Making the Move

While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. - The Google

It's sad to see the departure of Google Reader. I've been using it pretty consistently since it first appeared as a labs project and loved it. I advocated to all my friends and slowly got the all on board with using. It was fantastic to have that Group of people who would "share" on Google Reader and then it would show up across everyone else's Readers. There was the time in Google history where a privacy bug made it so if your gmail address was on the same thread in a gmail message as someone else, they became your friend in Reader and you started seeing their stories. It was awesome.

Due to this great "feature" many of my friend's friends became my Google Reader friends and I could see the cool stuff they were sharing. It built quite a fun interactive environment. Once I had my reader up when a friend was over and he noticed his sister's name on my computer (because he had sent an e-mail to both us, thus making us Google Reader friends). When I asked why he was starting so intently at my computer he said, "I was trying to determine why my sister's name was on it to see if I should be angry with your or not. I guess not." NOT INDEED!

Of course, eventually Google rolled out Google Plus and removed the sharing feature from reader. In two weeks Reader will close its doors. When Google announced the shuttering months ago I expected the Internet would respond with a half a dozen decent cloud-based RSS readers, but it appears to me that is not going to be the case. I exported all my data from Google Reader… but today I made the decision to never return to Google Reader. All my stuff has moved to Feedly and its working pretty well for me. I'm hoping that Feedly with open up it's API so that my favorite client (Reeder) can run against it, but for now I will continue to use Feedly directly. Someday I expect them to start injecting ads into my stream, but for now, I guess it's the best alternative out there.

Morning Time is Father's Time

Goooooooood morning, Vietnam! Hey, this is not a test! This is rock and roll! Time to rock it from the Delta to the D.M.Z.! - Adrian Cronauer (Good Morning Vietnam)

Growing up I associated the morning with dad. In the family, he had the highest amount of "morning person" in him. As a small kid I would be blissfully asleep in bed when he would wander in singing one of the many variations of "good morning to you..." and open the shutters on the windows in my room ("good morning to you"). I had a corner room on the north east side ("you look like a monkey"), so the morning sun would come right in the windows onto my face ("and you act like one too").

On lazy weekends we would get up, go grab some cereal, and sit down to watching morning cartoons. *chomp* *chomp* He-Man *chomp* *chomp* Captain N: The Game Master *chomp* *chomp* Mask. Back in the days of only have a half a dozen televisions stations, sometimes historic world events would occur and preempt the cartoons. My father, always crafty, would pull out a VHS tape of cartoons recorded on previous weekends and we were once again back in business!

Moving on to Jr. High and High School the morning routine matured, but I could still count on being woken up to music. Monday through Saturday, he would blast (I mean BLAST) the soundtrack to Good Morning Vietnam though the house at wakeup time. I expect to be able to recite Robin William's opening for the rest of my life. The only "relief" was on Sunday mornings.... "Jesus Christ.... Superstar... Do you think you're what they say you are?"

Home Automation

We hope you love your new Nest. - Tony Faddell

For our two-year anniversary Mrs.Chaos got me a Nest home thermostat.  It has the simple benefits of just being a super cool home thermostat with neat features about setting complex schedules and auto-detecting when I leave the house to switch to away mode.  We live in the age when robots should be doing so much more than washing our dishes and clothes - they should be vacuuming and mopping our homes, mowing our lawns, and so on.
I think my favorite "feature" is the undocumented API that is available.  So I can read various settings from the Nest and then do things based on it.  Recently I wrote a script that checks the temperature of the house through the Nest API and then checks the temperature outside using Forecast.io's API.  As soon as it cools down outside below the inside temperature it sends a notification to me to open my windows!
The other script I want to build is to get a few more temperature gauges so that if one part of the house (office, bedroom) is more than five degrees different from the others it I can just kick on the fan-mode to circulate the air.  Awesome, eh?  Yeah!

checkWindowState.php:

 
$forecast = new ForecastIO($api_key);
$nest = new Nest();
$windowStatefile = getenv("HOME") . "/Dropbox/scripts/nest/windowstate.txt";  
 $windowStateString = rtrim(file_get_contents($windowStatefile));  
 $windowState = "closed";  
 if($windowStateString == "open") {  
  $windowState = "open";       
 }  
 // Get the device information:  
 $mode = $nest->getDeviceInfo()->current_state->mode;  
 $insideTemp = $nest->getDeviceInfo()->current_state->temperature;  
 // Get the NEST reported tempurature  
 $locationArray = $nest->getUserLocations();  
 $nestOutsideTemp = $locationArray[0]->outside_temperature;   
 $outsideTemp = nestOutsideTemp;  
 $condition = $forecast->getCurrentConditions($latitude, $longitude);  
 $forecastIoOutsideTemp = $condition->getTemperature();  
 $outsideTemp = $forecastIoOutsideTemp;  
 if($mode == "cool"  
   && $windowState == "closed"  
   && $outsideTemp < $insideTemp ) {  
  $windowState = "open";  
  exec("/usr/local/bin/growlnotify -s --image ~/Dropbox/scripts/nest/nest.icns -n \"Nest\" -p Moderate -m \"It's cooling off, open your windows.\"");  
 } elseif ($mode == "cool"  
   && $windowState == "open"  
   && $outsideTemp > $insideTemp ) {  
  $windowState = "closed";  
  exec("/usr/local/bin/growlnotify -s --image ~/Dropbox/scripts/nest/nest.icns -n \"Nest\" -p Moderate -m \"It's warming up, close your windows.\"");  
 }  
 file_put_contents($windowStatefile, $windowState);  

Babyverseration

I mean, Hawaii is beautiful, but the world is full of beautiful places. - Robert Kiyosaki

We took a week trip to Hawaii to celebrate Babyverseration! It's true! Mrs.Chaos graduated! We had our two year anniversary and there is a baby on the way in September. We have all the reasons to celebrate.

