And Home Again

So my home stay didn't last long, as I made another trip back to Ohio last weekend. And although it was bitterly cold there, I am wondering if their weather isn't better than ours -- It has rained almost non-stop here for three days and further up the foothills into Tahoe they have gotten 6+ feet of snow. They closed down I-50 (the highway that leads from El Dorado Hills to Lake Tahoe) for a good part of yesterday. Here is some more coverage: The new year will come storming in - sacbee.com

Home And Back

I caught an early Xmas at my mother's house in Ohio this year. I usually fly "home" on Christmas day, but the flights were exhorbinantly priced this year(probably due to the holiday falling on a Saturday). Either way, it was nice getting back - even if today is only 5F.

Brian and I got some time to reconstruct his rig with a new 200GB hard drive and sample the newest coffeehouses. His Cup O' Joe isn't half bad.

The unfortunate thing about these trips is the flight:stay ratio - I fly about 16 hours for a 48 hour visit.

Feedburner Redux

So after talking to Brian, it seems that my post about my enhanced RSS feed was less than clear (see Wander: More With Fun RSS). Feedburner enhances your common RSS feed with a number of doodads that are quite handy.

SmartFeed™ converts your RSS feed between the myriad of formats available for syndication (RSS 0.94, 1, 2 or Atom) on the fly so that anyone who asks for it, gets it in the version they need. It also offers a ton of other enhancements like statistics and brnading (putting logo in feed). However, the coolest features (and the ones that drew me to it) was feed splicing. Feed splicing inserts other content into your RSS feed. Think of it as merging your RSS feed with other RSS feeds. For example, I am "link splicing" my Bloglines RSS stream (from my Bloglines clipping blog) into my RSS feed - all my postings there just show up in my feedburner feed intermingled with my blogger posts. I am doing the same thing with Flickr -- my photos just show up in the feed as I post them. Basically, everything I am posting these days shows up in this RSS feed.

They also give you this cool flash animated headline button:

Subscribe to my Feedburner RSS here.

Blue Rock Shoot

I had a quick turn-around after getting back from New York on Tuesday and headed down to the Bay Area. Since I had a few meetings at HQ over the week, I decided to stay down in my old home town, Los Gatos. Los Gatos hasn't changed much, but seems to have gotten a little bit pricier. My old house that I used to rent was still there and actually available to be rented (I'll have to look it up online to see how much they are gauging the new tenants).



As nothing was that new in LG, I decided to take my coffee in Saratoga this morning. After checking to make sure that my favorite dot com era restaurant (The Basin) was still in business, I settled into my favorite coffee shop in the world. Blue Rock Shoot is just about everything that you would want in a coffee shop: An abundance of wild wood tables, free wireless internet, good coffee, small mountain town atmostphere and most importantly stiff drinks (Starbucks really should serve alcohol). I settle down and enjoyed my Americano with the locals before I had to scoot into Menlo Park for a meeting.

Manhattan

I'm in rainy, drizzly, freezing cold New York City today, helping out some clients. Luckily, I got to stay right here in midtown, next to Grand Central Station. My office is only 2 blocks away and my client is across the street. This photo is from my client's office on Park Avenue around the 40th floor.

We didn't get a chance to go out to any good bars (or watch MNF), but we did have a good dinner at a place called Tuscan.

Boulder

As my location sidebar says, I'm visiting Boulder, Colorado this week to attend a few meetings. I've always really liked coming to Boulder since it's so close to the Front Range of the Rockies -- Even though they are 20 miles away. This picture was taken on the way south to our office in Broomfield, near the University of Colorado campus.

In less pleasant news, it is friggin' cold here. Even the locals are saying that 15F is cold for this time of year.

More With Fun RSS

So I have been experimenting with ways to improve my blog lately (i.e. switching from Hello! to Flickr for my photo syndication) but I am stuck with the vast amount of time that it takes to sit down to actually use the web (surf, collate, blog, discard spam, etc.) and the paucity of free time in my life. I had hoped that I could simply manufacture more idle time by using my mobile phone more fully (I post most of my blog entries via email from my Treo 600 while I am in transit), but it doesn't really help me read to keep up with whats really out there.

So I've been thinking that it would be nice to be able to tag all the articles I read that I find salacious interesting (that I usually repost here), have Flickr autopost all my new pictures and occassionally blog (like I am doing here).

And that's when I saw the feed splicer that Feedburner is doing with Flickr and Bloglines. This is cool.

You can check out my feedburner splice here:

You can just click on it and it will render in your browser. Or you can add it to the RSS reader feeds.

I'm still working out the bugs, but this seems cool.

DirecTV Prepares Tivo Clone

Techdirt turned me onto a story about DirecTV launching their own Tivo replacement from CNN: Challenger takes on TiVo, video on demand.

While this is bad news, this still won't kill Tivo. People love Tivo, not the service. In fact, few people know what a PVR is -- even people that own a Tivo. It's that ubiquitous. It also has a UI that defines the industry. Assuming that Tivo can come through on their NetFlix arrangement (for broadband movie distribution), I think they will be around for a while . . .

D-League Basketball

Shelley got some free tickets to the Kings NBA game tonight so Kelly, Shelley and I wandered down to Arco Arena to see the Minnesota Timberwolves. Having never been to Arco, I was surprised at how small it was. The last NBA game (and only) was in Chicago and Sacramento's stadium seemed smaller than my University's. However, it was packed with locals and they do love their Kings in a midwestern, minor league kinda way.



The Kings folded to Kevin Garnett's Twolves 121 - 110 late in the fourth quarter.

Blogging with Blogger and Flickr

So a few people have asked about the infrastructure that supports Wander, my blog here at Blogger.com. It's actually pretty simple:

• The blog itself is hosted by Blogger
• The photos are stored at Flickr
• The photos and text are posted via email from my Treo 600

To replicate this setup, follow these steps:

1. Go to Blogger: Create your Blog Now and sign up for their free blogging service. They have you enter your some personal details, create a name for your blog and choose a template that defines how it looks.
2. Go to Flickr and signup for an account there. They'll want to know a little about you also. Flickr allows you to upload and store photos free (with restrictions).
3. Once you have both accounts active, you need to configure Flickr to post to your Blogger account. Go to your Flickr account page, a choose the link "Your Blogs" under the Blogging header. Click "Set up a new blog" and follow the prompts (hint: you are setting up a blogger blog). After this is completed, you can upload a picture to Flickr and then post it to your blog.
4. Finally, go back to your Flickr account page and choose the "Upload by email" option directly under the "Your Blogs". It allows you to set a style for the blog postings and gives you a email address to send them to.

Once you have all that completed, snap some pictures on your handy camera phone and email them with some snarky dialog to the email address that Flickr gave you. Instant blogger goodness.