Holy coolness, check out this hand built kayak made from saplings and $25 worth of hardware (most of which is the cost of the tarp that serves as the kayak’s skin). There are plenty of photos of the process to check out. Apparently it actually works pretty well and is really light. I’m very tempted to make one or two of these for when friends visit and just for the fun of actually putting something like this together. I wonder if I’d be legally liable when they crash into a rock going down the rapids on the sacandaga river near my house.
In praise of Bodum vacuum coffee makers
A little change of pace – some talk of coffee, my favorite vice. I bought myself a Bodum mini electric Santos a few months ago, which is a very cool vacuum-based coffee maker. I bought it on a whim after my other pot (a black and decker which was incapable of pouring a cup of coffee without spilling) spilled one splash of coffee too many. After the novelty of the pot wore off I was at first ambivalent about it but I’ve grown to really like it. It has some downsides – there is more cleanup than a drip-based coffee maker and it takes more coffee to make a rich pot than a drip machine does – but on the other hand once properly run it makes a better cup of coffee and it’s much faster than my drip machine was. These things are worth checking out if you’re in the market for a coffee machine. Also if you’re curious I happened across this history of the vacuum coffee pot, where the author speculates that the vacuum coffee pot is poised to make a comeback. Apparently for a period of time ending in the late 50’s the vacuum coffee pot was the preferred pot in american households before being displaced by the drip based pot, but the vacuum pot is trending up.
The xserve and a project I really like (the Skidmore College Saratoga Census Project) go live
As of yesterday the xserve I’ve been working on most of the summer went live. I’m particularly proud of one project in particular that’s hosted there, the Saratoga Census Project. This project builds off of work I did at Bowdoin (especially the Romantic Audiences Project) and also manages to incorporate some ideas I’ve been working on since my junior thesis back at Wooster College. (not that Wooster actually let me go with the thesis I had hoped to – basically I was asking them for more than $20k for research and outside of my major I was one of the biggest underachievers you could imagine, so I don’t blame them for laughing at me). Anyhow, the site is a wiki designed to help students at Skidmore and residents of the Saratoga community build out a body of knowledge about the region they live in. It features an underlying database of the actual 1850 and 1860 census data for the community which is both searchable and integrated into the wiki itself using an extension to the wikipedia engine which we developed.
It’s something of an experiment for the instructor, Bill Fox, and the site itself is only now going live so there’s not much in terms of actual historical data in the site yet. But our hope is that this is successful enough to allow us to continue to feature it as a component of courses here at Skidmore and to write grant/s against it so that we can add additional census datasets, add features like maps, GIS encoded datasets, and more.
I love this project. Ever since Wooster I’ve been interested in the idea of having academic resources that are grown and nurtured over time by successive generations of students, and this is the first time I’ve been presented with an opportunity to really see how well this could work. Much depends on how this first semester goes, but so far things are promising. I’ll post again about this by January if not sooner with a followup on how things went.
Flash interface into the google and microsoft map data
This is pretty cool actually – check out flashearth.com, which is a flash-based interface into the google and microsoft map data. It generally runs a little smoother than the dhtml-based interface on google’s site, and more importantly it lets you switch dynamically between the datasets. This is a really handy and time saving feature. I hope the developers keep enhancing this, it could easily become my default interface into the map data if they get to feature parity with the google and microsoft sites.
Must….kill…all…tables
Pretend you’re me for a second. You’ve just come off a job where you pulled together a fantastic (ultimately award winning) large scale website redesign project, css based layout, standards compliant, the works (www.bowdoin.edu). You’re proud of your accomplishment and gratified at the recognition you get. You take a new job and quickly discover that the folks at your new job are clueless about css. They argue against the box model on the grounds that it’s too hard to make it work across browsers (translation – they don’t know how to do it, thus it’s too hard), they lay everything out in uber-complicated tables, and they pull shit like putting a call to the same stylesheet multiple times in a single html file because they use dreamweaver and they want their files to correctly appear in wysisyg even when they’re only working on a section of a page. In short, they’re best practices website design retarded. What would you do?
If you’re me, you’d go to battle with these folks by collecting as much data as you can to refute their position, which is what I’m in the midst of doing. Today I found a really great presentation that was given at Seybold San Fran years ago called why tables for layout is stupid (which is, by the way, 3 years old, hopefully serving to further make my point with the folks still stuck in a table-based layout world). Anyway, if you find yourself in a similar position my bet is you’ll find this useful in your discussion with the powers that be. And if you have other handy resources along these lines, please pass them along in the comments below.
(There’s also a great slide in a another presentation from the same timeframe demonstrating the scale of savings one can achieve by moving to CSS just on a bandwidth basis, which they demonstrate by looking at what happened with a redesign on the ESPN site. Check it out – this more than anything seems my most likely leverage point, I’m going to try to use it in a conversation with the CFO).
