’s seemingly impossible to add Flickr and Facebook links to it at the moment.

I love the look for browsing pictures.

Tree Bark, originally uploaded by Stmpjmpr.

dailyshoot.com/assignments/246: “Ads promote removing wrinkles, but they often add character. Make a photo of something wrinkled, crinkled, or folded.”

Holy cow! Apple sold a record number of Macs in Q3, but I think an interesting point here is that they almost sold as many iPads. So much for the iPad being a niche product.

Very cool. I haven’t seen anything like this from Garmin, which should be embarrassing for them. If HTC puts freaking Android phones on their riders and broadcast stats, Garmin certainly can. While its true that their consumer devices don’t have radios to broadcast their live status, I’m sure that Garmin are getting live stats from their Tour riders. In any case, they could do some fun things with their Garmin Connect site regarding the Tour. This is about as close as I’ve seen from them, which is fine, but HTC’s live transmission of data from its entire team kicks ass.