Two weekends ago: set up clothes line… just in time for Sunday’s rain!

Last week: set up a cat quarantine/acclimation gate between the kitchen and the rest of the house. I am hoping to write up an instructable on it some time soon.

This most recent weekend: set up a Pallet Compost Bin (pictured below, alongside clothes line.)

Dear blogosphere: I have not been reading your blogs much in the past few weeks.

Dear twitterverse: I have not been keeping up with your tweets much, if at all, in the past few weeks.

Work has been pretty busy the past few weeks. We have an end-of-the-month deadline that, fortunately, is not one of those impossible-even-when-working-80-hour-weeks deadlines, but is a decent challenge and entirely attainable. Meeting the deadline means fame and fortune for everyone on my team (okay, not exactly, but we all want to make the deadline.) My time for reading blog posts and tweets has suffered a bit–as well as my time, energy, and motivation to make them. So here’s a quick summary…

A few weeks ago was the Flugtag. My meager photoset is up on Flickr. It was pretty crazy-packed this time around. The gates opened two hours before the first flight time and I thought my hour-before would give enough time to spare. The bus ride over should have been my first warning. The #14 was so packed that the driver blew right past bus stops full of people. Every time there would be an angry, insulted, and disappointed “heeeeyyy!” from the people outside as the bus went past without even slowing. Honestly–angry, insulted, AND disappointed all in one breath, starting with the angry “h” and the disappointed trailing off “yyyy.” The Flugtag this year seemed longer than in previous ones. It was thirty-someodd entries and at about 20 we got tired of standing, packed in like sardines, and went to the south waterfront McCormick & Schmidt’s bar. The had the event fed in to the big screen TV there, sans audio and with some horrible video compression blockiness, but we watched the remainder of the event in the air conditioning, drinking wonderful microbrews.

Last weekend, I went with Northwest Paranormal Investigations (a group whose events I’ve been absent from a lot recently because of work, life, and Kim’s business) to the Edgefield. I have a brief photoset of some of the more touristy things. This particular investigation was pretty informal and not officially sanctioned by the hotel. It was mainly wandering the halls without drawing a lot of attention to ourselves–so obviously without a whole lot of gear. The Edgefield is one of those places with a weird history. It started life as a Poor Farm–a large plantation of what was basically indentured servants; the lived for free on the farm in exchange for their work in the fields. It has since been a childrens’ tuberculosis hospital, a nursing home, and several other things, but closed down in the 60s. Between then and when it was bought by the McMenamins in 1990, there were squatters, taggers, and (supposedly) satanists. The found that a large pentagram was painted on the floor of one of the rooms and weird stuff was happening there and on the floor above. The brought in bagpipers (?!) to help exorcise things.

There is a painting of the room and the pipers, with the (possibly offensive to some) pentagram conveniently obscured by an entirely-out-of-place coat rack. Not only is the coat rack nowhere near an entryway–it is in a second-floor hallway–it is a good 10 or 15 feet long and so perfectly obscures just a portion of the painting that it appears to have been custom made just for the purpose. At any rate, here is the painting:

The door of each room has a painting depicting a person from the Poor House. The one on the supposedly haunted room features the very same pipers in a configuration that looks very similar to a pentagram:

And i will conclude this section with one more photo from the Edgefield. This is the elevator. It’s a small service elevator. Upon entering, you are surrounded by this lady: three on the back wall, one on each side wall, and two on the front wall. When the door slides closed, there is yet another of her on the door (but with a flower instead of a face), completing the circle. I am not claustrophobic at all and never have a problem with elevators–but this particular elevator really left me feeling closed in.

We have a new kitty! As you may or may not remember, there is this black-and-white fuzzy guy who has been hanging around our house:

We finally got confirmation from neighbors that nobody knows who he belongs to. He isn’t fixed, had a bit of a runny eye, and was a bit feral (not crazy wildcat, but rough around the edges.) If he belonged to anyone, he was seriously neglected. We finally took him to the vet yesterday. $300 and a nearly clean bill of health later (he’s on some antibiotics now and was badly dehydrated), I guess he’s ours.

Last night, we had dinner out in Beaverton. It’s a suburb of Portland, and only about 20 minutes away, but feels like an entirely different world. I’ve been detached from suburbia for so long that it feels like a foreign place these days. Unsurprisingly, I got a lot of the same feelings I got from the last time I went down to visit Orange County.

I started (and finished!) Strongbad’s Cool Game for Attractive People today. It was pretty short, but quite fun! Although I completed the story, I still haven’t found all of the extras yet: three trophies, a Teen Girl Squad thinger, and the last page of the Snake Boxer 5 manual.

