I have a Google Voice account, and last week they finally enabled a feature to forward your SMS messages to email. This is a long-awaited feature, and much appreciated, as I no longer have to keep a browser tab open to Google Voice all day.

But it’s not enough, because I’m not necessarily by a computer all the time, and because SMS tends to be most useful when one is out and about, and it tends to be for things that demand instant notification and attention.

I don’t want to enable Push or Fetch on my normal email account, though, because I only want to be notified about SMS messages, not all the other emails I receive on that account. Plus, Push/Fetch tend to introduce an unfavorable Pavlovian aspect to my life, and I want to avoid that as much as possible.

SMS, again, is different, because text messages usually call for a more immediate response. But I don’t want to shell out $0.99 for that Gmail Push notification app — I haven’t paid for a single iPhone app since I got my phone! — and again, I don’t want Push on my Gmail anyway.

So I set up a new Yahoo! account (only because Yahoo! Mail already provides push service for iPhone). It’s dedicated solely to my Google Voice SMS notifications, and while it’s not as in-your-face as a full-on notification (like the one you get with a “normal” text message on the iPhone), it’s just about right for my tastes.

Normal Push Notification on iPhone

Email Push notification

The other advantage of doing it this way is that I can also reply to text messages from that email account.

So there!

Khoa’s blog post about never blogging anymore thanks to Facebook status updates made me realize it was finally time to admit that Twitter has done the same to my own blogging habits. I’ve always had a tough time writing anything in long-form. And Stephen Fry’s recent post about how tough writing is for writers has me convinced it will never get any better.

But microblogging via Twitter and Tumblr seems to fulfill most of my information sharing and self-expression needs. So my main website, esthernam.com, will consist of just that. I might add my flickr account eventually, but that’s about as far as I’m going to go.

There! That feels much better.

wow, almost 3 months without blogging! all my other services have served my need to blab my thoughts and feelings out to the world quite nicely. but some things are too long for twitter, so it’s time to come back to this thing.

First thought: Stanley still lives! we almost killed him at our volunteer appreciation party last week, but the Exec. Dir. gave it a last-minute reprieve.

Second: I’ve been using FF for months without Greasemonkey, and haven’t missed it! I guess all those things aren’t strictly necessary for me now that I don’t browse the web 12 hours at a time (clearly, surfing only 8 hours at a time means my usage is much more casual). The only indispensable extensions? Web Developer Toolbar and Mouse Gestures.

Third: Metadata symposium at the Academy was interesting. I like when there are lots of industry people in attendance, esp. from the big studios or vendors, because then you get a peek at current practices that you know must be scalable to some extent, even if they’re not perfect. I guess that’s what “best practices” means =P

last week for my job’s excecutive director’s birthday we bought a piñata, a purple monkey wearing red superhero boots. we named it Stanley.

Nobody wants to hit Stanley, much less flay his cardboard body to pieces, but it’s filled with mini Milky Ways, 3 Musketeers, and Twix. somebody (SOMEBODY!) poked a hole in the back of Stanley’s head, as well as the small of his back (because they’re two separate compartments).

When we’re feeling peckish, we saunter casually over to Stanley and stick our hand in either compartment to perform a candy-ectomy.

Thanks, khoa, for reminding me i had a blog!

Over the past year or so, I’ve slowly lost the urge to generate long-form content. It’s way easier to just tweet several times a day, “share” links via Google Reader, and comment on things in peoples’ friendfeeds or facebook posts. (i don’t even bother to add hyperlinks to things in my blog posts anymore! because anyone can just google everything. seriously.)

On the other side of the coin, I’ve been wasting more time on information discovery through these services than ever before. It got to the point where I ended up with 1000+ unread articles in my google reader at the end of each day, and this after spending an obscene amount of time wading through hundreds of articles every day. So last weekend, I performed a drastic feed-purge, unsubscribing from almost everything except a handful of sites, half of which are themselves aggregators, like Techmeme.

