Officially Lucky

Saw this over on Justin Williams’ blog and laughed my ass off:

What do you expect?? It’s lava!

If I can:

April 2005:

Dec 2006:

May 2007:

May 2008:

It’s been a long trip, but I’ve probably gained 15 years of life and my life has become exponentially better. I was so close to resigning myself, telling myself that there was nothing I could do to change who I am, and with the help of Jacqui and a lot of exercise, better eating habits (frequency and portions), cutting all the non-diet soda out of my life.

Nothing will happen overnight. This has been almost a 4 year journey for me and you make little gains every day. You don’t have to jump right into going crazy with stuff either, layer in your optimizations slowly, make conclusions, and either drop or reinforce if things don’t or do work out. Proceed to step 2. Before you know it, you’ll feel like a million bucks!

At this point the more gains I make, the more opportunities open up to me. I keep finding new ways to better myself to become more active. This is something that will never stop and has become a part of who I am.

To sum up my impromptu sermon here, don’t let anyone tell you you can’t splurge or cheat. Hell, I eat at Arby’s most lunches of the week and some weekends I drink a more than a few beers, but that’s my big thing I cheat on. I keep most everything tight and I exercise in proportion to the bad things I do, I keep making gains. Not necessarily as fast as I could possibly do, but it works for me, and so that’s what I need to do.

My foot slipped off my pedal on the way home today and it took a few good bites out of my leg. Thought I’d be a good internets person and take a short video and show the world.

Chris Wetherell, Google Reader engineer, wants to know what we think the keyboard shortcut for sharing an item with an note should be.

I noted the lack of such a shortcut in my post last night. Shift+S is already for sharing. Should it be Shift+N? Shift+S n ?

You can reply to Chris on Friendfeed.

You’ve been able to share items with your Google Reader friends forever. You could also publish a page of all the articles and pages you share to the public in HTML or RSS format.

Google added a bunch of new features to Google Reader today that enhance the experience of sharing items with people. If you’re a regular reader of my site, you might remember that I specifically asked for these features back in February:

Currently, I’m using Facebook Shared Items to compliment my Google Reader shared items, mostly because I can personalize the message and give my shared item some context. If Google Reader supported something like this, even a Twitter-esque 140 character limit to the comment, I could ditch my Facebook crutch for this sort of thing.

Of the new stuff launched today, most notable is the ability to add a short note along with the shared item to give it some context:

If you are like me, you might want to share something in Reader, but think your friends might not “get” why you are sharing it. Use the “Share with note” button on the item toolbar to create a copy of that item with your own note attached to it.

Now in addition to the familiar “Share Item” button at the bottom of each post, there is a “Share with Note” button as well

Even, better, the Google Reader team has developed a bookmarklet you can keep handy in your toolbar to share items and add notes from any webpage you’re looking at, just like I do now with Facebook. This is big. No longer am I stuck sharing posts from blogs that I subscribe to in my feed reader, now the whole web is my oyster!

You could build an entire blog, tumblelog, or just link blog right with these new tools!

Finally, and perhaps most disruptive in the feature, is the ability to simply add a random thought as a note into your shared items feed. Does this look familiar?

It should if you use Twitter. I can now link up pages with my commentary and analysis and intersperse it with random thoughts and ideas ala micro blogging. It’s my theory that Google is gunning for Google Reader to be the hub of your entire micro-link-blogging world. I give their team one or two more iterations and some API building before we’ve got something truly compelling on our hands.

Finally, as I was showing this stuff to Ed Finkler, he noticed a major oversight: no shortcuts for the new features! Eek! What a way to tarnish such a cool launch! Google Reader friends, please add a shortcut for sharing with a note as soon as you can :)

Last night Jacqui and I rode our bikes over to the Kerasotes theater on Western and Maplewood to see a live broadcast version of This American Life.

This was unique because the filming was done in New York City and then live broadcast to theaters all over the country. It was really fun and if you haven’t seen much of the video version of This American Life, it was a real treat.

The place was packed and we got some of the last seats in the upper area. We also ate popcorn and drank giant tubs of diet soda, which is also a treat because we never really go to movie theaters any more.

It was a lot of fun and if you haven’t had a chance to check out the first season of This American Life, I think it’s out on DVD right now (and on iTunes) and the second season begins this Sunday on Showtime, if you have cable TV, and it should also be running in iTunes as well.

This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten gay ads. You know, not that I mind, I’m just curious as to why! :)

I fixed a bug in my Google Reader feed processor that was making some of the stuff I shared through Google Reader lose the actual content (except for title and link).

So if you follow my link blog through any of the RSS feeds on this site, you should start to notice that they’re much cooler now ;)

I also cleaned up the middle sidebar you see on the home page of the site by separating out Tweets, songs, and links into their own lists. So now I list the 5 most recent tweets, 5 most recent songs, and the 100 most recent links.

On the Django side, I broke all that stuff out into their own context processors and their own template bits so I can include them piecemeal elsewhere on the site:

I’ve done just that. Now on all the interior pages of the site, I include my last 5 tweets and songs below the right sidebar:

I also added a very short bit of text under my photo over there, for those people who don’t want to click through to my about page.

