This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.
It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.
Fire Eagle has launched — a broker for your physical location, which other applications can use to improve user experiences. It’s really just APIs and geekery at the moment, but the applications that use and enable it will start appearing pretty quickly — I’ve already got a couple of ideas.
Apple sent out a couple of employees with bottles of water to keep the line cool.
Today at DevHouseBoston2, Shimon Rura, Jeff Potter and myself started work on creating a local geek-event aggregator/notifier webapp.
With a design sensibility somewhere between Craigslist and Upcoming, it should be live in the next couple of weeks.
Joy and I "adopted" a Tapir at the zoo last year.
As part of our tour of California, we've been attempting to sample the fast food at the chains that are only found on the west-coast.
The Six Dollar Burger at Carl's Jr, the Double-Double Animal Style at In-N-Out and a Jumpin' Jack at Jack in the Box have all been devoured. Plus shakes and/or malts at each -- The Carl's Jr. Caramel Malt is my favourite so far.
The weight-loss starts when we get back home.
Words that should never be placed together.
The largest tree in the world (note: no longer considered the largest living thing in the world -- a field of fungus is)
At the Exploratorium
With a bridge in the background
Joy and I sat on the beach for a while, watching some local dogs frolic in the waves.
24th St and Mission BART station.
One out shy of a no-hitter, Curt Schilling talks to Tina Cervasio of NESN.
This was out number 24 en route to what looked like a no-hitter.
Apparently, in Oakland the crowd need to be *told* to cheer their team.
Peering through a TV camera.
Here's what it looked like from Row 35 in Section 110 of the McAfee Coliseum. The tickets were considerably cheaper (and easier to come-by) than their Fenway equivalents.
Schilling warming up.
At the Jelly Belly factory.
When we arrived, there was someone posing next to the sign and having his photo taken. I'm not that much of a fanboy, so I just took a shot out the car window as I drove by.
(I did end up spending $120 in the Apple Company Store, though!)
One of Sarah Winchester's more interesting architectural features -- the door from the second floor to the garden.
Joy wearing her hard-hat, before we went a-adventuring on the Winchester Mystery House behind-the-scenes tour.
Looking through the list of "Things To Do In San Jose" that was in our hotel, Joy immediately went "Oooh!" when she saw a mini-golf course.
We went to get hot dogs at Pink's, having heard good things about them, but a 45 minute wait in the sun didn't appeal. Maybe another time.
The second flyer I received from Scientologists today. Rather disingenuously, this one doesn't feature the word "scientology" anywhere on it. (It's credited to the "Citizens Commission on Human Rights® International")
It's only because of that whole BBC Panorama farrago from a few weeks that I know that the "An Industry Of Death" thing is anything to do with them.
Most bizarre thing spotted in a Hollywood gift-shop so far.
Flyer from the first time (of three) I was approached by Scientologists on Hollywood Boulevard today. At least this one mentions Scientology.
When Bacon's in the back of the car, and I'm stopped in traffic, he loves sticking his head out the window and getting adoration from the other drivers.
Road testing my new GPS in Cambridge gave this rather bizarre instruction (it's telling me to take a "left on Magazine St", but the illustration is actually taking a right onto Massachusetts Ave).
Proof that the roads of New England are too much for even the smartest of technology to deal with.
The blinding light of the LCD projector, above a pretty full (and frustratingly loud-at-the-back) room.
Spotted on a door at Fenway: The secret instructions for making a footlong hotdog. WIth this recipe, I shall RULE THE WORLD!
Joy and my parents at Fenway Park.
You'll note that my dad (who's never been to a baseball game before) and my mum (who's been once) are both wearing Red Sox jackets. I'd mentioned to them the night before that it can get kind of chilly in the evening, so they should maybe bring a jacket. So when they happened upon Red Sox jackets at Marshall's earlier in the day, they snapped them up.
Classy!
WEEI and ESPN Radio were both handing out Japanese signs for the crowd to hold up. No idea what they say, though. (Outside the park after the game, the Sully's Tees folks were selling shirts that said "YANKEES SUCK" in Japanese. Some things are universal)
These guys were a couple of rows back from us. Joy & I are totally going to rip off their idea this Hallowe'en.
ZoneTag: Photosphere / About. Owner only: Fix Location / Add Tags / Settings
Handed out outside the park.
First person I saw with a MATSUZAKA 18 shirt on. Saw a fair few people who'd recycled their "DAMON 18" shirts from before he went evil.
First piece of Japanese writing I saw near Fenway, outside the Popeye's Chicken.
This is why watching the Sox in HD is so important. Sure, the game's a bit clearer, but really, it's all about those moments when Orsillo & Remy lose their everloving minds and amuse themselves.
