Service!
This week I have been exploring Google’s own-domain web-apps (email and more!) and looking into the interesting Amazon aStore beta. To set up an aStore, you must first obtain an Amazon affliate ID, for which you may apply here.
I have a project in the kitchen which is likely to make use of the aStore app, and i deem it to be timely!
No no Nokia
For about a year I have been frustrated by the inadequate file-sync support available for the Nokia series 6 phones, in particular the 6600 and the 6620. There appeared to be only limited ways to get the images off the phone.
The best way has proven to be removing the battery and downloading from the storage card by mounting the card on a USB reader; but the following pieces of software may also be of assistance:
Nokia Collector enables desktop file transfer to the phone only. Uploads appear as new SMS messages, enabling application installation.
Photo Server and Photo Retreiver are a pair of apps that enable image transfers from Nokia series 60 phones. A note, however: as of this writing, the download link will produce a non-binary download. I used an ftp client and set the file-type to binary manually, which worked. The developer has a bunch of interesting apps, most especially including a range of Nokia-specific Mac-remote-control via Bluetooth goodies.
Bocce!
After an intensive round of googlizing and calling local retailers, I was able to locate a bocce set for sale today, and thus will spend this evening cooking and eating hot dogs, apple pie, and root beer floats to the soothing accompaniment of the klonk of lawn bowls. I was briefly introduced to this sport one blazing September afternoon over ten years ago in Bloomington, Indiana, at the pre-New orleans home of Bart and XY.
And may I say how am excited to see my old pal Kenneth Goldstein this week for an evening? Very well then: very. Sometimes the right friend just finds you.
Zilliness
I have been keeping an eye on Zillow’s valuation of our house this summer, largely for morale-reasons. Currently the site lists the home as valued at well over 100K more what we paid for it in October. Anecdotally, I have heard that Zillow tends to err on the side of inflating reported values. It’s certainly what I expect the site to do, as a way of creating stickiness – it’s certainly working very well in drawing my repeated site visits.
Curious to see if anyone has done a systematic analysis of what Zillow’s reported values for a given property are in comparison to what people are actually paying for these listings, I was disappointed to find that no one’s done so in a careful, large-scale way. Are you listening, Consumer Reports? For that matter, are you listing, HouseValues and Redfin? Careful competitive analyses of competitor’s datasets over time could be a great marketing tool!
However, I did not come up wholly dry. This Phoenix-area blogging realtor did a quick set of reality checks on some recent sales in the Arizona community, and while I’m guessing he must have cherry-picked, he found little correlation between Zillow’s estimates and what he takes to be real-world market values. In two cases, he found gross overvaluations based on inaccurate data at Zillow, and in cases of homes currently listing, he found that Zillow was undervaluing the homes, based on his opinion of the market.
His basic critique is reasonable enough – you can’t trust an automated valuation service to provide accurate estimates because the actual condition of the property is likely to vary from that represented by the available data. I’m also not surprised that he feels the site is undervaluing homes that he is involved in developing listings for – the more capital there is in his market, the more there is available for him.
I am surprised that Zillow’s valuations do appear to be on the conservative side. I suppose that after this summer winds down and Seattle’s market cools down to match the rest of the country’s slowing sales, I’ll have a better sense of things. I was amazed to see that so far this summer nearly every house that has sold in our immediate area has well topped $400k. Wonder if it will hold. I hope so, now that we’re in it.
Access denied
I’m hacking away at our database at work, attempting to automate the daily data imports we use to bring orders into our order management system. We have three distinct data sources for each merchant identity, and of course these three sources employ diferring schema. I have chosen not to worry about normalizing the data at import in any significant way, rather storing the data in one flat-file table with fieldnames that segment the unique datasource elements. This makes it very easy to pull out the original source data in the format it was passed to us.
The associated merchant IDs are not written into the export files; this, determining the associated merchant ID is implicit and cannot be established by testing the data structure.
What I want to do is automate the import process such that my operator svaes the daily downloads in a given appropriate folder. Currently we have been saving them in files tagged with the data provider’s name and the date. I beleive I will change this to incorporate the data provider, merchant ID, and date shortly.
However, MS Access does not natively support automating data import with a dynamic file name – the Text Transfer function requires a hardcoded path and file. I think I could set up macros that useTextTransfers that import from a fixed-location file and that then create a new exported file incorporating additional data such as date of import and merchant ID, but again I find myself bumping up agains the fixed-file-name issue in Text Transfer.
I’m sure there must be a way to use VB to construct the filepath from user input selected via drop-downs, but I’m not there yet. Argh!
nearly wrapped
About 2 hours ago, we struck for the night. We have two pickups to bang out in the morning – I’m guessing around 11 am – and the shoot will be over and we pack it up and head home to Seattle. I am very happy with the results – the shots look great, we got good sound, and our actors’ performances were all we could have hoped for.
I was initially skeptical about the project and agreed to participate because I am interested in learning about fast-and-light filmmaking. the practice of which I believe poses a significant threat to the revenue dominance of major film producers, much in the way that the proliferation of cable channels has challenged the predominance of the US Big Three networks.
I haven’t looked at the shots and schedule we were working from since sometime on Thursday, but as I recall, this ten-minute film used about twenty shots and a bit less than ten setups. Last I heard, we shot two full mini DV tapes, which I think gives us 180 minutes of footage; generally we were trying to get three takes of each shot.
Greg and Joey and I worked together very fluidly, and in some ways the best was the way we developed the lighting for the setups. I hope that the dailies look as good as I think they do at 6 am after being up all night.
LA Kegs
LA kegger in the works? Sounds like you need to hit Bevmo.
Calendar
Word on AskMe is that this is a basecamp clone for selfhosters. I wonder if it accepts data from and publishes in iCal formats?
Wires
Also, I did too much yard work today to try to figure out the head-plaguing home LAN problem I’m still working.
On a related note, Treo 650’s are still holding at about $200 on eBay. So I’ll continue my waiting game.