Mike Lepore's Blog

Getting Facebook into Twitter

2009-08-17T11:15:00.000-07:00

Facebook status updates and Twitter have a lot in common. They're both microblogging platforms that let me casually stalk my friends and find out all kinds of stuff about what they're doing that I wouldn't normally know.

I wanted to have a unified view, so whenever I use a Twitter client, I can see all my Facebook Friend's update. But there's a twist - I didn't want all my Facebook friends. Some of my friends use Twitter to update their Facebook status with the Twitter app (like I do), and I didn't want to get duplicates.

You can see on the right how it works. Here's how I did it:

Get the URL to your Facebook Friend's status feed
Feed it into a private Twitter account (in my case friends) with a name of "Facebook" and a profile icon that is the Facebook logo via TwitterFeed.
Follow friends in twitter

Voila, I now get Facebook and Twitter together in any Twitter client.

Ok, here's the trick - step 1 is really hard.

Step 1 - Getting your Facebook Friends Status URL

First, I want to say "Thank You!" to Kristi Barrow's blog post about Facebook and RSS feeds. This step entirely comes from the information provided in her post and the comments. Without the information there, I never would have figured this out.

In order to create an RSS feed for a single group of your Facebook friends, you will need three internal Facebook IDs.

Your facebook ID
Your friends' key
Your friend's group number

Facebook ID and Friends' Key

You can get these three pieces of information from two facebook links. The first link comes from one of your applications. I use the "links" application, but any application with the "Subscribe to ... -> My Friends Links" can be used.

So, first select "Links" from the "Applications" menu as shown on the left. This will bring you to a page that shows your friends' links - as shown on the right.

If you right-click on the "My Friends Links" RSS feed, and copy the URL, it should be something like this:

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/share_friends_posts.php?id=xxxxxxxxx&key=yyyyyyyyy&format=rss20

Your Facebook ID is xxxxxxxxx
Your Friends' Key is yyyyyyyyy

Your friend's group number

In order to find your friend's group number, you should click on "Friends" at the top of the facebook page, and then select the friend list that you want from the menu on the left.

If you look at the URL in your browser it should look something like:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/friends/?filter=flp_zzzzzzzzzzzz

Putting it All Together

Ok, now we have three pieces of data:

Your Facebook ID is xxxxxxxxx
Your Friends' Key is yyyyyyyyy
Your Facebook Friend's Group ID zzzzzzzzzzzz

Now, lets put it all together into a URL that gets you a feed of your friend's status:

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_status.php?id=xxxxxxxxx&key=yyyyyyyyyy&format=rss20&flid=zzzzzzzzzzzz

If you want all of your friend's statuses, just leave off the flid=zzzzzzzzzzzz portion of the URL.

Get a new Twitter Account

Ok, sign out of twitter, and create a new account - I call mine friends. You can see a picture of the twitter account settings that I use to the left. I describe each of the settings below:

Twitter Username - the username you will follow - as you can see it is friends - you can pick anything you want, it really doesn't matter.
Profile Name - I chose "Facebook" because it means that any time this user tweets, it shows up as coming from "Facebook" in my feed.
Profile Email - You can use a trick that I use all the time with gmail, which is that you can create a new email address by using <your-username>+<anystring>@gmail.com to create a new email address. It will get delivered to your regular gmail account.

Picture - I use the facebook icon as the picture for the account - again, this just helps show the icon in my feed when I get an update

Protect My Tweets - It is really important that you check this box. The reason its important is because under facebook, statuses are not open to all. If you don't check this box, your friends' statuses will become viewable to everyone in the world. Protect your friends - check this box.

Feed your account with TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed is a tool that allows you to post the contents of one or more RSS feeds to Twitter. Head on over to twitterfeed.com, and get an account (you can either use OpenID, or sign up there).

You'll be taken to your "Feed Dashboard", where you should select "Add a Feed".

The URL for the feed will be the URL you created above, the twitter account should be your new twitter account.

I also have my facebook notifications fed into this twitter account, so I get messages like "So-and-so just commented on your status."

