anthonytrumbo.com

This Sunday I was looking for an outside activity to enjoy the warm sunny weather. I hadn’t been to Cheekwood in a while and was delighted to see that they were having an orchid show. I’m going to give another go at growing a Paphiopedilum Pinocchio, which I was told was one of the easier orchids to grow and blossoms often. You can check out more pics of my visit to Cheekwood here.

Thankfully the Fantastico installation system did not take anywhere near as long to allow upgrade to WordPress 2.5 as it did to make 2.3.2 available. So being the maverick that I am, I decided to upgrade and hope for the best. So far it looks like everything updated fine.

It has been a very long time since I last posted to the blog, but since we just completed Spring Break, I figured it was the perfect time. I spent the bulk of spring break in Orlando, FL watching a couple of our school’s sports teams play followed by doing the Disney and Universal thing. My mom came down to join in on the fun Sunday night and we began our 4 day-6 park trek. While we were crazy busy it was a ton of fun.  We even were able to be in the Disney Family Fun Parade, though we are pretty sure we crashed it. To see photos of the trip, check out this Flickr set.

There have been a number of times where I have had a graphic that I needed to convert from a bitmap to a vector. Typically these have been logos or items of that sort. Until now that required an expensive program like Photoshop or Illustrator and a ton of skill. Now there is a web service that will do this work for you. VectorMagic is a project of the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Lab and does a pretty good job at converting. So grab those logos and make a resolution independent version. Link found via Boing Boing.

Well, my mom will be happy that my website is back up, even though there are lots of little things I will need to fix. Not the least of which is all of the plugins and customizations of my template. Oh, well, guess that is what happens during upgrades sometimes.

Update: Ok, I think I recovered most of my templates and am working through the plugins. Hopefully the site will be fully operational soon, running Wordpress 2.3.1.

As I was walking Ella around my apartment complex I came across a blue Cobalt with a strange attachment strapped to the roof.

Now, I don’t know what is a more embarrassing display of geekery: the fact that I instantly knew what the contraption was, or that I decided it was worth a blog post. In any case, from reading blogs about Google products I was aware that there was a fleet of blue Cobalts making their way around the country taking photos for use in Google’s Streetview feature of Google Maps. The Cobalt doesn’t appear to have moved over the past few days so I guess it is on vacation for Labor day. Currently Streetview is only available in about 7 cities, but perhaps Nashville will be soon be on the list. And if I’m not careful, I may be captured out walking Ella.

On the news that Apple had sold its one millionth iPod, Amy Tenderich wrote a post on her blog , DiabeteMine, that design firms needed to step up to the plate and create more attractive diabetic devices such as insulin pumps and blood glucose monitors. These devices, while medical in nature, are also life devices that are with diabetics 24 hours a day. There is no reason, Amy says, that these devices need to look so clunky. Her post is an open letter to Steve Jobs to have Apple engineers have a crack and designing a more usable and attractive device. The design firm, Adaptive Path, took this call to heart and began work on design of a device called the Charmr. You can see all of their posts as well as design specs on their blog. They followed up today with a concept video of how this new device would work. If someone can get something like this to the market it would be a boon to diabetics everywhere.

It has taken me almost 2 weeks, but I finally uploaded my photos from a recent trip to NYC after many requests from my mom. You can view all of the pictures here. We didn’t stay terribly long in the City but did have a chance to check out the Guggenheim, eat at Via Quadronno, shop at Dylan’s Candy Bar and finally make our way back to the car via Central Park. This trip was just to whet my appetite for the city as I will be visiting again at the end of the month for our Senior Class retreat.

Found this posted on digg:

1,000 Person World’s Largest Restroom | Weird Asia News

There are 2 questions that I have not found the answer to. First, why is there a need for a 1000 person restroom. Even if it was a Disneyland type park, this would seem overkill. Second, what are the rules in a 1000 “seat” restroom in regards to spacing between men at a urinal. if there are 200 people there, is there a 2 urinal minimum separation distance?

And that isn’t a can design for “New Coke” but a new can design for various Coca-Cola brands. I purchased a can of Diet Coke from a vending machine while in Manchester, NH and had a sneaking suspicion that the design was simplified from the cans I remember from just a week or so ago. Coca-Cola has indeed redesigned their cans as you can see in this blog post. Personally I like the simplified look. I have switched my stomach lining destroying drink of choice to Coca-Cola Zero Vanilla recently so I’m not sure when the change occurred. For some reason it reminds me a bit of the look on the Coca-Cola Light cans I saw in Mexico, though I couldn’t find a picture for comparison.