A few things (ordered lists are so passé, I know.):
- Finals week and I don’t feel good about the way this is all going to end. On the bright side, I’m leaving it all behind, right? (See #4.)
- I need to finish the Move Magazine site this week.
- Speaking of Maneater projects, the QuerySet Refactor branch landed with some backwards-incompatible changes, which means I’ll have to sort through the ol’ Maneater code and change it up before we can go back to updating on the bleeding edge.
- My summer internship is looming and I still haven’t gotten exact dates, flight plans, or my apartment completely set up yet.
- I’ve opened a new blog elsewhere. To be updated more frequently and with more passion and fire than I’ve given this ol’ thing lately. Inquire within, mmmk?
It’s a tiny bit overwhelming right now.
Yet another lamenting post regarding my lack of activity on this blog. I feel like I do this at least once a year. Eh, at least I’m Twittering. (As much as I despise cliche industry buzzwords like “microblogging“, I’ll be damned if it ain’t easy.)
I’m going to be in Spokane a month from now, living there for a summer, totally on my own — a change of pace I’ve been looking forward to. I’m actually for real going pro with this crazy career plan of mine — that mashup (oh web2.0) of web development and news media. I want to say I’m excited, but there’s far too much to do in the interim. (I don’t think anyone who reads this doesn’t already know anyway. Like I said, this blog was shelved for a few weeks there.)
You’ll probably hear from me again soon enough — hopefully with more detail than this ol’ summary. It’s the final push of the school year; you shouldn’t have been expecting much until after next week anyway.
Wired’s aggregated coverage of the San Francisco Olympic torch relay is awesome. I’m enthralled by the event simply because of the up-to-the-minute, user-submitted material which includes a live video feed from a user’s phone, a Flickr link for recent “olympic” tagged photos, and CNN’s iReports. The everyman has turned into the most up-to-date and most comprehensive event journalist. This stuff is awesome.
I’m reading into Qik right now, which is what the phone-based video feed is using. This looks like an excellent idea; I’m probably getting a new phone in the next couple months and might have to plan around using this.
Just noticed that a handful of my Facebook contacts are now in a group for Course Hero. It’s another one of those school help sites that involves sharing of notes, previous exams, previous essays, and other things.
Normally wouldn’t deserve a mention, but the thing that piqued my interest about it are the login and registration processes which involve:
Logging in with a Facebook account — similar to how OpenID unsuccessfully tried to streamline user logins, this is the first time I’ve seen someone use the Facebook API as a portable login platform. (Now that I think about it, Google may be doing the same thing with their Google Accounts.)
You are required to upload five documents before you can access the site. It’s ridiculous. And I swear I should have thought of it first. Like old P2P programs (and some present-day P2P sites) that require you to upload within a certain ratio of how much you download, it discourages (and practically eliminates) the peer to peer problem of “leechers” — people who take from the pot, but don’t put anything back in.
…Which solves the problem that other school help sites have — they don’t have very much content. There’s that Facebook group going at the moment, which is serving as a form of viral advertising — 100 joined in the past 10 minutes (I won’t). Which causes more people to register out of curiosity and seed more content because they have to.
The tipping point of true success (I haven’t yet found an education help site that I’ve deemed good, useful, or successful) will come when user registrations from the Facebook group slow down — the usefulness of the site, the quality of the content, and the willingness of users to upload material will all become pretty clear by then.
I love thunderstorms, probably to levels that shouldn’t be considered safe by normal standards. When I lived in the dorms a couple years ago and they forced us to the basement during a tornado warning? I was the guy that snuck out the back and stood on top of the parking garage to take photos like this one:
I drove through today’s storm, accidentally, because I didn’t have the time to check my usual radar page. Oops. If I’d checked it, I would’ve seen something like this:
Continue reading ‘Summer storms’