Here, they take a fan to task who had removed his shirt (along with his friends) to spell "BOSTON" across their chests. They spent a good two minutes discussing how he should trim his chest hair, pondering whether it joined around the back, doodling with the telestrator, and commenting how he reminded them of Austin Powers. The cameras even cut away from Youk's home run to show this guy putting his shirt back on.
Hooray for Don and the Remdawg.
Clyde got attacked by another dog at the dog park this evening, and we had to take him to the vet to get the cuts looked at. A few staples later and he should be right as rain.
Thankfully, he's taking it all in his stride -- apart from strongly refusing to be put into one of those headcone things. No amount of snausages would convince him to wear it!
Joy savours the delight that is the "Berry Smoothie" barium stomach liner, prior to her CT scan today.
The tenth Web Innovators Group meetup. By my guesstimate, there were well over 200 people there this evening, a far cry from the 60 or so crammed into the back room at Tommy Doyle's the first time I went.
It just seems right that the first story I pulled up on the new Wii "News Channel" was about the European PS3 launch.
On the left, a doozer. On the right, my new Nabaztag/tag, who I've named "Doozer".
Somerville changed their Trash pickup policy on the 1st January. Now trash will only be accepted if it's in, or on, a trashcan; you can't just leave the bags on ground level. I forsee my future of creative stacking. (Or, perhaps, going out and buying a second bin.)
Theo, middle child of the multi-talented Cheever brood, shows off his prowess on "the skins".
Just launched my rebuilt and redesigned blog. It's still a bit on the brittle side, but I'm really happy with it as a first step.
Bacon, too tired to swat off the ribbon we attached to him.
Bacon doing his best Rudolph impression by hiding behind a carnation.
Not terribly legible (wonder if component cables will make a difference), but here's my blog on the telly, courtesy of the freshly-launched "Internet Channel" on my Wii.
Rather surprisingly, the browser supports Flash video, so the combination of Wii and YouTube finally gives me a way to, if you can imagine such a thing, enjoy watching video on my television.
Mac owners attract each other, it seems.
My Wii, looking all patriotic after the application of a decal from DecalGirl.com.
Inappropriate beverage dispensers, spotted in Target.
This is a cool new feature in ZoneTag: Gather up your location information in your cellphone (either with a Bluetooth GPS, or just by cell-tower/location matching), then upload photos taken with your regular camera to Flickr and have ZoneTag geotag them automagically.
One of the advantages of working at a location with the street address of "The Mountain"? Getting to see some gorgeous sunsets from the parking lot.
I wore my kilt into work today, for reasons that aren't terribly interesting (let's just say I agreed to it on Saturday night after I'd imbibed some Harpoon Barleywine.)
If anyone asked, I told them it was "Sean Connery Day".
Home, unpacked, and rawkin'! Four hours in the cold? Worth it!
The Wii bundle (the console plus Excite Truck and Zelda, neither of which I really wanted, but which I should be able to sell on eBay no problem), plus Super Monkey Ball and Rayman: Raving Rabbids. In my car boot. Mine!
I'm a happy camper.
Updated to add: Zelda and Excite Truck both sold on half.com in about 10 minutes, recouping my $90. Ace!
Twelfth in line. My Costco had 48 to hand out, and everyone in line at 9am got one. In fact, the manager had to stand around outside with a spare ticket until a family showed up at 9.31am and claimed the final system!
This kind gentleman showed up with a Box of Joe and donuts to share amongst the line.
The line for Wii, outside Costco in Everett MA at about 7.30am.
Originally, I was planning on going to Target, but when I got there about 6.30, they'd already handed out tickets to the line for all the systems they had. (Some students were offering to sell their places in line. I didn't bother asking for how much)
The official word from Costco earlier in the week had been that they weren't stocking Wii's in their retail stores, to avoid lines. This turned out to be untrue, as when I wandered round the corner, there were 11 people waiting, including an off-duty Costco employee who said they had 48 in stock!
New in the freezer section at Stop & Shop. "Diana Ross & The Temptations' Salisbury Steak Dinner" not pictured.
Tucked under my windscreen wiper on Landsdowne St. As I approached my car, I thought I'd got a parking ticket. Instead, I just got redemption. Phew!
The badges being handed out at the Weekly Dig "Dig This" awards party.
My birthday present from my wee sister? 2.5lbs of cheesecake, overnighted from the Carnegie Deli in New York.
I treated Joy to a box of Moo Cards for herself -- each illustrated with a photo of the dogs. Here are two, resting in some dog photo holders I picked up for her at Philadelphia Airport.
This is the pressure-gauge on the outside of our central heating furnace that gave up the ghost over the weekend. You might note that the clear protective plastic shield on it has turned brown, melted and buckled.