And hey, that bizarro drive-through whale even makes an appearance! “Sever your leg, please. It’s the greatest day.”

If we filter out all of the BrightKite checkins, replies, and things that are no longer as interesting as I originally believed them to be, then we end up with this little set of tweets (since my last Twitter-to-blog cross post):

• I need carbon nano tubesocks. [*]
• Oregon has crappy butter geometry. [*] (this was later elaborated upon in a blog post)
• Brian C. will share the details of his visit to be poked by Dr. Dong. She’s an accupuncturist. [*]
• Where do I find some extra virgin virgins? [*]
• …also wondering where I find some slutty olive oil. [*]
• “You can put toe jam on your muffin top.” [*]
• Anise seed and anus seed are two very different things. Dingleberries! [*]
• I can’t plan past or think beyond the event horizon of morning coffee. []
• Drinkin’ a marlargi–like a martini, but not teeny. [*]
• Who’s up for a game of spin the bottle rocket?! [*]
• In the shade with ginger lemonade. Not thinking about the test-case interface to the database in cyberspace to replace. [*]
• CNN on in the break room, talking about FARC rebels in Columbia, yet my brain keeps imagining fark.com rebels. [*]
• 90F out and I’m firing up the pressure cooker. WHO’S THE CRAZY ONE NOW??! Oh, yeah… Umm… That’d be me. [*]
• If “Final Fantasy” is up to number XIII, then how can it be considered final? [*]
• From a distance, shipping containers look like Legos, all stacked in their primary colors. [*]
• “Front desk? Yeah, the remote control for the fireplace is flashing ‘LoBatt’” WTF, there’s a REMOTE for the FIREPLACE?! [*]
• @Randomeis No, 2009 is the year of the word “penultimate.” This year is the penultimate year of the word “penultimate.” [*]
• In a bid to annoy grammar-nazis: “Their over they’re with there friends.” [*]
• “It’s up-the-nose spicy, not out-the-butt spicy” -me, on horseradish vs peppers [*]
• ZOMG! The HOOTERS in BEAVERTON is CLOSING! (Full disclosure: I only posted this as an excuse to say HOOTERS and BEAVERTON.) [*]
• This tweet’s for you! [*]
• Denied! “We’re not going to use the dremel on the chicken.” [*]
• I had Smart Water for the 1st time today. Didn’t feel smarter. Felt dumberer for having paid $1.50 for it. [*]
• It seems to me that every episode of The Middleman has one, and exactly one, Wilhelm Scream. [*]
• Pro tip: you can click the gray (X) during a slow iPhone backup to abort JUST the backup. The rest of the sync continues fine. [*]
• Also: at first blush, the 2.0.1 iPhone update seemed to improve backup speeds. Now I’m not so sure anymore. [*]
• Nasty day. I never close my office door–even when making private calls I keep it cracked a bit. Today, it hasn’t hardly been open. [*]

Remember Flugtag in 2004? There’s one this year–Saturday, in fact. Details are on the Red Bull site. Gates at 11, first flight at 1.

This is for the benefit of friends with iPhones–to get a feel for what sorts of applications I have installed and how I go about organizing them.

Page 1
These are the applications I use all the time and always want handy. They include:

• PCalc - A nice engineering and programmer’s calculator. When the phone is upright, it’s a regular calculator; when it is on its side, it is a real scientific calculator–not the crappy one that ships with the iPhone. You can choose between RPN or standard order-of-operations-with-parentheses, you can switch between bases (decimal, hex, binary, octal), you get all sorts of functions, unit conversions, and constants. It’s a real calculator.
• Mail, Calendar, Clock - We all know these. I use the clock as a wake-up alarm in the morning and as a tea-timer later in the day.
• VNC - For remote-controlling Mac, Linux, and Windows boxes at home and around the office. I ponied up for the full version instead of the Lite one.
• Weather, Photos, Camera, Maps - Again, stock apps
• Whrrl - to quickly locate and read reviews of businesses (usually restaurants and bars) around me or around town
• Yelp - much like Whrrl; seems to work better for “find places near me” whereas Whrrl seems to work better for “find places near that movie theater over there”
• Urbanspoon - a slot-machine-style restaurant picker. You have wheels for location, food style, and price. Let them spin or lock them in place, shake the phone, and out pops a restaurant suggestion.
• Evernote - At first, I was not sure that I would ever use the desktop+web Evernote service. Now I find I can’t live without it. It’s basically a set of notebooks that are synchronized between a web service, a desktop application, and the phone. It’s great for quickly capturing notes on the phone or copy-and-pasting things from webpages to send to the phone. Last night, I used the main computer to find a recipe, pasted it in the Evernote desktop app, then carried the iPhone into the kitchen and used it as a fancy recipe card.
• Brightkite - This isn’t an app, but a shortcut to the iPhone version of their website. Location-based stuff, like Dodgeball would have been had Google not killed it.
• Twitterrific - If you use Twitter, you need this. I don’t use it enough to have bought the paid version; I’m still using the ad-supported free one.
• NetNewsWire - The desktop version of NetNewsWire syncs with the NewsGator web-based news reader, which syncs with this iPhone application. If I mark an article as read or flagged in any one place, it synchronizes everywhere.