Follow Your New Account

Ok, go back to twitter, and log out of your new account. Then you'll need to follow your new account from your regular account. Once you do this (you'll have to grant permission to follow), you're all set.

Any twitter client (including the twitter website), will now have your facebook friends' statuses and notifications.

Riding on the Assabet River Rail Trail

2009-08-11T08:13:00.000-07:00

Connor's been riding his bike a lot lately, and he recently graduated away from training wheels.

We've been riding around the neighborhood quite a bit, but there's lots of traffic and lots of hills. I remember reading about the Assabet River Rail Trail a while ago, and had seen parts of it where it crossed various streets in town, but had never been on it.

The trail is planned to run from Marlborough to Acton - passing through Hudson, Maynard and Stow. Only the Marlborough and Hudson parts are finished right now, but its still 6 miles of paved trail.

We took off from Marlborough center and started toward Hudson, thinking we'd make it only a mile or two before turning around. But we ended up going all the way to Hudson center before turning around - 4.5 miles - or 9 miles round trip.

It was really amazing that such a beautiful area was hidden right through town - and so few people know about it. It even goes right under the highway. Anyone who lives near the ARRT should go and use it - walk, bike, take your dog for a walk or anything.

It was a really beautiful ride. I can't wait until we can go again. Next time we'll probably ride right from the house instead of driving to get there.

They're going to start construction again in 2013 - a long way off, but it will make a great ride all the way from Marlborough to Acton - much better than on a bunch of hilly roads.

Moving Megan to a Mac

2009-02-15T10:10:00.000-08:00

Well, after a long run with a Windows laptop, Megan finally got sick of running Windows enough to want to deal with the switchover to a Mac.

So I found a MacBook on Craigslist for $500, and moved everything over.

There's a couple of things that I didn't know how to do in the past, and gave me a bit of trouble, so I figured I'd mention them here.

Moving Firefox Profiles

Instead of using bookmarks, Megan just uses the firefox smartbar to get to all her various websites.

It never occured to me that you wouldn't use bookmarks, but because she visits the same sites over and over again, the smartbar had everything she needed - history, bookmarks (those she did have) and search results.

In order to move the smartbar information - along with bookmarks, extensions, etc - we moved the entire firefox profile.

A quick google found this helpful forum post on exactly how to do this - something that was very easy to complete. Start up Firefox, and we had the smartbar working exactly as it was on Windows.

iTunes

Well, the only other thing (other than the browser) that Meg usually uses on her computer is iTunes. Moving it was a little more difficult.

She has songs from a long time ago that she had imported from CD, songs that she downloaded from the iTunes store, songs downloaded one-by-one from the internet and songs loaded from the Amazon MP3 store.

There's a fairly simple procedure that google turned up.

Hurry up and Wait

But this procedure assumes that you can have iTunes consolidate your library. In order to do that it needs extra space to be able to copy your songs to a single folder. This takes a long time, and requires a lot of disk space (aparently its a copy not a move).

So after cleaning out lots of space from the cramped 80gb drive, we successfully copied everything over.

When we attached her iPod again, it even recognized it - and even synced just the changed songs. The only problem is that it wasn't formatted for the Mac - so we had to restore the iPod and resync all the music.

So to transfer 30gb of music, we had to copy (not move) it to a different location on the old HDD (1+ hour), then copy it over the network (1.5+ hour), then completely resync the iPod (1.5+ hour). The only necessary step (IMHO) was the network copy. So that sort of was a waste of time.

Other than that the transition seemed to be fairly easy. Goodbye to Windows in my house. Yay!

I'll update you all in a few weeks to let you know how the adjustment from Windows to Mac has gone.

OSX and Apple-Tab

2008-12-07T06:32:00.000-08:00

Ever since I bought a MacBook Pro, I've been trying to get used to OS-X.

I have never done well with the concept of multiple windows in an application - I've always thought of windows as top-level things. Which is why I don't like the default Apple-Tab behavior on OS-X (Switch between applications, but not windows within an application) -- Or the Apple-` behavior (toggle between windows in an application, not different apps).

