see a puffin eat a fish

Last week I had the privilege of attending my first ever Yahoo! Open Hack event based in Manhattan’s midtown. So many highlights to mention, here are some: Gabe in a spacesuit, Tikva running Ignite, learning about YQL, Clay’s talk and winning the ‘Hack for Good’ prize with my teammates @ramblezeus and @hsbakshi! Go power trio, maker of Powertrends.

We put two concepts out there. One was technology that aggregated real time energy consumption data and presented the data in a town against town contest. The town that saves the most energy gets money to fix potholes. The towns that lose and save less energy know exactly who didn’t pull their weight Secondly, we posed the question, can utilities use social media to predict future consumption trends? We already use Twitter to get our news, can we use indicators of future activity (shows people will watch, events they will attend) to predict electric load? Utilities have an energy storage problem so the more they are right about future load the less dirty plants need to be fired up.

Our first bear experience out in the country, they must be wandering around, stocking up for the winter. We came back to western mass to find our shed door wide open and Anna’s work kit upturned. We’d assume it was a vandal, we’re city people after all, but we noticed the hook was bent out of shape and covered in scratch marks. The shed wasn’t locked, all a person had to do was lift up the latch.

Then we noticed the scratch marks at the top of the door, someone was trying to rip the door off and then managed to get the latch open.

We went over to ask our neighbors and they said the bears go for the birdseed, some of which we (think) we had in the shed. Unless it was some other edible we forgot about. Or don’t consider an edible, like makeup from Anna’s kit.

Peter Sagel of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me fame on Jeopardy circa 1988. Everyone should follow them on Twitter. Also check out the snow at the bottom of the videotape, as of yesterday that’s a thing of the past. I just heard on NPR that snow on TV is leftover energy from the big bang, messages out of time.

So i’ve been putting off upgrading wordpress for years. I set this thing up a long time ago and the prospect of dealing with a software upgrade (who knows which old features are no longer supported), backing up my database and remembering all my old ISP passwords was a little too much for me. Well I neglected my blog for a little while, been way too busy with my latest endeavor. Today I come back to this hobbled little thing only to find out that it has been super hax0red, and by hax0red I mean some shmucks replaced the front page of my blog with a malware distro page. So there you have it. So I had no choice but to finally bite the bullet and upgrade Wordpress. Which is kind of exciting.

Now I can ask spam bots simple math questions and turn comments back on. Good times. So i’m back, I think. Doing a lot of moving around with Anna, mostly on the east coast. Working a lot on GroundedPower with my friends, can’t beat that. Oh and looking to buy a used small-ish pickup if you have one kicking around.

I haven’t been keeping up with the Fire Eagle badge ever since I got my iPhone. There’s no ZoneTag for the iPhone and the Fire Eagle iPhone apps that are available just aren’t a compelling use case for my daily interactions. They feel forced. But i’ve been getting a lot of interesting emails from people using the badge and I just checked my access log. There are tons of people using the Badge. Very exciting. Here’s a great user story that reflects exactly why I put the badge together in the first place:

> I just wanted to thank you for the Fire Eagle Badge and let you know that I
> have what I think is a pretty interesting use case. My parents are sailing
> from their normal berth in Annapolis, MD to Florida and then on to the
> Bahamas this winter. I have been maintaining a blog for them with a map
> showing their whereabouts – updated in real time with their GPS coordinates
> via a cellular data connection. When they go offshore they will not have a
> data connection so they purchased a SPOT satellite messenger-
> www.findmespot.com – primarily for safety, but also for tracking. SPOT
> offers a proprietary shared map page, but nothing I could put on their
> blog. They do integrate with Fire Eagle, however, so I linked them to a FE
> account and put your badge on their blog so they can be tracked offshore as
> well.
>
> Anyways, thanks again. I’ll probably be tweaking the layout of the map in
> the coming days. I’ll be sure to let you knmow if I find anything
> interesting while playing.
>
> Sam
>

Thanks Sam!

You can see the blog here.