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There is also a sharing section, where you can share a portion of your account with another user, and let them upload and delete files. It combines your usable space for this areas, so on group projects it gets quick first. Ohh and did I mention it has its own built in file versioning system?

There’s also a special folder for Photos that will automatically generate an online picture album of any pictures / folders placed into here. Of all the features, while I like some of the other ones a whole lot more, I use this one the most. Its great when working on web sites with clients and being able to save screen shots directly to this folder and show them what I’m seeing.

When I first found out about Dropbox, I was so excited about it, I went on a big kick about how everyone should be using it, but after time this excitement died down. Well now, Dropbox is giving away an extra 256MB of storage space (up to 3GB) (on top of the 2GB you get just for signing up) for every user you refer to the site, and so I’m back at it. Check it out: https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTM0OTg4Njk!

About 3 weeks ago I filled out a form on New Balance’s Website for their Wear Test program. Shortly there after I received an email back from them stating:

Matthew Farmer, your application has been received and will be reviewed by the New Balance Wear Test Team. It is possible that all positions in the Activity you indicated are currently filled, so we thank you for your patience as we look for testing opportunities that suit you.

Once you have been selected for a test, you will receive an email notification of your acceptance into the program. This email will also confirm your User ID and provide a temporary Password allowing you to log in to the site and manage your account.

Sincerely,
The New Balance Wear Test Team

http://weartest.newbalance.com

And that was that. I kind of forgot that I even applied and hadn’t heard from them since.

Then this morning I found a package on my front doorstep. At first I looked at it expecting to see my room mate’s name on it, but when I saw mine I quickly scanned the return address expecting to see it coming from my family, but was excited to see that it was from New Balance!

This last week I really started to gear up on my training for the LA marathon. I ran a 5 mile run at my goal marathon pace of 7:15 minutes / mile on Saturday and followed that up with a 8 mile run on Sunday, each of which left my knees feeling a little soggy.

I really thought a new pair of shoes might help with that, but didn’t want to drop the $80-100 that entailed on it just yet, and was thinking that maybe I’d ask for a pair for my birthday, though my family already do so much for me I didn’t want to. Last night I even had a dream about it. So these couldn’t have come at a better time. I can’t wait to get out there and put some miles on them!

The first week was pretty much tied up with Gosslin, a holiday my friends here made up about 6 years ago. Celebrated at the end of January every year, there are 17 points that must be completed during the night. This year a few of them were: Martina has to sneak in (which he did), Jess had to lead everyone in a song of dance, the Ramones were the only band listened to, Bowser and Banshe got married, and Noah had a Translyvanian BBQ.

During all of that, me and Noah also got a dog, Girl. She was found under a car in Eagle Rock a few months ago when this really nice lady took her in. She took care of her for a few months until we heard about her through a friend of a friend of a friend of Noah’s boss… or something like that. Since we’ve got her we’ve gotten her spayed, dealt with her with a cone on her head for a week, and I started taking her on runs.

As for work, I’ve started giving the freelance thing a try. Mostly doing websites. Its slow getting work, but looks some what promising. I think I’m also going to put my skills from EMC to work and start doing some Hard Drive Data recovery. Dave’s Mac hard drive went last week (due to some nasty file system corruption that DiskUtility couldn’t fix), and I was able to get everything back for him, so I figured I’d see if I couldn’t make some money there.

I’ve also started officially training for the LA Marathon. This will be my first time training with an official schedule, instead of just running as I see fit. I didn’t look around too too much, but decided to go with Hal Higdon’s Intermediate 1 Training Schedule. It’s an 18 week program, but the race is only 15 away, so I’m going to start at Week 1 and skip one week of the schedule until I’m on track. Given I finished Boston in 3:53, with my haphazard training for 6 weeks, I think I’ll be ok with this.

Enough side tracking for now. Back to work!

I wanted to take this as an opportunity to try out a few different web frameworks to see which I like the most and which I wanted to learn more. The first two I looked at were django and CodeIgniter.

After running through the tutorial for django, I was totally sold! Everything about it seemed amazing and worked like a charm! But when I tried to load it up on my 1&1 account, it was a no go situation. django is a Python package that has to be installed by a privileged user. There are other hosts out there at comparable prices that have django pre-installed, but they do not offer the amount of space that 1&1 does (which I use to back up my personal files). Also, a lot of the work that I do is adding functionality to already existing sites, where I have no input into where the site is hosted, and so again, it doesn’t look like django will work for me.

Next up was CodeIgniter, and while its not quite as impressive as django (I actually had to create a database table myself… *sarcastic sigh*), it seems like it will do the job.

