More Singularist Coverage

August 02, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Just to keep you up to date, here are some more bits of Singularist coverage... After the Chicagoist interview went up there were posts from Seattlest, SFist, and today DCist. A few days ago Ross Mayfield mentioned Singularist on his blog. LAVoice also had a post, and somehow I found my way into the comments on this blogging.la post about Joseph Mailander and Kevin Roderick (the singularist mention is down toward the end). Also last week were posts on losanjealous and blogebrity.

It's entirely ironic that I've had stuff on the web for like six or seven years now and a parody site I do gets more traffic than any of the more serious stuff. That's the nature of the web.

Chicagoist

August 01, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I got an IM today from someone at Chicagoist wanting to do a little interview about Singularist. I didn't realize that the whole IM conversation was going to be heading online -- be careful what you say online. Anyway, the interview is here on the Chicagoist site.

It seems like it would be appropriate to link to the interview on Singularist, but in meta-posts like this that'll do some funky things. And HTML::TreeBuilder barfs on the u-umlaut. I hate libs with broken unicode support...

Of course their link to the Chicago version of Singularist is broken -- I use just city name, not the site name with -ist -- but I added a line to strip the ist and make that work. The things I do for these people.

Singularist Launches

July 30, 2005 by Eric Richardson

So yesterday I launched Singularist, a site that takes the various Gothamist sites -- Gothamist, LAist, DCist, etc -- and makes a cursory attempt to take that stupid editorial "we" voice and make it singular. In the end it's really just a regular expression that maps five or six first person plural pronouns to first-person singular, but the effect works pretty well.

After first sending me a "knock it off" type email, Gothamist head Jake Dobkins now agrees that the site is legal according to the Creative Commons license Gothamist uses. Specifically this license allows non-commercial derivative uses.

I found it funny today, though, to go over to the blogging.la post Sean made linking to Singularist and read the comments. I launched the site yesterday morning and then proceeded to go to Rancho Cucamonga for the afternoon/evening and watch minor league baseball, so I missed all the fun.

My favorite part: Jake's comment that "i would have done it as a greasemonkey plugin, rather than devoting the energy to buying the domain name and making a whole logo. to me, that suggests a guy with waaaay too much time on his hands." Hah. I wish I had too much time on my hands. I'd say the reality is quite the opposite, however.

For what it's worth, I now have a page up with the Singularist code.

Camera Phone Shots as a Snapshot of Life

July 27, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Every time I go check out the Flickr Date Taken Calendar I think all over again about how cool it is. That calendar shows a little snapshot of my life, in picture form. Sure, I'm not in any (or almost any) of the pictures, but each of those shots represents where I was in that point in time. With traditional photos it's easy for dates to become fuzzy, but with digital images and EXIF data you always know exactly when things happened. That's really cool.

Pictures from Catalina

July 23, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Kathy and Laura and I went to Catalina today, and I took a good number of pictures. Quite a few of them are me sitting on the dock playing with lens flares and interesting ways to confuse the sensor with a sunset, but I think they're fun.

The quantity of pictures I took on this trip prompted me to figure out how to bulk upload to flickr. I ended up using jUploader, a cross-platform java app. It has an odd quirk of uploading in reverse order, but I figured out how to drag my pictures in reversed and get them to come out right on the flickr end. They're all there now -- 92 of them, I think.