Posted in Cats, Product, Tips
 January 23, 2010 5:22 pm  One of my cats, Mr. Knightley, likes to destroy toilet paper and eat plastic. That meant that I had to keep my bathroom door closed to keep him out of trouble. That was not great for ventilation after showers. For years, I looked for a solution that would protect the toilet paper and discourage him from eating the plastic lining of the trash can to no avail.
 I have finally found two things that helped me to make it safe to keep the bathroom door unattended. I bought a toilet roll holder from Ikea that had a cover. It was a great find since every other solution I had seen cost much more than the $10 I paid for that one. It was very easy to install, requiring just two screws.
I found the trash can solution at Target. It is a round step can by simplehuman studio. The key feature is “smartbucket”, which prevents bag overhang. It was pricey for a trash can, but the peace of mind of mind that there is less plastic for my cat to find and eat makes it worth it. I am actually going to get another one today for another room in the apartment.
I hope that information helps someone who has a cat as mischievous as mine. 
Posted in Gadgets, Product
August 6, 2009 9:57 pm I had had enough of my previous bluetooth headset. Once I got an awesome new phone, the old headset did not do it justice because I could not use it reliably.
Here were some of the pet peeves I had with my two-year-old headset:
- It was out of batteries when I needed to use it and did not have access to the charger
- The proprietary charger meant I had limited options when I needed to charge it
- I did not get enough notice before it ran out of batteries
- The over-the-ear design was a hassle if I wore glasses or had my hair styled in any way
Amazingly I was able to find a bluetooth headset that addressed my pet peeves. I have had my new headset, the Plantronics Discovery 925 for a few weeks now so I cannot remember exactly what brought it to my attention. Maybe it was because it was one of the newest models that Plantronics had. Nonetheless, here is how this headset is superior to the one it replaced:
- It came with a carrying case with a rechargable battery that charged the headset. I can recharge both when the headset is in the case. However, while I am out and about, the case comes in handy to charge headset.
- It used a standard micro USB charger. It came with two chargers… one for USB and one for wall charging. Since my Palm Pre also used micro USB for charging, it effectively tripled the chargers I had to available to charge either my phone or headset. That meant I could charge while I am at home or at work.
- There were two ways for me to find out when it was time to charge. If I hit the big button, it will blink an indicator and if the red light glowed, it was time to charge. While wearing the earpiece, an audible alert will bring attention to the need to charge.
- The elegant yet secure design did not have a loop to get in the way. This made it easier to insert into my ear and not have to struggle with my hair or ear.
I liked how it came in different colors instead of the usual black and gray. I decided to get gold because I liked the color and it was less obvious against my skin.
Plantronics listed the price at almost $150. I bought mine from Amazon.com for about half of that. I also got to use a gift certificate credit so that was awesome.
When I considered getting this headset, I envisioned the toughest use case would be my wedding day. My hair and makeup would be done. I didn’t want to run around holding a phone to my ear. This headset would answer the challenge because it would not touch my hair when it is in my ear. It would securely and comfortably enable me to do last minute communications. Plus, it does not look as ugly as most headsets tend to look. However, sometimes I would forget that I was wearing it so I hope that that will not happen during the walk down the aisle.
Posted in Personal, Website
August 6, 2009 7:32 am During our trip to his hometown during the July 4th weekend, my boyfriend, Troy, proposed to me. I was so shocked and speechless that I only managed to come up with a one word reply: yes! You can read more about the proposal from his blog post, Dream Merger. I know commitment can seem to be a scary thing for a lot of people, but being engaged to Troy has truly been a wonderful and fun experience. I just wished that the wedding planning was not so daunting. Fortunately, with Troy’s help and support I am less inclined to skip the preparations and elope. 
Being the Silicon Valley geeks that we are, one of the first decisions we made after the engagement was not the when and where of the wedding, but what domain name to get. Since we wanted to use Google Apps to help us with our planning and organizing, we needed a domain name to associate with our accounts. After much discussion, we chose DreamMerger.com. Because the companies we each work at have been considered a dream merger by bloggers, we often joked about how our dating was like a corporate merger. When we got engaged, Troy’s dad described us as a marriage made in Silicon Valley heaven.
