gohlkusmaximus.com

402 posts in 10 1/2 years…

Gohlkus Maximus — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 02:31:14 +0000

or about 3.2 posts per month. That seems right.

(And this is after importing my NaNoWriMo blog entries and my “Unfinished Thoughts” from my abortive tumblelog at gohlkus.wordpress.com.)

iPhone 3G + iOS 4 = no good.

Gohlkus Maximus — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 00:43:11 +0000

When I got my iPhone 4, my iPhone 3G became my new “iPod touch” (essentially). Though it only has 16 gigs of storage, it has better games and a nicer interface (and of course a much nicer screen) than my increasingly irrelevant 60 GB iPod classic. (I can hardly believe I watched half of season 2 of LOST on that tiny screen. However, if this rises to the level of “interesting” or approaches being a “problem,” it simply demonstrates how good my life is overall.)

In any case, “upgrading” the iPhone 3G to iOS 4 was probably a mistake (though I didn’t know it at the time). It is extremely slow at doing most things (the hardware is just not good enough to run the new OS). Luckily the 3G is no longer my phone and just hangs out in the bathroom, waiting to play music while I’m in the shower.

Lifehacker (which I’m starting to get a little bit addicted to) has tips for how to make iOS 4 usable on the iPhone 3G (or at worst how to downgrade it to iOS 3.1.3), since this issue is widespread.

[ flickr commons ]

Most amusing spammer affiliation of the day: “Frightmare Forest”

Gohlkus Maximus — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:26:24 +0000

I have to go through usernames on GreenGov2010.org (”Building a Greener Governor for California”) to delete the spammers and approve the real people.

There are spans of time in which a ton of users are created by Russian spammers. You can tell because they all live in “Moscow, ALABAMA” and have “.ru” at the end of most of their URLs.

Occasionally some of their fake info is amusing to me, and the title of this post is the latest. (That’s all.)

To remind myself

Gohlkus Maximus — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:16:20 +0000

I take a fair number of pictures, some of them good enough to put on the wall.

This New York Times article links to several services that will print your photos in a variety of formats (from 8×10 prints to giant vinyl cutouts). Good to remember.

Where have I been?

Gohlkus Maximus — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 02:21:55 +0000

As a general partner of Brainwash Movies, which has been the case for a couple years, I am involved in pretty much everything that goes on surrounding the 16th Annual Brainwash Drive-in Bike-in Walk-in Movie Festival in Oakland. It’s fun and very unique; everyone who can go should go!

Just in the last several months, we have viewed over 80 submissions of mostly short, sometimes weird, always independent movies, totaling 30 hours. We judged those movies in June and chose 4 1/2 hours (22 shorts and one feature) to show on August 7, 13, and 14. It could be our best show yet (but I say that every year). I was one of three people to decide which movies to show and which order to show them in. I also laid out the initial version of our printed program and promotional flyer. Next I need to do major updates to the website and our Facebook page (so far, I’ve just scratched the surface).

Also, the San Francisco Improv Festival (headed up by the awesome folks what brought you Crisis Hopkins) hired me to set up WordPress on their brand-new site and to convert someone else’s design to a WordPress theme. I did so and it went well. I plan to continue to do improvements on their site, assuming they don’t think my rates are exorbitant (which they really aren’t).

This on top of a ridiculous amount of work at CLCV (including a big website redesign that will launch sometime this summer) and trying to take some time for myself (including a very nice but too brief 8-day vacation in Milwaukee & Chicago). One of these days I’ll post a bunch of shots on my flickr page (stay tuned).

That’s the update — check out Brainwash and SFIF in August! It’ll be more than worth your time and the very reasonable cost of admission.

“The Great Car Reset”

Gohlkus Maximus — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 21:44:06 +0000

Richard Florida writes in The Atlantic about “The Great Car Reset,” based largely on some good data from Nate Silver (which needs an update) and an Advertising Age article. From the Atlantic post:

“Lasting prosperity requires investment in a new and more efficient economic system. We’ll never get there if we continue to spend every last penny on houses, cars, and energy.”

In dense urban areas like where I live, a car is a burden, not a convenience. Yes, there are a lot of places where it’d be very hard to live without one, but this is an interesting trend nevertheless… and the conclusions seem sound.

Certain things just cost more as a percentage of income than they did in previous generations, so (in the absence of some kind of income reform) people are slowly changing their behavior.

Love the commons; hate politics.

Gohlkus Maximus — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:58:58 +0000

[Thanks, Flickr commons.]