Axodys

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.

[Vox]:http://vox.com
[Axodys]:http://axodys.com

**Update:** Looks like all existing starter accounts [will be upgraded to Standard accounts by Monday](http://team.vox.com/library/post/more-about-invitations.html). 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