Doing My Little Part

Nina, Unicycle and I ;-)

While Nina learns how to balance and coast on the walk-a-bike (bike where the pedals are taken off.) I took out my Unicycle today. Would be great to master staying in one place with it. Which is hard, as you have to go constantly back and forth, that my wheel is a relative big one doesn’t help with that goal.

But it really makes a huge difference to Nina and me, if we are both trying to get better at driving a bike.

The beauty is, we move at about the same pace. It was a breeze to get to Levy’s (friend of Nina’s) house, which is just on the other side of the school yard.

To take off the pedals is getting very trendy around here. If I ever find the time I will post pictures of getting a bike from a garage sale and how we converted it to a pushbike aka walk-a-bike as Nina and I like to call it.

Picture taken by Mark & Marie Finnern.

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Pasta Master …

In the mid 80s there was a pasta scandal in Germany. No one trusted the ready made pastas in the shop anymore. During that time I once showcased how to use a Pasta Machine in a shop. We actually sold I think 16 of these machines that day. I was wearing an apron and a baker’s hat. It was quite the experience.

Now almost 25 years later, we got one of these machines, they are almost unchanged. I was struggling to get the consistency of the dough right, but as you can see from the picture, Nina was helping me, which made it all good.

Since then, the best wife of all made some linguine with semolina flour, which were much better than mine. We had them the last two days. Yummy!

Picture taken by Mark & Marie Finnern.

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Smack Button in Twitter Follow Email Please

Update: I should try this more often suggest improvements on my blog. I wrote and posted this entry on May 4th. Two days later Twitter changed their email notification. I am convinced that it was co-incidence and the change was in the works for a while. They also don’t call it “Smack”,  but more civilized “Block” this user. Thanks Twitter team.

The only thing missing are the last 5 posts of the new follower, but I guess they were afraid that this additional database call would tax their system too much.

This morning the Twitter Follow Spammers spiked for me about 10x. It is frustrating and I feel a bit helpless, as I don’t want to go to every spam follower’s profile to block. Others just switched off all follow emails, which I may be forced to do too.

In addition to my previous request to enhance the Twitter follow email, I would like to have a smack button in it too:  This Twitter user is a spammer <smack>. Actually I could only do it when I have the additional information: Twitterer since, number of followers, posts, last 5 posts, …

In the background Twitter could have an algorithm running taking into account: Posts, followers, conversations and number of smacks to throw people off the system. If they want to continue to be successful they need such strengthen their immune system.

I am afraid that soon we will all get “@<your twitter name> check this out !!! Cheap. <link>” Which will destroy your vanity Twitter search. A Smack button needed for that too.

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Craigslist please open up like Twitter

Twitter’s attitude to other companies using their data is a very agnostic one. It can almost be summed up in: If what you are doing increases Twitter adoption, and is not taxing our systems too much, we are fine. They are only a bit over two years old and it is amazing the little cottage industry that sprung up around them that is accessing their data and enhancing the experience.

One early example was Summize a search engine that Twitter acquired and is now part of Twitter.

Yesterday it hit me thinking about how different the world would be if Craigslist had the same attitude to third party hacking.

Yes, there is the famous HousingMaps mashup of rent and real-estate listings with Google maps, but not a lot more. Craigslist doesn’t have an API (that I was able to find), so the mashups are done using screen scraping tools.

I posted my thought on Twitter and Craig Newmark the founder of Craigslist responded:

finnern: @craignewmark Where could we be if Craigslist would be as open as Twitter with APIs and use of data. Way beyond http://www.housingmaps.com/

craignewmark: @finnern maybe, what do you have in mind? anyone in general community asking for that?
about 3 hours later from TwitterFox · Reply · View Tweet

finnern: @craignewmark the beauty of Twitter attitude is: We don’t know all the things that the general community is asking for: Surprise us.
about 6 hours ago from TwitterFox · Reply · View Tweet

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Community Engagement |

Would you pay for Someone’s Tweets?

Jeff Nolan askes an interesting question: What do you think, can a twitter stream be monetized via subscription?

