New Standards for Mazie's Birthday
This year The New Standards did one of their great shows at The Dakota right on Mazie’s birthday! At first we figured we would just not go see them, but we asked Mazie if she would want to go out for a grown-up night and she was all for it! We got one of the great U-shaped tables along the edge and Mazie got to sit right in the middle and enjoy a Shirley Temple and cheeseburger while listening to great music.
I sent an email to the band letting them know a 9 year old was celebrating her birthday with them and Chan gave a nice call out to her. It was a super fun evening.
Mazie's iPad
We’ve crossed a big milestone this year. As of this birthday Mazie now has her very own iPad. No more sharing. It is also setup with her own accounts for email and calendaring. She’s a digital equal in the house now.
Mazie was ecstatic about it and has been having fun using it for a variety of things. I’m really hoping that she uses email and messages. She’s been playing a couple of games. She even was reviewing her calendar to see what was coming up this week. Nice!
Of course the immediate reaction from Tyler was to wonder where his is. Wait a couple years there.
How Facebook
Improving ads, wow, how excited should I be? Just to be clear what this message really means is that Facebook is now actively collating all of the data that it collects about you from every website that you visit that has those cute little Facebook Like buttons and is using that to target ads at you in a better way.
“improving” and “giving you control”. Bullshit.
Really pleased with how the new #TeamSPS training / conference space turned out!
Our Neighborhood in 1938
My friend Garrick shared this link to the Minnesota Historical Aerial Photographs Online site. It is a pretty cool site where you can see aerial photos all over Minnesota going back as far as 1920. I immediately went and looked where we live and they currently only have one photo from 1938. I’ve highlighted our lot in yellow.
It was surprising to me that the tennis courts were in place back then. In fact, the entire Minnehaha Creek West Park seems to be pretty much as it is now with the same walking bridges and everything.
Our street doesn’t exist yet. The entire row of houses that we live in are not there but the other side of the block has been developed. Our house was built the following year, in 1939.
I also pulled up our previous house in Minnetonka in 1937 and it was entirely farmland. Was still farmland in 1956. The transformation there is amazing.
Kubb at Lake Harriet
Most of the time when I see people playing Kubb around Minneapolis they are folks I know from Minnesota Kubb. It was fun today to stop on a bike ride around Lake Harriet and right by the bandshell were 6 women having a nice game of Kubb. They were playing with a Bex set, the pitch was a bit small and they were doing that weird thing where you stack field kubbs on top of each other. But, they were having a blast throwing wood!
Family Bike Ride
We have been trying to get a good family bike ride in each day on the weekends. It was a great day today and Tyler got to get his first ride on his new Weehoo. Tammy discovered the Weehoo really liked it. I’ve pulled the kids in the Chariot (now owned by Thule) as well as the Novara trailer bike. The Weehoo is heads and shoulders over both of them. The trailer bikes always feel like they are pulling my bike to one side. The Chariot was fine but the kids didn’t have a lot of fun.
The Weehoo is a wonderful mix:
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It is a recumbent design so the kid is safe, has a nice seat and a three-point harness.
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Because the kid rides low, the center of gravity is pretty low and it doesn’t tug on the bike.
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The way it attaches to the seat post is well done. It rotates easily and cannot come off.
Tyler loved it. About the only thing that I’m not very impressed with on the Weehoo are the pedal straps. They seem poorly designed and are a pain to get strapped together.
If your looking to go riding with your kid, even when they are still pretty little, give the Weehoo a serious look.
Bike the Border
I helped my Uncle Tim get a new website up and running for Bike the Border, a bike ride in North Dakota that he has started running. Another case where WordPress was able to deliver a really great CMS. In return, he set me up with this really nice jersey.
He’s going to be in the Twin Cities on July 4th and is going to join us for the Twin Cities Bicycling Club Watermelon Ride. We are going to be sporting our matching jerseys! Thanks Uncle Tim!
Tyler and I having our respective Sunday morning screen time.
The weather was absolutely perfect for a day at the Edina Art Fair!
Last Day of School 2014
Mazie was super excited to be done with school for the summer. We have a 4th grader in the house now! The whole neighborhood celebrated as kids ran all over to start the summer off right!
NASDAQ SPS Commerce Market Bell Ceremony
On Tuesday of this week I got to be part of the SPS team ringing the market bell to start the trading day on NASDAQ! It was a ton of fun.
Should add more photos and video to this post.
Good morning espresso.
Fun morning with #TeamSPS opening the NASDAQ trading day!
Been up since 2 AM with son. Doing that “swish cold press coffee under your tongue” trick to get big jolts of caffeine.
House of Cards (Season 2)
Tammy and I just finished watching season 2 of House of Cards. What a great show! I just cannot get enough of Kevin Spacey.
Just learned that you cannot wear two different plaids at the same time. Worth noting.
Why WikiApiary uses pages and not articles
A while back @Waldyrious posed this question about WikiApiary.
@WikiApiary in the lists of wikis by number of articles https://t.co/dKeb8eowPE, why not show the article count rather than the page count?
— Waldir Pimenta (@waldyrious) March 5, 2014
The full answer is actually found in my talk page on WikiApiary. Articles are a construct that each wiki can manage. MediaWiki tries to create these two classes of content: Pages and Articles. The intent being that pages are in some way less like “content” than articles. The metrics for determining this are configurable, but I’m guessing nearly everyone leaves it at the defaults. I felt that the page concept, just looking at content and not judging if it was better or worse was a simpler way to look at thousands of different wikis.
Wanted: Dash Docset for MediaWiki
I really wish there were a Dash Docset for MediaWiki. The directions for creating docsets are pretty straightforward. It also strikes me that using pandoc to do wikitext to html you could convert existing help pages into HTML and make the Docset.
Maybe someone else will read this and think it is a great idea and do it.