Pioneer on the Internet – Sean Gursky

I feel like I missed a great opportunity to recap 2009, or even the decade that was. The final weeks of December flew by at an accelerated rate I didn’t think about a blog entry to commemorate the occasion. Therefore I am going to take a recent page from Jeff’s blog and do a statistical year in review.

Top 10 Google Queries
1. google analytics
2. wct
3. weather Edmonton
4. wcf
5. canada post tracking
6. ack attack
7. sean gursky
8. whois seagurs.com
9. virgin festival 2009 calgary
10. petro points

I have two Gmail accounts, one for work and one for personal but my work account does not have Web History enabled so everything that did go through my query appeared above. My busiest month for searching was in January with 489 queries recorded, and my least active month was in July with 117.

Top 10 sites
1. en.wikipedia.org
2. www.imdb.com
3. www.seagurs.com
4. www.worldcurlingtour.com
5. www.php.net
6. www.amazon.com
7. www.google.com
8. answers.yahoo.com
9. www.youtube.com
10. www.tv.com

I guess these results tell me I was obsessed with the status of seagurs.com (when it was in Redemption Period with 1&1 and waiting to take ownership back) and could never be bothered with bookmarking the Analytics site, or even learning how to spell it correctly. No idea how Virgin Festival made it into my top ten, especially since I did not even consider attending, but it stands as a testament to the year that was.

Top 10 Artists
1. Bear McCreary (2,587 plays)
2. The White Stripes (1,434 plays)
3. U2 (1,387 plays)
4. Matthew Good (877 plays)
5. Philip Glass (777 plays)
6. Bad Religion (726 plays)
7. The Beatles (684 plays)
8. Coldplay (680 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard (668 plays)
10. Michael Giacchino (520 plays)

No surprise by this, but maybe the sheer volume that Bear McCreary beat everyone else in the last twelve months is worth mentioning. Not counting the occasional song on Battlestar Galactica that contains lyrics, four of my top ten artists were instrumental and three of those were purely from soundtracks.

Top 10 Tracks
1. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis One (124 plays)
2. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Five (123 plays)
3. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Two (111 plays)
4. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Three (104 plays)
5. Regina Spektor – Man of a Thousand Faces (97 plays)
5. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Four (97 plays)
7. Bear McCreary – All Along The Watchtower (77 plays)
8. Bear McCreary – Heeding the Call (74 plays)
9. Bear McCreary – Sonatica (72 plays)
10. Bear McCreary – Passacaglia (65 plays)

Pianos and Bear charge the way. I really enjoy Man of a Thousand Faces, it’s a beautiful song but I didn’t realize that I had listened to it over 3.5 times a week (“Far” was released in June, halfway through the year).

I boarded eight different flights in 2009, flying to London, Marseille, Calgary and Las Vegas. Those eights flights spanned the same number of weeks. Roughly thirty hours of flight time equated to covering a distance of 22,242 kilometres. I drove my VW Jetta TDI 11,000 kilometers and filled up the vehicles 16 times and filed a single police report.

In 2009 I wrote 81 blog posts and I sent roughly 350 emails from my @gmail.com and @seangursky.com email accounts and 110 from my @hotmail.com address. I made fifteen orders with amazon.ca, two with amazon.com, one from amazon.co.uk and three with monoprice.com.

My rough estimates lead me to believe that I took nearly 7,500 photos with six different cameras. 17% of my photos taken this year were done in the two weeks in England/France. The majority of my total photo count came from my Canon EOS T1i/500D which had over 5,300 actuations.

We shall see what 2010 holds, and if my past numbers will continue into the New Year or not. 364 days remain…

When I changed hosting plans with GoDaddy I encountered a few problems with Gallery2. All of the configuration was correct, but when I uploaded a new image the square thumbnail would not appear. I deactivated the Square Thumbnail plugin from Site Admin > Gallery > Plugins, and reactivated it but there was no change.

I attempted to rebuild all thumbnails from Gallery > Maintenance but I received an error message about the last image I uploaded. I figured something was wrong and began the task of troubleshooting.