Page 2
These are useful apps or apps I’m evaluating to be useful, but I probably do not use them everyday.

• App Store - Stock application
• Pandora - Holy crap, this is a nice client for the Pandora “personalized streaming radio station” service
• AOL Radio - I honestly haven’t used this more than showing it off to people. It’s radio. You can get local stations or ones around the country. With station IDs and ads.
• YouTube - Stock app
• MySpace, Facebook, AIM, Pownce - Dedicated clients for all of these services. Nothing special. I actually don’t use them very much at all.
• Exposure - A slick interface to Flickr. Especially nice is the “show me photos geotagged with locations near where I’m currently standing.”
• BoxOffice - movie times and locations
• Remote - Control iTunes from afar
• Cocktails - a fancy database of alcoholic beverages.
• Wordpress - write blog posts from the phone.
• GeoHash - If you know the xkcd comic about geohashing, you know what this is for; otherwise, I can’t adequately explain it here.
• GeopherLite - A simple “I am here; I want to be there” GPS application. It gives you your latitude and longitude in plain numbers (something most apps hide from you) and gives you distance and direction to your target. It loosely integrates with the Geocaching website.
• 1Password - An extension of the 1Password desktop application (for securely storing passwords, credit cards, notes, and mailing addresses).

Page 3
Games!

• Bejeweled 2 - I had this on the Treo and loved it. I’m glad they made an iPhone version
• Platinum Solitaire - A fancy set of solitaire games, with gambling and achievements and feature unlocking. The first version was slow to load. Their most recent update speeds this up, but it’s still a little slow to load. It’s not slow enough that I’d risk spending money on a different solitaire app, though.
• Sudoku Unlimited - A great little basic Sudoku game. I tried the Electronic Arts one and Platinum Sudoku–both of which were slow to load (13 seconds for EA and something like 15 or 20 for Platinum.) That was entirely too long for a game you want to bust out, fill in a few numbers, and put away a minute later (15 seconds is a quarter of your time wasted watching a loading screen!) The Sudoku Unlimited interface is quick to load and easy to use. It offers several skins. The default yellow-pad-with-post-it-notes skin was gimmicky at first, but I’ve grown to like it a lot.
• Aki Mahjongg - A super-fast Mahjongg solitaire. Highly recommended.
• Aurora Feint - a Bejeweled-like game with the promise of being a massively-multiplayer game. Lots of people rave about it. I’ve yawned about it.
• HaHaHa - A promotion for The Dark Knight; you take a photo and can add Joker makeup to it.
• World 9 - It uses the motion sensors such that when you jump, you get a Mario jumping sound effect. That’s all it does, but I have gotten hours of entertainment from it.
• Dizzy Bee - A fun gravity-based game. You spin the phone around and a little round bee rolls around, collects fruit, and avoids monsters.
• PhoneSaber - Much like World 9, you swing the phone around and get light saber noises

Page 4
Stuff I don’t really use.

• Settings - Well, actually, I still use this a lot. I just pushed it off to the last screen.
• Calculator - Why use this when I have PCalc?
• Notes - Why use this when I have Evernote?
• Stocks - Why use this at all?
• Contacts - This is just an undeletable short-cut to a screen in the Phone appiTunes - I’d rather buy my tunes from the desktop. Or from a non-DRM’ed vendor.
• 3D Sense - It scans and decodes 2D barcodes. Useful, but not everyday-useful.

For those that may have missed out, there seems to be a new game for the LOST television show! Those that saw the season finale may remember the commercial for Octagon Global Recruiting. This hinted at something-or-other happening at Comicon. If you signed up to be on the mailing list, one of the emails you received had some HTML comments hidden in the source code. These are from someone using the name RuckusGuy. He details what to expect at the Comicon booth: recruitment drive, sign up for a timeslot, go into the booth for a personality/IQ test. He mentions a guy on the inside of Dharma who has rigged up a little something on Bluetooth. The little something turned out to be a video. It is effectively the same video playing on screens outside the booth, but with not-so-subliminal messages.

