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.

• Go through a hedge maze
• Create a crop circle
• Tour the Crayola Factory
• Geocache in all 48 contiguous states
• Drive a race car
• Make Moonshine
• Learn survival skills
• Etc.

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.

After Twittering for a few months, I started to feel uncomfortable about not owning my data, and wanted an automated way to store a copy of each Tweet for posterity. Another installation of WordPress would be perfect as a Twitter backup repository (alternatively, you could copy all of your tweets to a dedicated category within your main WP installation, but I chose to do it in a separate install, since I wasn’t looking for integration with my main blog.

There were really two problems to solve:

1) Have new Tweets automatically hoovered into the WP backing store.
2) Get all of my older Tweets ported into the system as well.

Here’s the resulting site. It’s not really intended for public viewing - I don’t care if people browse it, but it’s really just a backup system in the form of a WordPress site.

Part 1 is pretty easy; Part 2 was more complicated. Here are recipes for both procedures.

(more…)

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes brianpollack.com:

Brian Pollack is a west coast filmmaker. His work has taken him from Sitka, Alaska to al Anbar, Iraq. He has directed, associate produced and worked as cameraman on productions for National Geographic, Triage Entertainment, and CBS 5 Investigates in San Francisco. His print work has appeared in the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, and North Gate News Online.

Fried from a long day, then with a client until 11:00, much-needed couch time. Overwhelmed myself with Olympic opening ceremony last night, couldn’t take more. Then remembered - wasn’t Tivo about to grow a YouTube gland? Checked in and sure enough, a bazillion new vids were there, waiting to be inhaled.

As expected, video quality isn’t great blown up to HDTV size, and audio is sometimes out of sync with the video, but the range of human experience at your fingertips is mind blowing. Started with a few Captain Beefheart clips, moved on to Django Rheinhardt, then to Jacob Kaplan-Moss talking about Django at Google HQ in 2006. I’d never watch an hour-long video at the computer, too restless for that, but this works.

The long tail is in my living room.

P.S. Thanks to the WordPress dev team for creating the WP posting client for iPhone, which I’m tapping away at now - wallowing in luxuriant tech.

“The ink is never dry on these babies.”

Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome kaplanforoakland.org, a site promoting candidate Rebecca Kaplan for Oakland City Council.

Rebecca’s diverse experience as a civil rights attorney, an outreach consultant protecting Oakland residents from predatory loans and foreclosures, and as an elected Director for the AC Transit Board, makes her the right choice for Oakland City Council. She has the policy-making skills necessary to bring positive change.

Yet another WordPress site (not designed by me - I just ported her static Dreamweaver templates to work within WordPress so the candidate could manage her own content more easily).

Construction day for Miles and I yesterday, as we headed to Berkeley’s Adventure Playground — a playground built almost entirely by the same kids who play there (the creation of the play structures is the play). Many kids don’t have access to hammers, saws, drills or paints at home, let alone tons of free timber and a safe place to experiment. We’re extremely fortunate to have one nearby, as there are fewer than a thousand of them in the world, and of those, only two are located in the U.S. (as you can imagine, given our litigious nature).

History of adventure playgrounds:

C. Th. Sørensen, a Danish landscape architect, noticed that children preferred to play everywhere but in the playgrounds that he built. In 1931, he imagined “A junk playground in which children could create and shape, dream and imagine a reality.” Why not give children in the city the same chances for play as those in the country? His initial ideas started the adventure playground movement.

Many parents worry about the safety of adventure playgrounds, but don’t realize their safety records are actually better than that of traditional playgrounds. Counterintuitive, but not when you consider that most regular playgrounds aren’t staffed, while adventure playgrounds are monitored by adults who scout for and fix unsafe structures. And kids can’t even get their tools until they’ve found and returned either 10 loose nails or 5 wood splinters or located 1 “Mr. Dangerous” — a nail that’s been pounded through to the other side of an exposed board. Thus, the children are incentivized toward safety right off the bat.

For kids not into building, the structures are as fun to play on as they are to create. The creativity level and learning opportunities at these playgrounds is extremely high. Oh, and there’s an excellent 100-foot zip line ending in a pile of sand.

Had an amazing time as always (though forgot I had set the camera to lowest resolution, so the shots aren’t great), but Miles hadn’t gotten his fill of Hammer Time. When we got home, he wanted to do more building. First he wanted to make a sun-shade. Halfway through, decided it should be a boat, then finally an ice cream stand. Nice opp to talk about the importance of planning. Ended the day with him making banana splits for all of us, beaming proudly.

Flickr set from the day.

Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome the Canyon County Zephyr, out of Moab, Utah - All the News That Causes Fits.

“… the Canyon Country Zephyr, based in Moab, Utah. Editor and publisher Jim Stiles has loaded this irreverent newspaper with enough good reporting to put metro papers to shame… the Zephyr tells it like it is. In Moab, the erstwhile outdoor recreational capitol of the interior West, the siren like allure of booming tourism has become, for many, a monster out of control.”

A redesign of the site is in the works.