I finally got fed up with the lowercase g and ampersand in Trebuchet. So I bought a font editor (TypeTool), and fixed these characters. The g now looks a lot like the one in Meta, and the ampersand... well it's not great, but it's OK and was easy to create by modifying the existing one.

I'm using these versions on my computer now. You're welcome to as well. I've not done the italic faces yet, though. It took me long enough to figure out how to use the tool.

Trebuchet fixed
Trebuchet Bold fixed

Time is our most valuable commodity simply because it is finite resource. But while you can't technically buy more time, you can optimize the things you do in your day to make more discretionary time available to you.

The number one thing to do is shorten your commute. I suppose this is one of those things ingrained in me from childhood. We lived literally 300 yards from where he worked. He walked to work every day. Now I haven't achieved that level of optimization, but for 11 years I've lived less than 10 miles from work. I currently live 3 miles away: a 6 minute drive or 12 minute bike ride. I've also been biking to work regularly since 2001: another optimization I've previously written about.

Now I understand the appeal of living in SF or the East Bay (or even Marin or Auburn). But I assert the total costs outweigh the benefits. Spending 2 hours in the car 5 days a week is not worth the coolness of living in the city, or the cost savings of living on the rural fringe. Really that cost savings is negligible when you now factor in the high price of commuting today.

I probably could have saved $300k buying a comparable house in Alameda county. But my commute would have been 1.5 hours/day longer. At 180 commute-days/year over the course of a 30-year career, that works out to $37/hour.

So the question is, would you pay $37 for an extra hour in your day?

I needed this function recently, and might need it again in the future. I'm posting it here so it will be easily findable when I do need it again. FWIW, the Prototype Javascript Library handles this really well with its $ function, but the page I'm putting together doesn't need that kind of overhead.

function elementById(x) {
  if (document.getElementById) return document.getElementById(x);
    else if (document.all) return document.all[x];
    else if (document.layers) return document.layers[x];
    else return null;
}

Although it is not illegal to share lanes with motorcycles, it is unsafe.

California Driver Handbook

Cars and motorcycles each need a full lane to operate safely. Lane sharing is not safe. Riding between rows of stopped or moving cars in the same lane can leave you vulnerable. A car could turn suddenly or change lanes, a door could open, or a hand could come out of a window. Discourage lane sharing by others.

California Motorcycle Handbook

I got my motorcycle permit before I learned to drive a car. I recently gave it up, simply because it's too dangerous. I suppose if there's any part of your body you wouldn't mind losing, then you can get away with not protecting it. But I want to keep all of mine, which is why suiting up for a ride takes over 10 minutes.

That's why it baffles me that on top of the already dangerous activity of simply driving a motorcycle on the road, many riders feel the need to crank up the risk factor and speed along between lanes of traffic mere inches from impact. I don't care if it is legal. So is smoking. So is eating meat. So is riding without a helmet in one of the 30 states that don't require it. Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it is safe.

Nor does it mean you necessarily have the right to do it. Drivers are under no obligation to make room for motorcycles splitting lanes. In fact as the California Motorcycle Handbook states, drivers should "discourage lane sharing by others." I do just that, and I encourage other drivers to do the same.

I was out on a houseboat with a group of friends over the long Labor Day weekend. You'd think the control panels on a rental houseboat would be designed so someone unfamiliar with them could figure them out without training or a manual. And you'd be wrong. Just to get power to operate the electrical system, you needed to go to the back of the boat where the generator control panel is, turn on the blower for a minute, turn it off, hold down the on switch while pressing the start button, wait for it to warm up for a minute, then switch a dial over to "boat power".

But the real UI travesty was the engine blower. The blower is there to air out the engine compartment of any built up gas fumes, which could otherwise ignite in a massive conflagration. The problem is, the blower runs continuously when the switch is on, pulling power from not the boat's generator, but from the starter battery. There's no indication that the blower is on other than the position of the switch: no light, no warning beep, and not even a mechanical hum. So it's far too easy to accidentally leave the blower on and drain the starter battery. Which we did. 9 miles from the marina.

Luckily the rental company had the policy of sending a mechanic out to deal with any boat problems. The guy was fast, and for good reason; he's had a ton of practice. We were the 3rd boat that day that needed a jump start. All because of that poorly-designed blower switch.

