December 04 Vacation Destination Finalized

Many thanks for the input between Tokyo and Madrid, it’s settled. I’m going to Costa Rica. Yep, that’s right. Turned out to be the most affordable. We’ll be going December 18th through the 25th. Not quite sure what we’re doing once we get there. Fodors has some pretty good itineraries, I think we’ll be spending 2 days in San Jose, 2 days in the Volcan Arenal park (?), another day or two in Monteverde, then back to to Tamarindo for another day or two. Once the specifics are figured out, I’ll blog them. Exciting!

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Great Examples of Pork Barreling

Congress passed a bill with a bunch of tax breaks in order to stop having the EU continue to raise tarrifs on certain imports that’d the US had been in violation of WTO rules on (we were giving some US industries illegal subsidies). Of course, the bill is riddled with tax breaks and riders for corporations, such as $101 million for NASCAR track owners on grandstand expenses. This article has details.

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Updated PictureViewer Site

I updated PictureViewer to have album thumbnails, caching and use an HttpHandler to preserve the file names. The main page now has thumbnails (they’re a bit ugly, but I’ll clean up the scaling method soon). The images are now served out of natural sounding URLs (e.g. they end in .jpg or what have you) and scale if you put a ?scale=x% parameter on the query string. I implemented an HttpHandler to intercept the request and either return the image or scale it down to the requested size and return those bytes. The HttpHandler also handles setting the Expires header on the images in each albums, as well as the thumbnails so subsequent visits to an album are almost instantantous.

Further, I’m setting the Expires header on the HTML for an individual album, so if you’ve previously visited an alubm (within 90 days), the entire thing renders out of the browser’s cache. The main page, of course, is generated on the fly. The thumbnails that are shown on the main render from the cache (since it’s all from the same HttpHandler). I also have an optimization from a while ago where the thumbnails of 5% (since that’s the default scale for the thumbnails on the site) are cached to the server’s disk after they’ve been calculated and scaled.

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Public Transportation is Zen

I’ve been taking CalTrain from San Francisco to Mountain View for the last two weeks. I’m attempting to commute by train at least 3 times a week and drive during the middle of the week. Taking the train is bliss. I take the baby bullet train 7:11AM to work and the 5:58 PM back home. My hours are a way different days I take the train, they’re basically shifted up 2 hours but I find myself doing email on the train and in the evenings so I can stay caught up with people who are still in the office in the evenings. It’s so much nicer to not have to worry about driving, traffic, or gas. Price wise, it costs about the same to take the train ($36/10 ride pass versus 3 gallons/70 mile round-trip + depreciation), plus Microsoft runs a shuttle from the Mountain View station to work and I can park my car at the CalTrain station at 4th and King.

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