Since I'm blogging less and Twittering more, feeding that into this...
Swallowing my heart at the thought that Miles is six years old now. Remembering the day I raced home from work on my bike in the middle of a webcast (2001) after hearing that Amy was in labor. Cliche’ but true, the years between then and now have slipped by in a flash.
Miles has been planning a robot party for months. Wanted robot music. Robot games. Robot pinata. Robot making station. Robot cake. Robot music. The only thing he “planned” but didn’t get was a robot ice sculpture (where he got the idea for an ice sculpture is anyone’s guess).
Spent a Saturday afternoon building a pinata. Amy worked out the ingredients for the robot-making station (I had wanted to add LEDs with attached hearing aid batteries for them to attach, but turned out too expensive to provide electronics for everyone). Had a great time creating a playlist of music that was either about, or sounded like it was created by or for robots. The three of us collaborated on the robot cake making and frosting - tried to reproduce his original drawing as well as we could, typos and all.
Old friends and classmates had a blast.
Twitter’s best tweeter Merlin Mann (more famously of GTD and 43 Folders) abruptly stopped with the twitter thing in early September, and started blogging at kungfugrippe.com. Completely different style, hard to tell it’s the same dude. But loved this slide from a presentation on effective blogging, applicable to Just About Anything:
The old Bowie and Springsteen vids are also worth watching.
Since 1994, A Word A Day (AWAD) has done one thing and done it well - bring a new word into your active vocabulary (complete with audible pronunciations). Truthfully, I often skim or gloss entries arriving in the daily inbox, but every now and then one really catches my attention. Today’s word: Skeuomorph:
noun: A design feature copied from a similar artifact in another material, even when not functionally necessary. For example, the click sound of a shutter in an analog camera that is now reproduced in a digital camera by playing a sound clip.
The word captures the fake authenticity meme so well. Think wood-grained vinyl on the side of a 70s station wagon. Think “distressed” jeans. Think hockey mom.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes karaandrade.com
Kara Andrade is a veteran of multimedia journalism, both for print and online. She builds communities both online and off-line and has reported and organized events in virtual worlds such as Second Life.
Great-looking site!
On a train heading North, mackin’ on salami. Just spent a week helping ma pull up roots, getting ready for the next phase of her life. Looking out the window into people’s backyards, thinking about all the useless crap we accumulate over the years. The longer you stay put, the worse it gets.
To be fair, mom has great taste. But on some level, all useless stuff is junk - great taste just makes it harder to divest yourself of the past.
Letting go is hard. New circumstances mean you don’t get to look to the garage as a catch-basin for every shiny thing that catches your eye. Native American artifacts, antique furniture, classic LPs, rare fabrics… all beautiful, all meaningful, all lacking much in the way of practical value.
Formats expire - cassettes and their players, VHS tapes and decks, records and their tuntables… all superceded now. School drawings and papers by my brother and me, and photos? My dad was (is) a master archivist. The drawers of snapshots go deep as you wanna go. That’s history you can’t dispose of.. but neither can you just flip through a few albums and make a judgment. So amazing that it all exists, all those honeycomb-encased moments. But all a burden too. Weird to see how different the print quality of various development houses was over the years - some shots over 40 years old look like they were shot yesterday, others half that old have gone yellow or purple, or have been virtually lost to the fade of time.
I was five in 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Armstrong took his walk. Our family sat on the bed and watched in awe, knowing it was one of history’s great moments, unfolding in our lifetimes. What I didn’t know at the time was that my folks clipped newspapers for days around the event, and put them in a time capsule for my brother and me. Discovered the musty manila envelope last night and was moved, knowing that they had had that foresight.
I have a deep connection to Morro Bay and always will. It’s where I became self-aware as a teen, where I learned to surf and dive and build. It’s where I spent countless hours on the beach and in the woods, boy becoming man. My first experience of a sense of awe in the face of nature was on top of Black Mountain, where I often hiked (and did again a few nights ago, possibly for the last time).
Morro Bay is where I became a punk and a hippie, where I had my first jobs, where I made the circle of friends I was to keep for life.
It was an amazing place to grow up, large enough to not be podunk, small enough to be innocent and funky. Big enough to have a post office and a headshop and a sheet music store, too small for a mall.