Next up, time to work on this site. One problem. I don’t have any cPannel type login information or know any credentials for a database I can use… No worries though: sqlite to the rescue!

I setup CodeIgniter to work and all is looking great. I created some sample data with the command line sqlite interface and Select statements are working perfectly. I’m not pretty far into this project, too far to back out now. The client side of things are all done, and I’m now working on the admin interface. Time to setup some DELETE and INSERT queries.

“Unable to open database…”. WHAT? What do you mean unable to open database? If i changed any of these queries to a SELECT, they work fine, so its obviously able to open it. I chmod the file to 777, still nothing.

After what felt like, and probably was, hours of searching, I finally came across this article at mediakey.dk.

As it turns out, to be able to write to a sqlite file, the folder that it resides in must also be writable. So simple, but so frusterating. I’m going to post this hint in as many spots as I can find now, so hopefully other user’s won’t have to go through as much trouble finding it as I did.

At first I tried just using the “Post via E-mail” feature built directly into Wordpress, but I couldn’t seem to get this to work. It would log in, check the email, and make a post with the email’s subject line as the title of the post, but there would never be any content in the post. I’ve gone through a few minor updates to WP since first trying this feature, all with the same result, and so I decided to see if I couldn’t find a plug-in that would offer me this feature.

Turns out, I didn’t have to look far before finding Postie. I’ve only done a simple test from gmail -> WordPress, but it seems to work well and offers a lot of features. For instance you can apply categories to the post by including the name of the category in square brackets in the subject line of the email, and it supports attaching of images and files to the blog post. I’ll make sure to tag posts I do like this with a Moblog category, so if you see that starting to get some heavy use, you can safely assume that I’m using this and liking it!

THE POLITICAL DR. SEUSS traces Theodor Geisel’s life from his boyhood in Springfield, Massachusetts through his final days living atop Mt. Soledad in La Jolla, California. The film explores his little-known World War II era cartoons, his educational and propaganda film work—including the “Private Snafu” films he made with Chuck Jones—and Design for Death, his Academy Award-winning documentary on Japan, which is seen here for the first time since its original theatrical release in 1947. In-depth interviews with his widow Audrey, his biographers Judith and Neil Morgan (Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel) and Richard H. Minear (Dr. Seuss Goes to War), his long-time Random House publisher Robert Bernstein and editor Michael Frith, and historian Michael Kazin—not to mention Geisel’s own words through voice-overs—bring the man to life. THE POLITICAL DR. SEUSS is not only an intriguing portrait of Theodor Geisel but also a fascinating lens through which to view the complex political and social history of the 20th century.

Sorry posts here have been slow, but I’ve been pretty busy. From mid March through April, I was roaming around South East Asia. Then from May till August I was working at a camp, Philmont, in New Mexico, teaching kids low impact camping skills and keeping them safe from bears. And then I went with my friend Geoff and hiked the John Muir Trail from Yosemite Park down to Mt Whitney in California. That was 230+ miles in 17 days of hiking. The entire time after leaving Toulume we only saw TWO roads! We were pretty out there. It was incredible!

Now I’ve been back in LA for a few days, catching up with friends here and plan to ride a bike back up San Francisco with another friend Noah, and thought I might try to fix up the mobile blog again. So here’s a first go at that. Lets see if it works!

I’m not really sure when I lost the camera. Originally our train was scheduled to arrive on platform 2, where I took a goodbye photo with Arvinder and his dad, but at the last moment there we were switched to platform 4. This meant that everyone had to move up a crowded set of stair, across the overpass, and back down to the new platform (which was of course too much work for some, who felt it was easier to crawl through the gap of a freight train that was currently at that platform, run across two sets of tracks, and then climb back up on the new platform with all of their luggage in classic Indian style!). I think it was either here or when I was sitting somewhere with my baggy pockets that I lost it.

But whats done is done. J takes about 200 photos a day, and Judy has a really nice camera and takes similar shots as me, so I should make it home with out one OK. I also had only taken maybe 10 photos since I last uploaded everything, so its not like I lost much there which is the most important thing.

The king here is absolutely crazy. He’s on all the money and his face is plastered everywhere you look. Its illegal to say bad about the king, and when Judy once asked a kid she was teaching English to what would happen if the king ever died, the girl just shook her head scared, saying that they don’t talk about such things. So being in such close quarters to the king that day is apparently a really rare thing, and people were really excited and always trying to catch a glimpse of him which was neat.

Today is the start of Songkran, which is basically a New Years Eve celebration turned into a 4 day water fight, so I’m going to go buy the best squirt gun I can find and prepare!