Unfortunately, Weasel thought we were actually in a giant flying pickle jar and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out where the pickles were kept. Fortunately, he did eventually find a rusted shut jar of dill pickles, but unfortunately he spent the rest of the evening trying [...]
“This,” proclaimed Dave, “is the great flying pickle jar!”
“And my friends are inside of it?” I asked suspiciously.
“I think so,” said Dave.
“Well, okay then, let’s go inside- Wait a minute- did you say ‘the great flying pickle jar’?”
“Yes indeed,” gushed Dave. “I came up with it myself.”
“Oooookay,” I responded [...]
“Dave?”
“Yes.”
“Why Dave?” I asked confused.
“Well, because…I’m named Dave.”
“So, how did you get here, Dave?”
“I walked here.”
“Walked to this planet?”
“No, walked to this cave. I got to this planet by means of an escape pod.”
“So did we.”
“Anyway, did you see a group of a white lion, a four armed weasel and [...]
We clambered back down the tooth and out of the zoo and followed the deafening bellow. As we were running into the back area of the cave, where the bellow had come from, I heard Weasel murmuring something like, “’bout time I came back to this part of the cave.” [...]
Personas is a visualization project from MIT that converts digital footprints into a category breakdown that describes an individual. The mission of the web project, however, is not to provide some definitive interpretation of one’s data. Its creators hope to raise awareness about the capricious nature of data mining. [...]
“Are you a weasel?” I asked inquisitively.
“No,” again with a thick Irish accent.
“Then if you’re not a weasel, but your name is Weasel, what are you?”
“A waysel.”
“A weasel?”
“No, a waysel.”
“A waysel?”
“Aye.”
“So, you’re a waysel named Weasel?”
“Aye.”
“You’re an Irish waysel named Weasel?”
“Aye.”
“Then if you’re from Ireland, how did you get here?”
“Where’s [...]
When we arrived in the home of the little green creature, we noticed one major difference from houses on Earth: the furniture was built into the floors and walls and couldn’t be moved.
“My name is Plittereeg. Welcome to my home,” said the little green creature. Plittereeg led us to [...]
As we trudged along the desolate planet surface, we didn’t see any signs of life. We walked along the barren rocky desert for hours on end before we found a cave where we slept for the night.
When I woke up, very strangely, to something patting my head. When I [...]
When I woke up the Alabaster Lion was already wide awake and fiddling with the controls.
“Good morning,” he murmured. I checked my watch. It was 9:30 am. “We’re about to land,” said the lion.
“You don’t seem all that excited about it.”
“That’s because we’re not landing where I expected. I [...]
We kept climbing up the ladder until we made it out. Lion waited five minutes for voices then signaled that the coast was clear. We walked outside the ring of gears and I took off my goggles.
I followed the lion through dozens of narrow passageways and secret hatches until we [...]
That was what the ductopi had said. Why hadn’t I remembered that? I might have been able to escape if I had remembered that. I slowly backed up against the wall trying not to make any sudden movements. In vain, I came up with the idea that I might be [...]
The next couple of hours after the Military Exus Leader had left, I explored the room I had been left in. On the far end of the room where the domed window ended there was a control board, a pilot’s seat and a joystick. On the other end of the [...]
“What’s a Military Exus Leader?” I asked.
“The equivalent of a ‘president’ on your planet,” his voice sunk lower when he said “president”. “In any case, I lead my soldiers into battle.”
“What the @$% are you?” I shouted.
“Calm down,” said one of the ductopi lined up on the left wall. One [...]
Once I could look around the room clearly, the first thing I saw was a huge metal grate which I assumed at that point was an air conditioning vent and was the cause of all the cold air. The second thing I saw was a sci-fi style sliding door, like [...]
Ducks.
Yes, ducks. I don’t mean “duck,” like, “duck down,” I mean ducks like the waterfowl. This story started with ducks.
It all happened a couple of months ago at the park pond. My name is Drake. Ironic, yes? (for the uninformed, Drake is a male duck).
Anyway, it was around the time [...]
On Saturday, Paul Carr posted a perspective piece inspired by a special Weezer concert event attended by a mix of MySpace fans and VIP guests. In that article, Carr criticized the technology community’s recent fascination with real-time search, viewing the concert as a good example of the negative [...]
Found in my blog drafts, circa February 2009, were a couple of commentaries analyzing Twitter. This was a pre-Oprah world, before the U.S. government asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance during the election protests in Iran. In the interim, we’ve seen another major investment in the billion-dollar [...]
