The first ride of the season might be a shaggy dog

Finally, some time in the saddle this weekend! I managed to prep my bike for spring today, and enjoy 30 miles of parkway riding in Minneapolis' 50 degree weather, just in advance of the six inches of snow expected tomorrow. (No, I'm not kidding.)

I'm astounded by how much joy riding brings me. The last few weeks have been hell at work, I was woken up at 3 am by a woman buzzing my doorbell so drunk she didn't realize she was in the wrong building, and I've generally felt crabbier than normal over the last few days. Yet ten minutes into riding and my helmet can barely contain my grin. As intrigued as I was by the idea of riding, as much as I enjoyed being a passenger on Bumblebee, I simply had no idea how much I would love riding motorcycles. The rush of joy rolling the throttle makes me feel silly, a little inept at my loss for words to describe it, and very tempted to become an evangelist for giving a motorbike and an open road to every grumpy, downtrodden person on the planet.

Speaking of grumpy and downtrodden, I spent my Saturday at what might be the most disorganized DFL convention I'll ever attend (one that went so far past its allotted time that it finished in the parking lot after the building closed). There were some terrific results, though, most notably that Jeff Hayden, a guy with a spectacular gift for getting people organized, energized and motivated (very often while laughing their asses off) won the DFL endorsement for the Minnesota House of Representatives district 61B, a seat being vacated by Rep. Neva Walker.

I've gotten to know Jeff through our work together at Hearth Connection, and there are few people I know with his gift for quickly grasping complex, dynamic situations, and for intuiting the missing information that helps make sense of the whole. As he looks ahead to the election in November, I am tremendously excited by what his leadership will bring to Minnesota.

Speaking of leadership, I learned this morning that the good folks at The Google have created a new tool to synchronize Google Calendars with Microsoft Outlook. This is great news for people like me, who are chained to Outlook through work and the iPhone, but want to be able to use Google apps for their access-anywhere and sharing features. It's remarkable how long it is taking for our mainstream software vendors to work out how to have their widgets and applications all play nicely with one another, so that those of us on the user-end can pipe, store and update our information wherever we deem fit. I know, first hand, that data integration is never as easy as it sounds, but it's shocking that there hasn't been more progress already among some major, mainstream applications to have transparency between them. But then, that might make user migration to the best application a little too easy, and that might hurt the bottom line, eh? In any case, this news, combined with the iPhone's big software upgrade due this June, promise to make my appointments and calendars work the way they should.

And speaking of tech working the way it should, my home PC is not. I spent the morning and a chunk of this evening verifying that's it's got a nasty case of malware. Despite multiple levels of network security and resident antivirus software to prevent something like this in the first place, and throwing about five different anti-spyware suites to try to diagnose and cure it after the fact, it looks like the only viable solution is to format the hard drive and start over. (This time, with Linux as the foundation, and only using malware-comes-right-thorough-the-Windows via virtualization for the apps that aren't available for Linux.) Wish me luck.

My fingers are crossed: for better security, for better synchronization, for Jeff and -- good lord! -- for more riding weather soon.

Two point AWESOME

Apple has techies buzzing about the new features announced on March 6th for the next version of the iPhone software due in June. Version 2.0 will include enhancements for business users, especially ActiveSync for Microsoft Exchange servers (which can't help but be superior to the finicky, slow syncing with Outlook offline cache files that's presently supported via iTunes).

More importantly, it will finally open up the iPhone as a platform for 3rd party software developers to create new applications that run natively. (All previous iPhone development was limited to web applications. Among other things, webapps have the obvious shortcomings of requiring a web connection and being limited to what's possible within the context of web browser, which has little access to the other content stored on the iPhone.)

