The sun was at just the right angle to persuade me to stop on my way home and take a picture of these pretty flowers. Even though it is nearly Memorial Day the weather has been on the cold side the past couple of days. Today was much nicer and the local plants must have been soaking it all up.
Just opened up Photoshop and banged out this little experiment. Nothing much too it.
In case the JavaScript version of the original Super Mario game got a bit boring, Nihilogic has redone Super Mario Kart in much the same way. Weighing in at a mere 11Kb this proof concept lets you choose your driver (Mario, Luigi, or the Princess) and one of two courses. There is no collecting coins, knocking out opponents with turtle shells, or even counting laps. You can use the arrow keys of your keyboard to steer around a simple loop course over and over again until the end of time. The computer controlled drivers help keep up the pace though you can pass right through them as there is no collision detection.
Music is included to add to the nostalgia of the old SNES days. There’s not much else to this except to prove what can be done with modern JavaScript when applied to interactive games.
I’m in Virginia at a Korean barbeque buffet and spotted this license plate in the parking lot. One of the members in our party knows Korean and is having a conversation with our waitress.
Over the weekend I began reading Inside Steve’s Brain
“Jobs paid close attention to every detail. Even the mouse was designed to reflect the shape of the computer: it has the same dimensions, and its single square button corresponds to the shape and placement of the screen.”
Fast forward 24 years and when I go to use the Mighty Mouse
The Mighty Mouse wasn’t the first unsuccessful mouse released by the Cupertino company. In 1998 to coincide the release of the first iMac, Apple created the USB Mouse which became known as the “hockey puck”. While considered stylish with it’s translucent colors and circular design the USB mouse was actually very uncomfortable to use. Third parties released USB to ADB converters so people could use the older, more comfortable Apple mouses with their new iMac computers. There was even an adaptive shell called the iCatch which elongated the circular mouse making it more comfortable to hold and similar looking to the old Desktop Mouse II.
So while Apple dared to be different by making computers that were easy to use while being gorgeous to look at, their mice could never compare. But on the other hand the trackpads on Apple’s new MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops are marvelously responsive and a joy to use. Apple is at the top of it’s game when it comes to user inputs on non-desktop products. Perhaps Steve Jobs should ditch the whole mouse concept and bundle his desktops with a USB powered trackpad. That would certainly be better than licensing the trademark of a popular cartoon series to tack on to a crappy product.
P.S. I had to “clean” the trackball 3 times while writing this blog post.
I was at the Fort Totten metro station waiting 10 minutes for the next train to arrive. Down in the tracks under the dangerous live 3rd rail was a $20 bill that caught my eye. You might not be able to see it in this photo (look in the upper right) but it took a lot of will power to not hop down in there and pick it up.
I left work late tonight and ran into a group of college kids that must have been going to a cheesey 80’s party. The guys even grew out child-molester ‘staches. Totally diferent crowd compared to rush hour.
Sorry for the grim title but I just discovered this great infographic featuring statistics of how men in the United States will die in 2008. There are various causes covered including suicide, heatstroke, and electrocutions. The data was collected from the CDC’s WONDER Database. WONDER stands for Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research which is a collection of data that’s available to public health professionals and the public at large, boasting a wide array of public health information.
Thanks to this it looks I don’t have to worry about shark attacks (1), foreign objects left behind during surgery (2), or fireworks accidents (5).
UPDATE: This originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of Men’s Health and was designed by Julia Hoffman.
UPDATE 2: From Sean Nolan, Director of Men’s Health Online
Please remove the copyright-protected graphic from Men’s Health magazine currently at this URL:
https://blog.v3.russellheimlich.com/stats-on-how-i-will-probably-die/
You do not have the permission of Men’s Health to us it.
Sorry people!
Picking session topics at SocialDevCamp East
The DC area is exploding with meetups and unconferences. First it was BarCamp DC in August, then PodCampDC at the end of April, and just this past weekend was SocialDevCamp East which took place in Baltimore. The latest unconference had an emphasis on the future of the web and many of the sessions were theory-heavy about topics that are the very bleeding edge of the next-generation Internet.
