1) I have a queen sized bed, but only own one pillow. It makes sleeping strange.
2) I drink way too much diet pepsi, and usually have an empty bottle somewhere in every room
3) I typically buy the same thing whenever I’m at the store. That explains why I have four jars of salsa in my fridge, three tubs of vitamin E cream in my bathroom, and a freezer full of ground beef.
4) I type over 100 WPM normally.
5) Despite being able to solve problems in my head fairly quickly, I have a hard time organizing physical things. I can literally spend an hour cleaning my room, only to have it look exactly the same afterwards. That’s one of the reaosns I pay cleaners to come every two weeks.
6) I sleep about four or five hours a night on average (not by choice). I also sleep better with a warm body next to me, but really, who doesn’t?

We are working on that [fully electric cars], but let me just share with you the Ford plan about that. Our No. 1 priority is to improve the internal combustion engine, and that’s why the turbocharging, the direct fuel injection, we get a 20 percent improvement in fuel mileage and a 15 percent reduction in CO2, but we get that across all of the engines, across all the vehicles. Then we move to more electrification with the hybrids as you mentioned, and we are very excited that the next step after that will be full electrification. Now we’re tied into the grids, and we really have moved to an energy independence solution.

First, the number one vehicle at Ford is the F-150. It gets around 15 MPG. My car (a Mazda, partially built in Japapn) gets closer to 30 MPG. Most new hybrids coming out (and a few diesel cars) get closer to 60 MPG *today*, and their next models will be increasing that even more. So frankly, while a 20% fuel reduction is a good start (which would bring the F-150 milage to 18 MPG), it falls pretty short of the fuel efficiencies of most modern cars. If anyone has any stats on Ford’s cars with regards to fuel efficiency, please post them as I only have the trucks.

Photo from here

The US in in a dangerous predicament. One person said it best with regards to Wall Street — they are trying to privatize profits and socialize losses, which is exactly what the big three automakers are trying to do. I hope whatever bail-out the US government comes up with is a big ball of yarn with regards to having strings attached. Personally, I’d like to see some of the bail-out money be in exchange for stock, so that should those companies suddenly be successful again, the American public will benefit from it. Right now the bail-out packages only have down-sides from the tax-payer’s perspective — they should have a lucrative up-side as well.

In the normal business world, when you run out of money, you can either take out a loan, or dilute your stock and raise more capital. In both cases, you don’t get the money without any strings attached. In the first case, you have to pay interest back (which is the upside for the lender), and in the second case, you’ve diluted your shares, and given some controlling interest to the stock purchaser. In that case, the upside for the purchaser is the potential for the stocks to rise to a point above their purchasing price, at which point they’ve made a profit. So with regards to the bailout, I really think the tax payer’s deserve a scenario where an upside is possible.

The auto companies really need to innovate again and compete in the global market, and also find a way to make themselves relevant again, especially if they are financing their future using the tax dollars from ordinary citizens.

Canucks Jersey, photo by Duane Storey
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I ran into Ianiv in the mall, and we ended up chatting for a bit. One of the things I’ve been debating for quite some time now is moving out of the downtown core. My first choice is somewhere on the North Shore, hopefully fairly close to the Seabus (since I work downtown). Whenever I’m out that way, it just seems more community oriented, and easier to get around than downtown. My second choice is the West End, but I was reading that vacancy rates in the West End are less than 1%, so it’s probably harder to find a decent priced place there.

So, if anyone has a line on anything in the next few months that goes for less than $1200/month, please let me know. As long as it’s relatively clean and quiet, it’ll probably be fine.

Derek and I left Vancouver sometime in the afternoon on a Saturday I believe, and we landed in Tokyo 10 hours later. Narita airport is actually more than an hour outside of Tokyo, so even after you land you still have a fairly long trek to get into the city. Derek and I paid for shuttle transportation to take us to our hotel in the Tokyo Dome region of the city.

Derek In Tokyo, photo by Duane Storey
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Since I can rarely sleep on airplanes, I spent most of that flight just staring at the seat ahead of me and periodically trying to read. Without a doubt, ten hours was the longest I had ever been on a plane at one time before. Even though Derek and I were seated in different sections, it was kind of cool flying with a friend for a change, so I’d head to his section of the plane from time to time just to stretch my feet.

