Month: August 2008

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So. Mach.

Milesnote 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.

Music: Carl LeBlanc :: Indian Love Song
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Amtrekker

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!

Music: Bobby Previte & The New Bump :: Drive South, Along The Canyon
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Robot Piñata

Robot-Pinata 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.

Music: Vieux Farka Touré :: Ana
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What If? Foundation

Whatif-Meals 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.

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Notes on Open APIs

Geocachingicon 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. Continue reading “Notes on Open APIs”

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YOU Control the Action

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.”

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Mammatus

Mammatus

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.

Music: The Mountain Goats :: Wild Sage
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Get Your Twitter Timeline into WordPress

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.

Continue reading “Get Your Twitter Timeline into WordPress”

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brianpollack.com

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.