This is because the furnace apparently decided that merely heating water into steam and pushing it around our radiators was, shall we say, passé, and instead dived head-first into a mission of heating itself up to a frighteningly hot temperature and dripping boiling water onto the basement floor.
Remind me again why home-ownership is a good idea?
With little regard for public safety, I snapped a bunch of shots with my cellphone on my way home from work, which are lovingly (and automagically) placed along my route via the brilliance of Zonetag and Flickr.
Good overview from Tom Coates on how to get your cellphone geotagging and uploading photos automagically. This is the process I use, and I recommend the Nokia 6682 highly. It’s a decent-ish camera, and a great phone.
A mixture of Boston, Bassets and a Bunch of other stuff. They look great, especially considering most of the photos were taken with crappy cameraphones!
Sadly, two of the twenty images I uploaded got printed as "Unavailable photo:" Not sure what caused that, but I'm gonna ping Moo and see what happened.
Someone's been decorating the tree trunks around Union Square.
This is odd. Dunkin Donuts cups currently proclaim that they were awarded a "Best of Boston" award by Boston Magazine this year. However, a search of the Best of Boston site finds no such win.
In fact, it appears that the "award" was merely a corporate agreement to use the cup on the magazine cover.
I love DD as much as the next New Englander, but since the "Best of Boston" usually _means_ something (unlike some other awards, which just rank which business did the best job getting their customers to ballot-stuff), it seems massively lame to whore the title this way.
For our third wedding anniversary, I treated meself and the missus to tickets to see Jon Stewart do standup. He was splendidly entertaining, though it seemed like he hadn't updated his standup act much over the last few years (jokes about Y2K, the Million Man March and Rodney King!)
Tim Westergren of Pandora, talking with a hundred-or-so interested students and other music geeks at MIT.
A subset of the crowd at the Pandora Town Hall.
The light show was really quite stunning, but of course, looks like ass on my cameraphone. Their use of scrolling ticker displays reminded me somewhat of the Blue Man Group!
Clyde isn't spritely enough to hop onto the bed like Bacon, so he's made himself a little nest in the corner of the bedroom.
Clearly the presenter from Traineo had not performed sufficient sacrifices to the god of demos before getting up at the Web Innovators Group. Within 10 seconds of starting, his laptop bluescreened.
And all the Mac fanboys in the crowd smiled to themselves.
The grand finale for the Stones gig, ending at 11pm precisely.
Truly rock'n'roll at its most punctual.
I managed to nab some free tickets to tonight's Stones gig in Foxborough. We were up in the nosebleediest of nosebleeds, but for free, we weren't complaining.
Open-top Double Decker Routemaster London bus driving round the streets of Cambridge, MA.
Bobbleheads of the Red Sox commentators.
Taken during the Bose Cruise (It's like a Booze Cruise, but with less alcohol, and greater noise reduction).
A tanker navigating Boston Harbor with a few tugboats guiding it.
My favourite new piece of architecture in Boston.
Descending to Logan.
Just discovered that when I use ZoneTag with my GPS whilst driving, it not only tags the photo with "driving", but also the speed at which I was going.
Which was 65mph when I took the photo of this road sign, apparently.
Refreshingly honest, but it really feels like the New Hampshire tourist board isn't even trying anymore.
Joy hadn't had enough sleep, and her epilepsy was playing up, so for her, the walking tour of Kilmainham Gaol was more of a napping-and-leaning tour.
AMC apparently has a policy that you are not allowed to take rubber snakes into movie theaters showing Snakes on a Plane. These were the contraband snakes confiscated prior to this evening's showing.
What a corny pun.
The final bridge before victory.
Fabio is on the right. Peter is on the left.
The red carpet bridge was right below us, but we took another thirty minutes to find our way there.
This was my team.
This afternoon, our team at work took a group outing (under the auspices of "team building exercise") to the Davis Mega-Maze, a massive maze through 10-foot-tall corn. It took us an hour to find our way out!
When I got home from work, there was an unexpected package on the doorstep from Petco.com.
"Crap!", thinks I. "Clearly Bacon has got himself a credit card, and entered the murky world of e-commerce."
Luckily, it turned out to be a gift from the lovely folks at Reddit, as thanks to Bacon for appearing in banner ads for them!
As a precaution, though, I've taken away Bacon's pre-authorized credit-card application forms. You can't be too careful.
One of my pet peeves is when I'm trying to find a friend's house, but can't read any of the house numbers on the street.
I just installed this number on our house this week. It's a nifty design -- It's solar-powered, so it charges its battery during the day, then when it gets dark, lights up using a couple of white LEDs.
The things I do to help out our friends. (OK, I'll be honest: Most visitors to our front door are Chinese and Pizza delivery guys).
$20 from ThinkGeek.
My chum Noel and I sample Arrogant Bastard Ale. The bottle warned us "You probably won't like this," and it was right.
