Y’all know that I love Tinderbox. There a number of good reasons for this, but the one I’m talking about here (#46 apparently) is the truly great service that Eastgate continues to deliver.

An example…

I was unable to attend the Tinderbox Weekend in San Francisco recently, but Mark Bernstein put together a few packages with the materials and handouts from the event along with a CD containing sample Tinderbox documents and a copy of The Tinderbox Way. The package is a bit expensive at $75, but I ordered one anyway because Tinderbox usage and information on the web is generally fairly limited. Good sample Tinderbox files are especially hard to come by.

Anyway, within an hour of placing my order, Eastgate contacted me with the following note….

Normally we include a copy of “The Tinderbox Way” in the package, but I see in our records that you already have the book. Would you like a second copy, or would you like to substitute one of our hypertext titles for the book?

Now that’s just awesome. Not only did the package I ordered just become much more valuable, but I was reminded of one of the less obvious reasons I continue to use, and love, Tinderbox.

Rescue Dawn has all the right things. Christian Bale, The Great Escape, Steve Zahn, Werner Herzog, 91% Tomatometer.

I didn’t like it much.

I drink a lot of soda. My daughter drinks a lot of soda. Between the two of us, I’m never more than 12 feet from an empty or half empty can of Diet Coke. Trips to the store are frequent and inconvenient.

Enter, Soda Club.

I just ordered one. Now I’ll be able to make one of about 30 flavors of soda instantly, and easily stock enough to last a month or two. And no garage full of empty cans. And no trips to that awful smelly hell that is the return area of my local store.

Neat.

Arriving at the office on any given morning, I might find that someone has attached a lovely portrait of me to my monitor.

I love that

I’m not much into Anime, but Paprika got great reviews and is by the same guy who did Perfect Blue, Satoshi Kon. The animation is gorgeous, but I found it impossible to follow and therefore I stopped caring about 30 minutes in. You might fare better.

The Aeropress Coffee/Espresso Maker is awesome. For less than $30 you can have a small, simple device that makes a really great espresso or American cup of coffee.

I heat a cup of water in the microwave for 2 minutes, finely grind 2 scoops of beans and in 30 seconds I get a cup of coffee that tastes better than anything I’ve had before. I’m no coffee snob (yet) but this thing is great. And it also let me get rid of the drip maker taking up valuable counter space.

Buy one

I’ve gone and done it again. Yep, my blog is using yet another blogging engine. This time, it wasn’t just because I was bored. Honest. So it happened like this.

I’ve been looking for a nice, lightweight CMS solution for the office to augment our custom Rails CMS.

As good as Wordpress is, we never really got along very well. Besides, despite the cliams and exclamations of the Wordpress faithful, it really doesn’t work that well for more than just weblogs. The other more “CMS’ey” alternatives I’ve tried, Joomla, Drupal, TextPattern, etc. were mostly a PITA to make do what I wanted. I can’t explain it any better than that.

Time to take another look around.

I’d used ExpressionEngine back in like 2005 and thought I’d give it another whirl, as I’d kept hearing good things about it. First thing I did is try recreating fusionary.com and it turned out to be just too damn easy. The more I played with it, the more things started to click. Once, aloud, I said, “I think I could do anything with this.”

Just one look, that’s all it took, yeah.

What better place to try next but right here at jackbaty.com? My blog has been running Movable Type 4, which is nice enough, but in the interest of science, it had to go.

So here we are, all of my content running under ExpressionEngine. It went pretty smoothly, and didn’t hurt at all. There’s the blog you’re reading now, poems, and a few static pages right now. I haven’t imported all of my old content yet, and may not. It feels good to start fresh.

I’ll keep everything sitting over at blog.jackbaty.com for now.

Onward!

Zenfolio is my favorite image hosting site and Lightroom is my Raw converter/DAM tool of choice. Finally, the toolset is emerging for these two tools. Until recently, getting photos from Lightroom to Zenfolio has been painful.

1. Create export setting in Lightroom for images targeted for Zenfolio.

2. Export select files from Lightroom to disk.

3. Fire up the heavy and rather annoying Zenfolio (Java Applet) uploader.

4. Wait for the uploader.

5. Accept the Java security dialog.

6. Drag exported files to uploader and wait.

How come Flickr, Smugmug, iPhoto, Aperture and friends get all the good tools? I love Flickr, but only use it for one-offs, not galleries.

With Lightroom 1.3, we finally get some basic plugin support. And Jeffrey Friedl was nice enough to write a plugin for Lightroom that sends my photos directly to Zenfolio.

Check out his Lightroom export plugin for Zenfolio

There are things I must do all of them terribly important today they are terribly important Certainly there’s a mown lawn a clean car, a balanced checkbook a collection of tasks gleefully crossed off one list or another all leading to a future safely lined with the comfort of having finished so many very important things

But in the meantime Where is the art? When will the poems be written? Where is the love? Who will teach me to play music - and when? And what will the children remember?

A couple of real-world examples illustrating the advantages of using Raw vs JPG when trying to adjust photos.