Moustache May

And so begins another celebration of Moustache May. I along with colleagues from work, friends, and even family will be shedding the excess hair on our face, all except the magical region directly above our upper lips. In this time of celebration, let us reflect upon our moustaches with great veracity and be thankful that we may wear such a glorious configuration of facial hair.

I havent quite shaved my beard into a moustache yet. I have a wedding to attend tomorrow and didn't want to steal any thunder away from the groom with my terawesome moustache. The moustaches you see in the picture come from last year's celebration. Come sunday I will have the moustache and the pics to prove it.

Some people here in my office are under the false assumption that you must begin Moustache May with a clean shaven face. I don't buy into any of that malarky. I think that just takes away from the limited time we have to don moustaches.

Anyways, to kick-off this month in style I thought a wikipedia entry on Moustache May was fitting. So check it out and contribute!

Spock Turns Pay Only

Looks like Spock.com is most likely in its death throws. In a last gasp to remain afloat it has turned to charging users for its services. The change wasnt even made in a way that makes sense. When clicking on a users profile you are asked to pay $19.95 or to "skip". Both buttons however link to the same PayPal page. So there's no way to remain on spock.com at that point unless you hit your back button. I'd expect this from a website that was made by a teenager in high school, but not from a well funded silicon valley startup like Spock.

Update: Actually, it appears that Google just made Spock useless by letting people control search results about themselves.

This is Wierd

So I get an email from SlideShare this morning:

Hi carlton.northern,

We've noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job ... you must be doing something right. ;-)

Why don't you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team

I only have one SlideShare presentation and its nothing special. It's just a presentation I did for school on Atom and hAtom. It's currently showing 30,000 views. The last time I checked (which was probably a few months ago) it had like 500 views. I am assuming from the email that I got most of my views in the last 24 hours. I checked google's backward links and nothing shows up. Any ideas how my presentation became popular?


Update: I checked SlideShare today and found that my presentation was back down to 328 views. I can only assume that SlideShare had some kind of internal error. Wonder if anyone else reported these problems?


Update: Ok, I got pwned. Apparently this was an April fool's joke from SlideShare. Hardy har har.

New Domain Name

Yay! I finally got off my ass and updated this blog to a custom domain. You can now reach this blog at www.carlton-northern.com. Though the old URL works just the same carlton-northern.blogspot.com.

I Monster: A Dense Swarm of Ancient Stars

I can't stop listening to I Monster's latest album, A Dense Swarm of Ancient Stars. It's like being at a 70's disco while watching a 50's horror film, which I don't even think is possible without the help of a mind altering substance.
In particular, Cool Coconuts and Lust for a Vampyr stand out from the rest. Cool Coconuts is a song about bugs and coconuts put to a Brazilian, laid back tune. It reminds me of hanging out on a tropical beach eating freshly picked coconuts, which I might add I had the pleasure of doing in Hawaii last week. Lust for a Vampyr is exactly as it sounds, a woman wants to get up with a Vampire (not sure why they spelled it that way). I woudlnt be surprised if it gets a spot on HBO's True Blood. I can just imagine Anna Paquin getting down to this song as the pink-haired girl on the cover.
The rest of the album has a kind of disco-house feel, but it's not dated like the genre. It's as if its a kick-back to retro disco-house, but still as modern as anything else these days. Maybe, the music gets its updated feel from the subtle horror film references that are sprinkled here and there. It's funny to think that something from the 50's could make something feel new.
I give this album a 9/10.

Hawaii Pictures

Just posted my pictures to flickr.

Finally My Contacts are Managed!

Ever since I owned my first cell phone in 1998 I've had a nagging problem; contact information. Every time I upgraded my phone, I had to manually re-enter all my contacts. To make matters worse, my email (at the time Hotmail) contacts were not linked to my cell phone contacts, so I had to maintain two separate lists. The problem eventually got easier with the advent of SIM cards, but it still wasn't solved. Every time I got a new phone I hand to hand over my old SIM card to the cell phone carrier to magically transfer my contacts from my old phone to my new phone. To make matters worse, there were almost always errors in the translation.

Then Gmail Contacts came along and made my life a little simpler. At least now I had a web service interface that I could go in and muck with. I could at least merge my Hotmail and Outlook contacts into my Gmail contacts. I still had the cell phone problem. That is, up until now.

Google has finally solved the problem with their new release: Google Sync. I can finally sync my contacts from my cell phone to my email. Sure, there were a few other syncing programs before Google Sync. You had to entrust your Google password to them of course. Not the safest security policy. Also, most of these services worked for one device or the other, but not all. With Google Sync, they currently sync 6 of the leading phones with Gmail Contacts and I would bet that that number will keep rising. No longer will we have these ad-hoc attempts at preserving our contacts.

But what I'm really happy about is the new contact merging capability that was newly added to Gmail Contacts. After having preserved my contacts from about 5 different phones over the years and about 4 different Email accounts ,my contacts were in serious need of some cleaning up. I had tried clean up efforts in the past but inevitably through the crappy ad-hoc sync and backup attempts the errors that I would remove would almost always make it back into my phone book. So, with the merge function you can click on all the contacts that are the same person and Gmail will attempt to merge them into one profile, and it does this with some good results. I sat down today with about 670 contacts, after merging I now have about 550. I had about 12 contact entries that were all myself! I can't tell you how frustrating these dupes were in the past.

Needless to say, I am ecstatic about this new capability. This is how things should work. Seamlessly.

Here's a quick intro video: