mishakononov.com

I've got a Motorola Droid and a Mac and two problems.
1.) The Droid doesn't natively sync with iTunes
2.) My music collection is larger than the SD card on my Droid

I wrote up this little Python script that you give a source directory, target directory, and maximum size and it randomly selects audio files from the source directory, sets up a temporary file tree, then uses rsync to copy the files to the target directory. My goal was to make it as easy and quick as possible to grab a chunk of my music collection, put it on my phone, and "mix it up" occasionally.

I realize it's been quite some time since I last posted an entry about our house hunting, so here's a little (big) update.

Justine and I ended up putting in offers on three separate places, and we got outbid on all three of them. It was extremely frustrating. After some thinking, we realized that all three places were built within the last couple of years, and furthermore, all of them were built by the same company. We decided to go right to the source and explore the idea of building.

Today's the first game of the season! For anyone who's interested in catching a game, here's our schedule for this season:

Monday, 05/25 - Padres at Brewers - Babe Ruth Airport 2:00 pm

Bye week

Sunday, 06/07 - Padres at Pirates - Babe Ruth Spectrum 1:30 pm

Wednesday, 06/10 - Braves at Padres - Port Matilda 6:30 pm

Saturday, 06/13 - Padres at Orioles - Babe Ruth Airport 2:00 pm

Saturday, 06/20 - Padres at Red Sox - Medlar Field (Spikes facility) 3:30 pm

Sunday, 06/28 - Phillies at Padres - Babe Ruth Airport 5:00 pm

Eager to jump right back into the game, we went through four places yesterday. The clear winner was this one:
http://www.1kbb.com/real-estate/property-detail.php?listnumber=28278&type=1

Nice place, backs up to a designated natural area, can walk to the elementary school. Little small for the money, and pretty far out of town. It would end up being about a 15 minute commute for me and 20 minutes for Justine. I think we're just going to keep an eye on it for now!

So for those of you who haven't been in contact with me and have only gotten bits and pieces of the story, here's basically how things went down:

So the first house was a bust. It felt a lot smaller than we were expecting, had no yard, butted up against a townhouse community, and was about $30k more than we were expecting. I'm planning on getting in touch with a real estate agent tomorrow, so keep an eye open for more updates!

--Misha

Justine and I have our first appointment to go look at a house tonight. It's a FSBO, so there's nothing about it online. It's the same model and neighborhood as this place:
http://www.1kbb.com/real-estate/property-detail.php?listnumber=27932&type=1

I think we're also going to go and have a look at this place at some point in the near future:
http://www.1kbb.com/real-estate/property-detail.php?listnumber=27501&type=1

Exciting stuff!

Rather than going with a simple CAPTCHA solution for anonymous comments, I've decided to give Mollom a go.

Basically, Mollom is a web service that scans text entry and decides whether it is spam, ham, or something in between. In the latter case, it will give the user a CAPTCHA to try and determine whether they are actually human or not. They have a free version of the service, and their success rate is supposed to be phenomenal.

After my recent experience at DrupalCon DC, I decided to add some functionality to my web site. The last iteration of the site was just a flash gallery -- this one's got a lot more, including a series of personal news posts (I hate the word blog, but I suppose it's a necessary evil).

With the previous site, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to prevent people from downloading my photos and used things like a flash interface and watermarking. After spending some time contemplating FOSS and open source ideals, I've decided to release everything on this site, including the photos, under a Creative Commons License. It's a big step for me, but I feel like it's the right direction to head.

I'm going to make an effort to keep the site updated, and hopefully post some interesting (and useful) things. Hopefully you'll find something here worth your time!