Ultranormal

  • New Digs

    This change has been a couple months in the making and this morning in my pre-caffeinated stupor, I decided I was tired of fiddling with it and trying to make things perfect and just flipped the switch – welcome to the new lawver.net! Why change? Well, I’ll tell you…

    I’ve been blogging for over ten years now. This blog started out on Blogger, and then moved to Movable Type fairly early on, where we lived happily for almost ten years. Then, Movable Type 5.0 came out and I didn’t feel like re-doing everything on a platform that felt stagnant. So, I decided it was time to move to WordPress and save myself the trouble to maintaining templates that were starting to get creaky and stale. I’m not a designer, and I don’t have a lot of time for side projects anymore, so I wanted something that looked good and that would be easy to maintain. I chose Khoi Vinh’s awesome Basic Maths theme, made a quick child theme to throw my OpenID delegate and Typekit stuff in the header, moved some widgets around, and then flipped the domain name so it points to lawver.net instead of the temporary domain name I set up.

    There’s still a lot of data cleanup to do (the content column is a lot narrower than the old one and Jen likes putting up laaaarge photos), but it’s all in the old content and I can go back when I’ve got time later and clean them all up (there were some issues importing the textile posts too).

    And since this post lines up nicely with The Ideas of March, I’ll try to post things more often. Our old install of Movable Type was so crusty it was actually painful to blog. I don’t see that being a problem anymore…

  • My Kids Are Ruining It!

    We signed up for Netflix recently, and I love it. I’m not sure why I held out for so long… Anyways, the boys have fallen in love with it too and are now ruining my recommendations by watching nothing but Mythbusters and Mystery Science Theater 3000 on it. Now, whenever I log in, the “Top Picks” list is all Jamie and Adam or Tom Servo and Crow staring at me. No documentaries or alternative standup. Nope.

    (Max, if you’re reading this, I’m kidding. I just think it’s funny.)

    It reminds me of the Tivo Thinks I Want WHAT?! episode. When Tivo first launched, there was an option to fill up the empty space with stuff it thinks you’ll like based on your recording and viewing preferences. Max was two or three at the time, and into Blue’s Clues big time. We were into The Sopranos, Oz and The Wire. So, what did Tivo think would make us happy? The Price is Right and a bunch of old game shows from the 80’s.

    Collaborative filtering is great and all, but when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong.

  • Do I Need Pants Today?

    Have you ever been plagued by that question? I know I have. So, at Rails Machine’s hackfest last night, I set out to answer the question once and for all. How did I do it? With this: Do I Need Pants Today?.

    Yes, it’s ridiculous, but I got to draw underpants and build something completely silly and launch it in about an hour and a half.\
    And because I’m a good little geek (and thanks to a couple suggestions from the guys at the hackfest), there’s an API too! It only returns JSON, because that’s how I made it. If you want to build your own app that answers the questions (I really think it calls for an iPhone app), you can call http://doineedpantstoday.com/?format=json and get a little javascript object that will tell you the answer. If you pass wday=[0-6] (0 = Sunday, 6 = Saturday), you can get the answer for any day of the week. AND, if you pass cb=YOURJAVASCRIPTFUNCTIONHERE, you’ll get a neat-o JSONP response!

    Yes, it’s overkill. But, it was fun!

    Oh, and it should look awesome on your mobile device too, in case you need to know the answer and you’ve already left the house.

  • Some Huck Hacking

    I used to work on a big search product at AOL and still love search, even though that’s not what I do anymore. So, when I saw that IndexTank and Heroku were having a contest to build a cool app with IndexTank’s search-in-a-box, I couldn’t resist. I knew I had to keep it simple since I don’t have a lot of time for hacking outside of work, but I knew I had to do something.

    I had two ideas, and went with the simpler one: What would happen if you broke a book down into individual sentences and made it searchable? Would it be useful at all? I decided to try Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, since it’s not too long, is public domain, is quotable and full of vernacular that can screw up indexers, and I knew it was available from Project Gutenberg.

    I grabbed the text file, cut and pasted each chapter into individual text files and then wrote a Ruby parser to split it up into paragraphs and sentences, which were then written to javascript files. After that was done, I wrapped it in a simple Rails app to display each chapter and paragraph, and then fired all the sentences at IndexTank.

