How to add Tumblr to your Google Buzz feed

Ah, so that’s how all this Social Graph API stuff works:

1. Go to your Google profile and copy down the URL for the page.

2. Click Edit Profile

3. Scroll down to add links and add a link to your Tumblr site and save your profile

4. Edit your Tumblr template with a custom theme. I defer to the Tumblr help pages for instructions.

5. Add in the XFN magic by…

I’m now traveling internationally and right before I left I got a Kindle 3 to replace one I’d dropped in the river. One of the unexpected benefits of the new model is the web browser is based on WebKit and is actually functional and useful for most sites (the browser in previous models was much more limited and less useful, and I say this is an unexpected benefit of the new model because for the most part, Amazon brings new software features to the old models; I don’t know why the new browser which is just software is only available on the new model).

Another side benefit of the Kindle 3 is the built-in, free-to-use 3G wireless access works internationally. That’s pretty huge when you consider the hoops and/or expenses you have to jump through to get a cell phone working with wireless 3G data internationally. It wouldn’t be that surprising or useful if all the Kindle could do with 3G data is buy stuff from Amazon — which was basically my experience with the old model — but now that the web browser is useful, well, watch out world.

Anyway, so one of the things I’ll occasionally do with this new Kindle is check on Facebook from wherever I am that I don’t have other internet access. Right away, I found that the full-fledged facebook site (www.facebook.com) tends to crash the Kindle browser. (So do a lot of other sites that render complicated pages. Hey, they do call the browser an “experimental” feature.) That’s annoying, so let’s avoid that site. Strike 1. What other options do we have?

Well, there’s the old “mobile” facebook site (m.facebook.com), which I think was designed for really low end browsers like mobile phones, before the iPhone came along and redefined mobile phones as something that could maybe have a useful browser. I tried that on my Kindle, and it loads really quickly, but text input doesn’t work at all, so you can’t post status, search for friends, or really do much of anything. Strike 2.

And, there’s also the newer “touch” facebook site (touch.facebook.com), intended for smarter phones (www.facebook.com redirects here on iPhones). This one, it turns out, works just great in the Kindle browser.

So there you have it: the full-fledged site crashes, the mobile site exposes bugs with text input, but the touch site works fine. Hopefully Amazon will fix the other issues, but in the meantime, just use the touch site if you browse Facebook from Kindle (I changed the bookmark for “Facebook” to point to touch.facebook.com).

I like that Tumblr has an app to integrate Tumblr posts into my Facebook profile, and that it seems to work both reliably and quickly. I wish I could say the same for the Flickr/Facebook integration (which works slowly at best, and sometimes not at all, in my experience).

Just started using Tumblr; here are a couple things I want to do but can’t figure out how.

1) Backdating posts. I have some things I wrote a while ago and never published (anywhere); I’d like to publish them here but use the date I wrote them, not the date I publish them now. I’d like the backdated date to be used both for ordering posts in my blog, and shown as the date for the post. I do see that Tumblr lets me set the date for posts, with “publish on…”, and if I google for “tumblr backdate post” I see people discussing use of that for backdated posts, but even if I set the date for a new post to something a month in the past, it still shows up at the top of my blog labeled “1 minute ago”. (Note this backdating behavior is the same thing you’d want if you were importing an existing blog from somewhere else into Tumblr.)

2) Reblogging stuff from my personal blog to a family blog. I see that Tumblr lets you have multiple blogs from one account, and multiple authors for one blog. So I set up a personal blog, and a family blog; I’d like to repost some but not all of my own blog posts into the family one. And I see that Tumblr likes (and probably invented?) this concept of reblogging. So it seems I’d like to be able to reblog my personal posts into the family bog. However, the “reblog” button doesn’t show up on my own posts.

We’ve noticed that a few tour bus companies in Ushuaia, running between the town and the national park, will offer us a discount (say 55 pesos round trip for what they say is normally 70 pesos), but then write the original full price (70 pesos) on the receipt and ticket. Why would they do that?

I’m familiar with various schemes where someone charges you a high price and then documents a lower price (maybe they pay tax on the documented price, maybe you pay duty or tax on the documented price, maybe they’re working on a basis where they have to give X% of the documented price to whoever owns the taxi or bus or stand or what have you — in any of these cases, it’s to their advantage to hide some of the money they’re making). What’s happening here is the opposite, and I’m curious what the angle is.

Maybe they’re not officially allowed to compete on price — there’s a set price for all bus companies, and nobody’s supposed to undercut it to attract customers — but they do anyway, and don’t want written record of that?

I’ve been learning that the issues surrounding when you’re allowed and expected to recline your airline seat are a lot more complex than I’d previously realized.

First lesson was last May on a flight from Hanoi to Seoul, on Asiana (a South Korean airline). This was a 4 hour redeye leaving at 11:20pm and arriving at 5:20am after a 2 hour time difference — so in Hanoi time it was from 11:20am to 3:20am and in Seoul time it was from 1:20am to 5:20am — pretty well the middle of the night by any definition.

