curiousLee

I survived 24 hours of blogging!

Well if you followed along or checked in after my 24 hour marathon blogging stunt for charity, you'll see that I made it to the end. As promised, I've mirrored my Project Blog posts from hiptop Nation to my server. Click here, or on the image above to see all the posts. I re-arranged the posts in forward chronological order and changed the Pacific time stamps to Eastern. I also cleaned up a couple broken links, minor typos and lightened some of the dark images.

At the end of the 24 hours, I had raised $435 for the Alzheimer's Association, but on Sunday, I pursuaded my mother-in-law to donate $66 to push me over to $501! If you pledged via the Project Blog site, I commend you for making it through their wacky sponsoring process. Their system will soon notify you on how to make the actual donation. If you haven't heard anything by the end of the week, please let me know. And it's still not too late to donate!

Basically my marathon day was about photography, family and fighting sleep for a good cause. I got a fresh perspective on blogging/moblogging by having to keep to a rigid schedule. Thirty minute intervals are short enough that you can never really forget that you're blogging. By the wee hours, I had to make a checklist of things to blog about. Someone asked today if I would do it again. I answered yes, but now I think when this comes around again in a year, I'll say "been there done that."

Moblogging 48 half hours for charity

Sponsor me as I increase my blogging activity by an order of magnitude for charity!

I've decided to join Project Blog this Saturday, July 24th at 8am EST to blog 24 hours for charity (See the project press release). I'll be posting to my moblog on hiptop Nation every half hour according to the rules, and submitting from newly-replaced Danger Hiptop/Sidekick communicator will free me from having to sit near a desktop computer all day.

Much of what I might be doing Saturday is stuff I've moblogged before. When the blog-a-thon starts at 8am, we will have been up a while and walking the nearby farmer's market. Then I'll pack up my camera gear to drive west to Jeanne's house in Ellicott City, Maryland to do a third photo session with Janet in and around the house and grounds. Since we'll be down in a valley, my signal may be intermittent, but at least my entries will be queued up for transmission in batches. The photo session will end around 1pm at the latest and then we'll need to feed Cianna, go shopping and clean house. Later in the afternoon we might go for a smoothie. The evening and late night is when things will get more interesting as I fight off sleep and possible boredom. Expect to see some baby duties mixed with photo experiments. My wife gladly sponsored me $50 since I will be taking the night shift with baby Cianna. Of course I'll be guzzling caffienated drinks to stay awake. My last post at 8am on Sunday may very well be of the folds of my pillow just before my eye lids collapse.

So, you might want to check out the project site to consider doing the blog-a-thon yourself—or sponsor me for a few bucks to the Alzheimer's Association. Be sure to read the FAQ on the site. If you don't want to mess with logging into the system, just drop me an e-mail* with an amount you want to pledge and I'll enter it into the system for you. At the time of this post, I've got six sponsors for a total of $160 and three more pledges that I'm going to self-enter. Mark, my boss, appropriately sponsored me as the head of our board at AARP Services is the president of the Alzheimer's Association. He says he plans to tell our executive team about the stunt, which means I guess I'll have to keep my posts clean ;-)

The number of participating bloggers is now at 172, but I suspect there will be a spike in sign-ups just before the event begins. Buddy Heidi will be posting from Kansas City, and there's an art student at MICA in the game too. I see from her blog that she's planning to post around a theme (nude painting) as say others in the project's discussion forums.

OK, off to bed now to bank some sleep.

* This address has been blessedly filtered free of spam for a while by Knowspam, but that means you have to perform a quick confirmation step via a second e-mail if you haven't used this address before.

Update Friday, 7/23, 10pm: Well because the president of the company where I work personally sponsored me for $100, I've blown past the $400 mark! It's tricky to view the progress of my pledges because you have to wade through a long page of tables, but you can just go to the sponsors page and type Control-F (or Command-F on a Mac) to search for curiouslee within the page. All systems are GO, and I'm getting another good night's sleep tonight.

Twilight Moon over Madison Street

Ah, this is a scene that brings back fond memories of the time I had my design office at 4 East Madison in downtown Baltimore. As we were walking out of the first Baltimore Bloggers' Sushi Night at Minato, Amy pointed out the sliver of Moon setting behind the spikey spire of the First & Franklin Presbyterian Church. The complimentary wedges of dark blue sky and incandescent orange row houses on Madison Street were punctuated nicely by the crescent Moon.