If I have a problem with Gallery2 there is a good chance the answer can be found in the support forums. The forums were helpful but there was never a ‘catch all’ thread for my problem. Since I have gone through this process twice in eight months I wanted to write the steps I took for future reference and possibly for others if they have a problem when their square thumbnails are no longer being created after a host move.

Getting Started
The Thumbnails / resized images section in the FAQ got me on the path to troubleshooting the Graphic Toolkits. I started off with completely uninstalling ImageMagick, Jpegtran, NetPBM and Gd. At this point I uninstalled the Square Thumbnails plugin; I don’t know if this was necessary to remove the Square Thumbnails plugin but I did not want to take any chances.

Installing ImageMagick, Jpegtran, NetPBM and Gd was easy, but configuring them was where the majority of my time was spent. Gd installs without configuration, but the other three require a bit more attention.

ImageMagick
Fortunately ImageMagick is accessible by a public directory on GoDaddy hosting accounts, so when I had to provide a path for the IM (ImageMagick) binaries all I had to enter was “/usr/local/bin/” and Save Settings.

Jpegtran
This is where things got a little more difficult for me. There is a /jpegtran folder at “/usr/bin/jpegtran” but that would fail to crop the image when I tested the binary. I also received the error message “Incorrect exit status for jpegtran command”.

I downloaded my own Jpegtran library from the file “jpegtran.tar.gz”, which can be downloaded from here. I extracted the file and uploaded it to a folder inside of my Gallery2 installation. Then I set the folder and its contents to 755 and tested the settings again and this time the crop function passed.

NetPBM
I downloaded a version of the NetPBM file from Sourceforge (the same file is mirrored here). I extracted the files to a folder inside my Gallery2 installation and set the folder and its contents to 755. When I ran the test I had the “Jhead” path empty and had several error messages.

I attempted to install the “Jhead” library with Jhead.gz and jhead-latest.tar.gz but neither appeared to work. When I did this in April 2009 I was not sure if I had “Jhead” installed or not, but I am still able to use NetPBM on MIME types image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/gif, image/png and image/tiff so that will meet my requirements for now. If I find the answer for the “Jhead” library path I will update this post.

With ImageMagick, Jpegtran, NetPBM and Gd installed and configured I reinstalled Square Thumbnails and when I re-uploaded the image my previously broken image now appeared.

Over the last few months I have noticed that the speediness of WordPress and Gallery2 (especially Gallery2) has become an issue. I have had to handicap the features on Gallery2 by enable caching, removing the random image and view counts all in an effort to ensure a quick page load time.

To combat this I am going to switch my hosting plan within GoDaddy. Unfortunately it will not be an easy and smooth transition. I will have to cancel my current hosting account, wait 24 hours for seangursky.com to disassociate and then it will be free to set up with the new hosting plan.

After my hosting failure in March I want to make sure I have everything in place before flipping the switch, and all told this process should take a few days. It would be great if it was all sorted out before the weekend, but we’ll see how these things go.

Life goes on and sometimes the blog gets left behind.

The Christmas break for TV shows has started to kick in. Some shows (FlashForward, V) may not return until after the Olympics, others will begin again in January, but this quiet is the calm before the storm. It will give me a chance to re-watch season five of Lost and prepare for the final season in February.

Details about the sixth season are very accessible. Casting spoilers can appear in an interview for TV Guide or in a not-Lost related article. With just over fifty days to go it is easy to cave and read the smallest detail, but I want to go into February with as much unknown as possible.

To pass the time a little easier and get excited for the upcoming season I have spent a lot of time watching fan made Lost trailers. In Preparation for Season 6 is some of the best fan work I have seen on any trailer. Keeping in ABC fashion (where no new footage is shown in previews) these videos do a great job of building up certain elements of the show.

Blue Skies Over Bad Lands
Sadly the giant black hole that appeared over Norway turned out to be nothing more than the Russians testing a missile out at water. The photos from this entertained the alien geek in all of us and fueled the what if conversation a little bit more.