After a bit of googling I found something that will probably help me get the most out of my Mac. Which by Many Tricks. Gives me back the behavior I want, and its mapped to Option-Tab, so its not too different than what I'm used to. Yay!

Making the ClearCase Remote Client (CCRC) Use a Real Merge Tool

2008-07-17T07:29:00.000-07:00

I'm a Java developer (at least I occasionally write Java code), and most of the time the CleaseCase remote client running inside of Eclipse does everything I need for source code control.

The one complaint I have about CCRC in Eclipse is that it keeps using the old-looking and not very useful clearcase GUI for doing diffs and merges.

A few weeks ago someone pointed me to meld, a graphical gnome tool for doing merges and diffs. Meld works great, but I couldn't access it via clearcase - which is usually what I needed to do diffs.

So I wrote a script that can be used to modify the CCRC installation to use meld instead of the CCRC diff tool. It's available at:

http://employees.org/~mlepore/files/ccrc_meld

Note: as far as I know this works on Linux, and it might work on MacOS X, but I'm not sure how to make it work on Windows, because I think that Windows is looking for an .EXE file. Perhaps a batch file will work, but I haven't tried it.

Comparing IT Staffing to Basketball

2008-07-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

The fastest way to lose respect is to put clueless managers in charge. Clueless managers equal clueless CIOs. Can you ever imagine Doc Rivers, coach of the 2008 world champion Boston Celtics, talking about player resources like they were interchangeable? "I need two guard resources." "I need a center resource." No. Talent and teamwork make winning teams. Talent matters. Don't pay lip-service to talent. Find a way to locate and use the talent in your organization. You will only be as good as the team you assemble.

From 9 Reason Why Application Developers Think Their CIO Is Clueless

Attack of the Sticky Notes

2008-07-01T05:57:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, a bunch of us at work moved out of our cubicals and into a bullpen. I went away for a mix of vacation and a conference - overall a great trip.

When I came back to work I found my workspace a little yellower than I left it.

Contrasts

2008-05-10T16:22:00.000-07:00

Recently, I had read that various gas-powered small engines contribute a lot to air pollution, and really aren't good for the environment. In thinking about how many different small-engines that I had, I realized that it couldn't be good... a lawnmower, a weedwacker, a hedge-trimmer, a chainsaw, a snowblower, and there was nothing that was going to stop me from getting more.

So I went out and I've begun to wean myself off those engines. I went out and bought a reel-mower. I still plan on replacing the weedwacker with an electric model (I can't find an acceptable hand-powered alternative) - I've stopped trimming the bushes with a power trimmer, and instead use shears.

I think the chainsaw will stay - because I use it infrequently and cutting large logs is something its really good at - and so will the snowblower - because I really get sick of shoveling my driveway in the winter. But for the others I don't give up that much by switching to a manual tools.

In fact I think that I might have been missing something in a haze of carbon-emissions. Today I was out mowing my lawn with the reel mower (I've added a grass catcher to the back). And it takes slightly longer to mow the lawn now - the reel mower only cuts about a 12" width - instead of 24" that the old gas guzzler did (although they make a 22" model, but its heavier). But the only thing I heard was a "swish-swish" as it cut grass. That and my 5 year old running around with his play mower making noise "daddy look!"

About the same time my neighbor started his Toro lawnmower. All you could hear was the roar of the engine. And I know that the mowers don't smell good. When we were done you really couldn't tell the difference.

Come to think of it - why do I need a 5 or 6 Horsepower engine when a 1 person-power push mower does the job. I certainly can't imagine hooking up 5 horses to mow my lawn - that just seems like overkill. I might have even got a little more exercise than if I had used the gas powered one.

My wife mentioned the contrast. I think its a good thing - I'm not longer required to be in a world of my own - with a roaring engine and gas fumes while I mow the lawn. Instead everything is normal, except I'm walking along with a "swish-swish" as the grass gets cut behind me.

One Man's Junk...