A big part of me would love to move back one day - can’t imagine a better place to raise the squirt. We’re pretty entrenched in the Bay Area now, and would have to move some pretty big mountains to make a move like that. So it’s been comforting to have mom there, so we can visit a few times a year. But now, homeplate is gone, at least for the forseeable future. Trips to see ma will not include Morro Bay, a hard pill to swallow. But chapters have to close, and mom will be much better off (no, we’re not putting her in a home :)
Deep down, something in me knows I haven’t seen the last of this place. It’s got a magnetic grip on me - a grip I don’t expect will lessen with time.
Goodbye, boyhood home. It’s been awesome.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes albanytoday.org, an experiment in low-cost community journalism by J-School student Linjun Fan:
Linjun Fan covers Albany related news stories and writes a series of feature stories about Albany’s diverse residents.
This is the first site we’ve migrated from a free wordpress.com blog (Fan wanted to start running ads, and to have the ability to tweak her own themes, both of which are disallowed by wordpress.com). Impressed by the quality of the export/import system (which included all media), and by wordpress.com’s domain redirection service.
This week at Stuck Between Stations:
Roger Moore: Change of the Century: A Campaign Playlist, on the politics of campaign soundtracks… or what should be campaign soundtracks.
Me: Zoe Keating, Tetrishead — Recent discovery of avant-cellist Zoe Keating on WNYC’s Radiolab has us re-thinking what the cello can do to your mind.
Amid the din of conversations about how South Dakota alone gets enough wind to power a quarter of the country, or the huge efficiency gains of nuclear power, or how harnessing the movement of the tides could provide 20% of Britain’s energy needs, one important fact gets lost: The power grid in the U.S. has barely been upgraded in 20 years, and is nowhere near ready to move vast amounts of power across long distances. As energy demand rises and we start to look at large centralized installations (wind, hydro, nuclear, other), we overlook a politically inconvenient truth - without vast investments in the power grid itself, all that new energy isn’t going anywhere. The grid is already full-to-bursting, and moving lots of energy across long distances is a giant headache.
When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.
“We need an interstate transmission superhighway system,” said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Stranger than fiction: Tiny, virtually indestructible animals called tardigrades, aka “water bears.” They don’t do much, but they don’t seem to know how to die, either. From The Very Short List - What can’t water bears bear?
Tardigrades — barely visible invertebrates that cling to mosses and lichens — are an exception to this rule. They are virtually indestructible. In recent years, scientists have subjected tardigrades (which are also known as water bears) to extreme temperatures, ranging from 155ºC to –200ºC. They’ve deprived the creatures of food and water for years at a time and zapped them with incredibly toxic levels of radiation. But, just like a Timex watch, water bears keep on ticking. Earlier this month, scientists reported that a colony of tardigrades had even managed to withstand the vacuum of outer space.
There is no outer boundary to the mind-blowing properties of raw nature.
See also: the Tardigrades in Space blog.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes moabfolkfestival.com, promoting, what else? The Moab (UT) Folk Festival, being held November 6–9, 2008 in, where else? Moab, Utah.
Plans for a proper CMS for the site are in the works.
Podcasting changed my life.
There, I said it. Melodramatic, but true. When free time is whittled down to razor-thin margins, something’s gotta give, and media consumption is often the first luxury to go. And, speaking for myself, when I’m tired at the end of the day and give myself an hour of couch time, I’m not exactly predisposed to turn to the news. “Man vs. Wild” is more like it.
The one chunk of time I get all to myself every day is the daily commute (by bike or walk+train), which amounts to just over an hour a day. A few years ago, commute time was music time, but podcasting changed all that.
With a weekly quota of five hours consumption time, didn’t take long to subscribe to more podcasts than I could possibly digest before the next week rolled around. But I continue to hone the subscription list. Here are some of the podcasts I’ve come to call friends:
Links are to related sites - search iTunes for these if podcast links aren’t obvious.
- This Week in Tech: Tech maven Leo Laporte used to do great shows at ZDTV, now runs his own tech news & info podcasting network. I appeared on his TV show a few times back in the BeOS days; now I’m just a faceless audience member. Show gets rambly and too conversational at times, but they do a good job of traversing the landscape, and there are plenty of hidden gems. Frequent co-host John Dvorak drives me crazy, despite his smarts.
