Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
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.”
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.
I, for one, will welcome our shadowy overlords no matter how they’re elected.
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.
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.
Fried from a long day, then with a client until 11:00, much-needed couch time. Overwhelmed myself with Olympic opening ceremony last night, couldn’t take more. Then remembered – wasn’t Tivo about to grow a YouTube gland? Checked in and sure enough, a bazillion new vids were there, waiting to be inhaled.
As expected, video quality isn’t great blown up to HDTV size, and audio is sometimes out of sync with the video, but the range of human experience at your fingertips is mind blowing. Started with a few Captain Beefheart clips, moved on to Django Rheinhardt, then to Jacob Kaplan-Moss talking about Django at Google HQ in 2006. I’d never watch an hour-long video at the computer, too restless for that, but this works.
The long tail is in my living room.
P.S. Thanks to the WordPress dev team for creating the WP posting client for iPhone, which I’m tapping away at now – wallowing in luxuriant tech.
“The ink is never dry on these babies.”
Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome kaplanforoakland.org, a site promoting candidate Rebecca Kaplan for Oakland City Council.
Rebecca’s diverse experience as a civil rights attorney, an outreach consultant protecting Oakland residents from predatory loans and foreclosures, and as an elected Director for the AC Transit Board, makes her the right choice for Oakland City Council. She has the policy-making skills necessary to bring positive change.
Yet another WordPress site (not designed by me – I just ported her static Dreamweaver templates to work within WordPress so the candidate could manage her own content more easily).
Construction day for Miles and I yesterday, as we headed to Berkeley’s Adventure Playground — a playground built almost entirely by the same kids who play there (the creation of the play structures is the play). Many kids don’t have access to hammers, saws, drills or paints at home, let alone tons of free timber and a safe place to experiment. We’re extremely fortunate to have one nearby, as there are fewer than a thousand of them in the world, and of those, only two are located in the U.S. (as you can imagine, given our litigious nature).
History of adventure playgrounds:
C. Th. Sørensen, a Danish landscape architect, noticed that children preferred to play everywhere but in the playgrounds that he built. In 1931, he imagined “A junk playground in which children could create and shape, dream and imagine a reality.” Why not give children in the city the same chances for play as those in the country? His initial ideas started the adventure playground movement.
Many parents worry about the safety of adventure playgrounds, but don’t realize their safety records are actually better than that of traditional playgrounds. Counterintuitive, but not when you consider that most regular playgrounds aren’t staffed, while adventure playgrounds are monitored by adults who scout for and fix unsafe structures. And kids can’t even get their tools until they’ve found and returned either 10 loose nails or 5 wood splinters or located 1 “Mr. Dangerous” — a nail that’s been pounded through to the other side of an exposed board. Thus, the children are incentivized toward safety right off the bat.
For kids not into building, the structures are as fun to play on as they are to create. The creativity level and learning opportunities at these playgrounds is extremely high. Oh, and there’s an excellent 100-foot zip line ending in a pile of sand.
Had an amazing time as always (though forgot I had set the camera to lowest resolution, so the shots aren’t great), but Miles hadn’t gotten his fill of Hammer Time. When we got home, he wanted to do more building. First he wanted to make a sun-shade. Halfway through, decided it should be a boat, then finally an ice cream stand. Nice opp to talk about the importance of planning. Ended the day with him making banana splits for all of us, beaming proudly.
Flickr set from the day.
Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome the Canyon County Zephyr, out of Moab, Utah – All the News That Causes Fits.
“… the Canyon Country Zephyr, based in Moab, Utah. Editor and publisher Jim Stiles has loaded this irreverent newspaper with enough good reporting to put metro papers to shame… the Zephyr tells it like it is. In Moab, the erstwhile outdoor recreational capitol of the interior West, the siren like allure of booming tourism has become, for many, a monster out of control.”
A redesign of the site is in the works.
Why 1969 was great. Why 2008 is great:
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.
Hi-res version also available.
Thanks Tim Lesle