2008-05-09T11:59:00.001-07:00

A while ago, my wife and I bought a nice new microwave. We had one that was about 15 years old. It was huge, and ugly but it worked.

But we had been talking for a while about getting a smaller one, because we don't use it very often. So we went out and bought a $50 small microwave.

We figured we'd sell the old one on Craigslist or something, but never got around to it. My brother-in-law mentioned that my wife's parents could probably use it, because they have a microwave that is over 25 years old, and doesn't work. But they haven't replaced it because the countertop under it was never finished - and they didn't want to have a big unfinished space under it. So because our old one is huge (and works) its perfect for them.

Weird how everything can find a home...

Work and the Environment

2008-04-15T08:43:00.000-07:00

On May 16th, it will be Bike to Work Day. So I thought that it would be great to think about biking to work. After all, I have a pretty short commute, don't I?

Well, I looked into it, and I have a little shorter than an average commute. At least for the nation. According to the source referenced above, commuters usually spend 87 minutes - round trip - for a distance of 16 miles each way.

That makes biking to work pretty much impossible for your average commuter.

What can I do?

So what are my options to try and make it better? Or reduce my environmental impact?

Well, the most obvious is that I could get a car that is better on gas. But its still a car. What about a motorcycle? Or a scooter? Well, considering that I'm in the northeast - that would (at best) give me 6 months of the year for commuting. And people drive crazy around here - even on backroads. Not only that but people driving motorcyles are 5.5 times more likely to die in a given year than someone driving a car. That doesn't seem like great odds.

The Train!

Ok, how about Mass transit? Unfortunately there's almost nothing at all in the area I'm in. If I wanted to head into Boston I could take the commuter rail - that would mean a :30 drive to the train, and then an hour on the train, and then a walk - instead of a :45 minute drive (during non-peak hours). Its frustrating. I have friends in the Bay area - they have a better Mass transit system, but I think that they are fairly unique in the US. Lots of older cities have mass transit systems that don't reach much of the suburbs at all - never mind trying to get people between suburbs.

Relocation

I could move closer to work! But wait, the average tenure of someone in a particular job in the USA is only 4 years. That doesn't make sense. Moving every 4 years? I just want to mention that the next country up the list is Great Brittan, and they have an average Tenure of 10 years. More than double the USA.

I've watched too many friends and family get laid off, or have to change jobs for reasons outside their control to run my life around where I work.

So what's left?

It seems to me that if we (in the USA) want to break our addiction to commuting a couple of things have to happen.

We have to start looking to replace/supplement our highways with mass transit. Either a bus or train going along large beltways (such as I495) in MA would open up a world of opportunities.

We have to come up with some way of giving workers more confidence that they can stay at a single company for their entire (or a good portion of their) career.

Or we can keep going down the path of trying to make cars cleaner. I just worry that cars aren't the right answer.

Megan's Essay for Connor's Admission to Cornerstone

2008-04-02T12:48:00.000-07:00

My Wife is amazing.

Given this almost impossible task:

Cornerstone Academy

She was able to create an amazing essay. Now it might not seem that impossible, but think about it; you have to create an essay that talks about how great a fit your child is for the school, but also talk about his weaknesses are, and still balance the two.

So, here it is, my Wife's amazing essay:

Cornerstone Academy

2008-04-02T12:22:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, Megan and I realized that Connor was getting awfuly close to being ready for Kindergarten, and we had no idea where he was going.

He will turn 5 on 9/8/2008, just missing the cutoff for public school. Our original plan was that if we didn't find anywhere else, we'd send him to his current school - Our Future Learning Center for their K program. Unfortunately they just changed their program to only offer Pre-K instead of full Kindergarten.

We started looking around, looking at all sorts of schools. We looked into Fay School, a great school in Southboro, but it was very expensive, and out of the way. We looked into some Montessori schools, but they weren't quite right.

Then we found a school that was perfect! Cornerstone Academy in Northboro. A small, academically oriented school - only 1 class of 10 students per grade, a focus on well-rounded children, located on a wooded area with nature trails. Exactly what we were looking for.