As soon as we reached cruising altitude I reclined my seat and tried to sleep„ only to be awakened about 15 minutes later by a flight attendant asking me to sit upright so she could serve the meal. Now, first of all, I wasn’t expecting a meal on this middle-of-the-night flight and this seemed like a weird time to eat. Second of all, on flights in the US some people sleep and others eat and there’s no assumption that by reclining your seat you’re intruding on the space behind you. Third, this less-than-4-hour period was the closest thing I had to a bed that night, so I wanted to sleep; finally I’d just been woken in the middle of the night and was cloudy-brained and peevish. I said no thanks and tried to go back to the sleep, but the flight attendant was insistent: “now is the time for eating.” “OK,” I replied clumsily, “but when is the time for sleeping?” After going back and forth on this a few times, the fight attendant said “well, if you don’t want to sit upright, that’s ok” in a voice clearly implying it wasn’t ok, then returned to the passengers behind me and said something in Korean which I’m sure was an apology for foreigners who don’t know how to act. I sat there in a Walter Sobchak frame of mind (“I’m staying here, I’m finishing my coffee”) for about 5 minutes, but confused and feeling like a jerk and outnumbered about 300 to 1, decided finally to sit up and read since I wasn’t going to sleep anyway.

Now, maybe everyone else on the flight lived in or near Seoul and was going to go home and sleep and didn’t care about sleeping on the flight; I didn’t have that option in my future — just a 12 hour layover that was going to be unpleasant without sleep. But whatever. I chalked this up to strange local customs I didn’t understand, and went on with life, until…

Then this week we flew from Salta (northwest Argentina) to Buenos Aires on a flight leaving at 6:30am, also a time where I’d rather sleep than eat airline food. Again, I reclined my seat as soon as allowed and went to sleep. This time the flight attendant didn’t wake me, and I was asleep so I didn’t notice, but Vanessa said the passengers behind us were complaining and getting what looked like apologetic shrugs about clueless foreigners from the flight attendant.

So — anyone else have experiences like this or know what the various customs and expectations are around the world?

Based on our experience here in Tierra del Fuego the past few days, the name doesn’t seem so apt; either Tierra de la Agua or Tierra del Viento would be more descriptive.

The first day here we went for a hike around Glaciar Martial, lost the trail (a story for another day), and ended up trying to cross a marshy meadow that threatened to suck our shoes right off our feet. Or perhaps swallow us entirely. Anyway, there’s plenty of water here, both on land (glaciers, snow, streams, rivers, marshes) and in the ocean (the whole area is an archipelago), so that’s why I nominate “Tierra de la Agua”.

Today we went on a sailboat cruise in the Beagle Channel, where we experienced high winds — the sailboat captain said we were lucky because they can’t always proceed on sails alone, but on the other hand, it was so windy the entire port was closed for a while, and it was viciously cold. (Not just on the sailboat, but everywhere we’ve been here, it’s warm if you get sun and no wind, but quite cold if you get wind and no sun, which has been the case a fair portion of the time.) The native Yamana people supposedly didn’t build their own permanent shelters, but depending on the direction of the wind moved from island to island to shelter behind rock walls that best block the current wind — so we’re not the only ones to notice that the wind makes you cold. So that’s why I nominate “Tierra del Viento”.

It’s actually from the fires that the Yamana pervasively used to keep warm — apparently they didn’t like wearing clothes that would just get wet and provide no protection, so they kept fires burning at all times — that Tierra del Fuego actually gets its name. I find it a little ironic to name a geographical area not after geographical features which are relatively permanent, but instead after something as fleeting and transitory as fire or the people who make it.

After repeatedly saying someday I’ll start a blog and then not doing it because of all the stuff it’s already missing and all the stuff I won’t have time to post later, I’m just jumping in in the middle. First up I’ll be posting a bunch of stuff from our (my and Vanessa’s) current travels, both going forward in time and catching up from a while back, so there’ll be stuff popping up here in an ad hoc manner, some of it backdated, and hopefully without causing too much confusion.

Oops. I just realized that the “file number reset” setting on my D90 was set to off, because I got a new camera and assumed the default was correct, because it is on the D700. It’s not.

(Background: The “file number reset” setting, when on, starts over with the same default filename, DSC_0001, every time you use a new or erased memory card. If you turn that setting off, the number counts up indefinitely, even across memory cards, unless you explicitly reset it. I much prefer the no- reset mode, so that each picture I take gets a unique filename, or at least a filename much more likely to be unique. The D700 I use most often ships with “off” as the default, which is good; the D90 still ships with “on” as the default.)

To fix this on the D90, go to the custom setting menu, area d, and find setting d7; turn it off.

Another location where there are too many neat birds to ignore, so, more birdwatching and another list of birds, this time from the area in and around Ushuaia, Argentina:

31: Great Grebe (Macá Grande)

76: Rock Cormorant (Cormorán Cuello Negro)

78: King Cormorant (Cormorán Real)

118: Kelp Goose (Caranca)

119: Upland Goose (Cauquén Común)

121: Ashy-Headed Goose (Cauquén Real)

125: Southern Wigeon (Pato Overo)

138: Flying Steamer-Duck (Quetro Volador)

355: Austral Parakeet (Cachaño)

On a side note, I find the ducks and geese here a lot more interesting than the standard-in-North-America mallard duck and Canada goose. I think that’s not just because of novelty, but I wonder what people from outside North America think when they first see a mallard duck or Canada goose.