I do not know right now the when and where of the wedding. I have a vague idea of when I want it, and that is dependent on the venue, which is dependent on our budget. Sometimes I want to skip all the planning and get married at city hall. However, wedding planning is a great chance for us to work as a team to collaborate, budget, compromise, and be creative and resourceful. Of course, we have fun, too, which will hopefully be reflected in the celebration so that our guests will have a great time.
Posted in Tips, Website, Wordpress
August 6, 2009 7:14 am I just changed the theme of my blog to Atahualpa. I liked it when I first saw it because of the ability to have a rotating roster of random heading images. It’s really cool because it is so configurable that I don’t have to edit the theme files themselves.
The theme comes with some nice images. However, as a photo-phile, I wanted to use my own photos. The challenging part was finding images that I could crop to match the long proportions of the heading images. Once I figured out what I needed to do, I was able to generate more pictures without taking so much time on each photo.
Here are the steps that I have figured out. I used Picasa and Dreamweaver.
- In Picasa, look for landscape photos that had the most interesting elements in the horizontal axis.
- Select the desired image, File > Save a Copy
- Edit the copy, which will have the same filename with -1 appended (skip steps 2 & 3 if you don’t care about saving the original)
- Click on I’m Feeling Lucky to see if it improves the look of the picture. If not, undo
- Click on Crop and use the Manual option to select a long rectangle that contains the desired content
- Click on Preview to see the dimensions of the crop area. This might take experimentation since the size of photos vary but I found that I got good results if the height is no more than twice the max height set for the header image in the theme configurations. This is dependent on the width of the original and the size to which it will be reduced, if at all.
- Click Apply once satisfied with the crop area.
- File > Export Picture to Folder
- Select the desired Resize setting if the original is not the right size
- Click Export
- A Windows Explorer window should open that contains the new file
- In the local copy of the blog, copy or move the file to the folder: wp-content\themes\atahualpa\images\header
- In Dreamweaver, select the new file and upload
I hope that helps. It seems complicated with so many steps but after a while it gets easy to do.
Posted in Google, Website, Wordpress
March 13, 2009 12:16 am Google just made the Google Friend Connect API available to developers. What made this interesting was that it would make it easier for site admins/developers to integrate Friend Connect into existing login systems. As a Wordpress user, I was excited to see that there was a plugin for my blogging platform of choice. An added bonus was that I knew some of the people involved in the development of the plugin.
I wrote that first paragraph with the understanding that readers would know what Friend Connect was and what it was for. However, it is not that widely in use so I can’t expect people to know what it is.
Google Friend Connect provides a simple means of one-click user authentication using a pre-existing Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account. This means that a user doesn’t need to create a new account for every site that he comes across.
After installing the plugin to enable Friend Connect authentication on my blog, I tried out the Friend Connect sign-in process while I was logged out to see what it would look like to non-admin visitors. I had a few moments of panic after seeing that logging into the Friend Connect system also logged me into my blog. The scary part about that was that I saw a link that said Site Admin, which only I as admin should see. It turned out that I was only logged in as a Subscriber, and the Site Admin showed the dashboard, but only as much as subscribers can see. Basically, regular visitors were not getting admin access. It was a false alarm. I was able to confirm by checking the list of Users and saw my Friend Connect user identity was appropriately marked as Subscriber.
That’s the other cool thing about this plugin; it is able to add users to a website’s database. A couple of weeks ago, I was working on a Friend Connect login solution for Coppermine Photo Gallery but got stuck due to CPG needing database access to the application’s users. If I or any CPG developer can work with the GFC API, we could enable visitors to login with their Friend Connect credentials, and have those accounts create new users in the gallery’s user table in the database.
Feel free to try it out here by logging into Friend Connect to leave a comment. Of course, comments are still open to visitors who are not logged in, but when logged in, you won’t have to enter the usual blog comment form fields.
If you installed the plugin for your site and noticed that the blog looked different in places you did not want it to look different, it is due to some css definitions that the plugin has. You will need to delete or comment out the unwanted css definitions in fc_plugin.php
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One of my cats, Mr. Knightley, likes to destroy toilet paper and eat plastic. That meant that I had to keep my bathroom door closed to keep him out of trouble. That was not great for ventilation after showers. For years, I looked for a solution that would protect the toilet paper and discourage him from eating the plastic lining of the trash can to no avail.
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