We then had to go through the admissions process. This was not something that I anticipated having to do until Connor was much older (like ready for College). Here's how the process worked:

We filled out an application, including a picture and an essay describing Connor (more on this later)
We had to get teacher recommendations from his current teachers
He had to go for a 1/2 day interview, where the teachers observe him to figure out if he's a good fit
Megan and I then had to go to an interview to find out if they like us
We get accepted

As far as we know this process could stop at any point, and he could be rejected. So each part was nerve wracking and kept up nervous.

We found out today (April 2, 2008) that Connor has gotten into Cornerstone! This has been a long, but great process. I will be posting another entry with the essay that Megan wrote that got us past the first step, because I thought it was an amazing essay, and I would have been at a loss to figure out how to write an essay about my son.

My FiOS Experiance

2008-03-31T12:15:00.000-07:00

Well, I think its finally over.

My (very brief, and quite expensive) time with FiOS. I've heard lots of people rave about FiOS and how great it is. I'd like to tell another side to the story.

Over the past several months I've spent over 20 hours on the phone with Verizon - getting the problems I was having not solved.

This is the first post in a series of posts talking about my awful experience with FiOS.

How I ended up with FiOS

Roll back the clock to December 2007. I am a (relatively) happy customer of Comcast, with their Triple-Play (IP Phone, Cable and Internet Service). I pay somewhere around $150 per month for all three services. This includes 2 HD Tivo's - each with 2 CableCards, and a STB for a plain-old TV.

I had been toying with the idea of moving to FiOS, but hadn't taken the bait yet. Then Verizon makes their Free HDTV offer. This sounds pretty good. I have two HDTVs already, but a replacement for the aging 13" TV/VCR I have in the bedroom sounds like a nice thing - if I don't have to pay for it.

So I bite the bullet and call Verizon. I talk to a very nice agent who actually lives in my hometown. Overall this was a nice call. It took quite a bit longer than I had hoped (about 2 hours to get the scheduled appointment), but was pleasant. Verizon would have to wait 2 weeks to come out to my house, because I was porting my phone number from Comcast. No big deal (although this number will come back later).

I asked a couple of very important (to me) questions of the FiOS representitive:

Can I pay my bill online - the answer was "yes - of course"
Do you carry the Celtics games in HD - I know they're carried by "Comcast Sports Net" - so I want to make sure I'll get all the HD games - again, the answer was "yes, we carry CSN NE - HD"

Based on these answers, I figured that I was getting a good deal:

"Faster" internet than I have now
A free 19" HDTV
Cheaper than I was paying ($120 vs $150) - Nice!
A company backing the service that grew up supporting an always-on infrastructure that understood 5 9's of reliability (or so I thought)

Little did I know what would come next (to be continued...)

How Stupid Can You Get?

2008-01-08T07:11:00.000-08:00

I read yesterday that Sony was going to join the DRM free MP3 fray.

I was very excited. Since Amazon started offering MP3 downloads I haven't bought any DRMed music. Since iTunes started selling Music, I've encouraged my wife to only buy music online.

Finally the king-of-DRM Sony was going to give up and start offering DRM-free music.

Then I read this.

In order to buy Sony DRM free music - wait for it - you have to go to ... A STORE.

What!?

You have to go to a store to buy a card that has a scratch-off code. You then have to scratch that code off, and then can only download one of 37 albums.

Not individual songs, just whole albums. I suppose that it reduces the environmental impact of those CDs and packaging, but really!?

How stupid can a company be? Oh well, I should have expected that with Sony.

Travel with our Son - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

2007-10-13T17:13:00.000-07:00

My wife and I recently took our 4 year old son to London. We received a lot of advice - most of it "oh, don't take a kid on a trip like that". I will say that I'm very glad that we did bring him - we had a lot of fun, and it was great to let him see something different. And it really gave us a perspective that we didn't have before on our Son. It also gave us some ideas of what we did well, and what we would do differently next time.

