Captain's Log

Holiday Fun

So where did all the posts go? They decided to duck and cover when the broadband was taken away and they were left only with a modem. This brave post made it through though.

Spent the last 5 days around tons of family and relatives. It's my dad's 60th birthday and there were a bunch of big events which are now all over. After snapping 200+ photos and running around our temple I think I'm going to relax for the last few days of my break.

Pictures and more exciting posts coming soon.

Where have you been?

Uh oh. I'm referring to myself in the second person. Something must be up.

So where have I been? The semester started two weeks ago, so I've been pretty busy. Also last week, a good friend of mine, Keyur passed away. Between those two events I just haven't had the time or the drive to make a blog post. I usually shy away from the 'what is Ram eating for breakfast' blog post, but I don't have a choice on this one.

Keyur deserves more than just a paragraph, but I'm gonna save the rest for another time or place. If it weren't for Keyur, I wouldn't be typing in a blog at all; there would be no ramk.net. He was an amazing, funny guy with an admirable thirst for life. He was one of the friendliest people I knew. We shared each others enthusiasm on a lot of things, and sometimes humored each other when we didn't. He lectured me on the evils of GOTO and table based layout, and I lectured him on lab safety. He affected my everyday life in little ways I'll be counting years from now. I miss him terribly, and I will for a long long time.

On a less sad note, I will be trying to put more content up on my site. I guess I'm going to have to stretch my 'no rambling about my life' policy to do so, but I guess it's worth it.

And in other news, I'm getting 80-90 search hits a day. That's crazy. I never expected that. I guess if you build it, they will come. (I just really wanted to say that, knowing that I'm the builder. Really you should replace 'build it' with 'post useful stuff' and 'come' for 'find it on Google.')

photos.ramk.net

It's been up for a while, but now it's going public:

photos.ramk.net

It has most of the pictures that were in my old albums section (soon to be deprecated) with a few exceptions that I'll soon fix. I'm using Gallery to manage the photos, instead of creating everything by hand (with some automated help from a few other programs). Keyur introduced me to the wonders of Gallery, and I'll have to say it's pretty neat. G has also made the conversion to Gallery. There are some neat features, like being able to see the EXIF data for all the pictures from my camera. This includes all the photographic settings, but most importantly the timestamp of the picture, which I think is pretty cool.

Go see the additions for Summer 2003, which include a Flaming Dr. Pepper video!

So it's been a while.

And this is not a Staind song.

I haven't updated in a long long time, and my excuse is that I just moved from one apartment to another, which takes days and days of packing, which I'm not even done with yet. So maybe when I get a little more settled in, there'll be some more exciting content for all to see. Until then, go find a Jacob's ladder and play with it.

Recent Comments

One annoying thing about comments on blogs is that when people comment on old posts, you might never see the comment, because it's far down on your blog page. Well, there's an easy way to have a 'recent' or 'last n comments' list. Just add this code in where you want the list to show up. And you can change lastn="n" for the number of comments you want shown.

<MTComments lastn="5" sort_order="descend">
<a href="<MTCommentEntry>
<$MTEntryPermalink$>
</MTCommentEntry>#comments">
<$MTCommentAuthor$></a> 
on <MTCommentEntry><$MTEntryTitle$></MTCommentEntry><br />
</MTComments>

New Colors

New Colors! It's supposed to be an earthy theme - Green, Brown, and Blue. I think it goes well with the view of the Earth in the upper left. Let me know what you guys think.

Plenty of Pictures

On Thursday, Parker's parents were gracious enough to take us out to the Clay Pit for a graduation party in his honor. Friday night we went to Sixth and celebrated graduation for a whole bunch of people. Saturday we unwound at Schlitterbahn. Go to the albums page to see all the pictures, including: G and the Gshirt, me apparently consuming alcohol, Parker and the bartender, and Jackson imitating Courtney's smile.

Also, for your viewing pleasure, Juan Rodriguez!

A New Watch!

This isn't something I'm selling just yet, but it's a big change for me, so I thought I'd note it here. I got a new watch. (Yes, this is blog material.)

