Thanks (as usual) to someone much smarter than I, I can now present you with skimmable pictures a la iphoto '08. These are the new flipbooks, like video but interactive, great for sequences in time and space. More integration will follow. This is just the proof of concept.

To skim this image, just run your mouse across the image from left to right.

I've spent a lot of time making things look the way I want on this site. This was made possible (and the site itself) by a wonderful program named Rapidweaver. I know a little html, but not enough to quickly get together a site with a complicated layout (for a first personal homepage). I tried iweb, Dreamweaver and a couple other programs that intend to offload the cognitive load from the coding end so that I could focus on design. In almost all respects, Rapidweaver won out for what I wanted to do. I was able to find a free css template that was close enough to what I was looking for and edit it to make it sing. But the web galleries for photos and videos were another story. The style totally broke with the overall UI of my site, and they were ugly to boot. But I couldn't get Rapidweaver to do what I wanted or to include photo galleries produced by other programs within my site so that they appeared integrated. Also, of the software options at the time, many produced nice galleries, but seldom what I really wanted. I left the eyesore photo galleries up because I didn't have time to do anything else. But now my galleries are great. Not the best ever, but enough to make me unashamed of them. What changed?
Iframe pages in Rapidweaver 3.6.
The wonderful and free program Galerie for generating photo galleries.
Iframe pages are different than the offsite pages in Rapidweaver in that they allow you to use other pages within the context of those you generate in Rapidweaver. It's the difference between this and this. If it was easy for me to do what I wanted with the web galleries generated within Rapidweaver itself I wouldn't need Iframe pages for this, but they are a nice addition that allow for similar flexibility in other areas.
Also, a piece of software I hadn't found before, Galerie is like Rapidweaver for photo albums instead of entire websites (except that Galerie is free). The kinds of galleries it generates by default are already very close to what I like to see, and it has free themes that get even closer (also similar to Rapidweaver). After only a little tweaking to a free theme I had a album style I was very happy with. One of the features I especially like is its integration with iphoto. It doesn't require exporter plugins for iphoto and doesn't have the same refresh problems as Rapidweaver's implementation. It just makes an album out of whatever is in focus in iphoto at the time. The only way in which this is not useful is for keeping track of all the photo albums you have made in this way. But a little organization in iphoto through its albums does the job of organization nicely, and generating and uploading a couple albums is quick work anyways. It would be nice if Galerie were truly an editor like Rapidweaver, but at least it produces nice albums.
I hope you like the new galleries, and I'm encouraged by this success to put more albums here, adding another wrinkle to my earlier trouble with where to put pictures. Now if I can just get the fancy iphoto '08 skimming thumbnails to work (preferably without any server-side scripting).
As of now, there are four galleries on my site:
DDR game-play and pad modding
Riverside: A Milwaukee Game Research and Design
Saving Lake Wingra Game Research and Design
Sick at South Shore Beach Fall 2006 game-play
Enjoy!

I <3 DDR. I was so excited to have a new version to play here at the end of September. I thought I'd have a bunch of new favorite songs, and maybe there would even be a new Captain Jack. But no. A bunch of slow worthless songs I can do without. There's some that are okay. But overall we're talking stinkfest. It looks like these songs were picked by finding the cheapest to license numbers by the most famous artists. They are on average much slower than I've become accustomed to, and they just don't sound fun. Why would they do this? I understand throwing a few bones in to try and build the DDR fan base, but they've left out anything that sounds and plays like the songs that made the game fun for those of us who have been playing for years.
Worse, Konami has continued the trend of dance master double extreme ultra mode. This is a single player 'narrative' mode that I have hated ever since it was introduced back in Extreme 2. I wouldn't mind them throwing a useless mode in if they didn't do so in a way that ruined the rest of the game. The back of the box says the game contains over 70 songs, but 44 of those are accessible only by first playing through dance master mode. It's not like they prevent me from playing certain songs until I have burned 5,000,000 calories in Workout mode, another mode I could do without but benign. I can understand having to unlock portions of the game through play, and Max and Max 2 had this down just right. What's truly awful about dance master mode is that to unlock songs for normal play (for me this is with default options at whatever difficulty I choose, and with my wife), I have to spend hour after hour in the mind-numbing, single player, first way-too-easy then immediately way-too-hard, constantly using all the options I never cared to turn on.
I bet this mode took tons of time, effort and money to develop, but why? I love to play DDR. If Konami took their arcade version of Supernova 2 and split its 300 songs across 6 console versions, I would quickly plunk down $40 each and enjoy every minute of it. No extra work on their part. They could print money. Why go out of your way to ruin a good thing and displease an easy-to-please customer?
If they were just trying this out, I could understand that too. But this is the third time, and popular support is against this game mechanic.
Its enough to make me order a controller adapter and download all the mixes using bittorrent. It's not right, but at least I'll be able to play DDR, something the latest PS2 release wasn't designed to allow me to do.

I found this book "Reading Between the Numbers" by Joseph Tal recently and could not put it down. This is a very introductory text, and is organized around presenting statistical methods in the context of actually describing and understanding data. Its great strength is in not rushing to cover the formulas and methods of statistics, but only to bring them in when they can fit into the author's account of how statisticians are trying to understand particular phenomena. I found it very easy to get interested in its material despite having a long history of disliking statistics books and classes. I am using parts of this book in the math class I am currently teaching. The second half of the book is not as inspired as the first half, and the type editor looks to have left off at about that point as well, but all the same this is a great book for those new to statistics or those whom have been turned off by their exposure to the subject before.

I take a lot of pictures. I'm not great at it. I don't claim to be. But I like to take them and I'd like to use them to tell stories. One of the biggest reasons to put up a website was to share some of these pictures. But there are so many I don't know where to start. My triage process is lengthy and the specifics of it seem to change with every new piece of software I find, and with every new form of iteration between these pieces of software. Do I post to Flickr (best for actual photography types) or Picasa (integrates with the rest of my crap), or just stick with Facebook or MySpace (where my friends are and will most likely see my posts), or on my own website (where I have total control). The result: no posts, no pictures. They just sit on my hard drive. I look at them (which I like), but they don't do anything out in the world. Here's a picture of my cat. When she's not causing trouble (most of the time), she's really sweet. This makes me wish I didn't have anything to do but sleep on that bed in the afternoon sun.


One down. 7000 to go.