Make your firefox default browser page do something useful
For years now one of the first things I’ve done on a new machine or new install of a web browser is to set the preferences such that by default I get a blank page when I first launch the browser. I’ve no interest in the ad-laden default pages the various browsers give you by default, and even Firefox’s default google interface represents network resources that need to load when really I’m wanting to go somewhere else. Yes, I really am that impatient. Anyway, that changed today when I installed the bookmarkshomefirefox extension. Basically it allows you to turn your default browser page into an organized, aesthetically pleasing presentation of your own bookmarks, including your ‘live bookmarks’ (ie RSS feeds). Simple, free and useful. Check it out.
Attack of the killer bees
So there’s a large crab apple tree in my backyard. Soolin and I are in the habit of playing fetch after I work out every day, and normally I stand at the foot of the tree and toss the ball the length of the yard. Two days ago we start playing and after a few fetches, all the sudden Soolin starts doing the doggie version of the funky chicken, writhing about and rubbing her snout furiously. As this is happening, I discover my hair is full of something and it’s moving. It dawns on me that somehow we are now in the midst of a swarm of very pissed off yellow jackets and they are stinging the crap out of poor Soolin. I go into full panic mode ‘COME!’ I shout as I book off towards our barn. We scoot in and I pull the sliding door shut behind us. Soolin is still FULL of bees, they’ve crawled in under her coat and are slithering about trying to get at her to sting. Fortunately there is a pair of leather gloves right there so I pull one on and proceed to try combing the bees out of her hair – all told I get 6 or 7, with occasional pauses to battle other bees who either got in the barn before I pulled the door shut or have taken off her to attack me.
Amazingly I was only stung once, and it was really minor. Soolin took a complete beating though, the left side of her face swelled up so much her eye was mostly closed. To make matters worse, the next day my neighbor took the dogs to play in the yard while I worked out, and 10 minutes later HE came running into the barn in a panic. A slightly less awful version of the same deal had gone down, and he’s allergic to bee stings. So now we’re trying to figure out how the hell to get rid of these bees. They see the crab apple tree and the surrounding area as their territory and go ballistic if you get close. They nest underground which is most likely how the surprised me so completely, and why they went after Soolin more than me (she’s closer to the ground). I should mention that Soolin’s fine – her face was back to normal by the morning and yesterday when she got stung I gave her a benadryl. Wish me luck – this weekend I go to battle with the damned things.
academiccommons.org goes live
I mentioned some time ago that I had become a contributor to the academic commons, a website devoted to investigating the role technology can play in education. They officially went ‘live’ with their site yesterday, and my stuff is now up and online, though some of it still shows as having been published by my old boss Peter. It’s all content repurposed from here and edited slightly, so if you’re a regular reader it may not be of much direct interest, but it’s worth mentioning. And of course I’m pleased to have been asked to contribute as well.
Another classic board game available online
The original Avalon Hill Dune boardgame is a well regarded and influential game still held up as a paragon of elegant game design to this day. It’s based on the novel, not the movie, and is long out of print in english, though you can buy a copy of the game in french for around $50. It turns out there’s a free network, hotseat, and pbem capable version of the game available for win32 from this site. If you’ve balked at paying upwards of $70 for your own copy or if you just want to play, this will fit the bill. If you’re interested in further details on the game itself check out the boardgamegeek.com link above, or this site, which has some history, a variety of downloads, and links to other Dune sites, including where to order the french version.
I’m fortunate enough to have scored a copy of the game in english years ago off of ebay for less than $20 due to a fluke – basically ebay’s systems went down for a day and I won the auction by default because no one could bid during the critical last few hours of the auction. I felt bad for the guy auctioning it off but elated that he abided by the terms of the auction. I’ve never had a chance to play it though. If anyone cares to challenge me in the computer version, throw down the gauntlet and we’ll see who deserves to control the spice.
Got a widescreen monitor?
I bought a really nice Dell widescreen monitor a couple of months ago, the Dell equivalent of the Apple Cinema Display 20″ (but for only $380, hence why I bought the Dell – they use the same flat panel from the same vendor, though apple puts it in a nicer case). All in all it’s been great, but I’ve had one recurring problem with it – it’s a royal pain to get games running at the correct resolution with the thing. Unlike CRT’s, LCD’s really only look good in their default resolution, and most games do not come with settings for the 16×10 aspect ratio and 1680×1050 resolution of my Dell. Enter widescreengamingforum.com, a wonderful community knowledge base of all things widescreen gaming. If you have a widescreen monitor and you’re struggling to get a game running correctly with it, there’s basically a 100% chance that this site knows the answer (though sadly the answer is simply ‘it’s not going to happen’ often enough).
Dave's Place/Metamusing 