R Scott Jones

I know that I haven’t yet explained my recent job change here, but I will soon. One of the benefits of the new job is that I’m now working entirely from home. While this presents some challenges, overall it’s a great development for me. I downloaded some time lapse software a couple of nights ago and decided to put it to use on Tuesday, recording a portion of my workday from my MacBook Pro iSight camera. It’s not compelling video in the least, just a first attempt at time lapse.

Kim and I just finished watching No Country for Old Men. It was a good movie, but not a great one. Kim and I managed to catch them filming some of it during one of our summer roadtrips. We were driving through downtown Las Vegas, New Mexico looking for a place to stop for lunch. We passed a side street and glanced down it, seeing what appeared to be an international border station. It took another second or two as we mentally processed this unexpected sight before we looked at each and blurted “What?!!” Pulling a u-turn and headed back, we stopped at the gas station on the corner to fill up and investigate. They weren’t actually filming at the moment we were there, but upon questioning the local inside, we learned what was going on. We hung around for another 10 or 15 minutes before deciding we needed to move along. It’s certainly the only reason we remember anything about a town named Las Vegas in New Mexico.

A great update to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth presentation was heard at TED in March. It’s about 27 minutes long, but his updated thoughts are well worth every second. Check it out below.

Ever since making the switch back to Apple with a shiny new iMac last October, I’ve been waiting to complete the transformation and pick up a MacBook. Well, with the new job and the prospect of giving up the old Dell laptop I was using at the Sierra Club, I finally indulged.

As soon as I decided that I wanted to work for the Foundation, I thought about getting a MacBook Air. So sleek, so minimal, so elegant. However, after a good month and a half of brain-racking consideration, a ridiculous number of store visits, and future projections, I finally decided to get the MacBook Pro, which was the furthest from my mind when I started the process. However, in the end, it came down to the screen. The MBP has a 15″ with a matte finish; the MacBook and MBA both have a 13″ glossy.

Another major factor was that I am still planning on upgrading again in the next year, passing the MBP off to Kim to use as her main computer. I’m hoping that the next incarnation of the MBP will be a bit lighter and thinner…something that the technological innovations of the Air might just make possible. Of course, if no major changes are afoot in the next 12 months, I may just stick it out with my current baby.

Kim and I are back from a very frustrating weekend in Lake Havasu City. I was headed there for a conference and thought it might be nice to bring Kim along. We had planned to visit the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge on the way, but I was up late the night before working on a proposal so we got a late start and had to postpone the visit. After arriving at the conference, i realized that the 3 people who were the targets of my attendance had decided not to show up. In addition, I also realized that i had forgotten my laptop power cord that I desperately needed to finish my work project. Luckily, I thought, I can use Kim’s old laptop, which I had convinced her to bring at the last moment. Unfortunately, that laptop isn’t the most usable these days, and lacks the Office suite. That meant that I needed to ditch much of the conference–and having Kim sit in for me–to play this game of musical file transfers between my work laptop, Kim’s laptop, and the 1980s era hotel computers.

Tired as hell, I missed much of the conference trying to put together the project, with little to show for it. I did get a nice walk to the London Bridge with Kim, but that’s about it..unless it’s spring break and you’re topless, there’s just nothing to do in Lake Havasu City.

At least, we figured, we would be able to attend the guided outing on Sunday to Swansea, an impressive ghost town that’s being repaired and restored. Of course, with our luck we found out that the tour had been canceled for lack of interest. Well, at least we have a hike in Kofa to look forward to on the way back….except that it had heated up and would be about 96 degrees by the time we started the hike. Oh, and I still needed to finish the work project, so we instead had to call the trip a total loss and drive home defeated.

I finally got around to posting the rest of the pictures from my Denver trip in late February. You can now checkout images from the Denver Zoo, Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and the Denver Botanical Gardens. And feel free to check out the original around Denver set as well.

I just finished off setting up a custom domain for my tumblelog. After playing around with some of the various domain names I’ve been hoarding, I decided to keep it simple and create a subdomain on rscottjones.com.  The first thing that came to mind in picking a subdomain name was the word life, as the tumblelog really aggregates my online life…from stuff I’ve created like blog posts, flickr photos, and twitter updates to the things I’ve consumed, like sites I’ve bookmarked and feeds I’ve shared. So, “life” made sense.

There are several feeds that haven’t been updating through tumblr, due to their asinine 5 feed limit, though I sent a formal request for an additional feed allowance.  We’ll see what response I get.

Finally, I also briefly shopped around for a new tumblr theme.  I found a couple that I liked and installed them, but never did a good job of displaying some of my shared Reader items, so I had to switch back to a standard theme.

I’ve also created a friendfeed account, and will contemplate the various advantages of tumblr vs friendfeed over the coming months.

After reading about Matt’s name change, I decided to investigate locking up a shorter url for my own web identity–not that anyone else besides me cares what my domain name is. Unfortunately, someone already owns sco.tt, though I frankly couldn’t have afforded the $500/year registration fees even if it was there for the taking.

However, I did manage to lock up scottjon.es, which makes me feel slightly better for missing out on scottjones.com by a week, many years ago (stupid aircraft sales company). Yes, that’s a .es extension, which gives the site an international flair without the non-English words. It also shortens it by a few characters and gets rid of the “r” in rscottjones. I thought long and hard about that, as I’ve branded myself as rscottjones for several years now online (it’s my username at every social networking website) and didn’t want to lose that history and momentum. However, the only time I actually use the “r” is for my domain name and logins. Offline, few know that I’m actually R. Scott Jones and not the more generic Scott Jones. Since I started going by Scott in 1990, that’s remained a personal dilemma–apparently one I’m not quite ready to put to rest just yet.

In addition to scottjon.es, I also picked up sjon.es to further reduce character count. I had wanted jon.es, but alas, that was already taken, too. However, sjon.es is not far off and could still prove useful in an increasingly iPhone-like world, where computing devices–and their associated keyboards–continue to shrink. By the way, if you ever need to register a .es domain and don’t speak Spanish, I’d recommend dotster.com. You can purchase in English and pay in dollars, though you’ll fork over nearly twice as much as a normal .com. However, it’s far cheaper than several other .es registrars I found, most of which charged $50-200 a year, apparently mostly to schmucks who clicked on the first link they ran across without checking out the competition. If you do speak Spanish and want a better deal, check out 1and1.es, which sells them for just under $10 after the exchange rate.

Both sjon.es and scottjon.es currently redirect to rscottjones.com. I’m undecided if this will change in the future, and am still contemplating if I wanted to make the full switch over to one of them.