Nov 21, 2009
Yahoo Pipes is a really awesome product that a lot of people don’t know about, and I feel like Yahoo hasn’t really done a lot with. It’s basically a node-based data editor, but it can fetch source data from places on the Internet, which means you can have pipes with dynamic output. And then, you can subscribe to the results of those pipes or request them via JSON, which gives you a huge amount of flexibility.
Sep 5, 2009
Last week Monday, in the earliest hours of the morning, my girlfriend and I touched down in Orlando, Florida. We immediately picked up the rental car and drove out to Cocoa Beach, situated along the Atlantic coast, where we were planning on staying for the week. Then we slept. We were in Florida to see the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery on STS-128, which we expected would be pretty cool.
Aug 19, 2009
Building Fences and Doing Things
A week ago last Saturday, I helped my family build a fence.
Aug 3, 2009
Prompted by Andy Ihnatko’s glowing review of Posterous, particularly where he mentioned that being able to post by e-mail made him far more likely to actually make posts, I figured I’d give that a shot. After all, my blog is just a collection of text files, so it’s trivial to turn e-mails into blog posts. We’ll see if it actually encourages me to write more, hopefully it will.
Feb 18, 2009
Mark Dominus posted an article today about states’ second-largest cities and their relationship to the largest city. For cities he used Metropolitan Statistical Areas, though, which I felt made the results a little weird. In particular, many MSAs, especially those for large cities in the small eastern states, cross state lines, and it seemed weird to me to count those as belonging to a single state.
Jan 20, 2009
I thought the inauguration was pretty interesting. I don’t think that it’ll go down as one of the great speeches of history, but it was good. It started off pretty slow, with a fair amount of rhetoric that didn’t seem to tie together very much, but it picked up toward the middle. I was also struck by a few specific moments.
Dec 29, 2008
Following Jason Kottke’s example, here is the list of cities I visited during 2008, in chronological order.
Dec 12, 2008
The introduction of the R160s is finally making its presence felt in my commute. While none of the lines I regularly ride are getting any of the new cars, the C used to run entirely R38s, which are being retired. So, starting this week, I’ve been riding entirely on R40Ms and R42s (I can’t tell them apart), presumably relocated from the N, Q, W, and other lines that are getting the new 160s.
Dec 7, 2008
I’ve worked on Constrictor enough that I feel confident in allowing other people to be exposed to it. Some of the details might not yet be in their final form, but I think it’s in pretty good shape right now. You can check out the Constrictor area of my site to get documentation, which still a bit sparse, or a pointer to the code.
Oct 28, 2008
This site used to be hosted with Drupal, which is a very capable and high-powered content management system. However, I had always felt that it was a bit more complicated than I needed; I didn’t actually know how large portions of it worked, and it had lots of features I had no interest in using but added to the complexity even if turned off.