Yesterday, I came across an interesting short TED talk by sound consultant Julian Treasure. The presentation—an overview of his understanding of sound as it impacts business—begins with the following observation: “Most of the sound around us is accidental, and much of it is unpleasant.”
Sound consultant Julian [...]
A couple weeks ago, Twitter announced that a new feature—lists—was in development. Yesterday, a small percentage of Twitter users were granted access to the Beta version of lists, to provide some feedback before a wider release. It won’t take long before this change produces lasting consequences for the [...]
For the past few months, I have been working with other locals on a new web site dealing with images and expression. “Kazomi” (the working title) got me a trip to Istanbul and some bills paid, but the biggest payoff so far has been the chance to apply my [...]
On Tuesday, BBC Audiobooks America sponsored a Twitter event that featured popular novelist Neil Gaiman and hundreds of short-form writers. The outcome will be a free audiobook produced from the collaboration.
At noon, Gaiman—the author of Sandman graphic novels, Coraline and The Graveyard Book—kicked things off with the first [...]
Buoyed by a solid offensive outing—79 yards receiving and two TD catches in a victory—primo NFL wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals created an impromptu Twitter contest for any of his 100K fans who were still up. After first priming his audience to pay attention, Fitz then [...]
Last June at the 140 Characters Conference in New York, marketer Jeremy Epstein (@jer979) gave a talk about his strategy for using Twitter. The approach includes identifying key information providers in his areas of interest and building relationships with them.
Earlier this week, Cynthia Banham wrote an interesting article for The Age about how Twitter is changing the way wars are fought. Amongst the retelling of this past summer’s use of microblogging to support protests in Iran—part of a discussion going on now at Australian National University’s War [...]
As September came to a close, the City of Bloomington officially announced its participation in social media, featuring a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This is the kind of local activity I was hoping for when I joined Twitter in 2007.
Twitter’s Brett Seville—the lead UX guy for the fast-growing social media company—recently hinted that Twitter Labs is in the works. Like Google Labs, this would be playground for developers with access to platform engineers at a level beyond just use of their open API.
The continued formalization of [...]
Disney bought Marvel, and we’re concerned.
What if they make a new movie, Charles Wall-e and Generation Exium?
What if I get an issue of my Spiderman Comic that says, “Peter is on his way away from Flash Thompson when he falls into a manhole and meets a [...]
When the CHI conference gathers in Atlanta next April, one of the young traditions of the event—the Student Design Competition—will be enjoying its seventh year. With each running of the competition, the bar has been raised on both the quality and depth of the projects.
One of the side-effects of [...]
I can take a joke. I have an excellent sense of humor. In fact, some tell me I’m hilarious. I am also frequently seen running about town carrying an infant while herding two older boys. When the infant gets hungry, I nurse her. Woe is the sad sack who tells [...]
Archie wanted me to share his dream. Here goes:
We were in a house and we heard a PFF and we walked into the bedroom. In the bedroom we saw a Percy Jackson book, ripped. Out of nowhere Annabeth came out of the Percy Jackson book and walked out of [...]
What if Twitter, a social media community with millions of registered accounts, could be seen as just 100 people?
This graphic—created by David McCandless—was inspired by Rohit Bhargava’s [...]
Hello? … Hello? … Is thing thing on? … Contrary to appearances here on BlogSchmog, my writing hasn’t completely disappeared. It has been displaced.
Getting My Geek On
As a sometimes contributor to Wired’s parenting blog, I’ve managed to publish nine articles this summer for the volunteer group blog, [...]
The new studio facility for SproutBox—affectionately known as “The Box”—opened with local fanfare last night. Many familiar faces inside the regional Geek community were on hand, as well as other dignitaries and advisers for the development company.
The Box is gorgeous. A graffiti artist decorated the majority of the walls [...]
I feel free.
I am no longer
held by the
Shining bars of
Sunlight.
Shine, Gleam, Shine,
In the Rain’s
Soft Pattering Kisses.
Kiss, Patter, Kiss.
In the Rain,
I Feel Free.
[...]My biological CPU has been running at capacity for months, but I did manage to finally write a blog … for someone else. As part of my duties at Hanapin Marketing this spring, I wrote a little something something for one of their clients, the Indiana company [...]
The Kuril Islands are part of the Ring of Fire- an area where earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur in the basin of the Pacific Ocean.
About 90% of the world’s earthquakes, and 80% of the world’s largest earthquakes happen in the ring of fire.
The Kuril Islands connect Japan [...]
Today we’re looking up the Laptev Sea. The Laptev Sea is a marginal sea which means it is partially enclosed by land- like arcs of islands that branch off from the mainland. You can think of it as sort of a vase shape that’s wide at the base, [...]
