hello typepad

Happy New Year!

flickrimage
Originally uploaded by sudama.

I'll be offline for a week.

Vacation Time!

25 seconds to write the program, 5 seconds to mess it up with a typo, and 5 minutes to track down the problem. Finn calls this "classic development debug cycle." I call it "time for a few days off."

Booty Call

Booty Call
Originally uploaded by david.

That's some drink. Although it wasn't captured in the picture above, the price of the Booty Call was $2.50. I asked what was in the Booty Call, and our waitress said "No more Booty Call."

Finn's Thoughts on Puppet Sex

finn:

If 2004 is The Year Puppet Sex Broke, then it must be time for people to start decrying the current popular crop as ripoffs of the superior originals. Let me be the first to do so by recommending the 1976 film Let My Puppets Come, from the director of Deep Throat and The Devil In Miss Jones. And proving that having a pupet sex movie in your filmography can lead to future Oscar gold is Meet the Feebles from 1989, which was directed by Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame.

(Via randomWalks comments.)

Jenny's New Job

iPalimpsest: YA librarian.

I just found out that I'm going to be a YA librarian at the Fort Washington branch of the NYPL. This is quite a departure for me from teaching adults to use computers

Good luck Jenny!

TeacherTalk: A Schizophrenic Christmas

TeacherTalk: A Schizophrenic Christmas.

At this time of year, I suffer from multiple personality disorder. I am part mother, wife, and teacher---my usual full-time occupations.

    But I am also my own mother, preparing homemade caramels. And Martha Stewart, getting out the perfect serving platters for the perfect dinner party.

    I am June Cleaver, who never breaks a sweat while cooking. (Did she ever cook?)

    And, lastly, I am Carrie Bradshaw, clicking away on my Apple laptop, making deadline on my column.

    Yet why does it seem that everyone else in my life has only one personality?

My Mom started a blog this year.

Mindshare

kottke says:

Meg, Ev, Paul Bausch, Ben, and Mena are PC Magazine's People of the Year,  Recognized for something called "blogging".

Pat Riley once observed that as Michael Jordan's legend grew his name shrunk - from Michael Jordan, to Michael (temporarily causing a cultural logjam with "The Gloved One"), to Mike (thanks, Gatorade), before finally settling down at "MJ." The Washington Post referred to him briefly as "M" during his ill-fated stint with the Wizards, but it didn't stick. I bring this up because I call "Paul Bausch" "pb," even though I've only met him a few times. He never scored a double nickel in The Garden, but he did invent the permalink.

Thanks to Google Suggest, we have a whole new way to think about the alphabet. A is for Amazon, not Apple. Will this replace the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, which was "developed in the 1950s to be intelligible and pronounceable to all NATO allies in the heat of battle"? Fifty years later, the Google Alphabet suggests a different set of priorities: Paris Hilton, Tara Reid, Verizon and Zip Codes.

I enjoyed a brief stay as the #1 David Jacobs, but I'm humbled to occupy second place heading into the new year.

Social Software and 43 Things, Twinkler, Hugster

Link: learn python on 43 Things, Twinkler.

Link: dj's progress on Become a better programmer on 43 Things, Hugster.

Link: Anil Dash: Netflix Friends.

As Anil says, social software is a feature, not an application.  43things and flickr are so focused on adding features, it's exhilirating to watch (really). But is there no migration from twinkler to hugster, and when is someone going to use the flickR API (*) to correlate accomplished tasks with visual conversation? I've heard rumors of an API for upcoming, can we connect events from upcoming to pictures from those events on flickr, to milestones being met on 43things?

update, after spending a few more minutes with hugster. The first thing I do is race through to-do lists adding items to my own, (and presumably, robbing my future self from time I certainly don't have). This reminds me of what I call "the flickr point," the moment at which people upload large batches of their old photos to flickr, instead of using it as a temporary storage place for cameraphone photos. This suggests a benchmark for maturity in social software, when social software's primary use is actually getting somethind done, like listing photos (visual conversations) or to-do entries (global priorities) rather than assembling a prestigious "friends" portfolio.

This is not all good, as it also creates what I call "the chore". "The chore" envelopes all the time I've spent managing the physical and virtual junk I've accumulated through my own life. "The chore" is exacerbated by my OCD tendencies. "The chore" includes, but is not limited to:

• Moving. I hate moving. I'm very happy we have an affordable, spacious apartment, even though it's twenty minutes farther from Manhattan's center than I'd like it to be.


• Sorting Books, or splitting what was once one shelf or topic into two shelves or topics.


• After buying a new CD, resorting your CD book in alphabetical order. This necessitates moving every CD in the book one or two sleeves over. (This chore is obsolete)


• Deleting duplicate songs in iTunes.


• Consolidating iPhoto libraries.


• (coming soon) Consolidating hello, eyeballs photo libraries and making flickr and typepad's photo albums play nice.


• Using Applescript to forward and auto-label my old email folders into gmail. (in two years, gmail is going to be in wider use than outlook, that's a no brainer)


• Catching all Pokémon.

*Mom: an API allows websites to compare, sync and exchange data automatically

Jiiiha!

Jiiiha! 
Originally uploaded by Bummelisa.

 

Morning Foxy

Morning Foxy 
Originally uploaded by pachanga.