Jim Phelps » JimPhelps

Miniature Gardens

jimphelps — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 15:01:15 +0000

Two Green Thumbs Miniature Garden

This looks something fun to try. Two Green Thumbs has miniature garden supplies, decor and plants. Seems like a great garden hobby that would be easy to weed on weekday afternoon.

Gnome abduction

jimphelps — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 02:04:30 +0000

Must have garden product from Uncommon Goods.

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Lola Turn’s Two

jimphelps — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 22:27:25 +0000

Lola in car

Originally uploaded by jimphelps.

Today is Lola’s birthday. Our little girl puppy is now a 2 year old dog/puppy.

We are taking her out for a picnic dinner and swimming – which is her most favorite activity.

Happy Birthday Lola!

Hard to believe that you are now two.

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Spelling with flickr

jimphelps — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 16:44:42 +0000

from the Spell with Flickr site

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20 years without McDonalds

jimphelps — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 04:36:44 +0000

I just realized that 20 years ago I swore off McDonalds (and Burger King et al). It has now officially been 2 decades without a Big Mac or anything like that. I only stop at McDonalds to pee on road trips because you can go in the side door, take a left and the Men’s room in on your right (usually).

Happy 20th Anniversary of sans Mickey Dees.

Dreamhost one-click upgrade: I

jimphelps — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 16:43:07 +0000

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.X via Dreamhost’s one-click upgrade process. Worked beautifully. All of my plugins and themes came across with the upgrade. I didn’t have to do a thing.

Dreamhost – I <3 U

- Jim

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Making a living in a virtual world

jimphelps — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 16:56:14 +0000

Wire News has a story about Making a Living in Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world were you can live out the life of your avitar.

Within a month, Grinnell was making more in Second Life than in her real-world job as a dispatcher. And after three months she realized she could quit her day job altogether.

Now Second Life is her primary source of income, and Grinnell, whose avatar answers to the name Janie Marlowe, claims she earns more than four times her previous salary.

One person makes $150,000 a year (in real $US money) renting virtual land to other people. I must say that I’m not really sure what to make of it. Who would spend this kind of money to own and maintain a virtual island?

Islands are priced at US$1,250 for 16 acres. Monthly land fees for maintenance are US$195.

What if the server crashes? Is it obsession? Is “real life” too boring? Do they have too much money?

Sleepy = Good

jimphelps — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 03:40:29 +0000

Sleepy = Good

Originally uploaded by jimphelps.

Lola after several days of hard play and fun. Sleepy dogs are good dogs.

Why don’t calendars do time zones?

jimphelps — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 19:28:19 +0000

My laptop and my palm both understand Time Zones. I understand Time Zones. Why don’t my calendar applications (Oracle’s Calendar and the Palm Calendar in the handheld) understand Time Zones. What I want:

(1) When I create an appointment I should be able to mark the Time Zone for the appointment. I should also be able to make appointments that are Time Zone neutral – not tied to a Time Zone.
(2) My clients (Palm and Desktop and Web) should all understand Time Zones and should be able to shift the alarms to compensate for my changes in Time Zone.

How would I use this? Well…

- If I get an invite to join a conference call at 11AM EST, I could just enter that time without adjusting for my local time zone. Same with UTC time.
- If I changed time zones (say fly from Madison to San Francisco), my alarms would change to be appropriate. As it is now, if I fly to California, I need to keep track of the fact that the 10AM meeting is really a 10AM Central time so I need to set an alarm 2 hours earlier.
- But I can’t do a global change because some things might be dinners in California so they need to stay on Pacific time.

We have these bright machines that understand our location and time zones. This is the perfect task to offload to these systems. It is simple and fussy and requires sifting through events and applying rules. Perfect work for a computer.

Cory Doctorow’s New Book – Someone Comes to Town

jimphelps — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 15:03:17 +0000

Cory Doctorow has a new book out Someone Comes to Town

I really enjoyed his previous books: Eastern Standard Tribe and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Cory publishes his books as free eBooks and print books. As he said (can’t find the quote) – I’m selling more books because of the free publicity I get by people passing around the free eBooks. I might loose a few sales but I am gaining much more.

Cory used to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Looking forward to reading this new novel. Thanks for the good work(s) Cory.