Josh San Diego

Gmail has been updated to allow you to drag and drop files onto messages to attach them in Firefox 3.6 and Chrome, thanks to the new File API in HTML 5.

The Mozilla Developer Center provides some helpful info on how to do something like this: Using files from web applications.

Kelly and I went on a cruise in French Polynesia. It was nice getting away from the cruel San Diego weather. :-) I’ll have to post some pictures later, but we saw a lot of cool things in the water, including some spinner dolphins and a humpback whale that breached(jumped partly out of the water) several times.

On our first anniversary, Kelly and I celebrated the time-honored tradition of eating the top of our wedding cake. The notion of eating a year-old cake may initially seem disgusting, but actually we were quite surprised at how well-preserved and tasty it was. My mom made the cakes for our wedding, and she took it upon herself to preserve and store the top section of our wedding cake.

In order to store the cake for such a long period of time, she first wrapped the entire cake layer in saran wrap. Top to bottom, and all around, it was well wrapped. Next, it was wrapped in a layer of aluminum foil. It sounds simple enough, but we’ve heard some horror stories from people who just stuck their cake in the freezer without wrapping it, and a year later they take a single bite of frost-bitten ugliness before dropping the rest of it into the trashcan. That’s a shame. I’m glad my mom knew enough about cake embalming to preserve it so we could share memories with each other, our friends, and our families. (it was a hefty chunk of cake!)

While taking care of our back yard, we found a yellow, globe-like mass in the grass which I assumed was a mushroom. I tried to pull it out with my bare hand, and discovered that it was, in fact, a disgusting blob of goo sitting on top of the grass. It doesn’t even have a stem leading to the ground, it just sits there on top. After some research, Kelly figured out that it’s actually a “dog vomit slime mold”. If you ever suspect that a new species has taken up residence in your yard, you may wish to eat breakfast before investigating, just in case whatever you find may quash your appetite.

We now have quite a few of these slimy little tribbles roaming about the yard and climbing up on top of the grass, and any attempts to disturb them result in a dark cloud of spores blowing into your face. Apparently the only effective way to eliminate them is to spray them with fire extinguishers and airdrop them into the arctic. (or just wait until the weather dries out a bit)

On May 11, the Discovery Channel is going to air a new show called Weaponizers. Remote-controlled cars fitted with machine guns and rocket launchers sounds like a recipe for success. I’m not sure how many episodes they’ll make, but it’ll be cool to see a real-life version of Twisted Metal. They even have the fully-loaded ice cream truck.

Pandora is a free, streaming online radio where you can set up your own “stations” to listen to. I haven’t used it too much, but it’s a very interesting idea – who hasn’t wanted to change the playlist for a radio station at one time or another?

You start out by creating a station based on a particular artist or song that you like, then as you listen to your station you can give each song a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to customize the music that gets played. Songs that you dislike won’t be played again, while songs that you like will be played more often. The music your station plays will also change based on the musical attributes of songs that you like, such as heavy metal guitars and screaming vocalists, or soft piano pieces in a minor key.

This seems like a pretty useful tool for finding music that you like, as after listening for only a few minutes I’d already found a few new artists that I like but had never heard of. The main downside is that the number of songs you may skip per hour is limited, but as long as you start with a song or artist that you really like then it shouldn’t be too big of a problem. Their licensing prevents you from listening to the same song more than once every few hours, which is already an improvement over public radio.

When working in Windows XP, I am a bit obsessive about grouping programs together in the taskbar. Unfortunately, the order that applications appear in the taskbar is determined by the launch order of the applications. This means that users like myself are wasting time launching applications in a very particular order, and hoping that none of them crash or are accidentally closed along the way.

After a bit of searching, I found a great solution for this problem in Tasbar Shuffle. It allows you to drag and drop your taskbar items so that you too can have the peace of mind that comes with always finding Eclipse as the first item in the taskbar.

Well, Kelly and I have finally taken the plunge and are now home owners. We’re not moving until the end of the month, so we’ve been in cleaning/packing/shopping mode to get ready to live in a house of our very own. If you’re local and would like to help with the move, let me know.

We still have a big stack of gift cards left over from our wedding, so that’s going to be a really fun shopping spree when we get around to it. Fortunately for us, there’s very little repair work to be done, which means that we can use the gift cards for improvements, decorations, and general fun stuff.

We’ve just returned home after our first family vacation together. We managed to visit briefly with a bunch of my relatives, so now Kelly knows faces along with names. We’re both back at work today on New Year’s Eve, which is unfortunate.

On the way home, we visited Carlsbad Caverns. I’d highly recommend walking in on foot rather than taking the elevator, as this gives you a feel for how immense the hole you’re standing in truly is. It’s also a great workout for those of us with desk jobs to descend 750 feet on foot, even if it is on paved walkways.

Kelly and I were married on October 25. It’s a great feeling to be done with that planning and stress, and we’re getting settled in. Married life is good. Thanks to all who attended our wedding and/or sent well-wishes our way. We’ll be posting some wedding pictures eventually, so stay tuned.