Finally finished my presentation for the Advanced Internet Programming class I’m presenting at the U of MN tomorrow.
Welcome Izzy!
Today we welcomed the newest member of the Thingelstad family, our new dog Izzy!
Tammy, Mazie and Grandma Kaye made the trip to pick her up from the foster home. I guess she was really nervous in the beginning, but settled down pretty quick. However, not until she had puked on Grandma Kaye three times on the drive back. I got home after work and she was having a great time meeting the neighbor kids that had stopped by to say Hi. Mazie sure likes Izzy already and was providing her with a lot of attention.
She’s a really nice dog.
Still suffering the horrors of a 28.8 kbps dial-up. Windows Update ran all night long.
Getting frustrated on the small end of a ridicoulous 28.8 kbps dial-up connection in rural North Dakota.
In Minot, ND! Hotel and sleep await. More driving tomorrow to The Farm.
Thinking about learning java just to write a Twitter client for my blackberry.
Won the Change Game!
Narrowly escaped running out of gas approaching Fargo.
We're Getting a Dog!
We’ve been thinking about getting a dog for awhile. We figured we would get one sometime after we had kids, since a dog does make travel a bit harder, and hey, so do kids so why not really make it hard! :-) (She’s the one on the left in the 2nd picture, and the right in the 3rd picture.)
Mazie loves dogs. She likes cats as well, and enjoys attempting to smother Logan on a regular basis. Gypsie is more of a flight risk, and rarely does Mazie get to have her way with her. However, Mazie is a big fan of Rusty, Grandpa and Grandma’s dog, and Louie, Aunt Angie and Uncle Max’s dog.
I’ve never owned a dog but have flirted with the idea many times. Tammy’s folks have always had one. It’s a bit of a leap, but today we officially became dog owners (well, at least next Wednesday we will be).
Tammy has been scouting the adoption sites for a good pup. We wanted to adopt a dog, since there are so many (really, that many) dogs that need homes. She found a couple in recent weeks that she really liked but they were adopted instantly. Last night she found one online, made a long drive today to meet her and it was an instant match.
She’s a terrier-poodle cross. We’ll get her on Wednesday. I’m really excited, and need to learn a lot about dogs.
Linked: How Everything is Connected
The subtitle of this book is enough to garner intrigue – “How everything is connected to everything else, and what it means”. Wow! That’s a pretty big proclamation. I discovered Linked via an email from a former colleague who said she had read it and found it very interesting. This is a woman who is not prone to hyperbole, and when I got an email that made references to “neobiological” and the emergence of a new form of life from the Internet, I just had to know more.
Linked lives up to the expectation. Linked is all about networks. I don’t mean networks filled with ethernet cables and WiFi routers. Rather this is the study of logical networks that exist everywhere. The analysis of network theory, particularly the scale-free network model that the author creates, is all immensely interesting. I found the application of certain laws to scale-free networks most interesting. All scale-free networks must follow them. This becomes more interesting upon understanding that the Internet, the Web, our circle of friends and even the inner-workings of a human cell all follow the model of a scale-free network.
Prior to Barabasi’s work, network theory was dominated by random network models created by Erdős and Renyi. These random networks were mathematically interesting, and led to some worthwhile discoveries, but the problem is that very little in the real world follows a random network model.
Linked is a great book for provoking thought. While reading it I couldn’t help but consider all of the various networks that I am a node in. My head started to spin visualizing these multi-dimensional networks with connected nodes, behaving like wormholes in string theory.
More and more we are surrounded by, and participating in networks. The blogosphere is a scale-free network. LinkedIn is a scale-free network. Technology is extending the reach, and power, of these networks exponentially. It is worth us understanding the implications, and how to better leverage, these networks. I have no idea where this will all head, but after reading Linked I think I’ll be better equipped to understand it.
Introducing my Robot
A couple of months ago I heard about Twitter for the first time. I logged onto it, created an account, and pretty much instantly decided that it served no purpose. Honestly, I just didn’t get it at all. A friend of mine, mostly on a lark, decided that he was not going to let Twitter die so easily and started using it. This slight encouragement got me to the point where I finally “got it”. Now I find that I really have fun with Twitter and am using it fairly regularly (who knows for how long). We even have a Twitter use case at work, where we make all of the MarketWatch breaking news bulletins available to Twitter users.
About a month ago I had an idea for an additional use of Twitter. I have a lot of things at home that I use a variety of scripts to monitor, or use tools like cacti to graph them. The problem with these is that they are typically never looked at after a while, and have no way of reaching me other than email. Thus my robot was born. Through Twitter, I created another account for thinglesBot. This account is the personification of my robot.
Initially my robot was obsessed with temperatures. Four times a day he provided the temperature outside the house. He also provided updates on the internal temperatures in the house, including the attic and very popular utility room. (Said friend above monitors the temperature in my utility room with glee.)
I’ve now made him a bit smarter, adding more event-based things. He now tells me when our solar panels turn on and off, provided there is enough sun to get them going. This is a great feature for me, and helps me feel better about all the investment into alternative energy. He’s also dipped ever so lightly into my office giving an update on how many emails I have in my inbox at the end of each day.
In reality my robot only exists via Twitter. He is nothing more than a collection of scripts that run on a handful of computers and post messages via curl. However, Twitter allows him to exist as “him”, and be friends with me, and oddly, other people as well. Two people that I’ve never met, and don’t even live in the same state as I do, have made friends with my robot. Why they care to know the temperature outside my house is beside me, but cool nonetheless.
Welcome to the world, my robot.
PS - As an interesting aside, and a possible extension of my robot into the physical world it would be fun to have a Nabaztag WiFi rabbit as my robot’s familiar. He could speak through the Nabaztag. Hmm….
Updated with new robot icon and current features.
I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to Wordpress 2.1.2. Of course, it’s not just a Wordpress upgrade it’s also an upgrade to K2, Ultimate Tag Warrior, Subscribe to Comments and maybe six other plugins that I use to make this site the awesome experience it is. So far so good. The only mistake I made was an overzealous upgrade to K2 that I ended up losing all my custom header images with. I could use some new ones anyway so I’ll get that up soon.
If you notice anything not working, please leave a comment to this post so I can get it fixed.
U2’s Joshua Tree was released 20 years ago. Wow – I feel old.
Excited about the arrival of my Bluetooth barcode scanner!
- Hoping the market doesn’t tank today.
- Predicting the Dow will be up 100 points 1 hour after open.
- Dow hit +85 at 1 hour in. My +100 prediction was pretty close!
- Dow up +105 at 1h 14m into day. I missed it by 14 minutes! 🙂
Ordered a Bluetooth barcode scanner to make Delicious Library even more awesome.
If you find yourself in the parking lot of Lakewinds Coop waiting for your daughter to wake up – bring your laptop. The open WiFi in the cafe extends into the parking lot with no problems.
Buying a 2G microSD card for my Blackberry 8800. I can’t wait to try out some MP4 files.
What I Learned on AM Radio
This past weekend Tammy and I drove to Chicago for a long-weekend getaway. We drove there late on Friday, arriving in the early morning of Saturday. We decided to take a trip on the AM side of the radio dial. It’s amazing what you find on that side of the dial. In between the crackling of static there are some real gems. I thought I would share some of the great learnings with all of you!
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The push to raise minimum wages is all a big scheme by the unions to drive labor costs up.
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America would be a lot better off if we took some lessons from arranged marriages and brought “disgrace” back to our culture.
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Most notably, it turns out that most people that feel sluggish and lack energy are that way because they aren’t having proper bowel movements. With the appropriate cleansing you can feel like you are 20 years old again.
Great stuff. Amazing learnings.