"Huh, what's the big deal?" you say. Well I wear my watch all the time, all day. It's been everywhere I've been since my brother-in-law got it for me just before my sister's wedding. I've had this watch over 5 years. And before that I had the same model of watch for another 3 years. I've had the same watch for almost my entire adult life. Now my old watch has given out on me. After years of abuse, water infiltration, strap changes, and a battery change, it no longer works. I'll miss it dearly, but I knew I'd have to move on at some point. I gave up on the idea of a replacement long ago.

I've been looking for a long time. So after a little more searching, I decided I'd go with something not too fancy - although the fancy options abound. Definitely a waterproof sports watch. My old watch had world time, which was neat and mildly practical. It saved me from doing math in my head. I figured I wanted something more than just a plain watch, but not a USB watch or a watch linked to a GPS. A pager watch from Timex was very tempting. Casio has all sort of neat watches also. I decided on a simple, but cool Casio Waveceptor watch that sychronizes with the atomic clock signal in Colorado daily for only $30. For the instant gratification, and to avoid looking at my wrist in dismay for days, I headed to Walmart to pick it up. I wasn't impressed by it's appearance and lack of countdown timer, but I read a good review, and I was set to get it until I saw the Timex Digital Compass.

This watch caught my eye. I liked the way it looked, it had a nifty feature (digital compass), and was priced reasonably at $40. After a consultation with Sunny, I decided on it, and head out from the store. The compass is pretty neat, although only accurate to +/- 10 degrees. You can even calibrate it given your location to true north. Possibly one of the best features is the rotating compass template around the edge. Anyone who knows me knows how much I'll enjoy this when I'm bored. So after about 6 hours I'm quite happy, and I hope the next 5 years will go as well as the past 8 with my last watch.

Goodbye old watch.
Hello new watch.

Finally got it working!

If you've been watching my site over the past few hours then you might have noticed a lot of test posts fly by. I've been cooking up something and here it is.

Keyur mentioned earlier in the day that it would be neat if we could take advantage of the trackback feature of MovableType to create a page that shows each of our latest entries to our blogs. Well after about an hour of work, I think I've almost got it, with some minor hitches. You can go to moorehill.net to see the results. I'll fix up the style sheet soon.

The trackback URL is: http://moorehill.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1

All you fellow bloggers have to do is either:
a. paste this URL into the 'URLs to ping' box of each message you post, which is sort of a hassle
or b. paste the URL into the 'URLs to ping' box in the category attributes for each category that you post under. I don't know what to do when you don't post under a category, and that's the hitch I mentioned earlier. Maybe we'll figure something out for that later.

Until then you can check moorehill.net instead of each of our individual blogs for new posts. (Assuming everyone plays along.)

Moving all over the place!

So my website has moved for the 10th or so time. Now we're being hosted at Dathorn.com which has come highly recommended. A few friends (Keyur, Akash, Dan, Gautam, Sheelpi, Jackson, and Mike) and I split up a reseller package, and we're getting superior hosting at a very low cost. I think we've ironed out all the kinks over the past 36 horus, but if you see anything fishy or broken, let me know. Till then, enjoy!.

Keeping up with the site.

So now that I have a weeks worth of perpspective, I'm going to be hard pressed to actually post something interesting and original to sell every day of the year. Especially considering my audience mostly consists of my 'ram-cynical' group of friends. So in light of that I'm going to have to put in 'blog-like substance,' as Gautam calls it, to fill in the days between cool ideas.

That and I don't want to sell inferior goods. Everything I post about will be worth following up on. They don't call me a crack dealer for nothing. Shipments just don't come in every day.

www.ramk.net !!!!

The site is bordering on professional now. I'm paying money for hosting! Now you'll never have to worry about URLs changing again. It'll always be www.ramk.net

Check out the new look!

Well my page looks much spiffier than before. Keyur set me up with MovableType, a personal publishing system, and he also taught me a little bit about stylesheets. Mix with my existing web knowledge and you get what you see here.

The main purpose of the page is to show people some really cool things they might like. Friends have called me a 'dealer' for trying to get people to try new, addictive things. I only sell things that people will enjoy, so if you've found your way here, be assured you'll find cool stuff that you'll hopefully like as much as I do.

So keep coming back to see what's new. This is sort of blog but not really. More of a sales front for all the things I like.