I write all of these posts on magicspatula.com, as I have been doing for about 5 years. In the last several months, I’ve found that a larger portion of my readership is through syndication through Facebook and Buzz. The clearest effect of this shift has been that the comments left are now divided among at least three places: the original post itself, the Buzz/Reader items, and the Facebook note. This isn’t really a huge problem, but it does cut down on the interaction via comment as well as make it a bit more work for me to keep up with (especially since I try not to be on facebook too much).

I wish Facebook did a better job of attribution when it imported my blog posts. You can find a link to the original post if you try hard enough, but it’s not obvious… several friends have mentioned “oh, I read that facebook note that you posted” which had me quite confused for a while. It’s quite understandable that they were mistaken this way, but for some reason it bothers me. Maybe it’s because I don’t want my mode of communication to be compared to Sarah Palin’s.

I’ve really enjoyed taking and cropping pictures for the header of this blog. I’ve added several pictures from my Summer trips (included below). I think I have enough now and it’s time to start removing some of them. You can see the whole set here… I’m considering removing 6, 8, 10, 11, 14, and 17. Any feedback on those or the new ones is always appreciated.

A train passing in Chile:

A wall in La Alhabra (Granada, Spain):

A door from La Alhambra (is this one too creepy?):

From an island in Chile:

At the science museum in Barcelona, they had this transparent cube full of ping pong balls bounding around with a strobe light or something, creating a neat effect with a long-exposure photo:

More trip-related blog posts to come…

I’ve been wanting to write about health care for a while, and now I finally have the time to get started.

It’s tempting to just jump in with a small post about some tactical issue in the debate, or make fun of Sarah Palin’s death panels, but I think I’m going to try to avoid that and instead try to keep it more abstract. I don’t really have a strong opinion about what should actually be done, but maybe as I write one will emerge.

Since I literally didn’t know what the term “single payer” meant a year ago, there will doubtlessly be errors in my posts, so please submit corrections and criticism.

I always find those “I won’t be posting for a couple of days” blog posts to be rather narcissistic, but here I am, pretty much writing one (but for a longer period of time). I’m in the midst of a very busy summer, described below, and I likely won’t have the time to write much for a little while.

My weekends from late July to early September consist of:
Europe (conference)
Europe (vacation)
Europe (vacation)
Family visiting
Family visiting
Trip to Pittsburgh and/or moving (within SF, not to Pittsburgh)
Klump visit and maybe moving

It’s certainly been a great summer so far, but I must admit I’m looking forward to things settling down a bit, too.

If you’re looking for some reading, check out my google reader shared items in the meantime.

Don’t worry, I won’t forget to write about “death panels” when I get back. Death Panel would be a good band or movie name, by the way.

I’m about to begin my second big trip of the year: a couple of weeks in Europe. I haven’t had time for blogging lately because I’ve been so busy keeping afloat with all this travel and work, but I hope to resume after my return. I still have posts about Chile to write!

I’m leaving Thursday evening for Barcelona, where I’ll be attending ICDAR (International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition). I’ll be presenting my paper Low Cost Correction of OCR Errors using Learning in a Multi-engine Environment (PDF).

After Barcelona, I’ll be heading up to Paris, followed by Madrid, Toledo, Seville, Cordoba, and Granada. I’m very excited about the trip, but a bit stressed about getting some things done.

Anyway, time to finish packing.

In a previous post, I wrote that foreign embassies in Tehran have been treating the wounded demonstrators. I’ve now read from some sources that this may not be the case (e.g. the UK has denied it). I’ve corrected the post to point out that this was a rumor.

Taken during Kowalski’s visit last weekend (mostly on the boat to/from Alcatraz):

View the whole set

I may want to start retiring some of the older ones soon, I just have to figure out which I like the least.

.. shall happen this weekend, once I’m done wading through ~1100 unread items in reader from this week. Buckle up!

I’ve updated the design of this blog, as previously discussed. I’ve completely removed the sidebars that used to dominate the page, leaving it with a much lighter, more content-focused feel. Here were my goals:

• Less useless stuff on the page. This mostly meant removing the sidebars.
• More space for content. The content area can now hold larger images and wider videos without breaking anything.
• Limit text column width. While I want to be able to fit big images in, I aimed for about 15 words per line in the post body. I can’t remember what the ideal is supposed to be, but this is close. I considered using multiple columns (like persistent.info) to accomplish this, but it didn’t really make much sense here.

Some other notable things:

• I gave increased prominence to my twitter status on the page. I wrote the widget-like stuff myself, using their javascript API (and it still needs some work).
• If you click on Archives at the top of the page, you get a sort of two-layer tag-cloud-style display of the years and months. It’s not hugely useful, but I think it’s a better visualization than just a list. The implementation is a bit of a hack- I take the archives list HTML output, parse it in javascript, then render the clouds on the fly.

Let me know if you have problems- there’s still a lot of stuff I want to fix, but it should be functional now.

Thanks a lot to Jon for all the feedback in the process- this would have been much worse without his input!

I’m going to be working on my blog design this weekend, so things may break intermittently.