My cousin Sue has wanted to take me to the Spam Museum in Austin, MN for several years. Yesterday our dream came true when we made the 1-hour trek with my mom from my hometown of Riceville, IA. Unfortunately, when we arrived, we found that the museum is closed on Monday. Even so, the gift shop was open and I picked up a few things. Afterwards we drove across the street to Johnny’s Spamarama for a spam-themed lunch. I had a delicious Spam Reuben and Sue had the Spam Western Melt. My mom declined to have a Spam dish.
Tina at Erik and Rhonda’s wedding
Here’s my beautiful wife last weekend when she, Graham and I attended a wedding reception for my good friend Erik Rogers and his new bride, Rhonda. She even offered to drive home if I cared to take advantage of the open bar.
Memories of Nietzsche
A year ago our cat Nietzsche died soon after we returned from our vacation in the Midwest. One thing I realized after it happened is that although many people may have met or known Nietzsche, the only people who really, really knew him were those of us who lived with him: Tina, Thomas, Graham and I. Consequently, we all shared in the private pain of his loss – a pain that nobody else outside of our family can appreciate in the exact same way that we do. Nonetheless, as a final act of farewell, I thought I would share some of my memories of Nietzsche’s life.
Chain Factor high score
Social bookmarking
For me, the power of the internet is in its ability to facilitate communication with other people. Thus, I have lately found myself attracted to various “social networking” websites. Most recently I’ve been experimenting with several social bookmarking sites, all of which offer free memberships.
Happy Birthday, Graham!
Graham turned 9 years old early this morning and is he ever excited! Of course, it could just be the Indiana Jones Cocoa Puffs that have got him all hyper.
Gilmore Girls
I’m not a big fan of ABC Family, but the boys like Full House so the Tivo switches to that channel every morning to record it. One morning last year, I slowly woke to find that I had fallen asleep watching TV on our love sac. Full House had just finished and another show was starting. I hadn’t opened my eyes yet and still had one foot in dreamland but I slowly took notice of the dialog on this show. It reminded me greatly of David Mamet and was chock full of obscure cultural and literary references. I opened my eyes and took in my first episode of The Gilmore Girls. By the third commercial break I had acquired a Season Pass (i.e. I told my Tivo to record every episode on ABC Family) and Tina and I have been fans ever since.
Happy Mother’s Day
Graham quietly woke me shortly after 7:00 this morning so I could help him prepare our annual “surprise” Mother’s Day breakfast. We made our plan and I advised him that we should wait until at least 8:00 before starting it. Graham watched TV while I napped on the couch until Tina came out at 7:45 asking where everybody had gone. I emphatically told her that she should go back to bed and she eventually understood. Graham and I then went to work making french toast, warm syrup and with orange slices on the side. We served it to Tina in bed but she decided to bring it out to the kitchen since we don’t have a good tray for eating in bed anymore.
Tools for Twitterers
The popularity of Twitter has led to the creation of some great services that work with the “social networking” website. Because Twitter has a public API and makes the “tweets” (Twitter-speak for a message posted on Twitter) available to anyone, it’s easy for web developers to tap into this resource. Here are a few that I’ve found useful:
- Twitterholic ranks twitter users according to the number of followers each user has. I follow several people on that list include Barack Obama, John Gruber, Wil Wheaton and Warren Ellis. You can also use Twitterholic to view your own history of people following you. Here’s mine.
- TwitterLocal lets you find Twitter users in your geographical area. You can view the list of local users on the Twitterlocal website or you can subscribe to an RSS feed. They also track the top 30 locations for Twitter users in the world. Portland is currently ranked 15th only 6 spots below “Right here.”
- TweetClouds processes all the tweets for a given user and then creates a tag cloud for that user. If you’ve tweeted for as long as I have, it takes awhile for TweetClouds to process all your tweets, but they provide you with a static link that you can pass around to people afterwards that allows for delay-free viewing of your tweeting psyche. Here’s one I generated as I wrote this. I am evidently obsessed with “time” and “watching”.
- Quotably provides context for Twitter conversations by showing them as threaded discussions. If you glance at the Quotably page for my tweets, you’ll see people who reply to me as well as anybody to whom I might have replied. I use this when I see people I follow replying to people whom I don’t follow.
- Twitter itself provides a range of “badges” that let you display your tweets on your web page, Facebook account, Myspace account and others. If you look on the left of this page, you’ll see that mine displays my three most recent tweets.
That’s just a few of the tools that are available. Googling “twitter tools” reveals that there are many, many more out there. This article has a pretty good list.
Battlestar Galactica
In case you forgot what has happened so far: