metcaffeination » metcaffeination

Matthew’s Books updated

thm — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:05:46 +0000

I keep a permanent page on this website listing the books that my son has, in order to minimize duplicate copies. I have just now updated this list to include books acquired over the past year.

He does also have a number of books in Korean, which are not presently listed.

MPOD hiccups

thm — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 02:48:55 +0000

The companion site to this blog, the Matthew Picture of the Day, has been having a bit of trouble lately. Or rather, the automatic picture-posting program that runs in the morning fouled up on Sunday. I’m not sure why, and I think it was an anomalous, one-time problem. It wasn’t until the afternoon that I realized the problem and manually posted the picture. But the way the picture-a-day software works–checking to make sure it’s been at least 23 hours since the last post–the automation was disrupted, and today’s picture didn’t get posted until the evening either. I’ll manually post tomorrow’s picture, hopefully early, and by Thursday it should be running normally again.

To anyone who thought there wasn’t a picture Sunday or Tuesday: yes there was, and sorry it’s so late.

Packaging cards

thm — Fri, 09 May 2008 02:29:38 +0000

The domain name here, metcaffeination.net, is a made-up name. When I tell people I have a blog, or that I have a site with new picture each day of my son, I need to make sure the offer the domain name in writing, because its spelling is not obvious. I decided, recently, to make up some cards with the domain name, so I could hand them out like business cards.

I chose two different styles: the first, which I ordered from eInvite, are simple: the domain name, my name, and my email address. They had sufficiently robust online design tools so that I could get the type of card I had imagined without worry that fonts wouldn’t be imbedded or that some other problem associated with emailing a PDF wouldn’t happen. And I am quite pleased with the cards.

The second ones were photo cards, to promote the Matthew Picture of the Day. I wanted full-color photos on these, with the website url. For these, I went with Moo’s mini-cards, which seem to be the favorite of hipster digital designer types. These, too, came out well.

I got 100 of each, which for business-size cards is a small order. But I’d like to compare the packaging that each company sent my cards in.

First, the photo mini-cards. One hundred of them, in a small box, in a modest padded envelope:

The standard cards came in a corrugated cardboard box, half of which was taken up by packing material and the other half of which contained a smaller box:

Opening the smaller box revealed a fractal-like pattern: half of the smaller box was taken up by packing material, and half contained a smaller box:

Inside this third box were, finally, the cards. But half of the inside of the third box was also taken up by packing material:

To illustrate the amount of empty space that was shipped to me, here are the cards shown inside the outer-most shipping box:

Comments work now, I think

thm — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:04:38 +0000

Sorry all for not having comments working when this started. I think it’s fixed; I think it had something to do with what sort of Permalink structure the Neoclassical theme expected, and what Permalink structure I had. I’m using the reCAPTCHA spam-stopper, which helps to digitize old books at the same time.

Header pictures

thm — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:47:59 +0000

The picture in the header of this page is chosen randomly from, at present, 20 pictures. All are my own photographs, cropped to 865 by 180 pixels. As someone who’s been interested in panoramic photography, looking through my photos and trying to select those from which an interesting super-wide crop could be made was fascinating.

The actual crops were done with EasyCrop, a delightfully straightforward program for this sort of job. (I was actually surprised that I couldn’t do this easily with GraphicConverter, at least version 5.9.5.) The random header images was one of the reasons I was drawn to the Neoclassical Theme for this blog.

Go ahead, reload the page–the picture should change.