Me In Tokyo, photo by Duane Storey
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After checking into the hotel, we started wandering around the streets near the Tokyo Dome region. The first strange thing you’ll notice about Tokyo is that every building has more than one business inside usually. It’s not uncommon for a single building to have eight to ten restaurants in it, all on different floors. So you quickly need to get into the habit of scanning upwards when you approach buildings so that you can read (or in my case, look at the pictures) what is on each floor.

We met up with various other people who were in Tokyo for the same conference, and found a little whole-in-the-wall restaurant run by a small family. Given that none of us really spoke Japanese, and none of the owners spoke English, it was a rather interesting food experience. Tokyo was really the first place I’ve been to in my life where most people (other than the young generation) actually couldn’t speak english, so communication was usually a challenge.

First Meal In Tokyo, photo by Duane Storey
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Derek and I then tried to figure out the crazy subway system there. It was literally the first time in my life where I’ve felt absolutely bewildered. Derek and I spent ten minutes just staring at the machines and finally both just started laughing since we had no idea whatsoever how to use anything. Here’s a partial transit map in Tokyo for your viewing pleasure.

As you can see, it’s rather elaborate. One interesting thing to note is that you actually pay to ride the transit system based on distance. So if you look at a transmit map in each station, you’ll actually see the price to travel to each other location on the map. Going one stop over might cost around 80 cents, with around 30 cents extra per station you have to travel. It’s a pretty cool system, and you basically only pay for the distance you travel.

IMG_0493, photo by Duane Storey
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We didn’t really know where to go, so we ended up going to the Shinjuku subway station, which is probably the busiest subway station in the entire world. It lived up to its name as it was fairly hard to navigate, even that late at night. Shinjuku, at least the area I walked around, is basically the red-light district of Tokyo. It smelt like a sewer had backed up somewhere near the area, and literally made me want to gag a few times. It was mostly seedy bars and dark alleys, so we high-tailed it out of there in short order (although, we would be back in a few days).

I ended up back at my hotel, and ended up getting a fairly decent sleep. I woke up the next day and set my tripod up long enough to get a quick shot of me in my little window seat. I was on the 32nd floor of the Tokyo Dome Hotel, and was looking out south over Tokyo.

Me In Tokyo, photo by Duane Storey
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I’ll do another part to this series sometime this weekend once I find a few more photos. But that’s a good overview for now I think of the first day and a bit of my adventure. I’ll try to summarize the best and the worst parts about Tokyo in the last part, so check back in a day or two.

Clearly just a myth. Photo from here.

Rain, photo by Duane Storey
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There’s a lot I could say about today, but browsing around the Vancouver web it seems others have already said it for me. But I’m obviously thankful for the sacrifices others made so that we can enjoy the freedoms we have today.

Outside it’s rather dismal out today. I ended up driving to work, which is something I don’t typically do since it costs me around $20/day to park downtown. But the nice thing is I’ll be able to drive home after work and enjoy the heated seats in my car. Tonight is most likely going to be a couch and blanket night, since it’s pretty gross out there. Now that my tree is all lit up, there’s a bit more ambiance in my living room which makes it all the more comfy.

I got asked at work today if I want to go to Austin, Texas for the weekend. I don’t think I’ll end up going, but I can’t say that I’ve ever been to Texas before. In my mind there’s the typical stereotype of beer drinking, cadillac driving cowboys, which I’m sure is pretty far from the truth. More than likely I’ll be in Vancouver this weekend though, although one of these weekends I’d like to head back to Chilliwack and relax on a couch with a book.

I went to the doctor’s office yesterday with a pretty large laundry list of things for him to look over. The first thing I talked to him about was the c. diff infection I got last year. While the last test came back and basically said I was over it, I’ve had nothing by stomach and gut problems ever since. I was told at the time that many people develop irritable bowel syndrome after going through what I did, and that after a while it would probably resolve. But given that the symptoms are fairly similar to how I felt when I was still undergoing treatment, and that it’s been this way for nearly a year now, I just want to make sure we’re chasing the right problem. So we’re going to do another test for some things — this time I did my research and asked the doctor for specific tests with regards to the infection, tests that normally aren’t done (but should be based on the latest strains that are going around) in basic practice, but ultimately yield better results. So, we’ll see what happens.