- Podcacher: All about geocaching, with “Sonny and Sandy from sunny San Diego, CA.” Great production values. Love it when the adventures are huge, but get bored with all the geocoin talk (unfortunately fast-forwarding through casts and bicycling don’t go well together, especially since losing tactile control after moving to the iPhone). Still, lots of tips, excellent anecdotes, and occasional hardware reviews.
- Radiolab: I’ll go with their own description: “On Radio Lab, science meets culture and information sounds like music. Each episode of Radio Lab. is an investigation — a patchwork of people, sounds, stories and experiences centered around One Big Idea.” I love what they do with sonic landscapes. I can’t think of a better example of utilizing the podcasting medium’s unique characteristics. The shows are mesmerizing, and welcome relief from my tech-heavy audio diet.
- This American Life: Everyone’s favorite NPR show. Excruciatingly wonderful overload of detail on the bizarre lives or ordinary Americans. Your soul needs this show.
- Slate Magazine Daily Podcast: They say it would be a waste of the medium’s potential to just have someone read stories into a microphone. I beg to differ. I don’t have time to read Slate, but love their journalism. I’m more than stoked to receive a digest version of the site through my ear-holes.
- FLOSS Weekly: Another Leo Laporte show, but in this one he gets out of the way and lets his guests do the talking. All open source, all the time. Usually interviews with leaders / founders / spokespeople for various major OSS initiatives. Great interviews recently with players from the Drizzle and Django camps.
- Stack Overflow: Who woulda thunk a pair of Windows-centric web developers would have captured my attention? But great insight here into the innards of web application construction. Geeks only.
- NPR: All Songs Considered If you’re old-and-in-the-way like me, feeling like your musical soul isn’t get fed the way it should, you could do a lot worse than subscribe to All Songs Considered - annotated rundown of recent (and sometimes not-so-recent) discoveries that remind you why music is Still Worth Paying Attention To.
- This Week in Django: Part of the reason I’ve been so quiet lately is that I’m deeply immersed in Django training, having inherited a fairly complex Django site at work (more on that another day). This podcast is pretty hardcore stuff, for Django developers only. Can’t pretend to understand it all, but right now it’s part of the immersion process, and is helping me gain scope on the Django landscape.
- The Wordpress Podcast: I spend more of my time (both at work and at home) tweaking on WordPress publication sites than anything else, and this is a great way to stay abreast of new plugins, security issues, techniques, etc. Wish it was more technical and had a faster pace, but it’s the best of the WordPress podcasts.
- Between the Lines: Back in my Ziff days, I worked for the amazing Dan Farber, who’s still going strong at ZD. This is my “check in with the veteran tech journalists” podcast, and is a serious distillation of goings-on in the tech world. Always a good listen.
Obviously there’s no way to fit all of these into the weekly commute hours, but I try. No time to digest more, but dying to know what podcasts have you gripped. Let me know.
Miles woke me up this morning by waving an iPod in my face. He had spent 15 minutes writing this note, getting it just right (which in his mind means a period after each word). His writing has come so far this summer; he’s been busily labeling everything he owns with permanent marker. “Dead alligator head.” “The Specials.” “Secret Spy Legos.” Even an equation: “Play + Mobil = [happy face].” It’s amazing to watch how fluidly he’s taken to computers and technology. He can now read enough to navigate the Tivo interface without help. Knows how to launch a browser and type in the URLs for the sites he likes the most, though he was a bit unclear on the concept at first — typed “URL” into Google, said he was trying to get to the Legos web site. Loves the concept of progressively difficult “levels” in games and now talks about life as if it were a game. “Daddy, what level are you on at your job?” We take care to limit the amount of TV and technology time he gets, and to balance it against analog time. But we also see concrete evidence of it making a big impact on his reading and writing skills, so cut him some slack.
Y’all dream. Dream of all the things you could be doing if you weren’t glued to the job, glued to the family, glued to the tube. Watch Discovery and wonder if you should take up hang gliding / hitch-hiking / kayaking / gator wrestling / any activity that gets you off your seat and helps you milk life to the fullest. You know, that “50 things to do before I die” list? How many of those items do you really think you’ll cross off?
