see a puffin eat a fish

My company, GroundedPower announced the release of snapshots yesterday. Our customers are using snapshots to take notes on their energy consumption, compare their usage with others and submit interesting data sets to experts for review. It’s a really neat way to keep track of how far you’ve come in energy savings and see how your appliance usage changes through the seasons. Does the fridge cycle less when there’s more food in it? Does your water heater cycle less in the summer? Does your water heater use more or less energy than other people’s? What’s that weird spike at 4 in the morning? All of these questions and more are being answered using the snapshot tool. Here’s one of mine:

These are the kinds of interactions that are possible when real time consumption data is available. For example, uou can turn on all of your lights in the house, take a quick snapshot and then send your family members a bill for how much they are costing you when they don’t turn off the lights A level of timely interaction is lost with day behind or even 15 minute interval data.

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.

The FE Badge should now support oAuth 10A with the new security patch. The people at Fire Eagle are going to phase out the older oAuth implementation, let me know if you have problems!

Also, we’re super excited about iPhone 3.0 and push, a lot of potential for both fire eagle and the badge. Whee!

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.

Saw this guy on TechCrunch yesterday. This is exactly the direction we were going with Plodt. A collection of tags either top down or organically become a topic (see our presidential debate). With rich visualization/analysis tools, sponsorship becomes an avenue for entities that want to own or control a set of tags that define a topic. If Tinker becomes the place to go to track twitter topics, tags as well as collections of tags will have an adword like quality, having value relative to the popularity of an event. Right now only very basic keyword searches exist on Twitter, this is another way of meeting the data organization problem half way by encouraging users to help.