Having woken up to a particularly stonking case of bedhead this morning, I inwardly-dialogued "fuck it!" and asked Joy to help me take my beardtrimmer to my head.
Lesson learned? Next time, use a longer setting on the trimmer, cause my blond hair is nearly transparent this short.
Ah, I love the crap they sell at Brookstone. The overpriced junk that gives the air of being vaguely useful, but is too cheap and shoddy to actually solve a problem well.
My favourite one that I saw yesterday was this $50 massive universal remote. Pretend to be a Lilliputian from the comfort of your couch!
Joy bowling at King's. For a crappy cameraphone shot, I think this turned out pretty good!
Some of the bassets relaxing in the shade at the Colonial Basset Hound Rescue Basset Bash.
This adorable little puppy stole everyone's hearts at the Basset Bash.
Joy attacks me on the dodgems at Canobie Lake.
The Puffy AmiYumi Splurge! Splurge! Splurge! tour. They read their on-stage banter off of notebooks. "Thank you. You guys... are.. the.. best?" It only sounded 5% more scripted than when native English-speaking bands do it..
A (year-and-a-half) belated first wedding anniversary gift from our smashing chum, Cheryl: A signed Garry Trudeau print of Mike & JJ from Doonesbury.
Hopefully, our marriage will turn out happier than theirs!
The lead singer, Chantel, has a helluva lot of energy in her. Especially considering they've cancelled the next four dates in the tour because she's sprained her leg.
Chantel getting the crowd to crouch during "nth Degree". As I took this photo, she was admonishing the Axis security, and telling them to crouch too.
Managed to get a pair of "Standing Room" tickets in the "State Street Pavillion" at Fenway. Since it was a pretty grey day, not everyone had shown up, so we had seats for the whole game. Result!
I bought the DS Lite that I've been craving for so long this morning. Joy's been quite taken with Brain Age.
I'm hoping to get it back off her soon so that I can indulge in a little more Super Mario.
"Pierre Francois from Underscore_ Consulting" (who looked alarmingly similar to Alexis from Reddit) did a great presentation, somewhat reminiscent of Stephen Colbert's "The Word" segment. The video should be up soon.
Geekfood
Spotted on Brian's laptop. Purchasable from GoatseSticker.com
This was right at the start of BarCamp, before it got completely filled for the day.
I'm playing with a loaned XM Inno radio at the moment. It's considerably shinier than my olde Roady -- Nice colour screen, the ability to save tracks you like, and a reasonably decent UI for browsing stations (better than the one on the competing Sirius player.)
And hey! If they're getting sued by the RIAA, they've got to be doing _something_ right!
Our basement, with the delightful addition of a couple of inches of floodwater. Every hardware store in the area is sold out of pumps, so we're waiting for the fire department to pop round and help us out. Oh, the joys of homeownership.
Do Stop & Shop lie? Is this really "Extra Light" enough for Shangri-La?
My Brother-(in-law)^2's band. Fine garage-rawk tunes can be found at their MySpace page.
Bacon suffered a back injury this week -- A slipped disc or a pinched nerve, reckons the vet. Poor little bugger has the be kept in his crate (except for "short leashed walks") for two weeks.
Since he's caged and being fed steroids, Keith suggested we should rename him "Veal".
Joy on the Green Monster. As opposed to next to the green monster.
You know, I often dream about getting this much caffeine.
We had Green Monster tickets for tonight's Sox game. Since our normal seats are way back in right field, this was quite a different view!
Until very recently, there was not a single place in the City of Somerville (population ~77,000) where you could let your dog off-leash. Thankfully this has now changed, with the just-opened dog run on Nunziato Field. Here's some of the cheerful dogs that were gallavanting round there when we took Bacon down this evening.
Or, alternatively, half-a-mug of piss-weak, nastily artifically-sweetened, CoffeeMate-crammed brownwater. The rather disappointing result of trying a HomeCafe "frothy cappuccino" pod.
I got the coffee machine for free from BzzAgent, but I still feel ripped-off. I'll stick with my Senseo, thanks.
Intel is for wussies. The 100Mhz PowerPC 603e is where it's at.
This laptop was unceremoniously dumped in the random-crap-pile outside my cube. It's ten years old, running System 7.5, has a staggering 24Mb of RAM, and a whopping 500Mb hard drive. Anyone got suggestions for what I can use it for?
Hardcore Three-way Roomba-on-Roomba Action.
Two remote-control Roombas battle it out at Makefest.
"Branded Lanyard" would be a great name for a rock band.
Bacon's tail: Too fast for the LED flash on the camphone.
ZoneTagged Mon Feb 27, 2006 19:03:29 PST
ZoneTagged Mon Feb 27, 2006 15:50:02 PST
This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.
I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.