Just inside the northwest corner building at Charles and Madison, a pleasant group of bloggers were contemplating a second round of sushi. Amy, Cianna and I stayed long enough to have a round of drinks and for me to snap the photos that are in this phonecam postcard (click for a large version). I pushed the source photos to a moblog post at hiptop Nation from the restaurant table. I really only had a chance to get a round of introductions and some snippets of conversation before we had to head home to give Cianna bath and bed, but Baltimore Roll or eebmore will most certainly have good write-ups and links. Thanks to you two and the others for building this community. I'm really hoping I can make it to the next event.

Six months of curiousLee Brain Food

A major missing feature in TypePad's TypeLists, which is what drives the "Brain Food" in the right sidebar here, is a list archive. You'd expect to be able to click on the title of the list to see that or be able to append an Archives>> or More>> link. I think it's been said that that is a feature in the works, so one of these months I hope. Meantime, I just went into the administrative interface and listed out the last six months of links to dump into the extended section of this post. All I had to do was use Dreamweaver to remove a couple columns in the table. There are also pop-up notes somewhere in the database, but those are not displayed here. Happy surfing through the 304 links!

Link Title	Date Added
Keith Instone's collection of stuff on faceted browsing of web content	2004-03-03
My boss Mark is in CIO Magazine	2004-03-03
Bull Session With Professor iPod	2004-03-02
As Apple's new iPod mini goes after the low-end MP3 player market, those products will just continue to get smaller and cheaper like the Hyundai Pendant	2004-03-01
Michael Bierut on Information Design and the Placebo Effect	2004-03-01
Genov Modified Stroop Task	2004-03-01
The Stroop Effect	2004-03-01
Teleport is black magic software that allows you to slide the mouse cursor off a Mac OS X desktop on to that of an adjacent Mac to take control of it!	2004-03-01
DxO - a powerful new tool/technology for correcting optical distortion and artifacts in digicam images	2004-03-01
A photo tour of the Nikon D70 factory in Thailand	2004-02-24
The Official Information Architecture Summit 2004 Blog	2004-02-24
Arne Hess is blogging live with photos from the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes	2004-02-24
New ITU Background Paper on "Social and Human Considerations for a More Mobile World"	2004-02-24
Another nice tip from Peter: Use the 14-day free trial of WebEx for remote usability testing	2004-02-22
If money were no object, I would subscribe to Inventables' DesignAid, a monthly sampler box of exotic materials for inspiring product designs	2004-02-21
If the quality of Paul's writing lapses, he can now blame it on his new cat's walks on the keyboard	2004-02-21
Qveere Eye for the Medieval Man	2004-02-21
Assaulting the Adjective	2004-02-21
Peter points to 49432 royalty free portraits	2004-02-18
Lisa Rein interviews Brewster Kahle	2004-02-18
Citizen Zeldman's troubles with Amazon	2004-02-18
Boston Review on how young children's minds begin to process beliefs in addition to desires	2004-02-18
I need to pick up Steven Johnson's new book, Mind Wide Open	2004-02-18
Good Space.com article on next generation Mars rover	2004-02-17
Home Automation with Mac OS X	2004-02-17
Articles on enterprise architecture	2004-02-16
Gum Blondes - portraits of blonde women made out of bubble gum	2004-02-16
An Earth Scientist's Periodic Table of the Elements and Their Ions	2004-02-16
Interview with Harvard Business School professor David Yoffie on Apple Computer's future	2004-02-15
Moonstick - a beautiful slide rule moon phase calculator	2004-02-15
Frank DeFreitas Holography Studio, Allentown, PA	2004-02-15
The Digital Journalist article on the America 24/7 project (nice QuickTime movie featured along with selected images)	2004-02-14
Interview with Henry Petroski	2004-02-13