Tube Steak Challenge
A long overdue update wouldn’t be without an increase to the Tube Steak Challenge. Thanks to my nieces second birthday I was able to add three more to the drive to fifty-two.

In March my Project 365 photos, custom images and blog posts were eaten by 1and1. It took several weeks to go through the grieving process. I still find the missing images on my three years of Project 365 a sore spot, but eventually I came to terms that my blog posts would be gone but I would pick up the pieces and start again.

There was the possibility that the site could be recovered, even in part, but I did not want to get my hopes up that it would play out. Thankfuly, with the assistance of a few co-workers (Keith and Brent) they got to work on recovering posts through Yahoo’s web cache.

What followed was work that spanned several months as basic HTML pages were parsed with PHP and formatted into an XML document that WordPress could easily import. I understand the words but the process baffles me. It started with using Yahoo’s API to save the pages and then put them through the ringer to come out shiny and clean on the other end.

I am not sure how many posts I had over the years, I thought it number over 500, however, the magic that Keith and Brent worked was able to salvage over 180 going as far back as my first post in October 2005.

I have relied on my blog archive to tell me what I was doing this time last year or to remember a specific concert review. It wasn’t until those posts were gone that I realized how much this site meant to me, and that is why I will continue to update it.

Import WordPress

1. Importing post Velvet Mafia…
2. Importing post Studying Hard…
3. Importing post B-a-n-a-n-a-s…
…
182. Importing post My Right Keys…
183. Importing post My Not So Perfect Storm…
184. Importing post My Music Radio…

All done. Have fun!

This was a beautiful sight to behold. A huge thank you goes out to Keith and Brent for their effort on this, because without them Pioneer on the Internet would still be a shadow of its former self.

Small World
The Internet got a little bit smaller for me on Monday when Sean Gerski made a tweet about finding me online. The spelling on the last name is a little different, but phonetically we share the exact same name. Needless to say I awoke Tuesday morning to quite the surprise in my Inbox!

We are now e-friends and will be plotting to take over the world as only similar in name people often do.

Tube Steak Challenge
Last Friday my Tube Steak Challenge took another leap forward.

The Ice Dragons celebrated our summer hockey season with a wrap party at Gord’s where beer and food was provided from the team pot of our subs. Even though my method for remembering the number of dogs I consumed with the caps of beer bottles didn’t work out as planned I reached double digits before the end of the month.

I will be joining Gord and Tyler on a hike in the wilderness later this week up to Landslide Lake and there are hot dogs on the menu so I hope to return from the trip and have a a few more tubed steaks under my belt.

What is in a name? When it comes to marketing a brand or an identity the consensus is to come up with something and stick with it. Over the last few months I have been struggling with my online identity, but it has recently come to a head. Ask someone what my Last.fm profile name is, chances are three suggestions will come back. That is not how you stay brand consistent.

In 2005 I registered seagurs.com and used that as my online profile, however the use of the name was very limited. Besides the website it was only used as my Gamertag on Xbox360 and, most recently, on the Playstation PSN network. Could I really be identified as ‘seagurs’ elsewhere? Would it be a more appropriate and identifiable online identity than I realized?

For almost every other site or account I would go with ‘gursky’. It is an obvious nickname, usually unused when I register it on other sites. When Facebook launched vanity URL’s for user profile pages I began to wonder how I should be identified online. Would I go with ‘seagurs’, ‘gursky’ or something else? In the end I decided to go for something generic, but accurate name and claimed ‘seangursky‘.

The purpose of this post, and the reason behind this whole identity crisis, began when I was looking to create my custom URL on Flickr. Instead of being identified by numbers and letters I could use a name. I have been a member of Flickr for as long as I had a domain name but never knew they released custom URL’s. I was late to the gold rush but I had the intentions of registering ‘gursky‘. However, someone with a screen name not of gursky beat me to it.

