This is the coolest, cutest robot related music video I have ever seen.

I haven’t had a chance to watch the Seahawks play yet this preseason, but I did come across this amusing video diary that Matt Hasselbeck did for the NFL Network today. Matt is a pretty funny guy and I got a kick out of watching him banter with his teammates.

Axodys.com is long overdue for a WordPress overhaul. I’m a few versions behind and there’s a variety of cruft to clean up.

I’ve installed the latest version of WordPress (2.2) on another site I’ve been working on and it seems like a pretty decent evolution. Based on this summary I found it seems to be a mostly incremental release. That’s not really surprising considering it’s probably the most flexible and powerfull blogging platform around.

I’ve been aware of facebook for a while (I work at a university after all), but I hadn’t signed up because I didn’t have a specific need to. While I could see its value in a high school or college setting it wasn’t clear to me that it would be all that useful personally. However since I’m participating in the 30 Day Challenge and they recommended using it as a team collaboration tool I went ahead and signed up yesterday.

My first impression of facebook is quite good. The collaborative functionality and overall refinement is very nice and quite professional. It definitely makes social competitor myspace.com look like a worn out child’s coloring book. MySpace has been enormously popular (especially among the high school crowd in the last couple years), but from an aesthetic and web standards standpoint, it’s always made me cringe.

After fleshing out my profile and exploring a little bit further my second thought is that Facebook is going to kill paid membership sites like reunion.com. It’s free, it provides virtually the same high school class related functionality and a whole lot more besides. While searching I discovered one of my best friends was already signed up as well as numerous (usually younger) alums from my high school that I recognized and I only expect those numbers to grow by the time my 20th reunion rolls around.

The other thing about Facebook that really interests me at this point is its development potential. Facebook supports third party web applications. The Facebook API hasn’t been out all that long, but more websites are integrating via widgets all the time. Amazon.com, box.net, del.icio.us, flickr and twitter are just a few that offer support for Facebook. Here’s a more complete list of Facebook widgets.

All in all, Facebook is a useful and powerful social tool and I’m intrigued by its future potential as more and more people outside its current college age demographic start joining and using it.

Mary was watching the Today Show when I got up this morning. I was working on getting packed up for my ride into work and not paying too much attention, but I did notice when they started talking about the iPhone. Suddenly there was a clip of a familiar looking kid answering questions about his iPhone. Hey that’s Patrick Scoble isn’t it? Yep, a moment later they identified him with a title on the screen.

Now I’ve never met Patrick, but I know who he is because I’ve read a few of his blogs and heard about him tangentially via posts from his dad Robert and Dave Winer over the years. A year or two back he did a couple podcasts with his dad that I enjoyed as well. Needless to say he seems like a pretty cool tech savvy kid and I enjoyed seeing and recognizing him on national television this morning.

I was a big fan of Mr. Wizard’s World on Nickelodeon back in my elementary school days (and like Wil Wheaton I was a huge Third Eye and You Can’t Do That On Television fan as well) so I was saddened to hear the news that Don Herbert had recently passed away.

Thinking back, the first science experiment of his that comes to mind is the time he poured a layer of pollen on top of an aquarium filled with water so that he could submerge his hand without getting it wet. I’m pretty sure that I later replicated his experiment successfully (not sure if I used pollen or a similar powder) and every spring here in Spokane when yellow pine pollen is coating everything I immediately think of that episode. Thanks for the fond memories Mr. Wizard.

Where were you last night when LeBron scored 48 to lead his Cavaliers to a game 5 double OT victory?

Nanowrimo is only two weeks away now. I’m debating whether or not I will actually attempt this writing marathon again. I finally succeeded last year (and promptly relegated my novel to obscurity in a folder on my harddrive somewhere), but I enjoyed myself enough and was successful enough that I’d like to try again. Time as always is an issue. I’ve got a few projects that I’m working on and a newborn to help with, but the challenge is appealing…

Vox is definitely shaping up to be a pretty sweet weblog community, but only being a Starter class participant with only comment posting ability is starting to get a little old. I’m really looking forward to being upgraded to Standard mode and being able to invite my family and friends to join in as well. I think Starter mode will be perfect for a lot of people that are new to blogging like the various members of my extended family, but it’s fairly constraining to me. The real irony is that while generally I do far more post reading than post writing, now that I’m in a situation where I can’t write posts I really want to. Go figure.

