Keith’s Amusing Musings

I made some upgrades to this site to improve viewing and navigating for visitors using the iPhone or iPod touch. You will only see the custom look if you are reading the site on the iPhone. Otherwise, you will see the blog normally. Below are the before-and-after pictures of this site being viewed on the iPhone.

I am relying on the WPTouch plug-in which is about as simple to install and configure as it gets. I wish more software was as easy to install, configure and get working the first time. Separate but related, I also added a custom icon for bookmarking the site on your iPhone Home Screen. To see it, click the ‘+’ while viewing the site on the iPhone and choose “Add to Home Screen.”

Now you may be wondering two things:

1. Why did I customize my site for the iPhone?
2. How did I get those before-and-after pictures?

The answer to both is simple: I bought an iPhone 3G.

‘Tis true. TB made me do it so she could get one too. Ok, ok, maybe it was the other way around. Regardless, I sold out and retired my Motorola Q (aka Mobile ENIAC) and ended my cheap Sprint SERO plan. I have no regrets—other than the price differential between my former Sprint SERO plan ($30/month) and our joint AT&T FamilyTalk plan ($149.99/month).

The iPhone 3G is an amazing little device, far from perfect, but amazing nonetheless. TB uses hers more than I have seen her use any mobile phone.

Happy Independence Day, America!

One of the more interesting Deep Zoom examples I have seen since Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia, the Deep Zoom Obama Fan Site is also a great homage to presidential hopeful, Barack Obama. Consisting of over 12,000 individual pictures uploaded by Obama supporters, this massive composite in Senator Obama’s likeness provides a sense of his broad appeal and the universality of his message.

Fan sites like these tend to go away as quickly as they appear so I recorded a short video—about 70 seconds—showing the site in action.

[Warning: The following video may contain embedded ads. I am helping beta test Microsoft’s ad publishing platform. Hide the ads by clicking the ‘X’.]

Read about how a fire destroyed my beloved Vista Media Center and the saga and expense of rebuilding it the last few weeks.

If I had hair I would have pulled it all out.

Not cool.

I finally got around to updating my blog to comply with the Beta 2 release of Silverlight 2. This affects anyone who wants to view any new or existing posts containing Deep Zoom content. You must upgrade to Silverlight 2 Beta 2 (or later) to see this content.

Click here to check what version of Silverlight you have installed—you will need 2.0.30523.6 or higher.

You will know everything is working if you can see the galleries in any of these posts. Otherwise, click the “Install Microsoft Silverlight” badge in any of those posts to upgrade today…it only takes a few seconds.

I wanted to share the pictures from my first trip to China (Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai) and Korea (Seoul). I decided to employ the latest hotness in Web-based, high-resolution image visualization: Silverlight Deep Zoom. It is something you have to see to fully appreciate. Here’s what you need to do to get started:

Installation

1. Install Silverlight 2 (currently in Beta but it’s safe and will auto-update).
2. Return to this page and hit F5 to refresh.

The above steps only need to be done once. If you see the images below, you already have Silverlight installed.

Navigation

1. Pan around the image by click-dragging (like Live/Google Maps).
2. If your mouse has a wheel: Use the wheel to zoom in/out for more/less detail.
3. If your mouse does not have a wheel: Left-click to zoom in, hold down Shift then left-click to zoom out.

I hope you enjoy the photos and Deep Zoom. Let me know what you think.