It’s about that time

By robla | Published: May 21, 2006

As folks who know us may have heard, my lovely wife (pictured) and I are about to become parents.  Not that it’s really sunk in or anything, but I imagine it will some time this week, as, well, we’re due and the doctors aren’t too keen on the idea of letting the baby just chill until she’s good and ready..

Baby FAQ:

  1. Do you know if it’ll be a boy or a girl?
    It’s a girl, unless of course modern science has totally failed in its predictive powers.
  2. Have you got a name yet?
    We’ve got a list, but we haven’t decided and we’re not telling.  We figure if the gender isn’t going to be a surprise for anyone, you’ll just have to wait to see what we have in store.
  3. Has Margaret had/done X (where X is some horrible pregnancy related thing that lots of mothers-to-be have)?
    No, knock on wood/vaneer/whatever, this has been a remarkably trouble-free pregnancy.  Either that, or Margaret is really doing a good job covering.  Or maybe I’m an idiot (more likely than her “covering” per se).  But as far as my admittedly limited guy-insight on the subject can see, there hasn’t been many problems.

So there you have it.    Watch this space…I’ll try to post the update here when there’s more than just a bump.

Posted in Personal | 3 Comments

Seattle Parking Tax: Money Has To Come From Somewhere

By robla | Published: May 19, 2006

Apparently, Mayor Nickels plans to propose a parking tax for downtown Seattle to fund transportation.  Fantastic!  That means that the people who commute to downtown from Issaquah or wherever pay some for Seattle transportation (as they should) whereas those of us who live and work in Seattle aren’t getting disproportionately taxed.

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Apple’s $150 IQ test

By robla | Published: May 19, 2006

I’m not an Apple fanboy by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have to hand it to them with the new laptops.  Not points on quality, but on revenue maximizing genius.  Specifically, charging $150 more for a black laptop.  People will pay for the cachet, and charging $150 is just enough to make sure it maintains cachet.  That said, please shoot me if I ever think it’s a good idea for me personally to spend $150 more on a laptop just to get the color I want.

Posted in Tech | 3 Comments

Mobiguous company names

By robla | Published: May 2, 2006

A friend recently told me about yet another mobile startup who I won’t name, but suffice to say has yet another one of those generic amalgams of “Mo” or “Mob” with some other word. It got me thinking “hey, I can automate this; maybe save everyone some time”….which I did (at least the first part). Applying my proprietary formula to the not-exactly-exhaustive-but-close-enough word list that comes with in most UNIX-y systems, I came up with a list from which investors, domain squatters, and edgy industry soothsayers can all pull from to define the vocabulary of the 21st Century. Particular favorites of mine include “Mobarrassing”, “Mobgoblin”, “Mocabre”, and “Mosogyny”. Definitions for “mobnobbing”, “mocialite”, “mocreation”, “mobauchery” and “mobsidize” practically write themselves, and it’s only a matter of time before some hack tech columnist uses one/all of these words with a straight face (or whatever face they make when they write that stuff) More after the fold…
Read More »

Posted in Tech | 8 Comments

What a great picture of me!

By robla | Published: April 29, 2006


I’m on the right, talking to Brian Aker down at the MySQL User Conference. (photo by James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media)

Posted in Misc, Tech | 1 Comment

28 years of “You Light Up My Life”

By robla | Published: November 27, 2005

I’m a big supporter of moving back to a 28 year maximum term on copyrights. I’ve been thinking about how to describe that, and I think I’ve come up with one way of doing it. Rupert Holmes would still be able to earn a living off of his 1979 hit “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)”, but Debby Boone would just now be asked to hop off of the “You Light Up My Life” gravy train that left the station in the fall of 1977. I think that that’s more than enough economic motivation society should provide to ensure the creation of such … (ahem) … classics.

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Scan of 1979 Sears Wishbook

By robla | Published: November 19, 2005

It’s amazing how vivid smell memory is. I remember the exact odor of the Sears Wishbook 1979 after seeing it on Flickr. I believe the Total Control Racing (TCR) track was the highlight of my Christmas that year. The TCR track was supposed to kick ass because the cars could change lanes, but as it turns out, it was No Control Racing. The cars would frequently jam up, or lose contact with the track (and thus, lose power), and centrifugal force would force the cars in the outside lane, despite your Total Control. I don’t believe the 30×40 Power Table Top Refractor Telescope was all that it was cracked up to be, either. But, boy howdy, did I want both of them when I saw them in the catalog. I think the Electronic Mastermind (which I don’t think was X-mas bounty) lived up to it’s promise as a product, and got much use by pretty much the whole family.
(via Boing Boing)

Posted in Misc | 1 Comment

“Playing politics” is Bush-speak for “thinking critically”

By robla | Published: November 15, 2005

It seems that whenever Bush or the Republicans trot out the phrase “playing politics”, they really mean “thinking critically”.  Just visit the following links, and replace the phrase “playing politics” with “thinking critically” to see what I mean.

“But here’s the question.  The question is, how do you respond to [the intelligence failures]?  Do you respond to it by correcting the intelligence, or do you do what the Democrats are doing, which is [thinking critically] with it.  And I think the president’s point was at this critical moment in this critical war, with this central front in the war on terror, [thinking critically] is not what we should be doing.”  Chairman of the Republican Party, Ken Mehlman – Transcript for November 13 – Meet the Press, online at MSNBC – MSNBC.com

Some of our elected leaders have opposed this war all along. I disagreed with them, but I respect their willingness to take a consistent stand. Yet some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past. They are [thinking critically] with this issue and they are sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy. And that’s irresponsible.  President Delivers Remarks at Elmendorf AFB on War on Terror

I’m sure there are other substitutions that can be made, for “sending mixed signals” and “rewriting the past”.  In fact, I’m beginning to think it’s possible to translate Bush-speak into something intelligible.  Heh…nevermind…I can’t believe I just said that.