In an article in Foreign Policy magazine, Kenneth Rogoff considers what would happen if poor nations of the world actually caught up with rich ones.	2004-02-13
Investigating the packing density of M&Ms	2004-02-13
Glenn "InstaPundit" Reynolds' reading list	2004-02-13
MIT Media Laboratory booklet: Momentum	2004-02-13
Parameter-Free Geometric Document Layout Analysis	2004-02-12
Siemens to show prototype of PenPhone; write a phone number and it is recognized by the pen and loaded for dialing.	2004-02-11
Decompression bombs	2004-02-11
Create a laptop-based portable usability lab with X10 cameras	2004-02-11
For journalists, but useful for others: How to record telephone interviews directly to a computer	2004-02-11
SMIL Generator for PowerPoint Presentations	2004-02-11
Elevator World	2004-02-10
The HCI Rap	2004-02-10
Image Stacker (check out the sample image gallery)	2004-02-09
I saw this wacked-out parking garage entrance a couple times a week when I lived on Wall Street. Now Victor has archived a photo of it.	2004-02-09
Word Spy: Cyberbalkanization	2004-02-07
Take Control of Sharing Files in Panther ($10 e-book)	2004-02-07
Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do)	2004-02-07
A beta of Apple's iChat AV is now compatible with AIM 5.5 on the PC. I'll be broadcasting live baby video to family members soon.	2004-02-07
The Face of a Spammer	2004-02-04
Journal article: Symmetry of Ignorance, Social Creativity, and Meta-Design (432k PDF)	2004-02-03
Engineering geek names son version 2.0	2004-02-01
Henry Dreyfuss' classic industrial design book "Designing for People" is now in print again	2004-02-01
National Geographic Explorer's Hall's new exhibit "Mars 2K4" boasts a full-scale model of a Mars rover. On display through April 25th.	2004-02-01
iPhoto2TypePad looks incredibly useful	2004-02-01
A detailed history of Visio	2004-02-01
It's been too long since I've hung out with photojournalist Harry Mattison and his son Sean	2004-01-31
Dan Bricklin's essays "What will people pay for?" and "Paying for style."	2004-01-30
Radical incrementalism	2004-01-29
The Maryland Congressional Delegation is of course lobbying to save the Hubble Space Telescope	2004-01-29
Smugmug Pro online photo commerce service	2004-01-29
Daily Life in Ancient China	2004-01-28
My wife and daughter are mesmerized by the RainbowMaker installed in the window of our baby room	2004-01-28
Margaret's Walking Stick, an ethnographic monthly	2004-01-28
A genealogy diagram of a large and old advertising agency	2004-01-28
Wired on the backlash against social networking services	2004-01-28
An interesting dissenting review of Jerome Bruner's book Making Stories	2004-01-26
The story of Apple's famous 1984 commercial introducing the Macintosh	2004-01-24
My new start page at work: Wonkette	2004-01-24
Mini-Flash movies on infant perception studies	2004-01-24
Writing the Future: Computers in Science Fiction	2004-01-24
Dan Willis has revised his "Oxygen Manual: How to Help Your Team Turn Good Ideas Into Great Solutions" (433kb PDF)	2004-01-20
An excellent survey of biometric finger, face and eye scanner technology and marketplace	2004-01-18
Not far from my house, sad times have fallen on San Martin Drive. The director of The Space Telescope Science Institute offers his notes on O'Keefe's cancellation of the last service mission to the telescope.	2004-01-18
Categorizing robot locomotion	2004-01-18
3D origami folds	2004-01-18
Levenger offers the Pelican Demonstrator, a see-thru piston fill fountain pen	2004-01-18
Stacking Up Creativity With Pixelblocks	2004-01-18
Background info, links and video on a fascinating NBC Dateline story on the phenomenon of "inattentional blindness"	2004-01-17
Just in time for a presentation I'm doing next week on personas, Victor points to Shedroff's presentation on New Methods for Designing Effective Experiences	2004-01-17
Eartha, the world's largest rotating and revolving globe	2004-01-17
Paul Goldberger on New York City's new Walk/Don't Walk signs	2004-01-17
Downloadable 3D Studio Max file of the Curta Mechanical Calculator ($35)	2004-01-17
