I know, I know, this title sounds like a joke, but it’s not! We recently learned a neat trick, something that every parent should know. Our three-year-old daughter was playing with little beads and somehow got one stuck up her nose. It was lodged way up the nasal cavity, likely because she had been picking at it trying to get it out. We briefly tried getting it out ourselves, but quickly gave up out of fear that we were only pushing it further in.

We rushed her to the emergency room, and the nurse taught us a neat trick: simply plug the other nostril (the one without the obstruction) with your finger and blow into the child’s mouth. The important thing is to seal your mouth over the child’s (like you would for CPR) and to blow forcefully.

A couple of strong puffs later, the bead popped out. No big deal!

I spent the better part of today trying to figure out how to host and play video files on my website. This caused me endless hours of frustration, probably because I was trying to use Dreamhost’s QuickTime streaming service. It doesn’t work…or at least I wasn’t able to figure out how to make it work, and believe me I tried (grr). In the course of surfing around the web to find help (could Dreamhost’s support wiki be any more worthless??), I pieced together a solution. Here are the steps:

1. Prepare your video file with QuickTime.

• Open the file with Quicktime
• Export the file using “Movie to QuickTime Movie” setting (see below). Make sure you select the “Prepare for Internet Streaming” option and select “Fast Start”

2. Upload the file to your site. I created a new “media” folder (e.g., domain.com/media) for all my movie files.

3. Create a new html page and save as a regular html file (i.e., with .htm or .html extension). Here is the code to embed the video file:

<object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B"
width="640"
height="496"
codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab">
<embed src="/media/sample.mov" width="640" height="496" autoplay="false"></embed>
</object>

Note that you want to add 16px to the height value to show the controls on the bottom of the video player.

I have tested this in Firefox and Safari and it works fine, still need to get on a PC to test it in IE. I’m using QuickTime Pro Version 7.4.1 hosting with Dreamhost.

Here’s an example of the final product.

In an effort to teach myself basic programming, I have been playing around with stuff on my personal site. One thing I wanted to do was take the RSS feed from my blog and put headlines on the homepage of my site. I briefly considered trying to figure out how to do this myself, but quickly decided I would be better off just looking for an existing script that I could modify. I found a great PHP script (RSS2HTML) that seemed to fit my purpose perfectly. So I downloaded the script, customized it in TextWrangler, uploaded it to my Dreamhost server, tried to run it and…got the following error:

URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration

Well, this meant nothing to me. After a lot of research and trial and error, I found an article on the Dreamhost support wiki that says:

DreamHost has disabled the PHP option allow_url_fopen. This would normally allow a programmer to open, include or otherwise use a remote file using a URL, rather than a local file path.

I took this to mean that the script as written would not work on Dreamhost. Apparently the problem was the use of an ‘include‘ command in the script.

Here is the snippet I was trying to use:

The alternative, according to this article, is to use cURL. Well, long story short, this solved the problem and now it works great. Here is the new code:

You can see the final product here.

Changing the host file on a Mac is very easy, but it’s certainly not intuitive. This little tutorial will show you how.

Launch Terminal

Type:

sudo su
vim /etc/hosts
shift-a

Scroll to your desired insertion point and enter the info in this format:

IP address [space] www.example.com [space] example.com

Then the following to save and close the file:

esc
:wq
enter
exit

Done!

This comes in handy when doing development on a new site — point your host file to the dev server and test the site before pushing it live.

Remember to delete the entry when you want to go back to the live site. You can also comment out the entry (if you think you may want to use it in the future) by prepending the entry with a # — example:

# IPaddress www.example.com example.com

Thanks Casey!

Bonus:  Disabling the Firefox DNS cache

Here’s a list of my favorite restaurants in Sun Valley:

• Best of Ketchum: Riccabona’s ($$$$) (map). Formerly Felix’s, Steve Riccabona purchased the restaurant and has continued its tradition of welcoming charm, friendly and attentive service, and simply terrific food. If you’re looking for a great night out, Riccabona’s is not to be missed.

• Best Date Night: Michel’s Christiania ($$$$) (reviews) (map). Fine French cuisine in an intimate setting, Michel’s is a Ketchum landmark. Best French onion soup anywhere! They also have a great bar if you just want a cocktail and light appetizers.

• Best “gotta go” Tourist Spot: Pioneer Saloon ($$$) (website) (menu) (reviews) (map). Known for its prime rib and baked potatoes, the “Pio” is another Ketchum landmark. No reservations and very popular, so get there early or be prepared to wait at the bar. The portions are huge so come hungry! Full of neat memorabilia showing Ketchum history.

• Best Comfort Food: CK’s Real Food ($$$) (website) (menu) (reviews) (map). CK’s is a relaxed eatery in Hailey serving regional northwest cuisine. CK’s uses local organic produce when in season, and also works with local ranchers for their meats. They feature a daily “slow cooked” entree that is not to be missed, literally melts in your mouth.

• Best for Families: Rico’s Pizza and Pasta ($$) (website) (menu) (map). Simple — but good — pizza and pasta and very reasonably priced. Try their lasagna, some of the best around. Casual atmosphere, lots of families and very kid-friendly. This is a great place to go with the kids and not have a stressful dinner.

• Best for Appetizers: Sun Valley Wine Co. ($$) (map). This is a terrific wine shop in the heart of Ketchum that also doubles as a wine bar. Couches and comfy chairs in front of a roaring fire, with a few tables to either side, this is the perfect late afternoon escape. Grab a bottle of wine from the extensively-stocked wine racks and order a tasty panini or antipasto plate. More likely than not, you’ll see the owner running around the shop; he clearly loves what he does!