At least I’ve got good old Axodys here to channel some of that writing desire into.

In the meantime I guess I’ll keep adding interesting people into my Vox Neighborhood and tooling around all the cool pictures, audio and video that’s popping up. I really like the fact that there’s a ton of public material going up there even though you can keep stuff limited only to friends and family.

Update: Looks like all existing starter accounts will be upgraded to Standard accounts by Monday. Sweet!

I made a passing reference in a [Vox][] comment (that I can no longer locate today unfortunately) to the fact that [Aardvark'd][] should be made available for sale via [Google Video][]. Today I checked and [Aardvark'd][] is actually available for download for a mere $4 which is much more palatable to me than the full $20 DVD price was. So I downloaded the newly released Mac Google Video player, ordered the video, and started watching during my lunch hour.

[Vox]:http://vox.com
[Aardvark'd]:http://www.projectaardvark.com/movie
[Google Video]:http://video.google.com

For those not in the know here’s the blurb from the [Aardvark'd][] web site:

> [Four interns][] are brought into Manhattan and given 12 weeks to design,
> develop, debug and ship a program that will change the way computer
> geeks around the world fix their friends’ computers. [Boondoggle Films][]
> presents a journey through the world of software development from the
> perspective of a unique upstart, four quirky interns, and the world
> of The Geek.

[Four interns]:http://www.projectaardvark.com
[Boondoggle Films]:http://www.boondogglefilms.net

####My Capsule Review####

I loved [Aardvark'd][]. The four interns were my kind of guys. Albeit, 10 years younger, smarter and far better programmers than I will ever be. One classic scene revolved around them speculating on whether or not they could safely jump across the gap between their office and the ledge of a neighboring building in the event of a fire (and then breaking out some whiteboard physics to come up with a definitive answer). Lots of other humorous computer geek moments, minor drama, and plenty of inside looks at the process of rapidly developing and shipping a new software application. Overall a fun documentary with a nifty soundtrack that is well worth it’s price on Google Video.

####Related Links####

* [Fog Creek Software](http://fogcreek.com)
* [Joel Spolsky](http://joelonsoftware.com)
* [Tyler Griffin Hicks-Wright](http://hicks-wright.net)
* [Michael Lehenbauer](http://mikelehen.livejournal.com)
* [Benjamin Pollack](http://bitquabit.com)

After I saw Matt Haughey’s post about [Vox][] I was fairly intrigued because I definitely see the communications potential for family and friends. There are definitely times when having a semi-private website would be a plus and I think it would encourage a lot more people to take the plunge into this form of communication. From what I’ve been able to discern so far, Vox is very much a refinement of the [LiveJournal][] model aimed squarely at bringing in people that have never done any blogging before.

I applied for my own invite code a couple days ago, but imagine it could be a while before I get one as [Six Apart][] is still ramping up the service. I learned today that current Vox account holders can actually send out invite codes so if anyone out there has an extra one they can spare I’d love to try Vox out firsthand.

[Vox]:http://vox.com
[LiveJournal]:http://livejournal.com
[Six Apart]:http://sixapart.com

I just noticed that Brad Choate had created a [TextMate][] bundle that allows for the easy creation of weblog posts. This is a quick test to see if it actually works and what the ramifications for Markdown usage are. I’ve wanted this functionality forever, but hadn’t ever gotten around to working on it for myself.

[TextMate]:http://macromates.com

I submitted my first macports Portfile patch today when I noticed that Bazaar-NG is currently up to version 0.8.2 and the current port was 0.7. No word yet on whether it was accepted, but at least the process of creating it allowed me to get the update installed locally. It was also useful to get a little bit more of an under the hood look at how macports works/stores files. I’m still mostly clueless, but it was good to learn a few things

In other Bazaar-NG related news nobody has gotten around to creating a Textmate bundle for it yet so I’m going to have to look into doing that when I get some spare time. I’ll probably just build on top of the work of the darcs or mercurial bundles since that would be the easiest approach and they should have similar functionality.

I finally realized today that I could in fact install [LaTeX/TeX][1] via [darwinports][2]. I didn’t realize the standard unix distribution of TeX is called [teTeX][3] and so I was under the mistaken impression that there wasn’t a port available. On my last Mac computer I installed TeX via a system called the [i-Intaller][4], which besides being yet another package management system (yuck) completely hangs my MacBook Pro.