Weebles Wobble But They Don't Fall Down	2004-01-15
The story of National Geographic's first all-digital photoshoot	2004-01-15
Technology Predictor Success Matrix	2004-01-15
The Exploration of Mars in the 21st Century	2004-01-15
Baby Food Flow Diagram	2004-01-13
Mondo 2000 interview with Brenda Laurel	2004-01-13
IEEE Spectrum Online has a good writeup on IBM's WebFountain unstructured content analysis engine	2004-01-12
Hans Nyberg has wasted no time in converting NASA's just-released 360 degree panorama of the surface of Mars into a full screen QTVR	2004-01-12
What the firestorm from a single 300kt nuclear explosion over the Pentagon would do to Washington, D.C.	2004-01-10
Constructionist play for kids: Soda's MoovL Java applet for doodling and animation	2004-01-10
The 3D Gadget Printer	2004-01-09
The new Photoshop CS <i>doesn't</i> show you the money	2004-01-08
Slate: The Decline of Fashion Photography - An argument in pictures	2004-01-08
A data mining glossary	2004-01-07
Handwritten Moblogging!	2004-01-06
The UPA Usability Poster: Designing the User Experience (1.6mb PDF)	2004-01-06
Hiptastic: The X-Ray FM Radio at Moss	2004-01-06
Elementouch: A 3D periodic table you can build out of paper	2004-01-06
Zero Tolerance Punctuation	2004-01-06
A super-detailed pre-assembled plastic model of the Mars Exploration Rover will go on sale in February 2004 for $150	2004-01-06
In the strictest interpretation of the DMCA, secret decoder rings are illegal	2004-01-06
I must remember to read through the posts about parenting in the archives of Andrea's Adventures in Binkyland	2004-01-02
Scott Dorsey's survey of Chinese restaurants in Washington, D.C.'s Chinatown (updated Sept. 2003)	2003-12-31
Why McDonald's French Fries Taste So Good	2003-12-31
Coming to the U.K. in 2004: A portable gaming device with 2.8" LCD screen, built-in GPRS wide area network, GPS, Bluetooth 2, ability to play MPEG4 movies and MP3 audio from SD card, SMS and MMS messaging, and a high-resolution digital camera -- all for under $200	2003-12-30
Japan Media Review: Cell Phone Companies Set Their Sights on Senior Citizens	2003-12-30
Would have been a nice stocking stuffer: the iFlex gooseneck holder for Apple's iSight web cam	2003-12-30
Samsung DigitAll Magazine	2003-12-29
"Squinch" analysis for print catalog pages	2003-12-29
Europe's first supermarket designed for 50+ market--single professionals like it too	2003-12-29
The Astronomical Brainabetizer	2003-12-28
The Photo 3-D system produces analglyphic stereo (requiring red and green glasses) photos from any digital camera	2003-12-27
1996 article by Denise Caruso on the then new sweatshop job of reviewing web sites	2003-12-27
Forbes on The eBay Economy	2003-12-27
John Wagner's super-detailed digital drawings of the Manhattan Skyline	2003-12-27
Must see new documentary on war photographer James Nachtwey on DVD	2003-12-27
Design Your Own Paper Box	2003-12-24
Law student Heidi Bond considers Sauron's offer in The Return of the King in light of contract law	2003-12-23
Harry raves about the new teaser trailer for next summer's Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow. I looked and totally agree with Harry!	2003-12-21
Incredible panorama of a storm over Sydney (right click to view image at larger size)	2003-12-20
Mark Goldstein's Photography Blog	2003-12-20
Euro RSCG Worldwide releases Top Ten Trends for 2004	2003-12-20
John Perry Barlow has started what should become a great blog, but I'm all over the Barlowettes	2003-12-19
Joel Spolsky on the differences between the UNIX and Windows programming cultures	2003-12-19
The Atlantic's collection of articles from a century of flight	2003-12-18
Bill Moyers' conversation with Mortimer J. Adler on Six Great Ideas (thanks for the book pointer Charles!)	2003-12-18
An Essay on Beauty and Judgement	2003-12-14
Christina's Widgetopia	2003-12-14
The iDuck USB Memory Storage Device is available for purchase at Dynamism.com	2003-12-14
Paradigm Mapping	2003-12-14
Professor Spahr's tutorial on using Adobe Illustrator's data-driven graphics	2003-12-13