It was also very interesting, because this was our second trip to London in the past two years. Last time we went, we didn't take Connor - it was just the adults - so it gave us an interesting chance to contrast the two trips and really try and think about what traveling with a child means.

So thats why I'm writing this post. To let you know about our experiences traveling with our 4 year old.

The Good

These were things that we were worried about - but we really didn't need to. They worked out well, and I'd have no problem doing them again.

Flights

My wife and I were horrified that Connor would be a bear on the plane. We had a long flight - 1.5 hours from Boston to Washington DC, a long layover, and then another 6 hours overnight to London. We arrived in London the following morning at 6am.

On the way back we went through Chicago - and it was 8 hours, 3 hours, 2 hours.

Amazingly this part of the trip really wasn't a problem. We told Connor what to expect - and things went pretty much to plan. We packed a videogame for him (the Leapster) - along with a new game, and some music he liked on my iPod. We also had some snacks, and a few cars and planes for him to play with.

That kept him busy the whole flight. No problems at all. He slept on both flights, and things were good.

Getting Around

Getting from point A to point B was one of our worries. We brought a stroller just in case we needed it - or he really wouldn't walk. With a couple of exceptions getting around was ok. We actually didn't use the stroller at all - actually we accidentally left it at the hotel in London.

Connor love the Tube. So taking public transit was one of his favorite things to do. Megan and I liked it less than him. In fact there were times we wanted to try and take a taxi, but ended up on the tube because he wanted to so much.

If you've never been to London, they don't have an "ADA" act (or equilivant) for the old buildings. And everything's old. So in a lot of cases the stroller would have been a bigger pain than just walking and/or putting him on my shoulders.

Jetlag

I've done a lot of travel, so I have my own way of dealing with Jetlag. It worked just fine for Connor. When we took off we changed our clocks. The real key was to make sure that we all stayed up until real bedtime (in this case 10pm) every day - so we were tired. And we didn't nap too much on the first day. That let us adjust pretty easily.

I think Meg and I were hit harder than Connor.

The "Bad"

These are things that we did that we could have planned better - but we didn't think would be problems.

Eating

Typically our son isn't a picky eater (for a 4 year old). In the US we never really have a problem finding him food. He'll eat Mexican, Chinese, Italian, American, Japanese - pretty much anything around here. However he had never been exposed to typical British food - and getting him to try something new can sometimes be a challenge.

Well, breakfasts started the difficulty. Bacon and sausage was different - there were no pancakes or french toast or waffles, the eggs were a little runny - everything was just a little off. So he had ham and toast for breakfast.

By the end of the week he enjoyed Tea - which is what we would do for lunch. He enjoyed the pastries and scones and even the ham sandwiches.

But dinner was tough. Everything was a little different - and he wouldn't bend - he was tired and wanted something normal.

So he ended up having lots of deserts, cookies and chocolate all week - because we didn't have his typical snacks or dinner. We got through the week, but I think that was a big part of the one Ugly moment we had - the highs and lows of sugar.

The only time that dinner was what we expected was when we went to Giraffe on the recommendation of on of the "London for Kids" books that we got. That was great. They had a kids menu, and a grown-up menu, and it was something that he was used to - I can't tell you how much it helped having a placemat and crayons for coloring at dinner. We even talked about bringing those ourself in the future.

Playtime

This wasn't really "bad", but it was something we didn't think about - but we should have. We ended up spending quite a bit of time just having "playtime".

One time it was a playground in the park, another time it was running around through the leaves in Hyde Park, and often it was playing with toys in our hotel room.

I think that one of the reasons things went so well for is is that we did spend at least a few hours a day playing and relaxing.

Museums

Museums didn't work out well. Connor was just not interested. We tried the Museum of London and the Mews at Buckingham Palace. These things are just BORING for a 4 year old.

The Ugly

We only had one "ugly" moment. The day before we left I think we pushed Connor's patience a little too far. We took him to Harrod's (a huge department store), and tried to shop with him - for things that we wanted.

Normally we can do this in a mall, and we can keep him busy, but I think the whole week of traveling just had him a little outside his comfort zone.

