see a puffin eat a fish

The world famous Sheldon Brown has passed on. I first stumbled across his website when I was learning about fixed gear bikes. He never did update his site’s ‘early web’ aesthetic but whenever you would search for any bike related web resources, he’d always be at the top of the fold on Google. Sheldon personally did a fixed gear convertion on my Merlin titanium with vertical dropouts and his wife, Hariet Fell was one of my favorite CS professors when I was an undergraduate at Northeastern.

“He was also well-known for patiently and thoroughly answering his 500 – 1000 daily emails.”

So long Sheldon, rest in peace.

Yes, we finally have. I can say it officially. Sure, there’s still a TV and an ironing board in our old place, not to mention all the holes we still have to putty, but we won’t get to that stuff until we actually have to give the keys back.

We’ve been moving for the past week with a quick interruption for Thanksgiving in Maine (with stops in Gloucester, New Haven, Swampscott and Jamaica Plain ). Moving, four flights down, four flights up — over and and over again. I’m not exactly sure how we’re going to get out of this apartment whenever we decide to move again. Our stuff is so high up.

I’ve been without proper internet access for a week and a half, very off the grid. My connection has been a tethered N95 over bluetooth which surprisingly allows me to be online and make phone calls at the same time. The throughput reminds me of being thirteen years old and calling boards with upload/download ratios and 9600bps modems. I move much faster than that.

Today I am finally back online after endless arguments with Verizon.

And while I was out of the loop, Google released a new version of mobile maps that gives approximate location using cell towers. All of us with GPS enabled phones have been passively gathering data for them, very nice.

Today I attended the Mobile Bar Camp NYC, a gathering of mobile developers and evangelists, to talk about the future of mobile and catch up. There was a similar event last spring but I missed it as I had just graduated and was rushing to get going on my road trip out to Redmond. I’ve been out of the mobile world, getting a taste of Rails and Flex, but it’s a matter of time before I get back into it so it was cool to come by and see where things are headed.

I’ve also been told that the dormant WayMarkr got a mention on the s60 applications blog.

The BarCamp was sponsored by Nokia in association with RG/A. Outside of all the tiny lettering on the Bar Camp tshirts and the plethora of N95 boxes, you wouldn’t know Nokia was involved. ITPers, especially my class (’07) practically took over the event with our own Andy Maskin helping to put the thing together. So yeah, good to see everyone and interesting to see Sean Owen talk about his work with semacode decoding software for Android.

And get this, I WON an N95 with my group during a half-bakery make up a compelling business plan from these keywords in 15 minutes competition. An N95! With the GPS, accelerometer, the works! I’ve got all my applications running on it and have managed to tether it as a bluetooth modem for my powerbook (it’s saying 3G!). Next i’m going to go outside and see how the GPS behaves. I’ve never had the pleasure of owning a device with integrated GPS, this is going to be awesome. I might have to start writing Python again.

Also, Andy froze a cell phone in a block of ice.

Anna’s agency finally supports deep links! Still flash, but now at least you can get straight to her page.

My very talented friend MC Hyland is in the Paris Review this month with an apocalyptic, global warming inspired poem. Cheery! You can also find her this month in the Colorado Review and LIT.