James presents some anagrams for 'information architect'	2003-12-12
John Maeda's new book for 2004: Creative Code	2003-12-11
A dead man's switch for your web log	2003-12-11
Interactive Bow Making	2003-12-11
GPS locators for seniors (and kids)	2003-12-11
CryptoBuddy Secret Decoder Rings!	2003-12-11
iPod as Digital Photographer's Best Friend	2003-12-10
John Hagel's Working Papers on the interplay between new generations of information technology, operations and organization	2003-12-10
CSS Crib Sheet	2003-12-10
Beautiful: Moonrise Through Mauna Kea's Shadow	2003-12-07
Bill "Simplicity" Jensen's new book: Work 2.0	2003-12-06
Bluejacking	2003-12-05
Long overdue product: All in one stereo headphones and hands-free cellular microphone all in one	2003-12-04
Site Orbiter 2.0 site mapping tool for Mac OS X	2003-12-04
Chris "Anti-Mega" Heathcote's excellent survey of current Japanese cellphone features	2003-12-03
Jared Spool on Category Agreement Analysis	2003-12-03
Digital Sundial	2003-12-02
Meconium (baby's first poop) sounds like an element in the periodic table	2003-12-01
Edward Fry's Readability Graph	2003-11-26
Ralph Stacey's Agreement & Certainty Matrix	2003-11-24
I need to find this 17 facet hemispherical compendium sundial, which is apparently in Baltimore's Druid Hill Park	2003-11-24
Not that I use them, but here's a nifty little GIF banner maker	2003-11-22
Funny essay on the Diaper Genie (we just bought one)	2003-11-22
The Digital Bits DVD News	2003-11-22
Emory University's Globalization Website	2003-11-22
Steve's Digicams' early review of the new Olympus C-5060 Wide Zoom digital camera	2003-11-17
James Rosenquist Retrospective at the NY GUG until Jan. 25, '04	2003-11-17
Screen Tools is now at Iconfactory as xScope ... this should be an essential screen layout inspection tool for Mac-based web designers	2003-11-17
Mercer Management Consulting article on the successful use of "contentious debate" at Royal Philips Electronics (160k PDF)	2003-11-16
$5 will be well spent on this new e-book: Take Control of Upgrading to Panther	2003-11-16
Cold Marble's nifty multiple exposure and pinhole photos of last week's lunar eclipse as seen from Baltimore	2003-11-16
Ritz Dakota Digital camera hacked - mod a USB cable and you have access to a digital camera for $11	2003-11-16
Article and interview on the baby photography of Anne Geddes	2003-11-16
Text Fragmentation and Reuse in User Interfaces [that will be translated]	2003-11-13
Heartstopping photo of an auroral display over Oklahoma	2003-11-13
Digital rights management and the breakdown of social norms	2003-11-13
Playlistism is discrimination based not on race, sex or religion, but on someone's terrible taste in music, as revealed by their iTunes music library.	2003-11-13
The entire issue of the new IBM Systems Journal is on ease of use	2003-11-12
Great Flash animation on how LEGO bricks are manufactured	2003-11-12
Poynter Online's Photojournalism Tipsheets	2003-11-11
A Wired article on the International Spy Museum, which is a few blocks from where I work in DC	2003-11-10
Apple Panther 10.3.1 updater is out. Now I can think about cracking open my OS X 10.3 box.	2003-11-10
Welcome back Peter!	2003-11-07
The Design Observer web log	2003-11-07
Typorganism - a Flash site that uses sophisticated programming to deliver simple interactive games that encourage new ways of looking at typography	2003-11-06
Xplanations' new visual book for business professionals - Selling to the VP of NO. Secrets of the Selling Stars	2003-11-03
Bionx iRecordNow software turns your Apple iSight camera into a DV camera	2003-11-02
Oh, alright: TopTools Screen Ruler and Loupe for Windows	2003-10-29
Semi-transparent goodness: ARTIS Screen Ruler for OSX	2003-10-29
What digital camera makers can learn from the founder of Kodak	2003-10-28
Grouper converts news searches to RSS	2003-10-25
RSS to Javascript Conversion Service	2003-10-25
Newsweek Design 2004 issue	2003-10-25
An oldie but goodie: Generation of Bits - Tales of shame and degradation in the Big Idea Lab by Hunter S. Negroponte	2003-10-24