Brett [Something] decided the only way to make sure he crossed all 50 items off his list would be to leave the house and get started. And not come back until everything on the list was done.
Calls himself Amtrekker. Travels with four T-shirts, one pair of pants, one pair of shorts, and a backpack full of technology he uses to blog about his adventures and produce a weekly podcast from wherever he is at the time. And he’s doing it. Living the adventure dream you and I only dream about really doing. Only a few more items left on his list, then he can go back home.
Great interviews with Brett in the Podcacher podcast, episodes 178 and 189.
Go Brett!
Robot-themed party plans for Miles’ 6th continue apace. Last weekend decided to track down that elusive robot piñata, but no dice. The closest we could come was a Wall-E piñata, but no way. Decided to build our own - how hard could it be? A couple of cardboard boxes bolted together with cardboard rivets and filled with misc. party booty, wrapped in crepe paper and adorned with various parts from our robot-building grab-bag (TV speaker, busted headphones, random electronic thingy for an antenna). Arms and legs from gift-wrap tubing, swaddled in aluminum foil, and we were done in a couple of hours. To be destroyed by some blind-folded kid with a baseball bat in 15 seconds, no doubt, but we knew that going in. Should be good.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes the What If? Foundation, a wonderful charity feeding more than 6,000 malnourished and impoverished children in Haiti weekly. I’ve been working in the margins over the past few months to port their site out of a horrible and inflexible .ASP back-end and into WordPress, as well as consulting on the design and implementation.
Our Mission is to feed and educate impoverished children in Haiti, providing hope and opportunity for a brighter future. Founded in 2000, the What If? Foundation funds food and education programs for children in Haiti. We’re making a tangible difference in the lives of some of the world’s hungriest children. We welcome you to join us.
It’s been one of the more challenging collaborations of my freelance career, but everyone is happy with the results, and I’m proud to have donated some time to the effort. The work the foundation is doing is marvelous. This is the kind of site Birdhouse loves to work with - forward-thinking and effective.
Readers following this blog have seen my occasional references to geocaching - a sport/hobbby/pastime that Miles and I do quite a bit of, which involves using a hand-held GPS to place and find hidden treasures - either in the woods or in the city.
One of the many unusual aspects of geocaching is the fact that it relies completely on the existence of a single web-based database, represented by the site geocaching.com. As web-based database applications go, the site is a modern marvel. The database represents hides, finds, people and their discovery logs, travel bugs (ID’d items that travel the world, hopping from container to container), and more, all sliced and diced a million ways to Sunday. The site is deeply geo-enabled, letting users hone in on hides near them, along a route, or near arbitrary destination locations. It’s also one of the best examples I’ve seen of useful Google Maps mashups, relying heavily on the open APIs provided by Google to integrate its cache database with Google’s map database. This is what map mashups are all about, and geocaching.com has done an amazing job with them.
As the popularity of personal GPSs rises, so does the game’s popularity. But when geocaching.com goes down (or slows down), so does the game, which involves more than half a million hides world-wide, and many millions of players. The site, which is, sadly, based on Microsoft database technology and ASP, does go down from time to time (big surprise); it’s a “single point of failure” in bit-space for the entire meat-space game - a precarious position. (more…)
Miles has been obsessed with the Legos web site lately. Sits and watches dozens of videos in a row, then watches the same ones again the next day. This just in from Amy:
Miles is flying his Star Wars ship around the house and saying things like, “With the Lego Star Wars Gunship, YOU control the action! Deploy the rockets, put the shields into position and let the air battle begin! All sets sold separately.”
No Photoshoppery here - Mammatus clouds are formed when the air is saturated with rain droplets and/or ice crystals, and begins to sink. They don’t precede a tornado or presage a storm; the worst of the storm is usually over when Mammatus are seen. The name “mammatus” is derived from the Latin mamma (breast), for the way they hang down, seeming to offer … something.
Pix all over the web, but these are some of the best I came across.
I, for one, will welcome our shadowy overlords no matter how they’re elected.