The corresponding new version of iTunes will be the distribution vehicle for iPhone applications, and as part of that, hats off to Apple for distributing freeware applications for free. At the top of my wish-list for the new apps would be clients for the following services:

	SSH (secure shell remote command-line access)
	VNC and Windows Terminal Services remote desktop connections
	Skype or a similar "wifi phone" service
	Pandora

I'll be curious to watch how Apple handles distribution of applications with the potential to cut into the business model they've used for the iPhone (and, in particular, the profits available to AT&T, their exclusive wireless network). For example, a Skype or other wifi phone service could allow users with regular access to wifi networks to use that connection instead of burning their cell phone minutes (and would be especially helpful for international travelers), but those savings could translate into lost revenue for AT&T. Having anticipated an appetite for such features, I'm not sure whether the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) allows low enough access to the underlying hardware components of the iPhone to create features like that. I'm similarly curious whether it will allow developers to add some sorely-missed basic user interface features, such as:

	A clipboard and support for cutting and pasting
	A way to play Flash content (even if in a pared back format)
	Support for a broader array of Bluetooth devices (presently limited to audio only; access to Bluetooth keyboards and printers is sorely missing)

At a minimum, it should allow someone to create:

	A basic photo editor (crop, rotate, brightness and contrast)
	Some information-rich widgets envisioned by Edward Tufte
	Psuedo-GPS (aka "location aware") applications

With the release of the SDK, Apple has also made a variety of templates, style guides and other components available to help ensure that the elegance of the native iPhone apps doesn't get drowned in a sea of kludgy add-ons.

I've put some of those templates to use in the development of my first webapp for the iPhone: an interface to the list of movie recommendations I've received (which I've stored online already for many years), tailored to display neatly and compactly on the iPhone, with links to more information about the films (currently, New York Times reviews and IMDb.com details), plus a way to check whether the Minneapolis Public Library carries the title.



For now, I'm calling it iLike2Watch. Movies, that is.

Losing it? Or lost it?

My current title is "Director of Regional Community Relations, Information and Evaluation." Gulp.



From Jessica Hagy's fabulous Indexed.

Happy Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day!



I recently read Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day, a compelling description of his experience with savant-level mathematical and linguistic abilities, autistic-spectrum challenges and synesthesia. Among his accomplishments: learning Icelandic in a week, and memorizing pi to a mind-boggling 22,514 decimal places, by visualizing it not as a number but as a landscape. (Oh, as a landscape... Yeah, right. Duh. Why didn't I think of that?)



Since the rest of us might appreciate the relationship between a circle's diameter and circumference a little more, um, prosaically, here are some more ways to have fun with today's date:



Pi in Music converts the first 10,000 digits of pi into a musical sequence, based on the notes you select for each integer zero through nine.



Pi in Colors, on the other hand, depicts the wacky number by associating each integer zero through nine with a differently colored pixel.

Thanks to Perfect Duluth Day and Infosthetics for the references and images.

Keeping track

One of the projects that I'm excited to be tackling at work is the development of standard metrics to help guide our actions, a dashboard for Hearth Connection's operations. We'll be working with Michael Quinn Patton in April, a local evaluation guru with a national reputation and someone I hold in high esteem. Between now and then, we're preparing our best thinking about the components of the dashboard, in the hopes that our session with MQP is as thought-provoking and useful as it can be.

One aspect of this challenge that's really struck me is the difference in the kind of measures that are useful on a dashboard. Previously, most of my analytical work has been focused on measures that document the tremendous job our partners have done in helping people transition from homelessness to stable housing. Most of these measures we've done a good job at "pegging": engaging people with long histories of homelessness, facilitating rapid movement from homelessness to housing, helping people stay in housing, and while they're at it, increase their ability to function in other areas of their lives.

The challenge of a dashboard is quite different: what measures -- what gauges on the dash -- communicate useful information to help you decide what to do next? A gauge that's always pegged at 100% is just taking up precious space without communicating any useful information.

The correlated challenge is to have measures that are few in number and remain intuitive and understandable. (Even if it contained a ton of information, there's little point in having a Rube Goldberg gauge if it takes 20 minutes to explain what it measures, or you have no idea how any change in behavior will affect the position of the needle.)

