A few weeks ago, Melissa and I took a weekend trip up to LA to do some sightseeing. While sitting around in traffic, I spotted a gas station with outrageously high prices ($4.50/gallon) and took a picture of it. A few weeks later, during work, Chief tells me that the front page of CNN.com looks familiar. As it turns out, they used a picture of the exact same gas station for an article on high gas prices.

Here are the two pics. Notice the trees and light poles in the background match. Crazy!

Photo I took in LA

Front page of cnn.com a few weeks later

Noah and Eva are the proud new parents of a baby boy! You can read about their adventures as new parents on their new site. World, please prepare yourself for the ultimate in model parenting.

While messing around with Google Maps’s new edit feature, I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to find that my hometown got an updated set of satellite images. Sweet! In the past you couldn’t really get past a blurry town-level view of the area. Now you can zoom in almost all the way, so you too can explore from above all the momentous sites from my childhood including: 

• The house I grew up in. Notice the awesome-for-exploring forest in the backyard.
• Carlisle High School. Go Thundering Herd!
• The US Army War College. The only place in town where you’ll get pulled over for “doing 6 in a 5 m.p.h. zone.”
• and the town square. You can almost see the rednecks sitting on the benches!

I spent this past labor day weekend with two of my absolute favorite people, Noah and Eva. They picked me up from Great Falls, MT and we spent about 4 days in pristine Glacier National Park (northern Montana) and Waterton Lakes National Park (Canada). Vacations don’t get much better than this. We’re already talking about exploring more of the park next year! Here are some highlights…

• 130 photos
• 11 videos (displayed with TubePress, of course)
• hanging out with Noah, Eva, and James Bond
• about 23 miles of hiking
• seeing a full-grown GRIZZLY about 50 yards from us
• other wildlife: mountain goats, long horn sheep, lots of deer, a marmot, pikas, ground squirrels, a bald eagle
• saying “that’s what she said” in response to any statement including the words “hard” or “long”
• swimming in 50 degree water
• taking a ferry ride from Canada to the US and back
• 4 nights: 3 different cabins and 1 “lodge”
• 1700ft hike first thing in the morning
• watching Noah furiously chase down a plastic bag that I managed to leg go of in the wind
• seeing the glaciers that according to computer “modules” will be gone by 2030

I recently jumped on the last.fm bandwagon and am loving it. Here’s a video by The Knife that I think is just delightful. Check out the creative animation.

It’s amateur hour again as I put on my music-reviewer pantsuit and present to you: Rob Crow

Maybe you’ve heard of Pinback. They’re an “indie rock” band from my home city of San Diego. This is your basic awesome band. Pinback’s music is dare I say? mesmorizing. My boy Rob Crow is one of the founders. His album Living Well is, in my opinion, better than anything I’ve heard from Pinback. This dude knows how to sing. Oh and play the guitar. And bass. And probably some other stuff, too.

Rob Crow makes me a proud San Diegan (even though I think he’s from Encinitas? eh, close enough). Before I end this gushing encomium, let me just say that Rob Crow’s musical genius is near that of Beck. There, I said it.

I’m taking off the pantsuit and am returning to normalcy. Enjoy.

• Official Rob Crow site for people with man-crushes like me
• iTunes Store link for Living Well
• Pinback

As some of you may know, I was raised in Carlisle, Pennsylvania: a small town rich with history that dates back to colonial times. One of our notable, yet somewhat shameful, claims to fame is the Carlisle Indian School. On land which is now the US Army War College, the school was the most prominent example of the nation’s failed attempt to assimilate Native Americans into “white man’s” culture.

Ethics aside, the school’s history has always intrigued me. Recently, my dad sent me an article from the Washington Post about the school’s football team. Most of us have heard about the superhuman athletic prowess of Jim Thorpe, but I had no idea that the rest of the team had such an impact on the development of American football. They took the passing game to a completely new level, and used it to dominate the nation’s greatest teams at the time.

The article is worth the read. Here’s a quick excerpt:

“On Oct. 26, [the Carlisle Indian School football team] went to Philadelphia to face unbeaten Pennsylvania, ranked fourth in the nation, at Franklin Field before a crowd of 22,800. No team all season had crossed Penn’s goal line. On just the second play of the game, Hauser whipped a 40-yard forward pass over the middle that Gardner caught on a dead run. There are three or four signal moments in the evolution of football, and this was one of them.”

When I moved to San Diego this past summer, I decided to treat myself to a new Razr from Verizon. I know, I know, jumping on the bandwagon. But I actually really like the feel of the Razr. It even passes my infamous “ear test” which I give all new phones (hey, I used to work at Cingular).

While I’ve been basically happy with Verizon’s service, I’ve always hated how they locked down the features on their phone. For instance, they won’t let me transfer anything over Bluetooth, which makes it near impossible for me to upload my own ringtones, download pictures I’ve taken with the phone, etc. They also stuff the phone with Verizon branding that’s impossible to remove and so it just takes up space.

You may know that one can unlock just about all of those features by “flashing” the Razr with completely non-Verizon firmware (AllTell’s firmware, in fact). There’s other benefits like better signal strength, better battery life, and a faster UI. The downsides are that you void your warranty and risk turning your phone into a $200 brick if something goes wrong in the process.

I spent months reading the dozens of websites out there explaining how to do this, not to mention mustering up the courage to possibly kill my phone. Finally I stumbled upon this guide (permanent link), which I can happily report worked for me like a charm. If you’re planning on flashing your Verizon Razr V3m, this site is for you. It even includes links to all of the software you’ll need (you’ll have to engage in some piracy here, FYI). After getting all the software, the process took only about 10 minutes. It’s not, however, for the faint of heart. Mostly everything you’re doing is a complete hack and thus requires some comfort with archane software tools.

The new firmware looks almost identical to Verizon’s, the phone works just like before, and now I can play around with custom ringtones and really take advantage of the camera on this thing. My favorite new ringtone is from “Still” from the Office Space soundtrack. It’s great to hear “back up in your ass with the resurection!” when someone calls.

I’ll never look back to that bloated default firmware, and I feel great about getting around Verizon’s silly restrictions on my phone for which I shelled out the cash. Take that, VZW!

This is a huge, huge release for TubePress. YouTube finally decided to upgrade their API to support playlists (among other new features); a capability that TubePress users have been pounding down the doors to get.

New features in this version:

• Now with seven modes of operation. The new ones are:
  • playlists (with paging)
  • featured (the latest 25 featured videos from YouTube’s homepage)
  • popular (the most-viewed videos from the past day, week, or month)
  • related (videos that match any tag that you specify)
• You no longer need to supply your own developer ID and YouTube username. This means that anyone can use TubePress, even if you don’t have a YouTube account!
• Pagination. You control how many videos per page show up (supported modes only)
• Leaner and meaner. The speedups in this version are ridiculous. Makes dozens less of the expensive database calls that existed in previous versions. Reduces database space from about 40 rows to only one.
• Options page is more concise and XHTML compliant
• Improved documentation
• Bug fixes. Too many to list!

If you’re upgrading, please take note of the documentation as some of the syntax has changed. Also, any TubePress options you have saved previously will be wiped out in lieu of the new ones. As always, you can download TubePress from it’s main page. Please send all comments, questions, problems there as well. Enjoy!