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Seattle Library/Amazon LibraryLookup bookmarklet

By robla | Published: November 7, 2005

Stumbled into Jon Udell’s Library lookup bookmarklet and thought I’d give it a spin. It took some tweaking, but now I’ve got a Seattle Public Library/Amazon Bookmarklet

To use, just drag the bookmarklet above to your toolbar. Visit Amazon, search for a book, and then click on the bookmarklet. It’ll check the availability of the book in the Seattle Public Library.

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Posted in Tech | Tagged | 1 Comment

Giving Flock a spin

By robla | Published: November 3, 2005

….and of course, now that I’m sitting in front of this really easy to use interface, I don’t have anything useful to say.  Well, that’s a blog for you.  Plus, I’m feeling all Web 2.0-y now.

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Electowidget

By robla | Published: October 31, 2005

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on Electowidget. Electowidget is a plugin for MediaWiki designed to make it possible to conduct Internet polls and elections using many different voting systems, including the Schulze method, Instant Runoff Voting, Approval voting, and even plain old Plurality.

Electowidget isn’t designed for secure public elections. Rather, it’s designed for the types of informal polls and elections that currently happen on wikis today. It’s also designed as a tool to help election theorists provide comparitive examples of how a given result will be tabulated comparing multiple different systems.

All data is stored on wiki pages, in JSON format, and some parts of the system currently require you to get your hands dirty editing JSON. My next step is to hide as much of the JSON away from the end user as possible, so that editing raw JSON
isn’t necessary. One nice bit about JSON is that it’s a very machine-friendly format, so I don’t anticipate that step being too tough to accomplish.

The ultimate goal is to make a library that can plugged into most any CMS or other PHP application. A lot of the functionality is already such that this is possible.

This work is seemingly unrelated to my work on Spectaclar (user management project), but there is a tie-in. I’ve done some initial work on a CMS-independence layer which can be helpful in porting plugins to different CMS systems. I haven’t decided yet just how far I’ll take this, but I keep this idea in the back of my mind whenever I’m in that part of the code.

Anyway, I hope people find this useful. I anticipate it’ll be useful for at least some of the things I’m doing, so I suppose that’s good enough for me.

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MediaWiki OpenID patch

By robla | Published: October 6, 2005

Looks like Dan Libby posted a [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki OpenID patch. I’ll have to give it a spin after I get done with my current project.

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Coming soon: The Shining

By robla | Published: October 4, 2005

If you haven’t already seen this, you must. It’s a trailer for The Shining, only perhaps not quite as you remembered it (via MetaFilter)

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IRS file format for tax stats: .exe files

By robla | Published: October 4, 2005

If you want to get IRS tax statistics, looks like you better have a computer that supports .exe files (Microsoft Windows executable). SOI Tax Stats – Filing Season Statistics / Taxpayer Usage Study

There are so many things wrong with this, I’m not sure where to start…

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Barack Obama posting on Daily Kos

By robla | Published: September 30, 2005

It looks like Barack Obama has decided to start posting on Daily Kos

Of course, his first dispatch was “first p0st! LOL!”, but he’ll get the hang of it.

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Spectaclar: I’m not dead yet – news updates

By robla | Published: September 16, 2005

I haven’t had a chance to update things on Spectaclar or engage in a while, but I’ve at least updated the Spectaclar news feed with some interesting things I’ve culled from the past month of backed up blog entries. I won’t be very active on Spectaclar stuff for a little while longer, as I’m working on a voting plugin I plan to deploy on Electowiki

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I hope someone is working on Kwalify-type support for JSON/PHP

By robla | Published: September 5, 2005

I’m working on a PHP app that uses JSON, and I realized I needed a validator. Hrm…nothing seems to be out there. However, if I was using Ruby and YAML instead, I could use Kwalify. Alas, neither is an option for what I’m working on (an election plug-in for MediaWiki), so I’ll have to wing it.

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Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

By robla | Published: August 13, 2005

Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (Flash animation) (via Metafilter). Bravo! From the author: “I chose to illustrate the literal meaning of the lyrics in my animation instead of what it could symbolically stand for, simply because whenever I closed my eyes, that’s exactly what I saw.” Best Flash retro video since We Didn’t Start the Fire.

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Back from OSCON

By robla | Published: August 11, 2005

Grrr….I’m ticked off at myself for not posting here more. I went to OSCON and shared the love on Spectaclar. I haven’t been as active as I’d like on Spectaclar, but things aren’t completely dormant. I’m starting to mull over the idea of using Electorama as a testbed for some of the work that I’m doing, since there’s a pretty big community there, especially on the election-methods mailing list

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Many U.S. Cities Losing Battles To Preserve Their Burger Kings

By robla | Published: July 29, 2005

Every once and a while, The Onion still makes me smile. Many U.S. Cities Losing Battles To Preserve Their Burger Kings Quote: In Seattle, volunteer canvassers went door-to-door, collecting signatures to save the Burger King on Rainier Avenue. As a result of their efforts, Mayor Greg Nickels granted the store historic-landmark status.

“There are children alive today who don’t know what a Whaler is,” the mayor said at the signing ceremony. “All their lives, they’ve known only the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish. If you look into the eyes of such a child, you realize why it’s important that we save our shared Burger King heritage.”

Posted in Misc | Tagged | 2 Comments