Waiter Rant and Overworked and Underf*cked ... blogs with a more personal touch. It's nice to be reminded that blogs aren't all about gadgets, gizmos, and other geeky stuff.

I've been pretty preoccupied over the past week working on coding a simple gallery using the Flickr API.

The idea arose for two reasons ... one, just because i like messing with cool stuff like this. second, because it was quickly becoming apparent to me that hosting your own online photo gallery with full quality hi-res pics just takes up too much disk space.

My hosting company provides a great plan which includes 1.2gb storage for $15/month, but with a standard 2 megapixel camera you are looking at using about 1mb per photo you upload. This means you can hold roughly 1000 photos before you start to run out of space, and thats not much. I don't even take that many pictures, but I have about 700 online now.

The new plan is to pay a little extra for a pro account at Flickr and use Flickr as an image hosting service. Then using the Flickr API i can just query for the album information and display the pics on my own site.

Check it out ... all the actual images are hosted on Flickr. There are still kinks to work out, but so far i like it.

Just checked out the new trailer for Frank Miller's Sin City.

I can't believe how big comic movies have become. They have been slowly building momentum over the years and it seems that they've really hit full stride now with a huge variety of films each year being adapted from comics or graphic novels.

After seeing the trailer I must say that i am pretty excited for this one. I've read the comic and, like all Frank Miller stuff, it totally rocks. My favorite thing about Frank Miller is his ability to create excellent mood with his art ... it really sucks you into the stories he tells.

Anyways, from the trailer looks like it really recreates the visual mood of the comic. Definitely keeping this one on the radar.

Finally sat down and whipped up some icons that I had been thinking about doing for quite some time. Now there is at least links to the archives and gallery.

I was coding on my christmas eve :) ... what were you doing?

Head over to Jottings.com » Secrets of Firefox 1.0 for a great article that dives into the advanced configuration features of Firefox.

As suggested by Panos ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s
keyword: wp

allows you to search a huge and free wiki encyclopedia. pretty damn cool site and almost suprising that it has the support it does. i couldn't believe it when i tested out the quicksearch by looking up foobar and it actually has some good info. nifto.

Originally uploaded by jorb.

haha. i love these photos that seem like the most bizarre candid camera shots. i saw this one and thought ... "damn, how did he just take a photo of some guy in the can."

Discovered Hack a Day while browsing around at Frostyland. 2 for the price of 1 ;-)

A cool little quicktime video showing some behind the scenes footage of the production design being done by WETA for the narnia films. Looks like more of the good stuff we saw WETA do for Lord of the Rings.

2004 Weblog Awards. See who has the best blogs on the web (according to Whizbang!).

Originally uploaded by jperkinson.

classic :)

Yet another cool firefox extension ... this one provides a handy integrated method to post links to your del.icio.us account.

http://delicious.mozdev.org/

Well, the good stuff is just rollin' today. This tip courtesy of The Sect of Rama ... check out Flickr for a great place to store/share/find photos.

Flickr really does seem like the all in one photo sharing app. It basically does everything you would want, and my new favorite is that it allows you to instantly send any flickr photo directly to your blog, so expect to start seeing more photos in the blog via flickr.

The other great feature of flickr is that it allows photos to be tagged with keywords, which makes it really easy to search for photos using keywords and you actually get good results. Way better than google images if you ask me.

There's a bunch more inside the printable pdf doc. sooooo funny.

Really good article from sfgate.com about why Japan is at the pinnacle of the gadget market and why us Americans are so far behind.

The article basically boils down to what you may already know, it's just part of their culture, but the best part is all the actual detailed explanations of how that culture was derived. worth the read, especially if you are like me and wish you had the opportunity to buy a lot of the cool stuff you only see in Japan.

So I've been MIA the past week due to my knee surgery. I still can't believe that I needed a major surgery. I consider myself a fairly healthy and cautious person, so surgery was something I never considered likely for me, but so much for that.

Anyways ... the surgery went great. I was only in there for about an hour and as it turns out my ACL was totally ripped up and I also had 2 matching meniscal tears to go with it. Now, not even 1 week afterwards, I am already moving around pretty well in my knee brace, and the swelling is well on it's way down. I still can't bend my knee past about 90 degrees, but the p.t. guy said that is mainly due to the swelling, and as that gets worked out the range can be increased.

Here's a photo of my knee from the day afterwards when I had a checkup with the doc. Sorry for the crap quality ... had to use a camera phone since I forgot to bring my camera with me.

I have more, including some before surgery pics, and a variety of afters, but i haven't had a chance to unload my camera yet.

This whole surgery thing is certainly a trying process, can't wait 'til it's over ... months from now :|