An interesting new visualization for Twitter content was launched Wednesday evening. The Social Collider—a Google Chrome Experiment created by Karsten Schmidt and Sascha Pohflepp of the UK—reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter.
Social Collider, a Chrome Experiment in action
The project is several months in the making. The [...]
Yesterday, I put the finishing touches on my first book, an O’Reilly Media tome about the Twitter API. I’ll write more about that next week, when the book is released. One of the third-party applications I profiled in Chapter 2 is a personal favorite, Twitscoop.
UPDATE: Want proof the [...]
One of my favorite things about parenting is watching my kids when they don’t know I’m watching. When they are just getting a new skill, face scrunched up in concentration- making a new friend, eyes wide and open to connection- sleeping, long lashes framing their cheeks just so. I’ve imagined [...]
My journey into the community of practicing smartphone aficionados began in earnest today when I unboxed my new Android G1, courtesy Hanapin Marketing. Before that moment, I had held one other Android in my hand, borrowed from an early adopting friend. Then and now, it surprises me how [...]
In addition to family expansion and academic projects, I have been tasked this season with investigating designing for the mobile web. Hanapin Marketing is interested in moving into that domain, which currently is a wide-ranging wilderness of devices, protocols, and use. To help get a handle on this area [...]
One of the more interesting areas to watch for Twitter in 2009 is how the microblogging culture changes around the use of profile pictures. With the recent addition of an API method to allow these pictures to be changed remotely, third-party development will find ways to create new value [...]
The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, yadda yadda yadda, so if blogging is ever going to make it back into my daily routine, I’ve got to start typing something. Much has happened since I was using this space on a regular basis—Holy Crap! I’m a [...]
French Fry spent a lot of time outside this morning, and was very cold when he came in. He looked around for a warm spot in which he could recover.
Why was that spot so perfect? [...]
Saint-Louis is in Senegal, Africa. Senegal is a country in the far west of Africa. Africa is sort of a bean shape, and Senegal is directly in one end of the bean. It’s about 500 kilometers southwest of the Sahara in my estimation.
Rising sea levels are a threat to [...]
I have managed to get normal sleep since Christmas Day and found some time to enjoy a real vacation without fretting (much) about what academic and economic hell awaits in 2009. While the Mariott internets are somewhat reluctant to let us share our photos, we are trying to collect some [...]
Christmas has always been a magical time. I love the ceremony. I love the fact that is a season, not just a day. I love the preparation, from crafting gifts to decking the halls. Mostly, I love what the season does to people, Black Friday shopping at Wal-Mart excepted.
This Christmas [...]
The Sunlight Foundation—a non-partisan effort to use citizen investigation and candidate cooperation to make government more transparent—came out with a new widget that displays the tweet stream for all of the members of Congress who are using Twitter.
The widget is one of a dozen or so Internet systems [...]
I forget which local grad student tweeted about Upside Down Dogs a few weeks ago, but it has been a near-daily source of chuckles for me every since.
Upside Down Dogs is my default browser page
The concept is simple: Wait for your dog to fall [...]
That’s it. Now nanowrimo is done for this year.
But don’t think I’m going to stop just yet. I can’t just leave my book ending on a cliff-hanger like that, so this is my last chapter of my second book.
After starting their race, Kryptl realized this wasn’t any ordinary race. Baron [...]
Baron Freeze couldn’t believe it.
He felt like he was five years old. He had been asked by his son to come and watch over his grandson. He was going to spend the holiday going on with his devious scheme, little did he know, this wasn’t a coincidence. His son had [...]
Now properly stuffed with Quorn, potatoes and green beans, it is time to resume academic work. First, however, I wanted to share another Twitter-plus-Processing visualization by Canadian Jeff Clark.
On his web site Neoformix, Clark released a simple bar graph around midday on Thanksgiving. It scans the [...]
Archie sings his Thanksgiving Greeting.
The lyrics are:
Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving, I wonder somehow
If you don’t matter, it won’t matter now,
and if you ever wasn’t here,
we’d be a sad, sad, sad, sad
one.
Baron Freeze was very confused. He had just had a dream in which he was on a world and reality quakes never stopped on that world, and so everyone on the sidewalk was walking and slithering and jumping and skitterring almost all at the same time, and he was just [...]
After meddling around for a while with his new and improved creatures, Baron Freeze went off to his new special office and laboratory. He dressed up differently and on the door of his laboratory and office it said, “Professor Freeze, inventions made to order.”
Inside, Professor Freeze was working on something [...]
