AC Capehart capehart

Something has happened at work that has caused me a certain amount of anxiety. In response to that, I decided I really needed a pet project. I still don’t know what that project was going to be, but there were a few technologies that I thought I’d like to know better / play with. Specifically, Twisted, Stackless and RabbitMQ. I got on to the ubuntu box that I host in the amazon cloud and started doing updates so that I had a current box to do some of the above installs on.

Well, OK, she didn’t write her name by herself today. This morning, we practiced together with pen and paper. I tried to get her to hold the pen “properly” but didn’t get far with that. Her ‘S’ looked like something between a “d” and a squared-off “o”. But later in the afternoon, I set her down in front of AlphaBaby, and I pointed out some of the letters, drew her name with stars, etc.

I am having Geek Gasm, I just came across Jott.com and astonished. I’ve already Jotted my Google calendar and I feel I can Jott my To-Do list, Remember the Milk too and now I am Jotting this blog entry. I called that in it gives a home meeting to some event(?). I am really impressed. listenPowered by Jott WOW. Speech to text has become useful at http://jott.com/ The above is a blog entry “written” by voice.

OK, /this/ is the kind of thing I expected to stumble across at SIGGRAPH and didn’t. But WOAH, this is cool: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

I am a couple of months behind in reading Wired, and just came across Clive Thomson’s article on Twitter. Anyone who follows me (OK, just Yoz) knows how infrequently I update. It’s about like this blog. There are two bits of it that struck a chord with me: Productivity guru Tim Ferriss calls Twitter “pointless email on steroids.” I had a very similar reaction to it when I first stumbled across it.

Well, as you can see from the sidebar change, I added “Now Reading” rather than writing my own. That’s OK. I’ll find something else to geek out on soon enough. I’m wondering if I should generalize it to “Now Consuming” and add DVD’s we’re watching and games I’m playing.

I’m such a Shiny whore. I was working on a love machine (in python and django which I still quite like). I got pretty far along, but got stuck on how to deal with the creation and management of groups and let it drop. Carolyn just posted an entry about books we’re reading, and I’d seen other bloggers (like dadblog) whom I’ve not read in ages(sorry Joe) who have a little books sidebar.

Thanks to flock, I’ve added pictures to my flicker stream for the first time since Sam was a little-bitty-baby. Maybe it’ll have me use del.icio.us more again too. Still, some annoyances. I can’t seem to find how to have it default to spell-checking my form fields. Though that may be I haven’t stumbled across it yet. I also wish it had a twitter interface. Maybe instead of investigating flock, I should be digging through firefox plugins.

I wrote a long and detailed trip report on my recent SIGGRAPH trip for work. I was figuring to simply copy-paste it here, but in review, it seems a little too Linden-centric, so over the next couple of days I’ll try to figure out how best to excerpt it/restructure it to bring it out here. I was embarrassed that Carolyn had (until just now) written my two most recent blog entries and even so they were a month apart.

OK, I just learned that there’s now a facebook application called “the love machine” which is quite similar to the one we use at work — except that it’s out there for everyone to use! Curiously, it was created by Ooga Labs who have our CEO as an advisor (on their board?). As our CTO has said, (paraphrasing) “Now that facebook has announced their API/platform, never build another in-house social networking app”.