Baja Haha 2007

Much like the sailor tails of yore, I found myself shanghied on a sailboat in a foreign land. This is my story

From California to Wisconson, 1700 miles in an experimental aircraft

In late July I flew my Long-EZ, a homebuilt experimental aircraft, from California to Wisconson to spend a week with friends at a lake house and to briefly attend the Oshkosh EAA airshow. The journey was 1700 miles and took me over some of the most inhospitable terrain in the country

My weekend searching for Steve Fossett

As I m sure most of you know adventurer and record-breaker Steve Fossett went missing on a flight in western Nevada on Labor Day. A group I m involved in tracks ameture rocket and balloon launches, primarily via ham radio. Several of the folks on the groups mailing list expressed interest in helping for the search for Fossett whatever way was possible, and so Thursday night we met and made plans to go out to Nevada and try to do some searching ourselves

Home Fabrication

This weekend I went to the Make Faire here in Silicon Valley, put on by Make Magazine. make is geared towards folks who enjoy making things with their own hands, inventing and creating instead of simply consuming what’s available at the store

Yahoo Pipes, a very neat app!

Well, web 2.0, for me has a lot to do with making data available in an agnostic manner, wether that be via RSS or via a web services API. Data tied to a presentation layer, such as a traditional website, is data that has no future outside that website. The rise of mash-ups is enabled by data being decoupled from it’s presentation. Being combined with other data makes that data more valuable

Self-healing networks

Last year I wrote an article on building a self-healing network with off the shelf software components. If you are responsible for managing a large UNIX/Linux network it’s a must-read..

Project Management Tools.

I’ve been trying to find some project mangement software lately that’s compatable with the Getting Real development methodology. For our new ‘Locomotive’ project I’d love to find a tool where I can set out all the required tasks, and assign an hour value to them to create a timeline for how long each part of the project will take

My client, Avvenu, releases a great app

Avvenu got them selves some very good press after releasing their music player app at CES. They showed up on Techcrunch which linked to the article Go2web2: Your own iTunes PC! They’ve even gotten themselves well Digged. Their application allows you to listen to the music on your PC from anywhere, on most any device. Works for most mobile devices and web browsers. The coolest feature though, is the ability to share your music with your friends! You can share a playlist and your friends can listen to it via a nifty little flash app

A mid-January update

Cherie and I are still in Maryland, where we’ve had a strange winter so
far. So far we’ve only experienced snow covered roads and icicles
hanging from trees when watching the news in California… But yesterday
we finally got our first snow of the winter

A california road trip.

Heya Everyone!

Cherie and I had Halloween in the Castro district this year, but
leading up to it I had the most interesting journey from Manteca, where
we were staying with Cherie’s family, to San Rafael, where we were
staying with our friends Sam and Allison. I think I set a personal best
for the number of modes of transportation taken in one day. Cherie’s dad
Stan drove me to the Modesto airport. I then flew my plane to Hollister.
In Hollister I picked up my car and drove to the San Jose airport, where
I put my car into long term parking then took a bus to the train
station. Took a train up to San Francisco, where I then got on the Muni
(the SF ‘subway’) to within a few blocks of the ferry terminal, walked
to my ferry, which took me to San Rafael, where Sam picked me up and
drove me the rest of the way to their home. So to summarize… truck ->
airplane -> car -> bus -> train -> subway -> feet -> ferry -> car. All
in a single day