Over Christmas, I hacked together my first hardware/software project. It's been a long time since I've picked up a soldering iron, let alone built something worthy of sharing. It turned out to be a fun little project. Cause, effect, agency I got the idea to do a project over Christmas while looking …
On a normal Friday of a normal December, a bunch of families said goodbye to their kids and sent them off to school. Announcements. Meetings for the Principal. A normal Friday. Then the abnormal sound of gunfire. Of violence. Of death. And now, the sound of tears, of sadness, of remembering and …
Like many towns, West Hartford has a advertising supported, free weekly paper that's mailed to everyone. The latest issue arrived today with this as the front page article: Fire, police overtime nears $3 million in 2010 The Town of West Hartford paid nearly $3 million in overtime compensation in …
You can now pull in photos from your Facebook account. Right now, it grabs everything, but I have controls in the works to let you choose privacy settings or hide individual photos. There's pseudo realtime support, too. Proxigram should update basically as soon as you upload the photo. As always, …
Quick update on Proxigram: it now supports Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo sharing service. If you're a Pro account holder, it will even get realtime updates from Flickr, just like Instagram provides. The "point" of the app has changed, too. The goal is to build a single API endpoint for all of your …
I'm happy to share a little experiment I played with this week. I needed to take a look at Node.js & it's family of technology for a project but found it hard to find good explanations of best practices, etc. There are a half-dozen competing boilerplate/template samples that have very little in …
Where We Live ran a show today on why younger people (25-34) are leaving the state. I ended up missing the show (listening to it now!), but caught a very lively discussion on Twitter. One side conversation (you can see it on storify here) that I joined in on was about how hard it is to convince …
(I should point out, coincidently, and in testament to how obvious the headline choice is, the Courant chose a similar headline. I started writing this before I saw the Courant article, for the record. :-) ) I had a rather animated conversation with a friend today about CL&P's performance during …
That mouthful is my one sentence description of Google I/O. The demo floors and tonight's After Hours party are full of whimsy and wonder, literal playgrounds for technology geeks of all stripes. The atmosphere at I/O is all about the possible, the future, and the fanciful. There are companies …
As most of my friends and coworkers know, I've lost a whole lot of weight over the last year. Folks that see me for the first time ask me a lot of the same questions, so consider this my attempt to answer the most common ones. 1. How much weight have you lost? As of this morning, just under 60 …
I attend each Connecticut Forum event hoping to leave smarter than when I arrive. This is usually a slam dunk, no doubt it’ll happen thing for any given Forum event. Except, that is, for last night. The topic was Our Great Education Challenge. The panel consisted of: Davis Guggenheim, the …
I wanted to briefly expand on a few tweets I made during last night's Connecticut Forum. The topic was "The End of Civility?" and the panel featured David Gergen, Stephen Carter, Christopher Buckley, and Gina Barreca. It was a good discussion, and what I'll address was only one aspect of it. The …
It's hard to find time to blog or write or do much of anything aside from take care of our new baby, but I've been itching to write this post since we left the hospital last week. When you're expecting a baby, you can tour the hospital. They show you the rooms in labor and delivery and in maternity …
For so many reasons, Acadia National Park is special to Heidi and me. If you haven't been, you're missing out on one of the treasures of the National Park system and, really, of the east coast. The beauty of the park is remarkable (just look at the photo on the right!). Acadia's real strength, …
A while ago, I was looking at (and tweeted about) some dude's travel gear list and noticed a nice pair of binoculars in the pack, a pair of Pentax Papilio 8.5x21 binoculars. I saved it to my Amazon Wish List and this year Heidi bought them for me for my birthday. We've taken them on a short hike …
I've been remiss in my blogging responsibilities and, for that, I apologize. It's already January 5th and I haven't mentioned the most unusual of my Christmas gifts this year. It's the Back to Basics Egg and Muffin 2 slice Toaster and Egg Poacher. No, really! What is this thing? Well, if you've ever …
That's pretty much the review right there in the headline, but as I continue to stall actually finishing my work for, uh, work (I'm suffering from the coder equivalent of writers block on one problem at the moment), here's a quick endorsement for the Logitech Harmony line of universal remotes. While …
Another bit of Google fodder, in case others run into this problem. BTW, this applies to a computer running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), but I'm assuming similar controls exist in Leopard. I'll know in a day or two. :) So, on my work MacBook Pro, I noticed that the colors were extremely washed out. The …