It took a little while for the serum to develop in the air so it was going to be a while before the universe started getting destroyed.
Barron Freeze went back to the Time Traveler’s building to tell him all the “good deeds” he did. When he got there, a short [...]
AFter climbing back through the hole in the bed and pushing Barron Stupid off of his bed, Barron Small climbed out and waited six hours. Then, Barron Small ran as fast as he could through the space yacht, unzipped the universe door and used his teeny weeny rocket boot to [...]
While Baron Freeze and all the other villains were dancing on their disco floor, most of their evil pets and robots started dancing, too. And then their evil pets and robots started throwing them up in the air and slamming them down on the ground and all sorts of crazy [...]
Barron Freeze sat down in a large grand chair and thought desperately about what the other ingredients to the formula could be- and then he came up with a last resort idea: to look in the years and years old ashes of his father’s laboratory fire place.
He used the [...]
There were two big incidents in the past week involving backlash from the Twitter community. The first was Twitterank, yet another rank-order-the-elite tool to measure network value of twitterers, and the other is a swift response to a poorly conceived advertising campaign for Motrin. There are design lessons [...]
Around a week later, Barron Freeze returned to his underground laboratory. He took more blizzard serum, more black hole serum and more plasma serum and merged them together with his original mix. He zapped him his life-giving formula and the monster’s dead rock to his least favorite area: the cloudy [...]
Things move fast on the Internet. On Wednesday, Twitterank set a speed record.
Around midday, Twitterrank took hold of the twitosphere in the form of self-promoting tweets, published by the program itself as people looked up their ratings. A few hours later came the backlash, as many speculated [...]
Because Barron Freeze had eaten some of the white hole formula, he wasn’t affected by anything the black hole serum did. He pulled all the clocks out and time restarted. He doused the clocks in white hole serum and put them back up on the walls, and then he pulled [...]
Barron Freeze had a small problem on his hands. A small problem, nothing more than that, but still, a problem. After experimenting quite a bit with his black hole serum, he had to build a reservoir to fit all of it. It was starting to swallow up the reservoir and [...]
As the East coasters rolled over from Monday to Tuesday, Twitter unofficially registered their 1 billionth tweet. Not bad for a company just two years from launch.
GigaTweet counts down to the billionth tweet
Australia’s Nathan Reed—who created [...]
After zooming around the whole of Solariun, Barron Freeze returned to his castle and lifted up the carpet in the main hall, opened up a secret trap door and went down, down, down for about three miles. He went into an extremely large cave with tunnels that went all over [...]
Mike Trotzke of SproutBox has been busy these past few months, traveling around Bloomington and across the nation to recruit talent and projects for his new startup company. This week, Trotzke is at the fifth Web 2.0 Summit, a high-profile conference that includes the likes of Tim O’Reilly, Dion Hinchliffe, [...]
After a bit of planning, the Time Traveler decided to make Professor Frankinsteen his vice president. The professor gladly accepted and started making some sort of presidential device. He zapped it and suddenly a huge banner appeared across the front of the Pole Scraper and it said, “Everyone Welcome the [...]
It was June 14th, the day of the presidential tournament. The winner would become the new president of Pole City. The Time Traveler decided to enter because he thought it would be neat to decide if he wanted to add on things to the Pole Scraper or not. He only [...]
I’ll be live-blogging our family experience with this historic 2008 election. Updates will be frequent throughout the night.
6:00p - We convinced Carter to stop playing Wii to join us with our election watching. Archie, though, is watching Scooby Doo on the other iMac.
6:35p - BBC World News coverage rocks. [...]
After returning to the Ruby City, the Time Traveler saw a small building floating on anti-gravity. It said, “Professor Frankinsteen’s Laboratory” on it. He went in and Professor Frankinsteen, a man about one and a half feet tall with a moustache that curled around his feet and no shoes. He [...]
The family decided not to get up at the crack of dawn to stand be in line when the polls open at 6a in Indiana. We’ll rise on our usual schedule and head to Meadowwood sometime around when school would be in session, if public school weren’t canceled for [...]
Mark McKinnon commented last week on Twitter’s new role in democracy, drawing praise from like thinkers on the Internet but also some criticism in the comments on his own blog. While the long-term impact of Twitter is certainly debatable, its presence as a channel for real-time feedback on politics [...]
Awestruck and amazed, the Time Traveler started on to the conveyor belt. Running across the high-speed conveyor belt, he quickly made to the ocean paths that led to the different Emerald and Ruby and Gold cities.
Standing there at the base of the path, the Time Traveler decided to go to [...]
