see a puffin eat a fish

This is the first summer where Anna and I don’t have an excuse to leave Brooklyn. Two years ago we escaped in August by getting married in Maine and last year we spent the whole summer in Seattle. This summer we’re just here, unless that is we can figure out some time to go to Maine or Amherst. We do have a week or two in Montreal coming up, but I hear it’s even hotter there.

We spent Memorial Day in Virginia Beach where my good friend’s brother, Ben, was getting married to Pitya. The vows were all music (keyboard, violin, singing) and the bride made her vows in the form of a song, providing the groom with sheet music that he had to figure out on the spot.

To make it even cooler, the reception was in an aquarium. We had the run of the place and got to hang out near the shark tank and with the stingrays.

On the work front, i’ve been spending a lot of time on ebay trying to get cheap equipment for my startup and learning the virtues of esnipe.

My biggest catch so far has been a dual processor server with 4 gigs of ram and 164 gigs of hd space (configured into raid level 5) that I got for two hundred dollars. The only drawback is that with the four fans and dual power supplies, it sounds like an airplane taking off. I’m also in the market for used Apple 20″/23″ cinema displays if anyone has some. If only I was living in Boston and could make my monthly trip to the MIT flea. Good times.

I also bit the bullet and undertook a massive code rewrite. I’ve been putting off incorporating our evolving design into the new code but I finally decided that the longer I waited, the more annoying it would be. In the end the process was a bit time consuming but I was able to do it fairly systematically in Rails and not worry that I missed anything. I just went through the whole MVC tree object by object and then updated my migrations and libraries. I then wrote data migrations to convert all the existing data to the new schema. Not bad.

Congratulations!

I grew up on Mad magazine with its mix of dorky humor and current events. I would get at it the library — it was always the most banged up (and usually missing) magazine that the library carried. Part of reason for Mad being so ragged was the back page fold in section.

So I was really excited to see an Al Jaffe writeup in the times this past sunday. The man who is also responsible for snappy answers to stupid questions is still doing the fold in by hand after 44 years.

Also, Martine sent me this really neat interactive fold-in feature in NYT online.

WY20 has only been around for 24 hours and i’ve already gotten a bunch of feedback on the application. Thanks so much! Outside of all the bugs everyone has found (the current list is all fixed, send me more) i’ve noticed some emerging behaviors and misunderstandings regarding how to use WY20.

First, how to sign up. Send a tweet (not a direct message) that says @my20 hi. MY20 will in turn find this tweet and send you an authentication URL to FireEagle. This is a little confusing but is necessary due to how Twitter works, how the API is set up and direct limitations imposed on the API for developers so they do not throttle Twitter.

Once you are authenticated with WY20 and Fire Eagle, you can report your location by sending a direct message to WY20 (d my20 boston,ma). You must be following my20 on Twitter. Only direct messages are supported because I do not want to clutter your public Twitter timeline with location information and I want to keep your location information private. If these messages were made public, WY20 would defeat the whole purpose of Fire Eagle — to let you control who sees your location information.

Next, the value of WY20 is not clear because Fire Eagle is in its infancy. I am facilitating the collection of location information but until Fire Eagle’s application gallery is opened up, there are very few interesting ways of sharing and looking at that location information. I will personally be working on some of these applications.

Finally, there is some confusion regarding what location means. In Fire Eagle’s world, location is anything that can be geocoded. So ‘boston,ma’ or ‘11201′ work, but ‘office’ will not. Also ‘going to my office in boston,ma’ will not work. I’d like to stay away from having a regexp party. If WY20 becomes popular, I would be open to building in a translation mechanism so the application knows that when you tell me you’re at ‘office’ you are at ‘432 Broadway ny,ny’.

Thanks again for all the great feedback.