So we had a complete meltdown.

Now - if this was at home we could drag him to the car, and ride home with him screaming - but we could yell or whatever - and then get home to our house - where noone was watching.

But on Vacation - we could either take public transit (seems like a bad idea with a kid throwing a fit) - or a taxi (still not great, but better) - and then get to the hotel - where the doorman and the lobby staff can hear him say "I never get to eat - I'm so hungry" (the fit was over a piece of chocolate) - making the "walk of shame" that much worse.

When we returned later - we took a new tact. Realizing that we may have been pushing his patience a little too far, we instead took him up to the toy department and one of us stayed with him while he shopped - and we took turns looking for things in the store. For the couple of things we wanted to go together for we just would all go, and then come right back to toys.

Things like shopping that normally would test his patience were just a bad idea in the normal way.

Keeping him distracted worked great, and will definitely be in our arsenal next time.

In conclusion

The trip to London was great. We really enjoyed (other than the meltdown) Connor's company. It was fun to see his perspective on things - seeing things that we already had seen with a kids perspective was really cool - and I think we had a lot of fun as a family.

There are a few things I would do differently next time - but I would definitely do it again:

Upon arrival, I would buy a bunch of snacks to take with us during the day - healthy ones that he would like and we could stave off the sugar binges

When shopping, I would have tried to focus more around what he wanted to do - and try the one parent shopping at a time trick - even though its not exactly what we would have wanted as adults - it would have been better than our ugly moment

I think overall we would have tried to eat at least one more night at a restaurant with a kids menu. We only did one night, and I think having the kid-friendly atmosphere would have been great and helped made him feel more like home one more day.

More on Sharing...

2007-09-27T18:51:00.000-07:00

For those of you who actually read this blog, you may have seen my post on Sharing News Articles. It seemed like I had things going pretty well.

I could click on an article from my RSS reader and share it, or add a bookmark that was shared - and have them all published from one URL.

There was a comment about the fact that there are entire systems made for this - http://www.tumblr.com/ was mentioned.

Then I noticed that Paul's shares (the guy who actually figured this out - and never wrote it up) were coming up with comments and excerpts all of a sudden. So I asked him what he was doing. In the usual google way, they added another service - Shared Stuff.

Like tumblr it was made for sharing things. I still like the convenience of being able to just click in google reader, but now I can add comments too. Because of the setup that I described in my previous post, I just added my google shared stuff link to my shared link - and now it includes all three feeds.

Amazon Unbox

2007-09-27T17:49:00.000-07:00

I'm typically not a huge music buyer. I think part of that is that I really can't stand the time it takes to go find a song, go to the store, buy a CD, rip it, put it onto some music software, sync to a device.

Ugh.

So I'm still mostly listening to stuff that I had from 10 years ago - I purchase maybe 1 CD per year.

I liked the idea of iTunes - but couldn't really get behind it because I used multiple device - my computer runs Linux, my phone has MP3s on it, my Car has a CompactFlash card slot (which I love), and I now have an iPod Touch. But only the iPod can play M4Ps.

Well, I just tried Amazon MP3 Downloads for the first time today - because it lets me download 256kbps MP3s - for $0.89 each (or less if I get the entire album). I used their downloader to get two new albums - really really simple. I one-click shopped to download two albums, and poof! There they were in iTunes.

Plugged in my iPod and they were sync'ed - and they live as MP3s on my drive - so I can copy them to anything I want.

This is totally the way that music should be. I'll be going to Amazon for all of my music from now on.
This is both a "easy to use" and a "meets my needs" thing as well as a thing based on principal. A lot of the new music that I get I find from Pandora - and I want to send a message to the labels that making their music available without DRM is the right way to go!

Posting Media

2007-09-01T06:13:00.000-07:00

Up until recently, I had been posting any new pictures I had at flickr, and then just expecting people to get them. That was a great idea, except it only worked for images. I've been branching out to video a little lately - I have a nice little camera that can take videos as well as pictures - so I've been using that and I'm trying to publish some of them on google video. Unfortunately that meant that people had to go look in two different places.