Also, I haven’t really had a full night’s sleep in years. A typical night for me involves tossing and turning most of the night, often waking up ten times or more. Obviously that leaves me kind of bagged in the mornings. I pretty much need ten hours or more of “sleep” on a weekend to actual feel like I rested somewhat during the night. So thankfully I have a referral to a sleep specialists to finally do some tests.

So tomorrow morning I’ll probably swing by the lab and get pricked and prodded for a while. With luck I’ll have the results back by early next week. The referral to the sleep specialist probably won’t come for a few weeks, but they were hopeful I’d meet with the guy before Christmas. I can’t tell you how nice it would be to sleep through the night for a change.

Stay tuned in the next week or so for some official announcements. As of now, the date is still set for January 24th, 2009 up in Whistler, BC, Canada. We’ll probably schedule the event to start around 10am or so, which will allow people to commute up from Vancouver that morning. We’re hoping to invite some well known speakers to the event to share their knowledge about blogging and WordPress.

Right now we’re targeting somewhere between 50 and 100 people for the event, so drop a comment or sign up on the wiki if you’re interested. There’s also a Facebook event that you can sign up to. As of today, there are around 31 confirmed attendees, with around 44 maybes.

First, let it not be forgotten that the *ability* to blog is at an all time maximum. Thanks to the work of Automattic and WordPress, it’s relatively painless to start a blog, either on WordPress.com or on your own hosted server. That being said, I have to question just how many people are listening these days, and of those, how many really care to participate in genuine discussions.

With regards to my own blog, traffic has stayed fairly constant over the last year or so. The proportion of traffic has changed, moving slowly from direct traffic to organic traffic (from search engines). Unfortunately for me, there are a lot more people looking at my photographs via my site these days then there are people reading my actual content. Given that I spend a great deal of time writing some of my entries, part of that is obviously a bit alarming.

Whenever I have encountered a new technology or a new phenomenon, I have always attempted to evaluate its viability by imagining the extremes. An example of that is advertising. In my head, the advertising revenue model has always faltered simply because it cannot exist at the extreme. That is, we cannot and would not live in a world where advertising was dominant. First, people would become desensitized to it and probably stop clicking or buying. Second, advertising revenue has to ultimately come from somewhere — if you’re not building, making, or selling something tangible, then the whole system breaks down. That’s why I think the advertising revenue model will ultimately fail (despite people telling me I have been wrong for years).

With regards to microblogging, I see the same sort of problem. Yes, it is awesome to get relatively instantaneous feedback from your peers. But can the world exist with only microblogs? I would like to think no, since they ultimately don’t represent intelligent thought or discourse. Yes, they entertain. And yes, they are useful. But I think they can only exist in a world where they are augmented by intelligent discussion, either in the real world, or in the blogosphere.

Services like Google reader have only resulted in the further fracturing of the blog community. Many people who used to comment on blogs now seem to reserve their comments solely for use on Google reader’s “Shared Items” functionality. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the comments I’ve encountered have usually been intelligent, and would have probably sparked intelligent discussion should they be posted next to the source material. Why they were not posted on the original website is sort of beyond me. I have seen, more times that I would like, people commenting on shared items that originated from my blog. And yet, those people have not posted comments on my blog.

If Google reader provided an API to extract comments from blog entries, I would have long ago written a plugin to automatically post comments on blogs from their service. But unfortunately they do not. And since Twitter doesn’t really provide any kind of threading ability with regards to messages, there’s really no context to the information there. So today, we live in a world where it somehow seems easier to fracture content than to create it, which is dangerous and disadvantageous in my mind.

In my head, my blog has always been paramount to the world of Duane Storey. Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook should all be secondary. The content that ends up there, in my mind, should somehow originate from here, and likewise, comments and meta data should end up back here. The internet representation of Duane Storey is, and always will be, duanestorey.com. It will be my goal, as long as I have the ability to write PHP and boot a computer up, to try and bring all this information together instead of letting it all drift apart. And while I don’t mind these services using the data (there’s nothing wrong with filtering data or representing it a different way), I always want my site to represent all the content I generate, and likewise, want the discussions to end up here. Maybe that’s a pipe dream, but I really don’t think it is.