[1]:http://www.ctan.org/what_is_tex.html
[2]:http://darwinports.org/
[3]:http://www.tug.org/tetex/
[4]:http://ii2.sourceforge.net/tex-index.html

On an entirely tangential note here’s a [great article on Donald Knuth][5] (the creator of TeX) that recently appeared in Stanford Magazine.

[5]:http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2006/mayjun/features/knuth.html

I was checking reddit this morning and discovered that Inform 7 was recently released in beta form. I played around with learning Inform 6 a few months back, but ended up getting a little bogged down in the minutia of setting up the perfect development environment in TextMate and then got busy with basketball season. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t get too far into the development process because Inform 7 is completely revolutionary. I was completely blown away when I learned that Inform 7 is built around natural language programming and an incredibly powerful integrated development environment that runs native on both MacOS X and Windows. No more second class citizenry for Mac text adventure developers. I can’t wait to explore it further.

I’m not much of a console gamer, but this was just too amusing to pass up. Appqrently Nintendo’s new unreleased game console, previously known to most enthusiasts as the [Revolution][] has been renamed the Wii (pronounced “we”). Reactions are understandably mixed. The first thing I thought of when I heard the name and it’s pronunciation was the immediately obvious similarity to a fairly common [English term](http://www.wordreference.com/definition/wee-wee) among young children. As one of the articles that I read noted, they must not have done much testing with western audiences. After reading that the dual i’s in Wii are supposed to represent the consoles two radical new controllers I thought that was kind of clever, but I still think it’s an unfortunate name for a product aimed squarely at kids.

Further reaction:

* [Zach Stroum](http://zachstroum.wordpress.com/2006/04/28/lets-talk-wii/) A Nintendo employee with some interesting comments.
* [Penny Arcade](http://www.penny-arcade.com/2006/04/28#1146210360)
* [Gamespot](http://www.gamespot.com/news/6148462.html)
* [CNNMoney.com](http://money.cnn.com/2006/04/27/commentary/game_over/nintendo/index.htm?cnn=yes)

[Revolution]:http://revolution.nintendo.com/

Hmm… the [WordPress 2.0.2][] update didn’t end up being two painful. I’d forgotten that I still had an old defunct [Movable Type][] installation sitting on my server so I cleaned that out too. Now I need to go investigate the [new widget plugin](http://automattic.com/code/widgets/) because it looks pretty interesting.

[WordPress 2.0.2]:http://wordpress.org/development/2006/03/security-202/
[Movable Type]:http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/

In other site related news, the comment spam barrage continues. I’m guessing that [Akismet][] caught 100 spam comments easily in the last week. Give it up losers! They’re not getting through.

[Akismet]:http://akismet.com

I’ve been getting a ton of comment spam lately, but luckily [WordPress][] in conjunction with the [Akismet][] plugin does a good job of catching everything. I’m still a couple of minor versions behind on [WordPress][] and I definitely need to get on the stick as far as upgrading goes, but at least that hasn’t made it any more vulnerable to the problem from what I can tell.

Darren over at [ProBlogger][] has also noticed a recent increase in comment spam and [written an article](http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/04/27/the-cost-of-comment-spam/) covering the topic and the importance of continuing to fight it. He has a lot of good reasoning on why you need to prevent comment spam, but doesn’t really offer any solutions beyond being attentive and having up to date blogging software.

[Akismet]:http://akismet.com
[WordPress]:http://wordpress.org
[ProBlogger]:http://www.problogger.net

I realized this evening that it’s been exactly five years since my dad died. I still think about him daily, but this anniversary managed to sneak up on me. That’s probably a good thing in many ways.

I feel like I should be writing something meaningful; [five years ago I said](http://axodys.com/2001/4/26) that I had a lot of things that I wanted to write about him, but I never really did. I still have that desire though and it certainly hasn’t diminished in the intervening years. I think it’s finally time to start addressing this as we move into the summer months.

Not really a surprise to most people in Spokane I think. Even though I was pretty sure this was Adam’s last year from the beginning of the season I’ve found myself still hoping he would stay one more year. At any rate, whichever NBA team drafts Adam is going to pick up a lot of fans in Spokane. Good luck at the next level Adam.

