MikeKeran.com

David Brooks writes his opinion column today from China where notes a distinct difference between Asian and Western views on the indiviual versus the collective.  But Mr. Brooks didn't need to go all the way to China to see that.  All he needed to do was spend some time with kids...  or engineers.

What makes a spectacular reportage photo?   Several things: capturing a moment, juxtapositional composition, pehaps a unique point-of-view.  Of those criteria, the last -- the POV -- is most crucial to reportage-style photography.  Often a great point of view shot is ruined by the subject looking straight into the camera.  Think about the shots you see on the front page of the New York Times.

In a perfect world, you want all your websites to rely on the same code base.  That way a fix for one site is reflected in all the sites you manage.  This holds doubly true when you use any sort of framework software, such as Drupal, as there's nothing worse than going through a dozen different installs and rolling out the same patch over and over again.  Fortunately it is very easy to configure Drupal to run many websites from the same install.

Sorry, it's been a while since I've updating anything on my site.  Like I've said before, no one pays me to work on my own site!  Anyhow, there'll be more stuff coming soon as I've got a bunch of Drupal and jQuery items that I've been wanting to write about.  But until then, here's (yet another) detail that can be overlooked when setting up IE6 on a Virtual PC in a development environment.

In early December, 2003, Joanna and I traveled to Cuba. On this page you'll find some vignettes of our trip, which was educational, inspirational, and way too short.

The more I use jQuery, the more I like it! Until now, I'd limited my use of effects (eye candy) to some basic fades. On a new website I'm working on, the designer wants more pizazz so I've been playing with some of the jQuery UI tools, namely the Magnifier which produces a fisheye lens effect similar to Apple's Dock (OS X or later). In short, a line of icons is magnified, as if a fisheye lens were passing over it, as the user moves their mouse near the icons.

A bunch of random shots that I uploaded recently. Most are from a trip to New Zealand from eight (!!!) years ago. Shows you how well I keep things updated around here...

Anyhow, thanks to Simon who's traveling around the south island right now for asking for some advice on places to see. That, of all things, was what finally got my butt in gear.

Google provides an amazing, free website analysis product called Analytics, also known as Urchin, the name of the company Google bought to acquire this technology. As with many things Google produces, it does a lot of what you want, how you want and for a price you can't beat. It's obviously aimed squarely at users of their AdWords product. Even so, I've added it to several websites just to do basic analysis, such as unique visitors, entry points, search terms, and so on.

But everything has a cost and I wanted to know what the cost of using Google Analytics would be.

In Dec., 1998 I spent four month with some friends touring the southern end of South America — Patagonia — by bicycle. The pace of travel on a bike allows you to spend enough time in an area to connect with it, but still be able to get from point A to point B in decent time.

Few cars ventured on the main dirt (although it is now being paved) road, the Carretera Austral, so when I pulled into a town on a bike, I got plenty of attention. When Amy and Chip, riding a tandem, pulled in you'd think the circus had come town!