Josh Highland’s Blog

I have been "blogging" I guess for about 7 years now, off and on. When I was in college, I had the worst luck when it came to girls, but I always seemed to have a date. My friends would always want to know how my date went, and I got tired of telling the same stories over and over, so I decided that I would write my stories down, post them to my website, and let my friends read for themselves… thus my "blogging" started. Over the years, when something would piss me off enough, I would write about it. I still have copies of everything I have written, its just not online anymore.

Most people with blogs use a company like blogger or live journal or something like that to host their blogs. Me being a nerd I decided to write my own.

Since I run my own server, I rarely look at 3rd party companies for hosting solutions, expecially image hosting. I know a lot of people love flickr.com, but I never really knew why… until I signed up for an account to check it out.

The first thing that grabbed my was the abbility for me to use my camera phone (T-Mobile SideKick II), to send pictures straight to the web. I was hooked. Being the computer geek that I am, I couldnt leave it at that. I had to figure out how do to this for myself.

Late last friday night, I sat down and started coding. By 4am, I was able to duplicate flickr's photo email system. The way it works is pretty simple. I take a picture with my phone. I email the picture to a special email account useing my phone. I wrote a small program that checks my email box periodically, if it finds there is an email from me, it saves the image, turns the email subject into the photos title, and turns the emails body into the photos caption. All that info gets dumped into a database. pretty simple really

So, by being able to post pictures and text to my blog while on the go, I have turned it into a "MOBLOG"…. a mobile blog. I never really used the camera on my phone before this. I love it though. I just wish that T-mobile would release a better camera on the next version of the sidekick.

To check out the images that I have taken so far, go here: http://www.notpopular.com/blog/photoList.php, or click the "photo blog" link at the top of the page

Im thinking about relasing my code as open source. Im not sure though.

I wrote this on may 14th, but im just now getting around to posting it

There was a show at the church on Friday. It was a good time. I was still beat up feeling from the Bury Your Dead show, but that didn�t stop me from having a good time at the church show. It was probably the roughest show at the church so far. I got a nice fist to the side of my head that really rung my bell. Massive matt had to take me outside until i could see straight again. Later that night Joey managed to kick me really good in the shoulder and basically give me a dead arm. I swear, I�m getting to old to mosh. I don�t care what the Throwdown lyrics say!

I went out and ordered a new bathroom vanity and custom counter top. That stuff isn�t cheap, let me tell you! Eh, you buy it once and you have it for ever I guess, and its really nice stuff. I�m trying to figure out what to do with the wet bar in my living room area, I don�t know how to design it. This week i finished framing in, dry walling, and adding bull nose to around the new garden window. I also finished patching some holes i made running the coax, as well as finished sanding the ceiling downstairs. I don�t know if i need to hire someone with a texture gun or not to finish the ceiling. I�m going to do some tests on some scrap sheets of dry wall and see if i can do it myself. If I can, it will save me some money which is good.

I really need to work on notpop. The members are starting to revolt. I don�t blame them. Half the reason notpop was born was out of a revolt because i didnt like the features that makeout club offered. That and I wanted to stretch my wings and create a large scale website that could live on it own. Now i feel like Dr. Frankenstein. My monster has grown out of control and I need to do something before I lose all control. I have a lot of tricks up my sleeve though. I have a whole composition book full of ideas for notpop and pseudo code on how to put it all together. The trick is finding the time to do it!

It�s also gotten tricky to update things on the site… my work has blocked all access to this server. suck.