Christmas Tree Cutting

The first snow

Rest of the photos are here

Hot Potato, a Collective Storytelling Location Based Service (wheew)

Sticking with the location based theme of late on this blog, I'd like to introduce you to a hot new start-up called Hot Potato.

Hot Potato CEO Justin Shaffer refers to their service as "collective storytelling." While Twitter and Facebook allow you to do that through posts and updates, Hot Potato is about storytelling with group of friends that is specifically tied to an event. The event could be a Tweetup, a sports event, concert, holiday party, app launch party, etc. Think of the service as a mini website that is created in just seconds where users connect, add content through posts, comments, and photos.

The service can be accessed through their website or iPhone app, and a feature I love is that you exclusively login through Facebook connect. That way your friends are already connected to you - no need to invite people and have yet another username/password.

When you create an even or post to an even on Hot Potato, you have the option of tweeting the URL and posting to Facebook as a status update. This is a quick and easy way to get a large group of friends together where they can access the event on the web or on their mobile device.

Due to the ease of the service, the simplicity of creating an event, and the simple Facebook connect login, I predict Hot Potato will be very big.
 

iTunes link to app here, Blackberry and Andriod apps are in the works as well.

You need to use Dropbox. Seriously.

Dropbox has surpassed 3 million (pinky to the corner of my lip) users this week and topped that off with a $6M round of series A funding.

What is Dropbox?

A single secure place for file storage across all your devices (PC, Mac, iPhone, and Linux).

Why use it?

If you are the average computer user, you use multiple computers and have files scattered all over them. Has there ever been a time when you were at computer A and the file you needed was at computer B? Well, if you had Dropbox, then any file you placed inside the Dropbox file folder would have been automatically synced and on computer B already. Not to mention - on your iPhone too.

How much?

So, like totally free man. (for 2GB, which is a LOT of freaking files).

iPhone App?

It's awesome! You will have full access to files, pictures, videos, spreadsheets, and presentations all from within the Dropbox App. The files are not editable, mind you - but you can email a link to a file from within the app that can download/edited.

Trust me, you'll love it.

Location, location, location. What do you think?

As an avid trend watcher in technology, I am seeing Location Aware and Location Sharing applications boom to the top of the charts.

Ever since mobile devices added GPS technology, geeks all over the world have wanted to utilize the technology for obvious reasons. Directions, Train and Bus Maps, Geocaching, photo locations, Wikipedia entries, news, etc.

The location technology chatter that is booming now is social media related. I'm talking Twitter, FourSquare, Loopt, and Google Latitude. There are dozens more and more launching every day.

Twitter announced this week that geotagging... is officially available. This basically means that if enabled by the user, (it's off by default), the GPS coordinates of exactly where each tweet was sent from will be attached to the message. So, for example, I tweet "Just ate the best Thai!", but didn't include that we were at Phenom on Northampton Street, you could look at the location data and see something similar to this. Geotagging will bring the internet local.

Why is this exciting? Well, the entire goal of social media is to be.... wait for it: Social. But posting updates and information to a one dimensional computer screen, doesn't really qualify. When adding geolocation (exact location including altitude), it brings social media to a real and usable dimension.

There is a solid advertising model here too. Imagine you are in Bethlehem and the Apollo Grill recognizes that you are close to their location through a FourSquare update or a tweet that was geotagged. They send you a message like this: Free drink on us when you mention GPS at the Apollo Grill Bar.

This technology exists today and as more users opt-in and allow their location to be broadcast, the more valuable social media will become. It's exciting, new and the possibilities are endless.

What about you? Will you enable geolocation on Twitter? Are you totally into the technology and the Mayor of CVS - Forks already or are you more conservative and not willing to share GPS data just yet?

Vijay Singh hole in one Masters 2009

It's apparently a tradition for the golfers to "skip" a shot over the water during the practice round at the 16th hole.

So Vijay steps up and does this!

Another angle of this is here http://golf.fanhouse.com/2009/04/08/vijay-singh-hits-hole-in-one-during-tuesdays-masters-practice-r/

Rotating bubbles - very strange

We made "bubble snakes" by cutting the end of a water bottle and rubber banding a washcloth to the end of it. Then we dipped the end into a water/dishwasing liquid combo and blew.

What is with the rotation inside the bubbles? Does anyone know what or what this is called?

Pretty cool either way!

How to Shoot an Anvil 200 Feet in the Air

Oli Lemieux training trampoline wall Dralion Cirque du Soleil

Highway Collision Caught By Dash Cam

Please wear your seatbelt, it happens THIS fast.

Bluebird bitches out a Hawk

All of these shots were taken today at the barn in our back yard.

Bluebird: What are you doing here AGAIN?

Bluebird: You will NOT eat my family MISTER!

Bluebird: LOOK AT ME when I'm talking to you!

Hawk: Whatever.

When Wild Turkeys Attack

This is priceless!

Some Pictures....