Massive solar storms on the way ... I might have to wrap tinfoil around my wife's pregnant belly!	2003-10-24
Einstein for Beginners, a documentary comic book	2003-10-23
Ansel Adams "Think Different" Poster	2003-10-23
A review of the book <i>Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena</i>	2003-10-20
Dan Bricklin highly recommends Clayton Christensen's new book, The Innovator's Solution	2003-10-17
Computer Graphics World features a case study on modeling a near full term fetus in CG	2003-10-17
Giant Japanese wooden keyboards for seniors	2003-10-15
I have a nagging head cold and Idblog.org's Beth is denying me sleep by turning me on to The Byrdhouse Review	2003-10-15
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University's Fall Report offers a meaty collection of papers on Weblogs and Journalism	2003-10-15
Robert Horn, author of the book Visual Language and a visiting scholar at Stanford, has expanded his web site and added some examples of mapping social messes	2003-10-14
A Mark Bernstein thought fragment on the role of imagery in web logs	2003-10-14
A new PEZ Museum in Easton, PA	2003-10-13
"Nicholas, you're not crazy enough -- the lab should be nuttier."	2003-10-12
MIT's Experience Sampling Method Tool for Ubiquitous Computing	2003-10-11
Arnold Schwarzenegger's Top Ten Rejected Movie Lines	2003-10-10
Victor got his IDEO Method Cards and likes them. Unfortunately, they don't ship with sticks of bubblegum.	2003-10-07
Adam comments on the utility of WINKsites for moblogging	2003-10-07
I wish I had one of these head-mounted video glasses when I was commuting to New York City on Amtrak	2003-10-06
DateLens for Pocket PC and Windows Outlook	2003-10-06
An open letter to "tableless" recoders (right on!)	2003-10-05
Study finds most local newspaper web sites aren't very useful for local information	2003-10-05
Have PowerBook, Will Rock: Wired on The Incredible Shrinking Studio	2003-10-03
Today's Wordspy: Protirement	2003-10-03
Photojournalist's shots analyzed	2003-10-02
Best Practices for Time Travelers	2003-10-01
Rediscovering RALPH - The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities	2003-10-01
LOL: WiFi Speed Spray	2003-09-29
Nice. I'll take two: The Zenon MagneFlash 57 flat-panel electronic flash unit for digital and film cameras	2003-09-28
Jeffrey Veen essay, The Business Value of Web Standards	2003-09-28
Lou Rosenfeld releases his Enterprise Information Architecture Roadmap	2003-09-28
Ray Ozzie raves about the DOD's new book "Power to the Edge"	2003-09-28
Coming in 2004: Nokia Medallion digital photo display necklace and Kaleidoscope viewer	2003-09-25
Disney Space Age Font	2003-09-25
Manna from heaven: information architecture templates and design documents from AIFIA	2003-09-23
IDEO Method Cards - buy your own deck of 51 design inspiration cards	2003-09-23
Beth points to Ginny Redish's PowerPoint on Writing for Information-Rich Web Sites	2003-09-22
I want one of these <i>just because</i>: Philips Camera Key Rings Wearable Digital Camera	2003-09-22
Daniel Rozin's incredible new interactive art project - Shiny Balls Mirror - 2003 (you really have to watch the QuickTime video)	2003-09-22
Virtual PC 6 Notes and Reports	2003-09-21
How much does a cloud weigh? The answer is surprising.	2003-09-21
Anthropologist Grant McCracken's trilogy of books: Culture by Commotion	2003-09-20
Paper on the "rule of 150": Co-Evolution of Neocortex Size, Group Size and Language in Humans	2003-09-20
From the Sept. 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly - E.T. and God: Could earthly religions survive the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe?	2003-09-20
Breathtaking visible light satellite photo of Isabel from NASA (1700x2200px 820kb)	2003-09-18
I think this is how Warhol would do Saturn if he were alive today.	2003-09-18
Michael Angeles' NY-UPA Presentation on Blogging in Corporate America	2003-09-17
Neato Inova 8 LED Flashlight	2003-09-17
The Economist on Flat Panel Displays	2003-09-17
Book: Be Your Own Botmaster	2003-09-17