Problem solver that I am, I decided the best way to solve this problem would be to install timer switches on the blower circuit. You've probably seen these on hot tubs or saunas, where they want to limit the amount of time the heater is on for safety reasons. It wouldn't cost more than a few hundred dollars to outfit the whole fleet with these, and they would save a ton of hassle for their mechanics, not to mention the gas to drive a boat out the stranded renters. 

David Creemer wrote this post that got Reddited, spiking us into the thousands of page views for this blog. Yesterday, Seth Godin picked up on my eBay marketing post and wrote about it on his blog. Take a look at the chart of our traffic. It makes the rest of our traffic look like a rounding error.

Being a designer on a small development team means I end up in the code fixing visual design bugs. Firebug has been invaluable for this. Here are some of the things I do the most.

Right-click on anything on the web page and choose Inspect Element. This gets me to the section of the HTML source that I care most about.

Right-click in the Style panel on the right and choose Add Element Style. You can then add CSS declarations to this element and see immediately how it affects the layout of the page. If there's already a CSS block and you want to add a property to it, double-click on the white space after the opening or closing bracket.

Use up and down arrow keys in the value of a CSS element to cycle through values. So if I add a position declaration, I can use the arrow key to see how each value changes the layout. The down-side is you need a valid value in there already. undefined won't work as a starting point.

Arrow keys also work for numerical values, as long as they has specified units. Font size, margin, padding, position... you can nudge any of these values up or down using the arrow keys. It even works on an individual value within a multi-properly list (e.g. padding: 5px 10px 20px;) as long as you put the insertion point in the value you want to change.

And of course turning off a particular declaration is just as important as adding one or changing the value of one. Click in the left margin next to the declaration you want to disable.

There's a ton more in this utility, like the console for evaluating javascript expressions without resorting to alert();, and the DOM. But this is the stuff I use every day. I only wish IE and Safari had equally good debugging tools.

So you've been browsing through Flickr's Interestingness feature and found the perfect photo for your new desktop background. The only problem is, Flickr makes it hard for you to actually get the photo. Right-click on it and save, and you'll end up with spaceball.gif. Annoying. So here's how you get the real picture downloaded.

View Source for the page with the photo on it. The search for the term photoImgDiv. Immediately following this term is an <IMG> tag with a src value that looks something like this:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/1234/1234567890_a1b2c3d4e5.jpg?v=0

That is the link to the medium-sized image.  Select it, copy it, paste it into your browser's address field and go to it. (Select, Cmd T, Cmd L, Cmd V, Enter on Mac Firefox.) Note the question mark and everything after it is irrelevant. You only need the part up to and ending with .jpg.

Now comes the magic. In the address field at the end of the link, just before the .jpg, add _o which is an underscore and a lowercase o. Here's what the link will look like:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/1234/1234567890_a1b2c3d4e5_o.jpg

Press Enter to open it, and that will get you the original size of the picture. Now you can save it out to your computer.

This won't work for some pictures. In that case, try _b instead. This will get you the large (aka big) version of the picture. If neither of those work, then the medium size is the best you can do. _s is square, _t is thumbnail, and _m is small. But let's be honest here. What you're really after is the high resolution, no?

Now I just need someone to write a basic web service that takes a Flickr URL and returns the biggest version of the image. Any web hackers want to take this one on?

Of course doing a 2 minute web search turned up these existing instructions and this tool. Ah well, if it was new and useful to me, perhaps it will be to a few of you all as well.

I have four general-purpose computers running three different operating systems on my desk at work. At home I also have four computers, though I "only" run two different operating systems.

At work and at home, the computers are connected together using commercial-grade switched Gigabit Ethernet, with gobs of dedicated NAS-based storage. Both home and work networks are connected to the Internet via good quality dedicated DSL and other technologies. The WiFi signal is strong everywhere. I design networking software for a living, have a degree in computer science,  speak HTTP fluently, and am the primary inventor of a bunch of patents related to computer networking.

So when I want to copy a single, simple file from one computer to another what do I do? Reach for a handy USB-stick, of course! The perfect utility, predictable behavior, and universal support for the FAT-formatted USB storage stick trumps all the networking in the world.