What was I to do? This is Facebook all over again, do I go with ‘seagurs’ or ‘seangursky’ or something else? Ultimately I went with ‘seangursky‘ and began to wonder if I made the right choice.

I can change my Flickr screen name to reflect my custom URL, but that feels like I am giving up on an identity battle, however it is confusing to have a screen name different from the custom URL. Facebook, Flickr and Last.fm all have usernames that cannot be changed; but only last.fm is without my given name and just stands as ‘gursky’.

Only a few sites will allow me to change my name (like Twitter), but I guess the question is this: If the site allows it, should I move my identity over to ‘seangursky’? Or should there be a conscience split where social networking sites have one name but the rest don’t? Is it easy to define what is a social networking site and what isn’t?

I am at a crossroad. No matter which direction I go there will be old left overs (Xbox 360 and PSN under ‘seagurs’ and Facebook, Flickr and Last.fm under variations of my name) but which path is the right one to take?

I do not have an attachment to ‘seagurs’. It is a convenient combination of my first and last name, but is that enough to making it more prominent? Is the full name necessary? I have come to grips that I will never be the only ‘gursky’ online so perhaps this is how I can separate myself from them?

The Heritage Festival is a wonderful yearly event where you can experience other cultures through dance, food and history. With all of these cultural pavilions around me and $20 worth of tickets at my disposal to try something new, I could have eaten new food for the whole day. But I go and have a lefse dog from the Scandinavian tent.

It tasted like a normal hot dog, not the BBQ or flame roasted style I am familiar with. However, I can now say that my Tube Steak Challenge has expanded me as a person and cultured me a little more on how snouts and entrails are presented in other countries.

Heritage Festival: A great place to try a different type of hot dog.

The second edition of the Tube Steak Challenge is well under way. Our trip to Lac La Biche last weekend saw my second annual Challenge go from zero to eight in a matter of days. At this rate I will destroy my previous years record, but I know the winter months will see a drought of snouts and entrails so I will enjoy this gluttony for now.

It has been fifty two days since my eye surgery and things have been fairly consistent for the last few weeks. I am at a point now where my vision is strong enough that I do not have ‘functional fuzzy’, I can do my job without issue and do not have problems reading most text. The changes to my eyes have been subtle, and if there are improvements I may not notice it right away.

I was in a world of blur for several weeks and I thought I would notice the day where everything came into focus but it was so gradual that I barely noticed a change. It was like I woke up one morning and I realized that the problems I had from a week ago were gone. Things came into focus. I could see the building across the road, the font on my computer screen and the fine print text from a poster at work.

I have noticed that in low light situations reading is a little difficult, but that is the exception. I have not done night driving in a few weeks so I do not know if I will have halo’s, shadowing, or difficulty reading street signs. My distance vision is strong during daylight so I would hope that would help during darkness.

I was dependent on glasses for so many years I am surprised that I have not instinctively reached for the glasses in the morning to put them on. To that, I have never caught myself moving my index finger up to my nose to adjust the position of my frames, it is almost like I forgot all muscle memory related to when I wore glasses.

My one month follow up with the surgeon was the beginning of July and my next appointment is in October. I was told to decrease the frequency of the drops every month. For July I am use Flarex and Systane Ultra three times a day and then August would be two drops and then September is one. I have not noticed a problem going from four drops a day to three. The lack of the fourth drop does not lead to dry or blurry eyes and I can only hope that the same can be said for subsequent months.

However, the last few days I have noticed a bit more ‘gunk’ in my left eye, which is not the usual type of hard ‘crusties’ you get in the morning. The few theories I have are is that the eye is getting dried out with fans on in the bedroom, it is build up from my round of drops before bed or something else is going on, in any case it is only the left eye that experiences this and it does not happen every night.

It has been a fast fifty two days but not without its frustrations. For those who are recovering from PRK eye surgery my biggest recommendation is to have patience. It really is several months of recovery because not every eye will heal the same or as fast as you want. My recovery process has been longer than someone I know who had the surgery around the same time, and eventually it does get better.