Some miscellaneous useful software.

"Forget" your PDF password: use open-source PDFCrack. Installs easily on Mac command line (use gmake).

Looking for high-quality maps and "satellite" imagery of Hamilton? Try Map.Hamilton's iMapper. The interface takes a few minutes of experimentation to figure out, and then it's cool. Make sure you switch to Aerial Viewer (latest year) to get their ground imagery, which I think is actually generated by airplanes. It's quite a bit higher resolution than Google Earth has.

Want to annotate your PDF files? Try Skim. Seems potentially easier than using OmniGraffle... (and cheaper...)

I'm a terrible person. When I upgraded to Rails I totally broke a zillion URIs on this site, in particular most of the weblog links. I also probably lost a lot of google juice in the process. Well, now I have restored all of the weblog archive links in accordance with Cool URIs don't change (and I should practice what I preach...)

Incidentally I also made a number of other long-waiting fixes to the site, like installing the correct google analytics, fixing the top navigation links, adding a sidebar on the front page, speeding up the front page (somewhat.. still wrestling with that one). I still need to fix the tag browser so that it's as good as it used to be. And some day maybe I'll convert all of my old content over to some new CMS (well, I probably will never do that actually...)

Number of books that "should be required reading": 855,000.*

I hate it when people say that something should be required reading. Do you think that your pet crap is something that everyone cares about? I don't give a shit about your agenda.

Here's my list of what should be required reading:

• Parts, at least, of the Bible, so that you can see how odd and contradictory it is. The gospels are good though
• A bit of Shakespeare
• Well, that's about it. So long suckers.

* according to Google

I just went for a walk in the rain. It was nice and mellow. Nothing with me, no keys, no wallet, and best of all, no cellphone.

Anyway, here's some nice links to lists of all time greatest movies.

The mother of all lists of course is the IMDB Top 250. IMDB has been around forever! ...it's been on the web since 1993 which is like before the web even existed. Basically any movie on this list is worth watching. And it's the popular choices, as opposed to the critics, so they aren't just chosen for originality or historical significance (like some of the below) but rather because they're good to watch.

For the "critics choices" you can use the Best of Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten Tomatoes has to be one of the worst named websites of all time. But no matter. The problem with the all time list is that it includes movies that are loved by critics but aren't necessarily very watchable. However, they have a useful feature which is to see the top movies by year. For example here is the top 10 for 1969 (I've seen 5 of the 10 so far...). It's a cool way to explore cinematic history.

For more critic's lists, try the British Film Institute top 45 list. And here's more detail on their top 10. And then there's the American Film Institute top 100 (linking to wikipedia because the AFI site requires a stupid login).

And finally here are a few more from random publications:

• The Times top 100 (UK newspaper)
• Time Magazine top 100 (US magazine)

Well, that's enough of that. It's interesting to see the differences in the list. Is the best movie of all time The Godfather? Casablanca? Citizen Kane? Or as IMDB users would have it, Shawshank? (I don't think so...). Forget about the latest releases. Watch the classics.

Yes, I use eHarmony. I have my match distance set to something like 200km so I get about 5-8 matches a day. I try to sift through them pretty quickly to separate the wheat from the chaff. Here's my current procedure:

1. First pass is to eliminate people who are definitely not an option. Starting with the most recent match, I command-click (middle click) to open in a new window and then I look at the small photo:
   1. If they closed me, I close them, don't bother looking at photo or description.
   2. If there's no small photo, I close. It's not worth the hassle to request photos. A picture is worth 1000 words.
   3. If it looks like I wouldn't like them, I close without reading anything.
   4. If they look potentially interesting, I don't do anything (so they stay in the queue).
2. If I closed in the above action, I switch back to the original tab, because eHarmony is too slow in closing, and also it doesn't return you to the right place in your list if you go back. Once I'm done going through everyone, I close all the tabs, reload the main page, and get ready for the 2nd pass.
3. Now I'm on the second pass. All of the women left have passed the first sight test. Now I look at the photo details. I find it's very important for me that there's both a closeup face shot and a shot from father back so you can see what they look at. I include these in my profile. Without both, I close. If I don't like what I see (and this can be facial expressions, the context, as well as more normal attractiveness levels) I close without reading anything.
4. OK, finally, after doing the above step for everyone, the people who are left are worth reading about. In fact, at this point I only really feel the need to skim what they wrote because as I said, your character is written all over your face and the context of the photos. So I usually contact anyone who's made it this far.

So there you are. I do this in phases, because it's annoying to be really interested in someone, and then the next 5 people are horrible. So, I save myself the pain by going in passes and only increasing how much I care after I've eliminated the uninteresting people already. After all I need to manage my own sense of involvement or I'll just get tired of it.

I actually at one point wrote a pretty nifty greasemonkey script for firefox to add various close buttons at the top of the page to make it easier to close people. But it made me nervous. A couple of times I clicked the close button when I meant to click something else. Also, I just don't like Firefox—prefer Camino. So, no more of that.