Ryland Haggis 2, photo by Redpilot Photography
All Rights Reserved

If you haven’t heard of him, go add him on Twitter, or also check out his professional musician website.

Also, make sure to check out Jessie’s website — Jessie’s currently down in Nashville writing some of her next album.

Yes We Can, photo by Duane Storey
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The image is constructed using Flickr photos from everyday, normal people, the same people who helped Obama and his grass-roots campaign to secure the presidency. The search tags used on Flickr were “obama election victory” and “obama celebration”. The result is a mosiac using 1600 images.

Enjoy. If you’d like to see a higher resolution version, head on over here.

It’s been a few days now since president-elect Barack Obama won the election, and I thought I would share a few thoughts. The day of the election I saw an interview with a prominent African American on CNN who said that should Obama win, you would literally be able to divide the history of the United States into two time periods: the period before Obama, and the period after. He said from that moment on, you would no longer be able to say that certain things were not possible in the US if you were a person of colour. For the first time, he would be able to tell his son that he could become whatever he aspired to be in his lifetime, and could point to Obama’s victory as an example of that.

The historical significance of having an African American become president, especially given the history of the United States with regards to slavery, cannot be understated. And more importantly, the fact the Barack Obama won at all, given that he was the clear underdog in the beginning, speaks volumes to the number of people who genuinely want change in the United States.

Let it also not be forgotten that the victory the other night was not celebrated by the United States alone. In Vancouver, I saw more people watching the TVs in the Yaletown Brew Pub than I’ve seen for any playoff hockey game in Vancouver, and far more tears (although the Canucks losing the Stanley Cup that year was a close second). In Kenya, they celebrated by declaring a national holiday. People were cheering in the streets of Tanzania. The photo above was taken in Toronto. It is clear that the election was not only a great importance in the United States, but also of importance on the world stage.

It will be a few months before Obama takes control of the White House, but I’m extremely optimistic about his ability to inspire change, not just in the United States, but also throughout the world.

I’ve had my personal blog for nearly ten years now, and have been on WordPress for nearly three. As I write content, there’s always the implicit expectation that my content will come with me wherever I go in the future, no matter which CMS platform I end up choosing. With that in mind, it’s important for that content to translate properly as technology and our use of that technology changes (for example, screen resolutions increase, or the world shifts slowly towards mobile blogging).

When an image is inserted in a post, many people still hardcode the width and height parameters of the image. The problem with that approach is that it generally ties the content to a particular presentation, and makes it difficult to transition in the future. For example, let’s say you manually specify a width of 400px for an image. If one day you decide to change your theme post area to display 500px worth of content, suddenly all your images are too small. To fix the problem, you most likely have to go through and manually edit every IMG HTML tags to change the width. On a blog with 1000 entries, that doesn’t sound particularly exciting, does it?

A far better approach is to use CSS to specify the desired width and height. Most modern browsers support the “max-width” parameter, and those that don’t typically have workarounds. With that approach, you can simply change the layout via CSS whenever you want to overhaul the look and feel of all your images.

For some people, that probably sounds really straightforward. And yet, many third party plugins (and in fact, some popular CMS systems), add hardcoded width and height parameters to content. Every use video from YouTube or other services? If so, you’ll also probably notice that the EMBED code contains specific width and height parameters, which for most people don’t work well with their blog’s theme. What happens when you view a 500px video on a 320px screen? You could be in trouble if the width is hardcoded.

We fixed some of these problems with Blip.it, and made the plugin automatically generate it’s own width and height. We’ve also been testing out a new BraveNewCode video plugin on my personal blog that addresses this problem in a more generic way. Using WordPress 2.5 and above, you can simply use a shortcode to access any video on the web, and have it automatically size to the proper dimensions on your blog. Should you adjust your theme presentation sometime in the future, you can simply adjust the width and height for all videos in the dashboard, and have all your previous content automatically change as well. In addition, the code generated by the plugin validates against W3C in all cases, unlike the EMBED tag (that YouTube and others still provide) which was deprecated.

Anytime you generate content that has an explicit width or height tied to it, you really need to stop and think if there’s an alternative. You may very well be affecting the future look and feel of your website by doing so.