Title of my story: The Time Traveler II (the sequel)
Where we left off, the Time Traveler was running through the jungle being chased by strange orange liquid creatures.
He had to quickly get his scepter. Running through the wood he pulled a small stick from his pocket and pulled on it [...]
A quick online search for discipline tips for children reveals fairly standard results- be consistent, use natural and/or logical consequences alongside rewards to increase good behaviors and communicate limits in a clear and developmentally appropriate manner.
Shift to googling about “challenging” kids and most of the advice is the same as [...]
Not long after a mention on international television, Joe the Plumber had a Twitter account. By debate’s end, he already had over 200 followers. Google searches unearthed a plethora of web sites for the generic new archetype for normal America, but the real [...]
I’ve been thinking about things recently and I’ve come up with this:
I think that Nintendo’s “Wii” should have a movie making channel in which you are the director of the movie and you may hire other people’s Mii’s from the check Mii out channel and use them as actors. You [...]
Today is Blog Action Day, an annual collective-action event when everybody writes about the same topic—Poverty. The organizers of the event helped out by providing a nice list of resources on the subject, but I’m going to riff on our own experiences with poverty.
Today also happens to be [...]
Possibly not my best day parenting ever, but if I believed in grades, and in lame reassurances for failed attempts, I’d give myself an A for effort.
Carter and Archie: WA WAAA WAA He blah blah blah and He did this and that
Me: (reciting to self: I am calm, I am [...]
Carter and I had almost an hour to debate politics on our way to the Bloomfield Apple Fair last weekend. In between giant lawn signs for Mitch and a pretty cool homemade Obama sign, Carter outlined his desires for the next president.
Carter: What I really hope is our next president [...]
Twitter scheduled a little maintenance window tonight. It didn’t last long and I sure successfully improved something. I’m hopeful I’ll be able to say the same about my own downtime.
Twitter’s downtime has a new [...]
When Bad Horse comes calling, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. Even little men. Little evil men.
The long-awaited application process for induction into the Evil League of Evil surfaced last week. The Makices responded with a Sunday afternoon video project at the Informatics Design [...]
We knew this day would come. Everyone dies, even legendary actors responsible for many of the movies in my top 10 list. When I saw the tweet that Paul Newman had died at age 83, however, my entire life jumped to the next generation.
The boys and I cleared out this week to give Kevin some quiet and a chance to concentrate on Twitter- we got to visit the most fun aunt ever, coincidentally, my sister.
Aunt Meg climbs at Chicago Children's Museum
We spent [...]
We’re so close to my brother’s favorite holiday ( in case you didn’t know … its Halloween ). My club is having a flame contest and the winner gets a flame trophy,ten dollars,M&Ms and Three Musketeers Bar.I’m kinda at loss here so I’m going to have to wrap it up [...]
A funny thing happened on the way to my doctoral degree …
A new Makice is expected in March
We are officially switching from man-to-man to a zone in time for March Madness. Welcome as this news is, it also has our family trip to Boston [...]
On October 15, millions of people will read blogs advancing the public conversation on poverty. This is thanks to the efforts of Blog Action Day, an annual collective-action event when everybody writes about the same topic.
Poverty from Blog Action Day.
I was reminded of this event [...]
Carter has been running off to the back of our shed every chance he gets. Generally, he refuses to tell me anything that’s happening back there, as it is their “secret space.” Yesterday, he bounced back out to read with me and couldn’t contain his excitement.
Carter: Our bridge to somewhere [...]
Some of the best times to talk to Carter are right as he’s falling asleep, or just as he’s waking up. He’s too tired to run off half-way through the sentences. Last night as he was dozing off we had this exchange:
Carter: Do you think humans are the most powerful [...]
We’ve worked at keeping track of those precious kid conversations over the years- but it’s hard to take the time. Twitter has made it even easier because I can jot down the smaller tidbits that would otherwise get lost. Whenever I have a moment, I sit down at the computer, [...]
On Friday, Indiana University tested its emergency notification channel. Like other universities, this system is largely a response to the tragic shootings on the Virginia Tech campus a year ago.
IU-Notify was first tested last December, a couple months after Purdue conducted similar tests. IU-Notify allows students, [...]
One of the more interesting new third-party Twitter services to make an appearance this month is Twintro. This innovation from Robert Balousek offers a way to sample a featured Twitter member for a day.
Known by various names—such as tree shaping, arborsculpture, living art or pooktre—eco-architecture has been a fantasy of environmentalists and ecologists. Thanks to applications of research out of Israel, that fantasy is closer to becoming reality.
Plantware creates structures out [...]
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