In the short term I’ve decided to return to my roots a bit and focus more on building my portfolio up a bit more and taking a few classes to bone up on my all around skillset as a network engineer and also as a web developer.

What’s coming up in my personal future:

• The soon to be unveiled new project
• The soon to be fully launched “Portland Dreams” site
• A resurgence in my participation in the Portland Tech Community (add my absence as another failing of my former employer. How can you possibly be a vibrant tech organization when 95% of the rest of the tech community has never heard of you?)
• More baby pictures than you can possibly shake a stick at. (why in the hell would you be shaking a stick at pictures of my babies? They’re awesome and cute. Plus the littlest one’s drool is a proven cure for dryness)
• Massive note taking and rehearsal to give a decent couple of panels at Wordcamp next month. This will be my return to the world of public speaking (for those unaware, it’s been about 12 years since I’ve done anything remotely resembling public speaking). If anyone wants to give me a pair of New Balance sneakers to go with my black turtleneck and jeans that’d be great :D

On the work related side (and as part of a return to my graphic/designer roots):

• The soon to relaunch site for the Percussion line I’m in.
• Wordcamp Portland limited theme
• Launching a photography site for a former coworker from the K. Falls newspaper
• Completion and launch of 3 plugins on the WordPress.org site.

While not on either list I’ll also be endeavoring to write at least 2-3 posts a week from now on as well as increasing the number of Howto articles as well.

In the last bit of news I also recently switched to Disqus for my commenting needs. For those not in the know this means I have a few new features for my little spot on the web.

Features of the new Disqus WordPress plugin:

• Comments are indexable by search engines (SEO-friendly)
• Export and import of comments
• Automatic synchronization between Disqus.com and your WordPress comments
• Uses the new Disqus API
• Moderate/administer your blog right from the WordPress admin

Very cool stuff and they even have integrated Seesmic support for video commenting which is just awesomely cool.

Well that’s it for now, I’ve got work to be done and eventually my In-law’s swimming pool to hop into. See you all on the flip side.

Lastly:

• RIP Bernie Mac & Isaac Hayes.
• Major congrats to the Phantom Regiment for winning their 2nd DCI title. This version of Spartacus was amazing and I enjoyed getting to see it twice this summer. Way to go! Hope you guys come west again next year!

The boys in a rare moment of semiquietness.

“Does it actually work?

Yes! That is, it depends. (Mainly on your expectations!)

In my experience, the results are usually fairly good, sometimes even stunning – considering the artistic sophistication most of us are able to come up with (gallery forthcoming); and in the cases they’re not so stellar, they are at least entertaining ;-) But clearly, the approach has its limits.

One thing to keep in mind is that retrievr doesn’t do object/face/text recognition of any kind, so if you’re drawing an outline sketch of a chair, it almost certainly won’t get you one back (except your index only contains images of chairs). The same holds for corporate logos, icons &c.
It helps to think of it as matching the most pronounced shapes and slabs of colors.”

Works for me. I tried a little of everything from drawing a pathetic picture of balloons and got a nice set of ballon pics over to trying the best abstract drawing I could do with the brush sizes and found quite a few oddly creepy photos that I’d never have found otherwise. Sites like these reallly underscore the need for sites with cool technology to release API’s to the masses.

Retrievr!