Yes, for some cases 'scp' 'rsync' 'smbtar' and friends can't be beat, especially when you already know how to name and authenticate to the destination (i.e. is it 192.168.5.32 ? smb://fooobar/baz ? \\skippy\flazzle\foo ? sftp://jokers:wild@server.snip.snap.com/home/me ?) None of that matters to the USB stick.

The closest replacement I've seen so far is DropCopy -- but that's not cross platform (yet!?). Someday we will sort all this out. Until then, I always keep a 4G stick handy.

It looks like my work adding Rated Best to the various start-up directories caused a nice increase in traffic. 40 people/day isn't great, but it's a lot better than 4!

I read today that in a sampling of ~3000 PCs, a third of them had downgraded from Vista to XP. We've already seen close Microsoft partners hold off on rolling out Vista internally. And there's the whole Mojave fiasco where Microsoft--under pristine lab-like conditions--tried to convince people that all the setup and cofiguration problems aren't really problems as long as someone else sets up your computer under pristine, lab-like conditions.

But it got me thinking, how much money has this disaster of an OS release cost the PC industry? Are there many people out there like me, who might consider buying a new PC, but instead continue to make do with the old one primarily because they don't want to deal with reinstalling XP? Microsoft has all but given up at this point, focusing attention now on the new Windows 7 blog.

I finally updated my Rated Best site to use sIFR for the titles and headings. (I'm using various weights of the font Meta.) Getting that working was a real challenge, especially since my blog development environment is all brower-based. Browser-based debugging is a lot like particle physics research. Slam some code against a browser and see what comes flying out. Tweak the code and repeat.

Suffice to say that sIFR is a very fragile technology that requires everything to be just so in order for it to work. I still can't figure out how to get the elements from jumping around as they load, but it's good enough for now. Anyway, let me know if you need help getting it working on your site. I'm apparently an expert at it now.

The other thing I just did was to do a bit of passive promotion. I added an info page on Rated Best to CrunchBase, TradeVibes, AboutUs.org, SimpleSpark, Sphred, and the Facebook product pages. And of course the sIFR examples page. I also submited to FeedMyApp, KillerStartups and Listio. It seemed to work well with AskMeGo, which now has a PageRank of 4. Any other places I should post it to help out SEO for Rated Best?

Why is this so hard? I have a beautiful Borkholder cherry wood entertainment center that I have no desire of replacing. The interior will fit a TV up to 29.5" wide. Right now I have a 27" tube TV in there that I bought off of Mercata, which tells you how long I've had it. I'm ready to make the step into the modern era with a 16:9 HDTV, but it's proving to be an over-constrained problem.

TV manufacturers appear to have a few magic dimensions they support for TVs. 32" is one of them, as is 26", 37" and 42". It seems the the narrowest TVs are just under their diagonal picture size. So a narrow 32" TV is just over 31" wide: too wide for my cabinet, but from this heuristic, a proportionally smaller 30" TV would be perfect.

Unfortunately, they don't appear to exist. There are a few 30" TVs out there, but they are either tube TVs which are wider. Or for some crazy reason, the 30" LCD TVs all seem to have their speakers mounted on the sides rather than below.

I know it can be done. There are 30" computer displays like the one from Dell where the width is only 22". But then I don't want to spend $1200 on a pixel-perfect TV. I guess I'll keep looking.

Now that I'm an American citizen, I feel a little bit more at ease revealing my decidedly un-American activities. Here's my first admission: today I rode public transit to work (but I promise it won't happen again)! Google Maps transit planner showed me that I could walk to the bus stop, pay $1.75, ride for 20 minutes, then walk to the office, all in less than 30 minutes, with no transfers needed.

Sadly, my office is moving in a couple of months to a new building just about 5-10 minutes further drive from my house. Google maps transit says I will need to take two buses, walk more, and have a total commute time of 70 minutes. If I ride my bike to the bus, then I can skip a transfer and have a slightly longer bicycle ride on the back end -- total time about 45 minutes. But I could also just ride directly to the office, and skip the bus for a total time of, well, about 45 minutes.

I'm fortunate enough to be able to ride my bicycle to work when I want to, but I seem to live in that all-too-common American "suburban grey zone" -- too short a commute to make public transport a good option, but too long to make walking or biking a no-brainer. Maybe I just need to change my brain to get on the bicycle more often. Hmm.. more un-American activities...