    I call the result… Huck Smash, and I think it’s pretty cool.

    It was a lot of fun to write an app without a database or ORM, just a bunch of javascript files that Ruby can read and an extremely limited scope. I know it probably won’t win, but it was a lot of fun to write and only took a few hours to put together. Writing the text parser was a lot of fun, and figuring out how to navigate the book and build out the HTML so you can link to an individual sentence was cool.

    I’m going to try to spend more time outside of work playing with single-purpose sites and fixing Ficly up. I need to keep things constrained so I don’t bite off more than I can chew or over-commit, but this was so much fun I want to do it again.

    I’d love to hear what you think of Huck and any ideas you have for improvements.

  • My Favorite Albums of 2010

    I’ve done a bunch of “best of” music lists over the years, but this was one of the hardest. I gave up on limiting it to ten almost right away and went right to 18. There was a ton of great music this year across a bunch of genres (as you can see by the list). I don’t have time to describe them all now, but you owe it to yourself to check them all out.

    Again this year, there’s an appearance by some spectacular mashup work. Girl Talk gets all the press, but The Kleptones released the best album of the year with their double album. Uptime/Downtime is amazing, and while Uptime will keep you dancing, Downtime is the more impressive to me. It sounds like a complete album and you don’t feel like you’re listening to mashups. They’re just great songs. With most mashups, you’re totally aware that you’re listening to a bunch of stuff that wasn’t meant to go together. In the best ones, they’re all made to work and sometimes build an even better song out of the component parts. In the Kleptones’ case, even way back to A Night at the Hip-Hopera, they build great songs out of the pieces they find lying around to the point where you forget that these songs even existed in another form.

    1. Uptime/Downtime by The Kleptones
    2. Heligoland by Massive Attack
    3. Broken Bells by Broken Bells
    4. The Lady Killer by Cee Lo
    5. New Inheritors by Wintersleep
    6. Permalight by Rogue Wave
    7. Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons
    8. The Suburbs by Arcade Fire
    9. Together by New Pornographers
    10. Fields by Junip
    11. This is Good by Hannah Georgas
    12. We Kill Computers by The Pack A.D.
    13. Wake Up! by John Legend and The Roots
    14. Mt. Chimera by Brasstronaut (not available on Amazon, you have to get it from Zunior, but trust me, it’s worth it!)
    15. Of the Color of Blue Sky by Ok Go
    16. All Day by Girl Talk
    17. The Five Ghosts by Stars
    18. Latin by Holy F\^ck

    And I can’t leave without an honorable mention for new discovery: Lungs by Florence + The Machine – I think I’ve listened to this album more in the past few months than almost anything else in the top 20.

  • Christmas Fun

    Christmas Morning Face

    Brian really liked Christmas.

  • Me me me me me; it’s all about me

    I am the worst mom ever. If anything were to happen to Kevin, I’d need to pay someone to objectively coparent with me. BRB getting more life insurance on Kevin. And maybe a parenting book.

    Btw, the kids are fine. Mostly.

  • Home Blabberings

    Raise your hand if your formal dining room looks like this:

    Photobucket

    I wish architects would start adding computer nooks as a standard space in houses. And I don’t mean just an official office. I want a space for the kids’ computer as well as a real office for the adults.

    We have family coming to visit and I’ve been trying to suppress my desire to spiffy-up the place. No need to buy superfluous knickknacks, especially right before Christmas! I also have to remember to use my time wisely. Washing guest room sheets, important. Rearranging the bookshelf, not important.

  • Shmoopy Time!

    Happy 38th Anniversary, Mom and Dad. Thanks for showing me love, commitment, and compromise that has me going 12 + years on my own fabulous marriage. Love you!

     

  • The boys

    The kids have had a fantastic couple of days.

    At school on Friday, Brian was recognized for achieving High Honor Roll and perfect attendance and Max was recognized for achieving High Honor Roll, perfect attendance, and was his class’s Super Hawk, which is the best all-around student. YAY school!\
    At soccer on Saturday, Brian received the Good Sportsmanship Award, his second of the season, and Max’s team won 5-0. YAY soccer!

    I still think Perfect Attendance is silly, but as long as those awards are being handed out, I am going to brag that my kids got them. 😛