[Wired News][] has been providing a lot of [coverage](http://blog.wired.com/apple_30/) of Apple leading up to the company’s 30th Anniversary on April 1st. I particularly liked the [Apple Heroes and Villains](http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/herosandvillains/) gallery they put together. Fittingly enough, Steve Jobs actually gets three different entries because he went from hero to villain to hero for founding, leaving and then saving the company.

I should also mention the [Apple OS](http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/apple_os/) gallery they put together covering the evolution from DOS 3.3 all the way to MacOS X because it’s pretty interesting as well. The original MacOS screenshot reminds me of the first time I got to look at a Macintosh up close in the computer section of a defunct downtown Spokane department store called the Crescent. I didn’t end up getting my first Mac for another 6 or 7 years, but I’ve had one ever sense.

[Wired News]:http://wired.com

I’ve been using my new [MacBook Pro][] for a couple days now and it’s definitely pretty sweet. It’s really nice to have plenty of screen real estate and it’s really not significantly heavier than my old 12″ PowerBook. It does tend to get pretty hot at times and I have heard the processor whine occasionally, but I’m pretty tolerant when it comes to that kind of thing and haven’t found it very bothersome, although apparently [some people have](http://joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/801.html).

On a software note I was pleasantly surprised to learn that [Comic Life][] was included for free. I’ve always wanted to try it out, but had forgotten about it. [Omni Outliner][] also came installed as did the entire [iLIfe][] suite. I’m looking forward to playing with iMovie HD and Garage Band soon because they should really demonstrate the power of this laptop and the Core Duo processor.

I wasn’t the only one impressed by my new computer. When I showed the MacBook to Mary’s Windows using dad last night he said he was jealous and really liked the screen and overall thin design. It wouldn’t surprise me if he ended up getting a Mac within a couple years; the biggest obstacle is his existing PC software collection. Well, that and the fact that he’s a pretty big fps gamer .

[MacBook Pro]:http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/
[Comic Life]:http://plasq.com/comiclife
[Omni Outliner]:http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/
[iLife]:http://www.apple.com/ilife/

It was tough going for Adam Morrison, but the [Zags did it](http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/basketball/ncaa/specials/ncaa_tourney/2006/03/18/indiana.gonzaga.ap/index.html) and beat Indiana 90-80 thanks to great play from the supporting cast. Sean Mallon came up huge and played the kind of game that those who followed his Ferris high school career knew he was always capable of. 15 points and 10 rebounds couldn’t have come at a better time and made a lot of people in Spokane proud. And of course Erroll Knight was simply sensational around the basket with his dunks and tip-ins, especially considering how sick he had been earlier in the day.

Next up: UCLA!

My mind has a funny way of working at times. I’ll be reading something innocuous on the web and I’ll follow a couple links and stumble upon an interesting idea and start reading more about it and then BOOM! Suddenly I’m obsessed with it. I’ll spend all my free time reading up on the new subject until I’ve amassed a reasonable working knowledge of the topic at hand. That’s how my kayaking interest started a year and a half ago (still have some finishing work to do on my Sea Raider btw, but it’s definitely a functional kayak). This week’s obsession started when I stumbled across a mention of electric cars at [43 things](http://43things.com/).

It turns out that converting an internal combustion engine car (ICE to the electrical vehicle community) into an electrical vehicle is a pretty doable project if you’re mechanically inclined. It’s somewhat expensive, but far less than buying say a new Toyota Prius. You’re looking at probably 200 hours of labor all told, but for a guy like me that just adds to the appeal of the project.

From a weekly driving habits perspective, there’s no question I’m a good candidate for an electric vehicle. I rarely drive more than 20 miles a day during the week. Most low end EV conversions can easily accommodate twice my average daily driving requirements. The rising cost of gas irritates me, especially since a tank of gas for my Element runs $30 these days, but at most I need two trips to the pump a month. A year’s worth of gas for my Element is probably only one tenth the cost of a basic EV conversion. I haven’t crunched the numbers, but intuitively it doesn’t make a whole lot of economic sense at this point unless I were to sell my Element and that’s not even on the table because I’m planning to keep my Element for a long time (I could actually see converting it to an EV in 10 to 15 years though) and definitely need its cargo flexibility.