The Atlantic's 1927 article: Beauty the New Business Tool	2003-09-17
A brief [and somewhat accurate] history of Elizabeth Spiers	2003-09-15
For James' Molskine notebook: The PrintDreams PrintBrush mobile printer	2003-09-14
Huge Diane Arbus retrospective coming to SFMOMA	2003-09-14
Nick Proach's catalog of space models, spacesuit replicas, and DVDs	2003-09-14
Next time in Princeton: Grounds For Sculpture	2003-09-14
Must See at The Corcoran Gallery of Art - Beyond The Frame: Impressionism Revisited	2003-09-14
Jim Lowney's Pictures From Ground Zero, Two Years On	2003-09-14
An unsettling Cringely column on identity theft	2003-09-13
The new Formac Studio TVR	2003-09-12
I want one of almost everything from MXYPLYZYK	2003-09-12
Picturephones Changing the Nature of Photography	2003-09-11
Interactive Visual Explainers - A Simple Classification	2003-09-08
Turn your Pocket PC into a professional quality digital audio recorder	2003-09-08
Writing Photo Captions for the Web	2003-09-08
An uncommon love of Chicago expressed in photographs	2003-09-04
Paul Ford delivers a latenight thoughtwander on how small elegant computer languages should inspire someone to create a simple language for web development	2003-09-02
I'm drooling in multi-color for the ColorSplash	2003-08-30
Beautiful reduction: Scott Christensen's "O" Tissue Ring	2003-08-30
Virginia Postrel @ AEI in D.C. on 9/9; I'm going to go.	2003-08-29
Interview with Virginia Postrel on her new book The Substance of Style	2003-08-29
DIY plans to make an Ingo Maurer LED desk lamp	2003-08-28
Blended exposures to achieve an 8-10 stop dynamic range in digital camera images (been doing this technique for a while now)	2003-08-28
David Weinberger's deep thoughts about the Web for kids in grades 6-8	2003-08-27
Today's (8/27) delightful impulse book buy: Schott's Original Miscellany	2003-08-27
Google finds links on "fault tree analysis" while I read the Columbia accident report	2003-08-26
Stock up on Mitsui Gold CD-Rs	2003-08-26
We're going to see The Blue Man Group for the first time on 9/5	2003-08-25
Clive Thompson on The Gender Genie	2003-08-22
Digital-Camera-Battery.net	2003-08-22
How to archive VHS tapes to DVD with the original flat-panel iMac	2003-08-22
Jakob Nielsen likes his Sidekick, but says we are one generation away from usable mobile devices	2003-08-21
Pepakura Designer - make patterns to assemble paper sculptures from your 3D computer models	2003-08-21
Global Internet Traffic Index graph showing the Big Blackout	2003-08-20
Unofficial TypePad User Group Forum	2003-08-19
Marc Rettig's paper on co-created, collaborative project walls is available again (1.8mb PDF)	2003-08-19
MIT's ACG is now PLW	2003-08-16
Voices of a Distant Star - an anime about love that spans space and time against the backdrop of intergalactic war	2003-08-16
Sweet: Sony's new digital camera that is like a MINI version of a Nikon Coolpix	2003-08-15
The Myth of Discoverability	2003-08-15
Update: Looks like I'm not done fixing my RSS feed	2003-08-15
A non-linear multi-mode Flash navigation system	2003-08-14
List of RSS Parsers	2003-08-14
Finally, a GPS card that works with OS X on a Titanium PowerBook	2003-08-13
The Elements of UML Style	2003-08-13
Abbe Normal's great list of RSS readers	2003-08-13
Conscientious - Joerg Colberg's Photography Web Log	2003-08-12
Illustrated MovableType Templates	2003-08-11
Enhancing and Assessing Spatial Cognition through Computational Craftwork (PDF)	2003-08-11
Figures of Speech	2003-08-11
Make grids with a layer style in Photoshop	2003-08-09
WiFi sticker	2003-08-07
HBR classic on the evolution of organizations	2003-08-07
A simple taxonomy of mobility	2003-08-07
Drawing to Explain	2003-08-07
The smallest ever Guide To The Internet	2003-08-07
3D Paper Models	2003-08-07
Comparative Usability Evaluation	2003-08-07
Using off-camera flash with a Nikon Coolpix 995	2003-08-07
EB White foreshadowing 9/11	2003-08-07
McBreen on Software Craftsmanship	2003-08-07
Map Projections in PDF	2003-08-07
Tate in Space Project	2003-08-07
Javascript RSS Viewer	2003-08-07