The only reason I felt like I could do this without falling to pieces is Google Reader’s awesome “share with friends” feature (”Cmd-S” for you keyboard-shortcut fiends). Not the part where *I* share things with people (though I do, naturally), but that I get to see what *other people* find worthy of sharing. Right now I only have about 8 Google-Reader-sharing friends (HINT, HINT!), but they have thus far proven to have excellent curatorial skills, so I’ve decided to experiment with relying mainly on these friends of mine to point me to the best of the web. No more wading through posts myself to determine what’s good and what’s not – I’ll just wait til others have done that filtering for me! (Side note: it may surprise you to learn that @levarburton and @mrskutcher have pretty decent signal-to-noise ratios, as far as celebrity Twits go).

[Huge Tangent: There's SO DAMN MUCH information available today that the "search" problem has long ceased to be "can we find information on such-and-such?" but rather, "What is the best information I can find on such-and-such?" We're going to rely much more on curation and recommendation to obtain useful information - Google itself uses human-mediated relevance algorithms, but it still falls short sometimes. Another question I find worth exploring further is that of pure, serendipitous discovery, specifically: will it become more scarce as we come to depend more on the recommendations of people we know (which implies less diversity, if more reliability) - or more, as we turn our eyes more often to unusual things because our trusted friends are the ones pointing them out to us?]

Anyway.

Of course, with all that time saved from not having to read every damn RSS feed there is, i will have more time to spend on Hulu. although truthfully, I already spend a lot of time that i shouldn’t be spending on Hulu.

I admit it, this whole computer addiction is getting out of control. (As my carpal tunnel-ridden arm squeaks, “Yes, it is.”)

Need a quick, easy way to get checksums of files in a folder? A few months back I wrote this tiny bash script for work. It just occurred to me that it could be useful for non-work things as well.

This script uses md5, but you could easily change it to sha-1 or whatever flavors openssl supports.

(PS This script doesn’t support recursive directories. I didn’t need to worry about folders inside folders so I never bothered. If you want to fix this, please do — and share!)

sumchecker

Run the script by specifying the folder you want checked. It will generate a text file called md5sums.txt.

Late last year I went to the doctor for something that I thought could be a problem. I had several tests done, among other things, thinking my school insurance would cover it. But I was an idiot who didn’t read the instructions, and didn’t know that I had to be referred by the school clinic before the insurance would pay any of it.

So when in November I got hit with a $200 bill for the doctor visit, I thought, oh well, that’s what I get.

Then, last week, I got another bill in the mail, this time for all the lab tests, none of which were covered by the insurance, again.

This bill was for $1200. Freakin hell!

In settling up the bill, I ended up having to pay “only” $200. Still not great, but much, much better than $1200, for sure. It shows how much everything gets inflated when the insurance gets involved.

Just witnessed my mom attempting to illegally pirate software. She uses a program at work that she likes and wants to use at home. So she decided to copy the program file onto a flash drive and bring it home to paste on her laptop.

Of course, on Windows, you typically need more than the .exe to be able to run a program. So she came to me for tech support, which is how I got wind her of illegal, pirating ways.

I said “It doesn’t work that way, mom, you’re going to need the installer disk for the program.”

And she said, “But it isn’t free!”

Luckily, there is a free, non-business use version of this particular program, so we’re in the clear.

I have mixed feelings about piracy in all its forms, but don’t usually think of it as being “cute.” On this one occasion though (and hopefully it stops at just one), I may make an exception.

Watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” on television. That film’s a big one in the moving image archiving field, because it’s one of those examples of a work that’s fallen into public domain, so any debate about copyright, orphan films, public domain, and even colorization, always mentions “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

But I’d only seen it once before, and that was quite a few years back, so it was interesting seeing it with new eyes. I mean, not from an archivists’ perspective, but just as someone who’s a few years older. And I think it’s even more poignant at a time like this, given the state of the economy and all that. But even on its own, the film is much, much better than you’d think it was, given its reputation.

Au contraire, it’s a dark, disturbing film, not nearly as schmaltzy as you’d think it was. It might get a little sentimental, but by the time the film takes you there, it’s well deserved. So it’s a film to watch from the beginning; if you were to tune in only in the last ten minutes, you’d totally think it sucked.

And thankfully, it’s in the PD, so it plays like, 80 times a week on various channels all throughout December.

While discussing figures for next year’s events and budget stuff:

Executive Director: So we need to raise…how much per person? I don’t know. What is it?

[Deafening silence of mental math]

ED: We need a math person around here. There’s usually somebody who’s good at math, but we don’t have any.

Marketing Associate: But we’re all Asian! How’s that possible?