Winston the water fountain

Paige's Iron Pigs Cheer

Paige's special cheer:

Step up left, step up right, 1,3,4,9 - drink some Sprite. GO IRON PIGS.

When I asked her what the numbers were for, she said they were there so they could rhyme.

This was during our teacher outing for Next Level Development to the Iron Pigs Game.

Isn't it ironic? Finger bitten off during California health protest

(AP) – 8 hours ago

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — California authorities say a clash between opponents and supporters of health care reform ended with one man biting off another man's finger.

Ventura County Sheriff's Capt. Frank O'Hanlon says about 100 people demonstrating in favor of health care reforms rallied Wednesday night on a street corner. One protester walked across the street to confront about 25 counter-demonstrators.

O'Hanlon says the man got into an argument and fist fight, during which he bit off the left pinky of a 65-year-old man who opposed health care reform.

A hospital spokeswoman says the man lost half the finger, but doctors reattached it and he was sent home the same night.

She says he had Medicare.

O'Hanlon says the attacker fled but authorities have a good description.

source

Paige's Frog Alarm Clock

What you can do with bubbles

Google Traffic: The bright side of sitting in traffic.

The bright side of sitting in traffic: Crowdsourcing road congestion data: "This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. It is cross-posted from the Official Google Blog. - Ed.

What if you could do a little something to improve the world during your daily drive to work? Here are a few ideas: tell everybody in the city when you're stuck in slow-moving traffic; warn the drivers on the freeway behind you that they should consider an alternate route; tell the people still at home that they should spend another ten minutes reading the morning news before they leave for work; tell your city government that they might want to change the timing of that traffic light at the highway on-ramp. Of course, you can't just get on the phone and call everybody, and your one traffic report from your one spot on the road might not help much anyway. But if everybody on the road, all at once, could tell the world how fast their car is moving, and we could make it easy for anybody to check that information on their computer or cell phone, well — then we'd be getting somewhere.

If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that's exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.

This week we're expanding our traffic layer to cover all U.S. highways and arterials when data is available. We're able to do this thanks in no small part to the data contributed by our users. This is exactly the kind of technology that we love at Google because it's so easy for a single person to help out, but can be incredibly powerful when a lot of people use it together. Imagine if you knew the exact traffic speed on every road in the city — every intersection, backstreet and freeway on-ramp — and how that would affect the way you drive, help the environment and impact the way our government makes road planning decisions. This idea, which we geeks call 'crowdsourcing,' isn't new. Ever since GPS location started coming to mainstream devices, people have been thinking of ways to use it to figure out how fast the traffic is moving. But for us to really make it work, we had to solve problems of scale (because you can't get useful traffic results until you have a LOT of devices reporting their speeds) and privacy (because we don't want anybody to be able to analyze Google's traffic data to see the movement of a particular phone, even when that phone is completely anonymous).

We achieve scale by making Google Maps for mobile easy to install and use, and by making it easy for people to provide information about their own vehicle speed. There's no extra device to plug into your car and no extra software to buy. Google Maps is free and works with most cell phones, and the number of cell phones with GPS is rising every day. Some phones, such as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the Palm Pre, come with Google Maps and traffic crowdsourcing pre-installed (the iPhone Maps application, however, does not support traffic crowdsourcing). Google is fortunate to have a lot of people using our products, and that scale helps make our products better.

We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start. We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when you have chosen to enable location services on your phone. We use our scale to provide further privacy protection: When a lot of people are reporting data from the same area, we combine their data together to make it hard to tell one phone from another. Even though the vehicle carrying a phone is anonymous, we don't want anybody to be able to find out where that anonymous vehicle came from or where it went — so we find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it. We take the privacy concerns related to user location data seriously, and have worked hard to protect the privacy of users who share this data — but we still understand that not everybody will want to participate. If you'd like to stop your phone from sending anonymous location data back to Google, you can find opt-out instructions here.

We've already been able to provide useful traffic information with the help of our existing mobile users, but we hope that is just the start. As GPS-enabled phones and data plans get less expensive, more people will be able to participate. Crowdsourcing traffic gives us a way to harness bits of location data from our users and give it back to them in a form they can use to make impactful decisions that affect their free time, their pocketbooks and the environment. The more people use it, the better it will get. So next time you're sitting in morning traffic, turn on Google Maps for mobile and let someone else know they can hit the snooze button one more time. Tomorrow morning, they might do the same for you.

Posted by Dave Barth, Product Manager for Google Maps.

Thunder Hole where as many as 20 people were swept out to sea today in Acadia National Park Maine

Thunder Hole, originally uploaded by -SPK.

A 7 year old girl has died after a wave swept her off the rocks here today. (this is a photo from a few years ago.)

11 of these victims have broken bones and the Coast Guard believes there are other victims still in the water yet to be identified as missing.

Now, I get it: You want to hear the THUNDER at Thunder Hole, but come on, don't actually GO DOWN there with a 7 year old.