Celebrities can and I am convinced will within the next 6 months. It is such a low hanging fruit. Lance Armstrong could easily charge $5 a month and thousands of his almost 300K followers would sign up to be part of his life.

Celebs can turn the price wheel to make it more or less exclusive.

Twitter enable that functionality and take a little cut, that would be a nice revenue stream.

You can take it even further. How much would you pay for someone to follow you? Lance is following 39 people at the moment. For many people it would be enormously valuable to be #40 I think up to #100.

It would be a direct monetizing of fame, leaving out the tabloid middleman.

Of the people I follow personally I would pay for Tim O’Reilly’s tweets. They are high signal, engaging and mostly in the areas of my interest. Thankfully I am convinced that will never happen.

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Arnold Lather Up

Yesterday I twittered about the lack of water in the Golden State:

California needs 20% less water use this year http://is.gd/klQZ: While showering lather up with water off. Same while brushing teeth.

Today I remembered that Antanas Mockus mayor of Bogota faced with the same problem solved it by taking a shower in front of running TV cameras:

When there was a water shortage, Mockus appeared on TV programs taking a shower and turning off the water as he soaped, asking his fellow citizens to do the same. In just two months people were using 14 percent less water, a savings that increased when people realized how much money they were also saving because of economic incentives approved by Mockus; water use is now 40 percent less than before the shortage.

Being filmed is anything but new to the California Governator. Therefore my call to him:

Arnold Lather Up

Stop the flow of water while you do and ask us fellow citicen to do the same. We need your action hero status to turn off the phoset and save our precious fresh water resources.

A lot of women will be really happy too. Of course it would be even better if this issue would be picked up by the current commander and chief in Washington. I think that would make even more women really happy

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There goes the Neighborhood II

The Eichler on 2304 Bunker Hill Drive last week finally got trashed
It is loud and very distressing. We are looking for relief during the day. If you have a furnished apt., or in-law … that could give us relief while this is going on, let us know.

Demolition picture taken by Mark & Marie Finnern.
We started a set of pictures regarding 2304 Bunker Hill Drive.

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There goes the Neighborhood

Sketch overlaying the size of the original Eichler house with the McMansion that is replacing it at 2304 Bunker Hill Drive.

For the background of the story you may want to check out my previous post: 2304 Bunker Hill Monster House.

Speaking with lots of neighbors about it, about 90% think that it isn’t right that you can wake up one day and there are bulldozers flattening the house next door. You should have a say.

Unfortunately we were not able to energize the community enough to do something about it. It didn’t help that the Highlands Community Association seems to be only focused on the Chamberlain project. My joke is, that it should be renamed to Highlands Chamberlain Association. One example is, that there was never even a mention of the looming demolition in the Lowdown the monthly community paper. This months and in previous months front page is given to the Chamberlain project. That is just very frustrating and sad.

Picture taken by Mark & Marie Finnern.

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Toy Rocket Rocks

Dragged Nina out of the house this afternoon to the sound of a toy rocket shooting into the sky.

Turns out Santa brought one to Skyler a nice kid from the neighborhood. He and his father were shooting the rocket into the sky  from the school yard across our street.

Of course we joined the fun for a while, until Nina got bored. I guess it is more a boy toy thing

Go to the Rocket Neighborhood Fun Flickr set for more details.

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Building a Carboard Box House

If you have a couple of hours a box cutter and a big cardboard box, you can have a lot of fun creating a little house with your kid(s).

The Flickr set can give you some inspiration.

In short: Take off the flaps of the box; cut out an upside J for the door on one side; don’t forget a little upside U about half height for a door handle; cut an I with serifs as Window that can be opened and closed in another side.

That is all that is needed and the fun continues with coloring, decoration, coming to visit, …

Try it out and let me know how it came out.

Picture taken by Mark & Marie Finnern.

Oh and here is the slideshow of the set:

Here and there I would love to add some text to the slideshow would be nice. You have to go to the actual set for that.

Is this an American problem? We have not even moved in yet, but it seems we outgrew our new house already. If you have a bigger box, let me know, or we built an extension.

Posted in family |