HP recently released two apps that let you run an 12C Financial Calculator or 15C Scientific Calculator on your iPhone. The apps cost $15 and $30 respectively. Initial reactions around the internet so far seem to show outrage over the price, but considering the fact that you can’t find a 15C on eBay for less than $100 I’d say the price point isn’t too bad. With a phone, GPS, music player, PDA, gaming system, and more all in one device already, it’ll be interesting to see how quickly more tools & gadgets that we interact with on a daily basis will be virtualized, and available in one (hopefully easy to use) package. Who’s gonna give me my TV remote control & garage-door opener apps?

It’s official, the 08-09 Philippi Service Adventure crew is now safely at their respective homes. Ok, technically Eva is jet-setting around the country for a few more weeks, but she’s pretty at home on the road, right?  I won’t spend too much time gushing about our unit because they know how much we’ll miss them. But for those of you who weren’t here to enjoy the past weeks in Philippi, I decided now is the perfect time to link to a few more photos.

The New River Bridge & Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine	Backpacking in Otter Creek Wilderness Area	Blue & Grey Reunion and Closure week adventures

Now it’s time for me to get lots of work done in preparation for the upcoming school year (and a few weeks off in South America!), for Beth to get in some summer travel to hang out with friends, and for both of us to just spend some time together and with family. Please remember the girls in your prayers as they adjust to life after SA and us as we prepare for the next unit.

 I just love the random connections we make through Service Adventure. For example, wednesday, Jim Skidmore took us to visit Orchard Hill Aplacas. Rebecca & her husband (the owners) gave us a tour of the place & shared a wealth of knowledge about all things alpaca. I’d seen llamas in Peru, but they were mostly in pens & I didn’t pay that much attention to them. The really cool thing about this trip was that we spent a lot more time around the animals. There were 15 or so animals in a big pasture where they were… I guess you would call it frolicking. The more I watched the alpaca, the more I realized that they acted like big cats, or maybe dogs, and less like cows or some other type of livestock. Anyway, I snapped a few photos with my cell phone if you want to check ‘em out.

Layne Wyse recently posted a link about a book by photographer Alex MacLean titled Over: The American Landscape at a Tipping Point. It’s filled with aerial shots showing human patterns of development and their impact on the environment. I didn’t realized there was a fair amount of waterfront property near Phoenix Arizona before seeing this book. You should definitely check out his pictures, either on NPR or by visiting Alex’s website and clicking the “New Book: Over” link. You can also buy the book (and see even more photos) on Amazon.

As you may recall, the Philippi Service Adventure group had the chance to take in Barack Obama’s Inauguration back in January. I posted photos on Facebook & Flickr a while back, but never linked to them from here. So, in case you haven’t seen them yet, you should definitely take a look. The captions of my Facebook Album tell the story of our day in D.C. while my Flickr Set contains a couple more random shots.

I’ve definitely been keeping busy at Haiku too. I won’t say too much here, but I’ve been collaborating with a company named Noteflight to make Haiku a great place for teachers & students to share music. If you need a few examples of how sweet Noteflight is, check out these two scores. Take care!

I don’t know why I didn’t discovered these until just this morning, but there’s an excellent collection of time-lapse videos on Flickr. To watch them, click the little play icon in the bottom-left hand corner of the video. To watch the video in full size click anywhere within the video. Here’s one of my personal favorites:

P.S. I’ll post our inauguration story & photos here before too long, I’m just trying to get caught up first

Doing a bit of blog reading this morning I ran across RFC2324: The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP). Published in April of 1998, it defines “a protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots.”  lol!  Even if you have no idea what an RFC is and don’t care at all about Internet standards, this document is well worth skimming. Parts of it a dry and read just like any other RFC, but there are gems buried in there. Here are some of my favorites:

2.1.4   WHEN method:
When coffee is poured, and milk is offered, it is necessary for the holder of the recipient of milk to say “when” at the time when sufficient milk has been introduced into the coffee. For this purpose, the “WHEN” method has been added to HTCPCP.

2.3.2   418 I’m a teapot:
Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code “418 I’m a teapot”. The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout.

7.   Security Considerations:
Anyone who gets in between me and my morning coffee should be insecure.

One decision I’ve been very glad I’ve made was signing up for a last.fm account a little over a year ago. If you aren’t familiar with the site it serves two main purposes: keep track of every song you listen to, recommend new music based your past listening record. By now, last.fm has a huge amount of information about my music listening habits (more than 13,000 plays) and with all that data available it’s only a mater of time before a programer has some fun with it. One of my favorite finds has been LastGraph, which generates some pretty nifty graph of my listening habits. For example, the graph at the top of this post shows every song I listened to in 2008, while at right you can see some details of my listening activity in late July when I was listening to a lot of bluegrass and a little Death Cab. If you’re interested, you can even download the full, year-long graph (1.6 MB). Looking at a full year in retrospect is always interesting & I love spotting the little shifts and trends in my life. For example, NPR dropps off of my chart in July when we moved to Philippi & I didn’t listen to the Story of the Day podcast on my walk to work, or the steady streams of Coldplay & Radiohead. Sometimes when I consider the fact that I track nearly every tune I listen to, every book I read, and every trip I take it seems obsessive, but I’m always grateful in retrospect.

I just wanted to pass along two blogs that I visit when I need a touch of humor in my life. First there’s FAIL Blog which documents failures both great and small. One of my favorite recent examples was this failed article:

Then there’s The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotes who’s title is fairly self-explanatory Hope you can get a few chuckles from these sites too.

Will spotted this at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and suggests that the quotation marks may be “the deliberate accident of some wry staff member” which, actually, kind of makes it better. Actually, what would be best if it was some ostensibly serious demonstration of “talent” like karaoke.

In case you don’t follow my every move, I’d like to offer links to all of the photos I’ve taken, documenting the past several months of my life:

Life + Love

WV SA Get Together

NYC

Service Adventure Miscellanea