Megen is now 3/8 of her way done with medical school. Congratulations! To celebrate (and because she now has some free time) she baked some apple dumplings for us:

This blog uses SUP (Simple Update Protocol) to let FriendFeed and any other SUP consumers know that I've recently published a post. The code is very simple.

Read more about SUP on FriendFeed's blog.

• me: This is the spy show right?
• Mick: yep
     but the store is a direct take-off on best buy
     everyone wears green (instead of blue) buy-more polo shirts
     except the nerd herd, who are shirt and black tie
• me: I wonder if Best Buy bought blanket air time on the network or deliberately chose that tv.
     s/tv/show
• Mick: oh, this is on hulu
• me: interesting
• Mick: (also, i think i'm one of the few people that actually understand that syntax =))

Netflix launched it's "Watch Instantly" feature on TiVo today and it's awesome. The selection isn't huge but I was happy to find:

• 30 Rock: Seasons 1 and 2
• The Office: Seasons 1 through 4
• High Fidelity
• Enchanted
• Pirates of the Caribbean
• The Boondock Saints
• Pan's Labyrinth
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• etc.

I tested a couple of streams out and I'm happy to report that it works really well. The Office played in HD and started streaming in seconds. You can pause, rewind, and fast forward too (when you rewind or fast forward a lower quality version of the stream is shown so you know where you are). Ratatouille wasn't in HD but the quality was still excellent.

Unfortunately for Netflix this means that I can downgrade my account from 2 to 1 DVD at a time. With all this extra content (and I'm expecting more to come quickly) I don't see a reason to get that many DVDs. If the library size increased a few times over I'd love a "Instant Only" plan ($4.99 maybe?).

I do have some issues with the implementation though. For one only the main account holder can modify your Instant queue. This isn't a huge deal but it means Megen has to remember my credentials instead of just using her own to add anything to our Instant queue. We also ran into a bug where TiVo would punt us back to the main menu in the middle of watching an episode of 30 Rock. Restarting the TiVo seems to have fixed it though.

I found this meme from Thomas Hawk.

1. Visit the mall with the family.
2. Secretly take photos of things they look at (sweaters for instance).
3. Send myself emails from phone when I can't take a photo.
4. Buy things online later.

Megen made me pumpkin cheesecake for Thanksgiving. I am a very happy (and thankful) man right now.

I'm in the market for a small P&S camera. I already have a DSLR and have decided that I'd like a camera that is 1) small enough to fit in my pocket 2) takes decent photos and 3) can do the occasional video that is easy to upload to common services (Flickr, Youtube, etc.).

I first looked at the Canon G10 because I loved that it could take RAW photos but after seeing it in person it is definitely way too large. I'm now deciding between the Canon SD1100 IS and SD870 IS.

SD1100 IS:

• Cheaper
• Smaller and lighter (barely)

SD870 IS:

• Wider lens
• Larger LCD

I love the wider lens on the SD870 IS; sometimes you just cannot back up enough. It would be especially nice for those shots where you stick your camera out in front and hug your significant other. But the SD1100 IS is really cheap.

What would you do? I'm leaning towards the SD870 IS at the moment.

Update: I bought the SD1100 IS. I found out the SD870 IS has some funky touch controls that didn't sound great to me and the next model up was too expensive for what I'm looking for. I also discovered that the SD1100 IS can do timelapse movies which sounds like a blast.

Update again: I refused delivery of the SD1100 IS because there was a sale on the SD880 IS. It was more expensive but I think it's worth it for the features: 28mm lens, next generation processor (Digic 4), larger LCD. The SD880 cannot do timelapse for some strange reason; maybe Canon will enable it with a firmware update later. I'll have it sometime next week.

Migrating from one blogging platform to another can be a pain. I don't want it to be difficult to move away from this one so I've added JSON output. Any page that displays entries can be represented in machine readable JSON by adding ?format=json to the end of the URL.

def render_json(self, entries):
    json_entries = [{
        "title": entry.title,
        "slug": entry.slug,
        "body": entry.body,
        "author": entry.author.nickname(),
        "published": entry.published.isoformat(),
        "updated": entry.updated.isoformat(),
        "tags": entry.tags,
        "link": "http://" + self.request.host + "/e/" + entry.slug,
    } for entry in entries]
    json = {"entries": json_entries}
    self.response.headers["Content-Type"] = "text/javascript"
    self.response.out.write(simplejson.dumps(json))

For example the archives page contains every entry on the blog. So this link is all you need to migrate.

It'll also now ping Google when you publish a new entry. Eventually I'll support more pinging services.