trisweb.com

It all started with my last “new year” post, which is timestamped January 1st 2005, 00:00:02. I guess I wrote it on the last day of last year, so I’ll do that again.

This year was, in a word, wonderful.

Warning: Long. It’s not obligatory to read past this line.

It began with a great ski trip (as so many good Januarys do), then back to Berkeley to finish my Junior year, which I did, fairly successfully (read: without failing).

My summer plans began to take shape early. I applied for an internship at Google, which I didn’t get, so I went for a backup job at Patagonia in the IT department, working on a gigantic web-based product lifecycle management program. Turns out it was a great job where I really felt useful, and now I’m consulting for them in my spare time.

I became fed up with the available web photo gallery apps as I began to take more pictures with my new camera, so I decided to write my own, which I called zenphoto. Development is very active today, especially now that I’ll have more time to devote to it, and with the thankful addition of Todd Papaioannou to the zenphoto “team.”

I finished summer, and work, and vacations, and headed back to school for this past semester, which just ended as my best yet (as in, highest grades and most interesting classes, which correlate, of course). I also moved into my very own house with four friends and my own room, which has been a… maturing experience. Seriously though, it’s been great. Much better than group living.

I turned 21, and didn’t have a drop of alcohol my entire birthday (come on, it was a game day! I made up for it later).

I finally (yes, for the first time) asked a beautiful young lady out to dinner. Now I have a beautiful, wonderful girlfriend. For the last few months, life has been better than ever with her in it.

It was another great season in the Cal Band, and for Cal football, culminating in a decisive win over BYU in the Las Vegas Bowl last week (and a great trip to Las Vegas for us band members).

I found out I’m accidentally graduating on time, and I’m starting to think about life after college (just a little). I realized over projects and work that my skills (both technical and creative) are worth something (quite a large something), and I’m incredibly lucky to have been in such a position to develop them, which I will always remember.

trisweb.com is still alive and well, though it could use a little sprucing up. That could be in order for next year. Also due for a makeover is the frontpage of zenphoto.org… blech. And hopefully this will be my last post in Wordpress 1.5, as 2.0 was just released earlier today.

Like I said, the year has been wonderful. I hope all of you have had even half the good fortune I’ve been having, and I hope I can share my wealth of it with you somehow through my various projects.

Now for some due celebration! I’m currently scarfing down my Christmas candy, and later, Champagne! Happy new year!

I’m headed off to the Las Vegas bowl this evening (a 12 hour bus ride from Berkeley, mind you). Being 21 is finally going to be useful! Not that I plan on doing much gambling between band practice… we’re learning our whole show in Vegas. Should be interesting.

The game’s on the 22nd on ESPN at 5 PM Pacific Time if you want to watch. Should be a good one. Go Bears!!

Oh, and Happy Holidays everyone! I can already imagine the snow… and skiing… Ah! I can’t wait! Enjoy the season y’all

Update: Cal won decisively 35-28 in a pretty exciting game. Lots of pictures soon.

Upon seeing this post by John Berry at Agile Partners, (through Michael Heilemann, thanks!) I couldn’t resist applying it to an actual photo album.

Without further ado, here’s a zenphoto theme that uses a Scriptaculous slider to resize photos, just like iPhoto.

Slidaculous Resizing Zenphoto

Credit where credit is due: I copied the code exactly as written in John’s post, then modified it for a little extra efficiency, and used zenphoto’s size-in-the-URL trick to progressively load higher resolutions as you slide. Yeah, I did say that. Try it out.

This is a testament to zenphoto’s flexibility. There’s no reason one couldn’t continue to add more scriptaculous effects.

Props to Rhapsody.com, Real’s new through-the-web version of their music service, for supporting Firefox not only at a minimum level, but completely. The player that streams the music from the site? Yeah, it’s a Firefox plugin. Good job guys. The instructions for setting it up were also just about perfect, getting every detail of the Firefox UI exactly right. I love this extention to the service, which should let me play music from several places I couldn’t before (ahem—the computer science labs), making the limitation of streaming a little more bearable.

I’ve been a Rhapsody member for about 2 months, by the way, thanks to UC Berkeley’s deal with them. Three bucks a month for unlimited streaming of any music in the world is definitely worth it, even if Rhapsody’s UI could use some improvement when compared to iTunes.

My point: I’m paying this much just to discover and listen to new music, and it’s fulfilling exactly that—which is all I used to use P2P networks for. I still buy CDs, and I always will. Just gotta have my raw bits that I can use as I see fit.

Oh music labels, when will you trust your consumers? Or rather, when will you realize that trust will be lucrative?