I'm excited about the resources we've found that will help us first decide on some of these metrics and then implement the dash. I've long been a fan of Edward Tufte's work on visualizing information, but the great folks at Juice Analytics and the Particletree have helped folks like me take those ideas a step further, by developing and consolidating tools to make implementing clean, clear, information-rich graphics more attainable for the rest of us.

And so have the folks at The Google. They've recently introduced their Chart API, a free, open-source way to embed charts and diagrams into web pages, just by sending them a properly formatted URL. I'm tremendously excited about the potential for this tool to help us quickly imbed elegant visualizations of data into web products, especially Co-Pilot. To give you a taste of the Google Chart API, here's a Venn diagram of the banners I've recently added to this blog, categorized by whether they depict friends and family, travels and/or motorbikes.



And speaking of travel, I recently came across a stunning and evocative work by artist Seyed Alavi, an aerial rendering of the Sacramento River, woven into a carpet at the Sacramento International Airport. Great concept, and, from the looks of it, an equally impressive implementation. Enough to even make me wish for a layover in Sacramento.

And we must. And we will.

Hear me now

Today, Hearth Connection had an opportunity to make the case for some essential funding for projects to help people break the cycle of homelessness.

I count myself lucky to feel so proud of the work and mission of my organization, and the terrific people with whom I work. The cause is just, the case is sound, the need is great.

And it's a brutal session. Wish us luck. Better still, if you're in Minnesota, send a note in support of House File 3381 / Senate File 3287 to your Legislator, and to the members of the House and Senate committees responsible for these funding decisions. Thanks.

Bend it like... someone or other

I've had a chance to play around with Garage Band a little more, which just demonstrates that there's a big difference between using the software, and using it well. But what the hell, enjoy my first track, Bent.

Pajama Saturday

Today was one of the more relaxing days in recent memory. I felt a bit overdue for a pajama Saturday, the only rule of which is no street clothes. (I cheated a bit in my early morning jaunt out for the daily bread, but the PJs were there... under a pair o' jeans.) The day was spent perusing Julie's iTunes collection, listening to the radio broadcast of Otello at the Met, eating well, tackling some techy challenges and just plain relaxing. It's been delightful. I can think of more productive Saturdays I've passed at home, but not many that were better spent.

In many ways, it's been the antithesis of the kind of day the poor soul who drafted this to-do list must be having:



Hardly on the same plane as kicking the junk, my results from today include changes to the look and feel of the Rooster's home on the web. I hope you enjoy the new rotating banners. (See a new one by clicking here!)

Pouring over photo albums to select them was tremendous fun, as was troubleshooting the Javascript to incorporate the rotating banner into my Blogger template. I started with a slightly modded version of Blogger's "Tic Tac Blue" layout, and found the script here. Tweaking the template to make the images fit neatly (which I'd say I've only 85% accomplished) required a lot of parsing of the template's HTML, a fun challenge. Less fun was figuring out why the script would not rotate through banners contained in a draft post hosted by Blogger. It appears that the kind folks at Google have anticipated this kind of use, and for reasons that aren't clear to me, prohibited it. (Images saved in draft posts will load fine when you browse them directly, but fail if you call them through an <img> tag generated by Javascript.) Beats me, but I settled for simply hosting them elsewhere.

Following a tip from the Idealog, I've also created a feed that integrates post, comments and my Google Reader shared items into one RSS 2.0 feed. (There's an atom version as well.) A great idea, but I share Jeff's skepticism: so far, FeedBlendr seems a little twitchy. We'll have to see how it plays out. Your feedback, should you choose to use it, would be most welcome.

Julie and I also had a chance to play around with Audacity, which I've used pretty extensively in the past, and Garage Band, an application I can tell will repay considerably more attention. Here's the product of our first few minutes of audio, um, engineering on her Mac.



I hope you've also had a pleasant Saturday, however you've spent it.