Erik's Blog

Several dozen times now I have come close to starting a blog or twitter account or Facebook account for my 77-day-old daughter, and updating it as if it was her talking about herself. But there’s something that always stops me. It feels vaguely unethical. Like I’m not sure that I would have wanted my parents to do the same to/for me. The Golden Rule and all that. It would be cute as the dickens, of course, and it would help separate my own identity and thoughts from all the reporting on her activities. Let’s face it, the Offspring post category has rather exploded around here lately. It’s one thing to do it for an inanimate object, but eventually she’s going to grow up and participate in the social internet world, and maybe she won’t like having these old accounts (and scatological status updates) lying around?

Can I get some opinions from my audience about this? Would you do it for your kid? Would you really enjoy reading Nora’s status updates from a separate account? Knock me off the fence.

I dedicate this post to my high school World Literature teacher, Glenda Stephens, who crammed way too much Greek mythology into my head. As with many good teachers, I hated it at the time and have been grateful ever since.

My favorite lolcats are the ones that are way over the heads of most lolcat viewers.

The photo was found on the internet by my friend, Seth. The caption is mine.

It’s really simple. I want my contacts organized in groups, just like any RSS client. When I open up my Twitter client, I want to go directly to my friends’ new tweets before reading my celebrity or news tweets. I care more about jagosaurus or sgazzetti are up to than what celebrities like Wil Wheaton or Penn Jillette or John Hodgman are doing. And I want an unread count for each group, like most RSS readers give. The total unread count should be shown in the dock icon.
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Below is my Twitter feed posted during the birth of my daughter, saved here for posterity.
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A month ago, a scandal rocked the e-commerce world. A Development Rep from Belkin, a computer peripherals manufacturer, was caught hiring people to write fake reviews of Belkin products on Amazon.com. The internet tubes rattled with outrage! Everyone in the e-commerce industry knows that the latest must-have feature for your website is customer product reviews. Amazon.com has been the leader in e-commerce since the beginning, and their review system is excellent. I openly admit to being influenced by product reviews in my recent prepurchase researching. They’re really quite helpful…or are they?
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One of the uses of Twitter, I’ve found, is for complaining when there’s no one around at the moment to hear your complaints. So you broadcast them on Twitter. And one common activity that results in the "bored and angry" mental state necessary for such tweets is being on hold on the telephone. Here are a few recent tweets in this genre from people I follow.
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Sarah Palin’s career has been full of ups and downs in the past six months. It’s interesting how traffic to my Can Sarah Palin really see Russia from her house? post has ebbed and flowed with Palin’s popularity. The other events that have affected this traffic graph were my blog getting dugg and a link from Bad Astronomy. Check it out:
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If you’re ever curious what the weather is (or was) like here, there’s a solution! I recently discovered a very well done 360° webcam in nearby Laredo. You can download 7330×900 high resolution photos from every quarter hour of daylight going back to November 3, 2007. It will also generate timelapse videos, but 15 minutes is too long of an interval to make an interesting timelapse video.
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Today I was accidentally plagiarized by one of my blogging heroes, Phil Plait, keeper of the Bad Astronomy blog. He wrote a post titled “How far away is the horizon?” in which he goes about explaining how to calculate the distance to the horizon given your altitude above Earth. His methods are slightly different, but his diagram and data almost exactly match my “Distance To The Horizon” post from last March. When confronted about it, he said,

Holy cow. Mine really *is* similar to yours. I swear, I never saw it. I even searched to see if someone else had done this before! Great minds, I guess.

I believe him, of course. Even accidental imitation is a form of flattery.

I still like my post better because I calculate the distance along the surface of the ground and I include a handy javascript calculator rather than a lookup table. Plus, mine has actually been put to good use calculating the distance from Sarah Palin’s house to Russia!

At no point in the process of creating this image did I realize what it would be in the end. All I knew when I started was that I felt like doing some Photoshopping. Struggling to come up with an idea, I was staring at some of the objects on my desk and two caught my eye, a gemstone globe and a miniature ceramic chipmunk. I’d already done the "creature standing on the globe" trick with the BITWRATHPLOOB blog header, but nothing else was coming to me. So I held the globe out at arm’s length, focused on the chipmunk, and snapped a picture. Once imported into Photoshop, I cut out background and removed some of the background reflection from the globe’s surface. At this point, it was clear that I needed a star field, so I found a Photoshop tutorial to generate one. As soon as I put the globe and chipmunk in the foreground, the text that was needed popped into my head, and I knew my creation was complete.
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