At Comicon, things went as described: people took recruitment tests at the Dharma booth–with some questions reminiscent of Blade Runner. The report from Thursday of the podcast The Transmission had a good man-in-the-street type of review. And while we’re linking to The Transmission, any good Lost fan may want to listen to The Visionaries Panel. It’s not directly related to this particular game, but is a great little Q&A session with the guys from Lost, Chuck, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Pushing Daisies.

The actual Lost panel was on Saturday. Once again, I point you to The Transmission who has a good audio recording of the panel. This starts out with the usual introductions. They guys then talk about sponsorship. These days, people use all sorts of methods of advertising and sponsorship. You get product placement, lower-third ads, and that sort of thing. And in an example of “life imitating art” as they explained, Dharma has sponsored the panel. As such, they had requested a few minutes of everyone’s time. Mr. Hans Van Eeghen takes the stage and talks about the recruitment results. You really need to listen to the audio or watch the video for this. “We came here looking for the best and the brightest… but instead, we get you.” All of the personality testing was recorded, and he brings up a best-of (or would that be worst-of?) clip reel of people’s answers. At the end of his few minutes of time, he optimistically states that he found 10 recruits who passed and calls them up on stage. He also says that they are still looking for more people and that everyone should check out DharmaWantsYou.com on Monday (Yesterday.) One by one, the people he names make it to the stage. They then go off, as he explains, to the Dharma booth for further instruction and information and the stage is given back to the Lost guys.

You then get the Q&A session that goes on for the rest of their time–EXCEPT about 5 minutes before the end, there’s an interruption. Dan Bronsen, one of the recruits called up on stage to go to the Dharma booth at the beginning of the talks, rushes in. He is out of breath and yelling about a video and about exposing the truth. He eventually gets his video played on the big screen and it’s a sort of unsteady-cam of him being brought through the Comicon floor to the Dharma booth, then being sat down to watch a video. He records the video, but at the end is caught with the camera and makes a dash for it. He runs out of the booth, escaping capture, and across the Comicon floor, and then the video cuts out.

Without spoiling too much, it’s best you just watch the video for yourself. Like last year’s Comicon video, it is from Dr. Marvin Candle. No bunnies this time, though.

And now you’re caught up. DharmaWantsYou is up and running. You can take a personality test, sign up, and log in. There is mention of weekly assessment tests, a leader board, but not much to do currently–just sign up. The leaderboard thing has me a bit worried. I just hope it ends up being a collaborative game and not a competitive one, as the former tends to build communities and the latter tends to splinter them.

Just to circle back to my post about field-testing the iPhone in Seattle last weekend, it looks like my issues with the location-based services not functioning correctly were Seattle-specific. Everything works as expected here in Portland. I might be pissed if I lived in Seattle or traveled there more (I don’t know if it’s just Seattle or other cities, too), but it works where I live and spend most of my time, so I’m perfectly happy with it.

Honestly, the GPS is kind of cool, but I really do not expect to be using it for more than a quick geocache here or there. Or maybe, if someone writes an application to record tracks and waypoints, I might use it to better embed GPS location data into the photos taken with my non-GPS digital camera.

Kim and I saw The Dark Knight on Friday after a yummy dinner of sushi and edamame. I do not know I can contribute anything that has not already been said elsewhere, much more eloquently than I can say it. It was the best movie I have seen in many a year. I do have to say, though, that that one cellphone scene (if you’ve seen the film, you know the one), was made much more creepy by the cellphones-in-cakes part of the ARG.

I also got to see the trailer for The Watchmen that everyone has been getting all crazy about. As a standalone trailer, I can’t say that I understand all of the hype. Based on that one trailer alone, without any other input, I guess I’d be on the fence as to whether I’d go see it. That being said, I have to admit that I am not familiar with the source material. I picked up both The Watchmen and V for Vendetta back before V hit theaters as an Amazon bundle, but have yet to read the latter. But even still–without having yet read V at the time, when the trailer came out for V for Vendetta, I knew I wanted to see the film. And had I not already been familiar with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (another Alan Moore property), I would have wanted to see that based on the trailer alone (putting aside that it was generally considered a horrible movie.) So yeah–until I read the graphic novel or until I hear more detail of the film, I am on the fence.

There was also a trailer for The Spirit, a sort of film-noir superhero film that releases next year. Apparently, we have to go see it. Kim recognized the knife-throwing bellydancer in the trailer.