If I were to build an EV right now I’ve already found what could be the perfect vehicle on the [Seattle Craigslist](http://seattle.craigslist.com): an 86 Honda CRX with a dead engine for $350. Assuming the body is in decent condition this would be my dream EV. Before I owned my Element I drove an 88 Honda Accord LX that I loved for several years. The CRX from that era is basically a sportier subcompact version and would make really fun two person commuter vehicle. Unfortunately money is tight, the CRX is on the other side of the state and it would be a pain to transport over here. It’s fun to think about though and fits nicely onto my list of projects to accomplish at some point in the future.

[The MacBook Pros are shipping](http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1529) according to [AppleInsider]. More importantly Apple did a free processor bump as well and the base model will come with a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo instead of the original 1.67 GHz announced. 2GHz and 2.16GHz models are also available. I don’t know if this is good marketing strategy on Apple’s part or just Intel manufacturing power at work, but I like the end result and I’m really looking forward to my new laptop. I wonder how long manufacturing and delivery will take for those of us who ordered a month or so after they were announced?

[AppleInsider]:http://appleinsider.com

I needed to fax some documents recently, so I began looking into various [web based fax alternatives](http://www.savetz.com/fax/). There are actually quite a few web based fax sites out there and most of them are fairly inexpensive. They’re especially valuable if you want to be able to receive faxes and don’t have a dedicated line or fax machine. That was definitely overkill for my situation though so I kept looking around until I had a sudden lightbulb moment.

The built in modem in Apple laptops (which I had never used because I use WiFI or Ethernet 100% or the time) supports printing documents as faxes. In MacOS X Tiger (and possibly earlier versions) it’s also fully integrated with the Address Book application and the Printer Setup Utility in a very elegant fashion. I plugged our Canon usb scanner into the iBook I’m using right now and suddenly faxing signed documents became a very simple task.

At this point faxing still has the advantage of being (somewhat) more secure than email since it goes through the phone system rather than the internet, but it seems fairly archaic by today’s standards and really isn’t the most efficient way to send documents back and forth. It’s really too bad that we haven’t figured out how to make public/private key email encryption and communication simple and ubiquitous yet. The technology has been around for a long time, but it’s still not mainstream and I kind of doubt it ever will be.

I’m a big fan of [Booq][] laptop sleeves. I’ve used a 12″ laptop sleeve for my PowerBook the last couple years and it has served me very well. I definitely prefer using a larger more flexible messenger style bag in conjunction with a sleeve for my computer, but [Booq][] offers a wide variety of very nice laptop bags as well. Most importantly for me, they just realized a really nice [sleeve for the MacBook Pro](http://www.booqbags.com/Detail.bok?no=542) that I’ve got my eye on now. It sounds like the new sleeve won’t be out until April or late March, but I’m going to see if I can get one ordered before then.

[Booq]:http://www.booqbags.com/

Last week I had the misfortune of losing my trusty PowerBook’s hard drive to s.m.a.r.t. error oblivion. I’ve tried a couple different recovery applications, but haven’t succeeded in salvaging anything yet. I have some backups, but I definitely lost more information than I would prefer.

The good news is that the failure of my PowerBook has provided the impetus for me to get one of Apple’s new [MacBook Pros](http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/). I ran the request by my supervisor and she agreed to let me go ahead with the purchase. In the meantime I’m getting by with a 14″ iBook and it should be more than sufficient to carry me through the next several weeks until the new machine arrives. I’m already really appreciating its larger screen and faster G4 processor.

I stumbled across an open source book cataloging application for MacOS X called [Books][] and it seems really cool for being in beta stage. Lots of built in importing and exporting options, data gathering using [Amazon][] and and ISBN and a nice clean interface. My only real complaint is that it let me quit the application without saving my database first. Luckily I had only entered two books so it wasn’t a big deal.

I definitely want to go through my book library when I get home and start entering some more titles.

[Books]:http://books.aetherial.net/
[Amazon]:http://amazon.com

Hats off to the Steelers. They made the plays they needed to and the Seahawks couldn’t quite ever get over the hump. Lots of little things drove me crazy throughout the second half. Stevens scored the only touchdown, but pretty much dropped every other pass thrown his way. The defense uncharacteristically gave up that 75 yard touchdown right out of the gate. Hasselbeck throws the interception on the drive that would have put the Hawks ahead. The defense getting tricked by Pittsburgh’s trademark gadget plays. A great season, but a disappointing finish.