So in the spirit of stealing ideas from the Russell's, I finally figured out why John has been posting his pictures to flickr and also putting them up on a separate blog. Now I know.

Anyway, you can find our media over at Mike Meg and Connor's Media.

Sharing News Articles

2007-08-29T06:02:00.000-07:00

I've been watching the set of posts and articles that Paul has been putting up an RSS feed as shared for a while now.

I really like the fact that he did this, and I asked him how he managed to get stuff that came as part of RSS feeds as well as stuff he just found online and shared the articles. He was nice enough to tell me.

So I now have a page and RSS feed of articles that I think are interesting.

Since he hasn't gotten around to writing it up, I figured I would. Its a really cool combination of using del.icio.us and google reader, both of which are really smart applications that don't think of themselves as data syncs - in other words, they let you expose data that comes into them.

Google reader allows you to mark any article that you read through RSS as "shared". It then creates an RSS feed for those articles that is published to anyone who's interested. Google reader also lets you tag feeds, and for any particular tag, you can create a public feed for that tag as well.

del.ico.us likewise allows you to create bookmarks with tags. For any tag in del.ico.us you can get an RSS feed (starting to see a trend yet?).

So what Paul told me to do is to create a new tag in google reader called "share", then import both my del.ico.us "share" tag feed, as well as my google reader shared items feed into that single tag. Then publish the "share" tag as a public feed.

What you get is the ability to share any article from google reader, or any page that you may see on the net you can share too.

So

2007 Flower Show

2007-03-20T06:25:00.000-07:00

Every year we go to the MassHort annual Flower Show. Its a great chance to get out of the winter doldrums, and really enjoy a preview of spring.

Every year, I bring a camera, and was really looking forward to playing with my new Sony A100. I figured that I should be able to do some new cool things that I never have done in the past with it, since its a full DSLR.

As we were starting to head out, I had the crazy idea that I should give Connor my compact camera to bring with him and take pictures if he wanted. I figured that he'd have fun taking pictures, and maybe even get one or two that came out pretty well.

What surprised me is how many good pictures he got. I don't think I'm just saying that cause I'm his dad either :)

Anyway, if you want to take a closer look, check out his Flickr PhotoSet, or if you want to see boring pictures from me, you can check out my Flower Show Pictures.

Outsourcing...

2007-03-19T06:44:00.000-07:00

I'm moving my blog here to blogger, because I'm slowly outsourcing our house's entire IT hosting operation.

At one point we ran our own DNS server, DHCP server, mail server, our own web server, our own photo gallery, etc. When I was right out of college and didn't have anything else to do it was fun, and I kinda enjoyed it. And it really made me learn the then newish technology linux.

As I started to get a bit older, and realize that there is life outside a computer, I got sick of having to upgrade, patch, tweak, and fix problems. This blog is one of the last things to leave. Here's a list of where things have gone, and the order they left:

DNS Server - www.worldwidedns.net - dns hosting for not too much money
DHCP Server - Linksys (WRT54G - not really outsourced, but I don't have to deal with it)
Photo Gallery - flickr.com - great app - allows me to backup all our photos for like $20 per year, almost unlimited uploads, and a cool community where I can see other people's pictures
Mail Server, Web Portal - Google Apps for My Domain - this was awesome. I could move everything over, and point my old domains to this one. I didn't have to worry about any more stuff.
Blog - here!

There's still a few things that I take care of at home, and I'm looking for good solutions to move them to easier platforms, but I suspect that I will always run a server in the house for particular things:

Hosted web applications - when I used to run a D&D campaign, we used GEAS to keep track of the campaign. A few other people have picked it up and have their campaign there. I'd have to figure out how to move it to a hosted wiki somewhere.
File and Print Services - I like having the ability to ssh into my fileserver from both inside and outside the firewall - I'm tempted to get something like a Bufalo TeraStation, but it seems pretty expensive for less that what I can already do.

But we've moved a bunch of stuff already, and the blog is the most recent thing to go.