Red egg reminiscence

In a quiet moment on New Year's Day, I ate the last of the red eggs my mother brought to celebrate Cianna's first month. Staring into the salt covered blue glass plate that held the egg shell fragments, I started to drift back through all the great times I blogged last year. Instead of enumerating all the best entries here in this post, I'll just leave you with this photograph, and continued access to my blog archives here, on my hiptop Nation moblog, and the old Blogger site. Last year was pretty much all good.

On maternity, meetings, mobility and more

The posting to the main area of curiousLee gets sporadic when I'm in periods of transition, as I am now, or simply crushed with work. Hopefully, I'll pick up the pace a bit soon as I discover my new routine. Here are some updates:

Maternity - If you've been visiting for updates on the imminent arrival of the baby, the moblog is the best place to keep up as I'm posting almost every day. Amy's two days beyond her due date, and VERY ready to eject the baby. The doctors are tentatively planning to induce birth this Friday morning (11/28). Otherwise, she's in remarkably good spirits. She's agreed to let me moblog the birth (in text and images), and I promise some thoughtful, tasteful, and hopefully not-too-sappy entries.

Meetings - I can't believe I'm starting my fourth week at AARP headquarters tomorrow. The first week was mostly spent on addressing administrative details. Then I decided to take a fast-paced deep dive into the operations and set up 14 one-on-one meetings over the last two weeks with a large number of team members. I called my meetings with my co-managers "mind melds," as we had 60-90 minute wide-ranging conversations. Traversing the content, community, strategy, technology, and design teams has allowed me to quickly gather the data to create a concept map of the current state of the web site's operations. I also met with many of our key internal clients in production and status meetings. Amy was very correct in describing the life of a manager as one lived in meetings.

Mobility - I'm on the MARC commuter train a little more than two hours every day and it has become a good time to blog. I've snapped images during breaks in the day and written them up on the rail ride home after consuming a beer and pretzel. In case you haven't been scanning the right side of this blog, you'll see a link to recent mobile blog posts, and a list of individual entries under Mobile Mike. You can also bookmark the direct link to the hiptop Nation blog.

I meant to note here the events around the release of the America 24/7 book, which has a photo of mine just inside the front cover. Online pals thoughtfully covered some of the launch events for me. Eric, who works at HBO near Bryant Park in NYC, checked out the outdoor show of photos from the book around the park, and noted that my image didn't make the cut. I suspect I won't see it again since almost all of the images shown in promotions are people shots. Jessica, Rick, and Kale observed the in-store kiosk display that's everywhere. Alas, due to an administrative screwup at the project office, my image didn't make it into the online print sales store. I'm going to keep bugging them, but I don't have high hopes. If you aren't planning to buy the book, you can see about 80% of the images from the book in the online catalog. MSNBC also has a slideshow of a few images set to music.

Update 11/24: Oprah picked America 24/7 as one of her Favorite Things of Holiday 2003 and gave everyone in her studio audience a copy.

Mobile Mike feeds curiousLee

After looking at the now defunct RSS Monkey and Adam Curry's somewhat clunky RSS Box Viewer, I discovered and implemented the newly-released CaRP RSS to Javascript Conversion Service. Since TypePad can't yet pull in syndicated feeds as blog content, CaRP works well as a way to retrieve the latest headlines from my mobile blog at hiptop Nation to include in the sidebar here on curiousLee.

Once an hour, the CaRP server retrieves and caches the RSS feed from hiptop Nation. Via my account at CaRP, I've configured the system to strip everything except the 10 most recent linked headlines. After adding some list item tags, the resulting snippet of data sits on the CaRP server waiting to be retrieved.

When this blog page is loaded by your web browser, a line of Javascript code embedded in the template of the sidebar is executed to pull and insert the feed headlines and links. The hosted service costs $14.95 a year and saves me the hassle of installing and maintaining a piece of PHP code on another server to accomplish the function. But for those who want to tinker, there's a version for you to download and install yourself, or the developer will do the installation for a modest fee.

The Web-based administrative interface to CaRP is competently designed, but should only be used by people who are comfortable with coding HTML, and understand the RSS mechanism. There's room for vast improvement in the area of user interfaces for syndication feed management, and hopefully, the TypePad team will rise to the task.

Having my moblog headlines above the fold on curiousLee better represents my overall content creation activity. I post to hiptop Nation almost every day, so along with bits of information in the Brain Food section, the sidebar will be the most active area of the page. I can certainly post directly here from my Sidekick, but I like keeping my moblog separate and I'm very accustomed to working with hiptop Nation's unique four column picture grid.

With all the life changes looming, I suspect I'll be taking advantage of free minutes on the run to moblog more frequently with shorter illustrated posts, and posting longer entries here much less often. The next curiousLee improvements will be a link above the fold to a filled-in About page, global and footer navigation, a blogroll, and (most likely) Atomz Express Search.

UPDATE: Due to a clash between the way TypePad maps from the root directory to curiousLee and CaRPs limitation of one absolute URL path per news feed, viewing this page via http://curiouslee.typepad.com will break the script. Please use the official curiousLee URL: http://curiouslee.typepad.com/weblog. I'm hoping to work with the developer of CaRP on a fix.