Mike Subelsky talked about Amazon’s EC2 web service.
The first session I went to was about Amazon’s web services specifically the EC2 service. The discussion, which was led by Mike Subelsky, revealed the possibilities for new products and services thanks to Amazon taking a lot of the cost and hassle of running server hardware out of the equation with their on-demand virtual server solution. System administration is foreign to me but I could see the benefit of Amazon’s web services.
Dr. Harry Chen discusses the Semantic web.
The Social Media and Semantic Web panel was a real thinker. This was the first time really diving into the nitty-gritty of the Semantic web, which will make the future Internet smarter and easier to manage with data being in a well structured, meaningful format. Dr. Harry Chen led the discussion (see his slides) with some valuable contributions from the crowd about where this web trend was heading. This gave me ideas about how U.S.News & World Report could add Semantic data to it’s upcoming data projects.
Bear, from Seesmic, adding to the Semantic web discussion.
Lunch was provided at SocialDevCamp East and consisted of a make-your-own sandwich buffet. It was probably one of the best spreads at any unconference I’ve been to. During lunch I chatted with Patti, the founder of a Baltimore area start-up called 600block.com. The site aims to help you and your friends find interesting local things, starting with Baltimore and eventually branching out to other areas. I also met Bear who is an infrastructure developer at Seesmic. He mentioned Seesmic is embracing the Semantic web by building FOAF and SPARQL into their API’s. They hope to make everything they can as open as possible which is really encouraging for the future of web video communication. He also gave me a Seesmic t-shirt. Nice!
Shashi knows the benefit of social media to companies.
After lunch I went to see what Shashi Bellamkonda from Network Solutions had to say about Selling the Value of Social Web to Management. Shashi is a very web social guy who I first met at PodCampDC. He cited how lots of companies are opening up direct communications with customers like Comcast with their ComcastCares twitter account. His main point was blogs/Facebook/Twitter are not another marketing avenue for companies to fill, but rather a way to expose the personality behind the company.
The final session was an intimate discussion about the popular JavaScript libraries that are out there. In attendance was Amy Hoy who is engaged to Thomas Fuchs the creator of script.aculo.us. Clearly she had a bias to Prototype but everyone else seemed to be into jQuery.
I had to duck out after the actual conference part was over so I missed the after party. I met a lot of interesting people who share the same passion for technology as me. Each time I go to one of these unconferences I come out with a bunch of ideas and new perspectives. I can’t wait until the next one which will probably be BarCampDC 2 sometime in the summer. And if you missed this one don’t fret as their are plans for another SocialDevCamp East in the fall.
Other SocialDevCamp East Recaps:
There are many web services and tools that can be used with Twitter. Such oddball web service/Twitter mashups include TrackThis which sends you a twitter message every time the status of a package you are tracking changes, and Timer which helps act like an alarm for things you need a reminder about. But I just stumbled across Fuelfrog which is one of the more useful collaborations.
Fuelfrog provides a simple service allowing you to track your cars mileage per gallon as well as the average price you pay at the pump. Using their website you enter 3 things: the miles you traveled since your last fill up, the price you paid per gallon, and the total number of gallons you bought. Fuelfrog will then tally your findings and provide you with some handy specifics over time. I only started using the tool today but the site will tell you the frequency you are filling up, the average MPG your car gets and the average price per gallon you are paying. In the future they hope to let you compare your performance to other vehicles to see how you are doing.
This simple tool comes in handy for tracking the performance of your car. My parents used to do this manually by writing down the mileage from the trip odometer onto the gas receipt and do the number crunching later at home. But thanks to Twitter integration I can ditch the pen and paper and simply tweet my gas stats straight to Fuelfrog. After providing my twitter username (kingkool68) I can now send a tweet from my phone to @fuelfrog with the miles, price per gallon, and total purchase amount in that order. A handy nemonic is MPG – Miles, Price, Gallons. There is also a Windows Mobile app if you want to be lazy about it.
I’m going to be using this over the next couple of weeks to see if I notice any patterns about my fueling habits. At the very least I can look back and remember when gas used to only be $3.71 a gallon!
(via DownloadSquad)
