Two Cents and a Thousand Words

Hope you’re having a very happy holiday, whether you celebrate it today or another day. I had a great time with my family, and I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail from my friends (I love e-mail from friends). I was also lucky enough to receive some really great presents.

Speaking of presents… there’s a project I’ve been working on for a while, mostly in design mode. I call it ObjectTree, and it’s basically a tree structure that can be used to organize information. It’s really simple, actually, but I think it could be really powerful. I’m currently working with it to make it into a ToDo list (see what I’ve done so far at M@ineSites Labs), and I think I’ll be using it on this site for a links directory or maybe a listing of the projects I have going on. It’s MySQL driven, and it’s just at version 1.0.0 (enough to work, but without a lot of features). I’d like to make it password-protected next, and then I’ll probably be tweaking it to allow for a little more flexibility. It’s template-driven too, though, so you have the power to completely customize how it looks. Add to that a Creative Commons By-NC-SA license and you’ve got yourself hours of editing and tweaking fun.

Download ObjectTree

ObjectTree brings up something else that I’ve wanted to do for a while: reorganize M@ineSites a bit. In the past I’ve looked at it as a two-part “company”: business on one side and creative content on the other. With The Pool rising in popularity and my growing interest in popping out some open code, I’m looking at creating the M@ineSites OpenGallery. It’ll basically be a centralized place for all of the code I’ve released under Creative Commons and will include documentation. Hopefully it will also serve as a testing ground. It’ll be located at mainesites.net/open, but it’s not quite ready yet.

I’m working on two new sites now: one’s a categorized person directory and the other’s a gallery of public domain images. I’m not sure which means more to me, so that probably means I won’t get either done by the end of vacation. That’s ok, though; I’m really excited about both of tthem.

Back to happier things…

The Wired article on The Pool has been BoingBoinged and Blogdexed (2). Right now it’s tied for #27 on Blogdex.

Here in Little, home of the UMaine psychology department, sitting right under the Psi Chi board, it just doesn’t feel the same.

One of the theories I’ve held throughout my life is that the good things in life and the bad things of life all balance out over a given period of time. It’s not exactly the most positive theory, but a lot of times it turns out to be true. Yesterday was a perfect example. I woke up at 6:30 on Monday and Tuesday acting just like it was Christmas morning; I woke up, rushed to my computer, and checked Wired. After I read the story yesterday, I thought to myself, “I hope it doesn’t balance out.” Well, it did, plus some. Michele meant a lot more than any Wired article.

My theory’s not so great if something great happens, but it’s great if something bad happens. It reminds me to keep a positive outlook anytime anything bad happens. I’ve started to feel a lot better since yesterday afternoon, but it’s still a shock. It’ll probably always be hard to go into room 140 and room 120.

I don’t seem to have much luck around finals time and car accidents. In high school Val Morin, an overall great student at Hampden Academy, was killed in one. I hoped that something like that would never happen again.

My favorite psychology professor died today following a car accident. Michele Alexander was a wonderful person in an almost infinite number of respects; she was the head of UMaine’s Psy Chi chapter, did numerous studies in the fields of social psychology, gender and race stereotypes, and group dynamics, knew a number of other respected psychologists in her field, and was loved by most of her students as a teacher who really enjoyed her work and enjoyed teaching. Her baby Camden, a few months old, was apparently with her but was not hurt in the accident, according to an e-mail from psychology professor G. W. Farthing sent out to psych students earlier today.

I was lucky enough to have PSY 100 (General Psychology) and PSY 330 (Social Psychology) with Michele. It goes without saying that those were by far my two favorite psychology classes so far; she’s the one who really got me interested in the topic.

Thanks for everything you did for me, Michele… and for everything you did for everyone.

So, The Pool’s this site where you can enter in a proj…

eh, what the heck, I’ll let Wired news reporter Michelle Delio explain it. She does a pretty good job.

I guess now you know why we were at the analog pool…

Always fun to see how much a storm can change in a half an hour when a radar site goes out…

10-20″ by tomorrow night.

(image from Intellicast)

You’ve gotta check out Veepers at Budwesier. It’s an awesome Java technology that uses characteristics of your face to simulate expression. I tried it out with my face… check mine out here. It’s a really good idea.

(thanks, John)

Ever had one of those moments where you just have to stop and appreciate the beauty of what’s around you?

On my way to class this morning I had one; everything was almost completely white. Trees were covered with crystalized snow, and it gave everything a really spectacular look. There was a little fog to add to the mystical scene, and the sun was just starting to shine; it was amazing. I’ve set up another Simple Image Gallery called Crystal Trees if you’d like to see some more of my photography from this morning (again, just click each image to advance); my “Favorites” album in iPhoto grew a bunch after I put them all on my PowerBook.

Campbell’s is donating a can of soup (up to 5,000,000 cans) for each click on the Click for Cans page of their site. You can click once a day. Even if you’re not an NFL fan, go and help out those in need.

A cookie won’t fit into a glass of milk for dunking. What would you do?

A math major would determine the required radius of the cookie for dunking, and then shave it to the appropriate dimensions.

An English major would write a story about how the cookie refused to go into the cup and then went out on an adventure.

A political science major would write a BS paper about why he wasn’t able to fit the cookie into the cup.

A psychology major would analyze why the dunker wanted to dunk and what made him want a cookie in the first place.

And a new media major would talk about how Oreo had associated the act of dunking with their brand image; he would then copyleft the process of dunking the cookie so that the dunkers of the future would need to give attribution to him to ensure that Oreo wouldn’t patent the process and then demand royalties for each dunk.