Long title, huh? I was going to write out a thoughtful post about Brightkite and why I’m kind of warming up to it, but Herschell’s vertigo-addled brain did all the work for me:

My first text to the brightkite servers was relatively painless and took the same amount of time as it would to tweet it (on Twitter). All I did was send “? LOCATION” to BrightKite’s SMS # and in seconds, BKite (see what I did there? heheh) asked me to verify WHICH LOCATION, in which I replied “1? and PRESTO CHANGE-O! Internets! YAY. Bonus points for the seamless integration with my Twitter acct! HOORAH.

Let me put my use case Friday evening here. Me and Jacqui are hanging out at one our favorite places for drinks downtown, a champagne bar. I have already made a “contact” in my iPhone for the Brightkite service called “bk”.

I send an SMS to ‘bk’ with the following:

@?Pop's for champagne

to which the servers reply with a listing of the possible matches and their addresses—the correct location was the first. So I reply with:

1

And like magic, Brightkite has updated my current location, what business I’m at, broadcasts that to Twitter (which I have previously approved), and even updates my location in FireEagle which could, in turn update many other geo-spatial services that support FireEagle!

The real tipping point for this sort of thing will be in June of this year when Apple releases iPhone OS 2.0 and we can start running 3rd party applications.

Source: Steve Jobs’ slides from March 6 SDK event

Why then? You may ask. Sure, there are cell phones out there now that have GPS built in that allow you to do some of this cool stuff. But there were also a lot of cell phones in the past 10 years with “web browsers” and mobile browsing didn’t catch on in a BIG way until Apple made it easy and powerful by porting Safari to a mobile platform.

So with 3rd party applications, and even without real GPS, developers will be able to get a “good enough” location on your iPhone and transmit it wherever you want. I might be sending mine to Brightkite, or FireEagle. Or using it to geo-tag the photos I snap on my iPhone and send to Flickr.

And speaking of photos, you can email photos to BrightKite from your phone and they get tagged with your current location. It’s only short leap of deduction that BrightKite could relay those photos onto Flickr with geo-encoding intact.

I am really looking forward to June!

Rode to Walgreens to pick up some vital supplies and thought I’d try my hand at the Flip.

I felt no earthquake and no aftershocks :)

We are Wicker Park Bucktown is an special service area¹ with the following mission:

to sustain and promote the prosperity and unique qualities of life of the Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhood and commercial district, whilst preserving its diverse character for the benefit of its residents, visitors, and businesses through the wise and discerning investment of resources to enhance our public ways.

They recently held a master planning open house and invited locals to give their suggestions for the area in a really fun photo format. They’ve uploaded the photos to Flick for anyone to browse through:

1. WBP Open House #1 Suggestion Box
2. WBP Open House #2 Suggestion Box
3. WBP Open House #3 Suggestion Box

And some sample photos:

Awesome idea, I spent some time looking through all the photos.

¹ A special service area (or SSA) is a taxing district, usually centered on commercial districts, where the tax money collected is administered locally. For more information on WPB (including its mission, boundaries, and Commissioners) visit our home page. If you browse the “News” page, you’ll get an idea of the types of projects WPB has been working on.

Here’s a quick question to the Django people following my blog, and one I think will be a huge help to individuals attempting to perform something similar.

I’m currently working on a project that could make use of Nathan Borror’s excellent django-basic-places and django-basic-people applications.

I’m loving them so far, and getting a lot done. However, one thing that I would like to do is allow for a Person to be associated as an “owner” of a place. If I were writing all of these as a cohesive application, I would add an ForeignKey field to the Place model and link it up to the Person model.

Those apps, however, should be standalone and not linked and kept as generic as they are. So how can I link these two models in my project? Should I create some sort of intermediary model that relate the two? Is that too much of a hack?

Is there some mechanism I’m just plain overlooking?

Awesome video, watch it here or click through if you can’t see it:

It was 60°F yesterday and it was the perfect opportunity to take Jacqui out and hit the pavement on her new bike. We rode from our place out to Lincoln Park zoo, saw all the animals and then rode down to North Avenue Beach, up and down the lakefront trail, and then took a break and snapped some photos:

It was a great day. Jacqui’s a little sore, but well worth it. Here’s the whole Flick Set (18 photos) and a map of our photos and where they were taken.

Who would’ve thought they’d transcribe the Klingon dialogue as well?

Anyone have any idea where I can buy non-black colored Panaracer Tserv 700Cx32 tires? They come in some cool colors (pink!) but it only seems possible to get them in black stateside.

Another option are these Tufo Prestige tires:

However, they seem kind of expensive for something I may not end up liking too much.

The state of 700Cx32 tires is pretty drab. Black, black, black. Oooh wait this model has a reflective strip! Meh.

Maybe I should just bite the bullet and get some 23mm wheels and never look back. The variety of tires for that width are pretty dazzling! :)