• Best Burgers: Grumpy’s ($) (reviews) (map). A local favorite for great burgers and beer. The burgers are huge, fast and fresh and the atmosphere is laidback and local. Paired with their classic schooner of beer (32 oz!), this is the perfect afternoon treat. Just don’t whip out your cell phone, Grumpy’s is a place to unwind and disconnect (they don’t even have a phone). Remember to order at the bar, there are no waitresses at Grumpy’s.

• Best for Groups: Sawtooth Club Restaurant & Bar ($$$) (website) (menu) (map).

• Best Lunch: Perry’s ($$) (map).

So I’ve been using Twitter for a few days now, and I’ve come across a few tools that add some value/fun to the experience.

• Twittered Daily is a neat little tool that creates a “daily digest” of your Tweets. This seems to be particularly useful for reposting your Tweets elsewhere, such as Tumblr. All you do is sign up with your Twitter username and it automatically generates a feed URL.

• Tweetstats is a neat little web app that graphs your Twitter usage, including volume of posts, timing of posts, interface used, etc. Kind of interesting to see trends.

• Looking at my “Interface Used” graph reminds me of another app worth mentioning, Hahlo, which is my preferred app for posting from my iPhone.

I’m still trying to decide whether I see the value in Twitter overall, but tools like these certainly add to the experience.

In the spirit of my last post… Say you have a number of separate video clips that you want to upload to a video sharing site…they are all individual files, but they all are part of the same event. You could use iMovie or the like to create a ‘movie’ … but that seems like a lot of trouble if you just want to share the clips, but not add titles, transitions, etc. Quicktime makes it very easy to accomplish this task using nothing more than “Copy” and “Paste” commands. Here’s how:

1. Locate the video files and open them in Quicktime.

2. Position the triangles in the progress bar at the beginning and end of the footage you would like to copy.

3. Select ‘Copy‘ from the Edit menu

4. In the second clip (the clip that you will be adding the additional footage to), position the upper progress bar triangle at the location where you want to insert the additional footage. For example, if you simply want to add the footage to the end of the clip, position the upper triangle at the end of the progress bar.

5. Select ‘Paste‘ from the Edit menu.

6. Select ‘Save As…‘ from the File menu. Make sure you select the ‘Save as a self-contained movie’ option.

7. You now have a single video file containing all your clips!

I like this. Really like it. We are all experts at something.

The Internet, and blogs in particular, offer the perfect medium to help others find solutions to problems.

We all have seemingly little problems that we have to work through from time to time. Generally with time, some fiddling and trial and error, perhaps a little advice from friends, we find a solution.

There is always a little personal satisfaction in working out the solution, but it never occurred to me to share my solutions. After all, who would care? And even if someone was troubled by the same thing, why would anyone look here for a solution?

But of course there’s Google. The problem that’s vexing me may be vexing others, and who knows, maybe someone who does a precise Google search may find my solution. And be glad they did. And I’ll be glad to help. So I’m going to try to post solutions as they come up.

Resort reported 19 inches overnight. Delayed opening due to avalanche control, first chair up around 10:15. Warn Springs parking lot full by 8:30am; we heard reports that the line on the River Run side was over the bridge…on foot!

We got to Warm Springs around 9:30, the crowd was as big as I have ever seen it. But boy was it worth the wait! Untracked runs down Frenchmans, knee-deep power, face shots…the works!

Bowls opened around 1:30pm…but I was on my way over to Dollar with Griffin

What a day!

The strong winter storm that has been pounding California is heading inland, arriving Sun Valley mid-afternoon today. It started snowing at about 2pm this afternoon and it continues to fall. I’d guess 6+ inches so far today. We heard a report from a Boise TV station predicting up to 20 inches of snow in the Ketchum/Sun Valley area. According to the National Weather Service:

SAWTOOTH MOUNTAINS-BIG AND LITTLE WOOD RIVER REGION- INCLUDING THE CITIES OF … STANLEY … CLAYTON … HAILEY … KETCHUM … BELLEVUE

A WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 PM MST SATURDAY.

A STRONG WINTER STORM WILL SPREAD LIGHT SNOW INTO THE CENTRAL IDAHO MOUNTAINS THIS AFTERNOON…THEN THE SNOW WILL INTENSIFY DURING THE DURING THE EVENING AND OVERNIGHT HOURS. SNOW ACCUMULATIONS THROUGH SATURDAY AFTERNOON WILL RANGE FROM 10 TO 20 INCHES FROM 6000 TO 8500 FEET ELEVATION… ABOVE 8500 FEET… MAXIMUM SNOWFALL COULD ACCUMULATE TO AS MUCH AS 3 FEET. WIND OF 25 TO 35 MPH ALONG RIDGE TOPS AND THROUGH MOUNTAIN PASSES WILL RESULT IN CONSIDERABLE DRIFTING SNOW AND NEAR- ZERO VISIBILITY IN BLOWING SNOW.

More broadly, this From Weather.com:

The strongest in a series of storm systems is plowing into the West with its impacts spreading far inland to the Rockies this weekend.

*****

A foot or two of snow will fall in parts of the Cascades of Washington and Oregon. In the mountains of California, hourly snowfall rates could reach 6 to 8 inches. Snow accumulations between 2 feet (valley floors) and locally 12 feet (ridge tops) will bury the Sierra by the end of the weekend. White-out, blizzard conditions will make any travel through the Siskiyou and Sierra Mountains deadly.

*****

Snow and damaging winds will increase through interior parts of the West this weekend, impacting Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, and the Colorado Rockies. Several feet of snow could fall at the higher elevations with wind gusts to over 80 mph.

Apparently I-84 is closed in Eastern Oregon due to high winds and flying rocks!