http://briansamson.com/b thoughts from brian samson Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:32:50 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I ran into a deal on the REI.com outlet site today that looked pretty sweet. It was already a pretty good deal, but when I saw it was from REI, I thought, "Wow, I wonder if they'll let me use my dividend online?" It turns out this is ... http://briansamson.com/b/2008/rei-online/ I ordered a macro lens for my camera this week for taking pictures of bugs, and it arrived today, so I went out back to try it out. I ended up finding one of the weirdest looking bugs I've ever seen. Looks like some kind of a tick ... http://briansamson.com/b/2008/bug-lens/ I was reading this text file on my MacBook the other day that had some strange copy/paste behavior. It turns out this was because of one of the dozens of "space" characters in Unicode, one of which was being interpreted as a linefeed in some editors and as a ... http://briansamson.com/b/2008/a-flag-pin-for-your-mac/ I have a tendency to argue politics with anyone who will take up the subject. My friend Simmons is one of these people, and we have spirited internet discussions on a regular basis. As a result, we've started a political blog you can go read at: 1idiot1genius.blogspot.com. ... http://briansamson.com/b/2008/all-politics-all-the-time/ I'm doing a ruby on rails project with MySQL that needs to store some images, and I thought to use the database. However MySQL's default blob size is only 64K, so I wanted to use their LONGBLOB column instead. No big deal, and in fact they will automatically detect ... http://briansamson.com/b/2008/mysql-and-blob-sizes/ After stuffing my face with ribs on July 4th I grabbed this shot of some clouds coming as the sun started to set. http://briansamson.com/b/2008/clouds/ This woodpecker has been living in my palm tree for a month or so, and he's usually quite camera shy. I managed to snap this picture over Memorial Weekend. http://briansamson.com/b/2008/flying-woodpecker/ I recently bought an iPhone and I absolutely love it except for one thing: AT&T service. I'm not the type of person who makes a lot of phone calls anyway (apparently this is normal), but it would still be nice to be able to make a phone call in ... http://briansamson.com/b/2008/more-bars-in-more-places/ I caught this photo of some bees romping in the cacti flowers and couldn't resist the voyeuristic urge to snap a photo. Way to go, you two! (click for big) http://briansamson.com/b/2008/spring-has-sprung/ Mary Bridget used TurboTax online again this year, and I've always thought it was bad, but this takes the cake. Usually TurboTax uses a "wizard" style, asking simple questions and then using the answers to fill in the right boxes. It has some problems though, like asking if ... http://briansamson.com/b/2008/turbotax-is-awful-software/