A quick four days on O'ahu followed by three days on Maui and it was nice. I don't think I have ever stayed in Honolulu before and it was pretty crazy to see the vastness of shopping, shopping and more shopping. Beyond that we did get up to the Polynesian Culture Center, the Pearl Harbor Memorial and went to a laua out on Paradise Cove. At the laua I learned that it's improper to give a closed lei to a pregnant woman, as our local guide swiped out Mrs.Chaos' closed lei for an open one.

The three days on Maui were a little quieter and spent more just relaxing. Had some fun times at the beach resort and we ended the whole trip with an evening sunset cruise around the bay.

Now we're back on the mainland and life is slowly returning to normal. I mean, as normal as it could be knowing there is a baby on the way in just three months and that Mrs.Chaos is done with school. So by normal, I mean, totally different than anything before.

My Mother's Hawaii

Oh, let me have just a little bit of peril? - Sir Galahad (Holy Grail)

I'm in Hawaii for a week and borrowed my mother's travel guide. The highlights she makes will give you a view into traveling in my childhood.

• Scorpion stings are a problem!
• Be wary of head-on collisions (especially from drunk drivers)
• Tides can pull you out to sea!
• There are jellyfish. Everywhere!

It's true. Hawaii is a perilous place where danger lurks around every corner.

Audible - My First Complaint

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world. - Voltaire

I love audiobooks. Love love love them. In my previous job I had to commute (via car) about six hours a week - that was two three-hour drives in a week. I started by checking out audiobooks from the library and once I had finished everything there I moved on to buying from iTunes. People forget, but in the days before the iCloud, you were only allowed to download your book once and if you lost local copy *poof* it was gone forever.
When I discovered Audible I found that it was the right way to get audiobooks. You buy them once and then you have them in your Audible library forever and can play them, more or less, anywhere. They do have DRM - but they play through iTunes and through every device I have had. At one point I got an error message that I had reached my device limit - but that was installing on around twelve different device - so I guess I forgive them. I guess.
I have been an annual subscriber for the past three years getting twelve (12) credits every year. The first year it worked out great. The second year Mrs.Chaos joined in and was burning through the credits (Song of Ice and Fire is 2 credits per book) and we had to renew early. This past year I started getting Audiobooks from the library again and I ended the year with seven (7) credits as my account came for renewal.
I figured that with seven credits left over I could wait until I ran out to renew my subscription, but Audible is a JERK! JERK! I went to cancel my subscription it tells me that it will expire all of my credits, "please make sure to spend all of credits before expiring your subscription or you will lose them." I don't know what books my book club will pick, so I can't expire all of my credits. But the cheapest subscription they have will give me twelve more credits!
Audible - I'm angry with you. For the first time in three years. I am angry.

#followateen

Many friendships have started with mix tapes. - Om Malik

These is this new meme going around about finding a random teen or tween on The Twitter and following them to give you better insight into the kids today. Seems like a good idea, eh? I think I've been meeting or following random people online since the start of the internet.

I initially put up a homepage my freshman year of college, back when there were about ten websites. My page was filled with a lot of random imagery and animated GIFs that would link to various things. I really wish I had saved copies of those early things - but they are lost to time and don't show up on the Internet Archive. One of the random visuals was a picture of Sailor Mars, alt-texted with something like "Sailor Mars - My Future Wife", that linked to my About Me page. This is how homepages rolled - it was the early days. The result of doing this back then is that when you Yahoo'ed for "Sailor Mars" my site came back in the top 10 results. A nice young lady named Cindy from somewhere in Tennessee did this Yahoo search, found my page, and wrote me an e-mail. I think we exchanged e-mails about life and times for a couple years - and eventually she dropped off the radar. We had very different backgrounds and world views - so it was interesting discussions. Lost to the wired... so it goes.

Sometime my sophomore year of college, a junior in some art high school on the east coast dropped me a line. I can't quite remember, but I think her opening mail also had something to do with Sailor Mars. Apparently a college dude having Sailor Moon on his website was quite the thing! We traded mails for about a year and I got to relive the joy of junior year of school as she went on her first date, got dumped for the first time. Like most - she eventually changed e-mails or something and was lost to time... so it goes.

Henry was fun - I think I was a junior when I found his Geocities site when looking at various "Shrines" about Evangelion. Henry was a senior at some high school. He was a smart kid and I had a lot of fun exchanges with him over the year. I think when he went to college he switched emails and once again... poof... gone to the internet void... so it goes.

When I was taking a compilers course and searching the internet for help I ran across "CompSciChick's" online journal (we had moved on from "homepages" but we hadn't made the technological leap to 'blogs' yet). She was a computer science student at some school in Chicago taking a compilers course and compaining about project partners. Her journal was filled with nice and interesting computer science updates for a few months and I enjoyed reading about her take on learning a similar field to me. Then it got really weird. She decided that it would be fun to make extra cash by stripping. So she spent a few months practicing pole dancing and working up the courage and finally auditioned at a few "classy" places - all of which told her she wasn't good enough. She didn't want to work at non-classy places, so that ended that. Eventually her site stopped updating... so it goes.

When I was living in Memphis, TN, consulting for a casino management system I was bored out of my mind and going through a tough patch of "what am I doing with my life?" The office was on a huge plot of land and I would spend my lunch hours wandering off somewhere and squirrel fishing--you tie a peanut on a string, have a squirrel grab it, and then attempt to lift the squirrel off the ground. It is referred to as a "catch." I did an internet search on the topic of squirrel fishing and found Yasuhiro and Annie. Yasuhiro hadn't been updating his site in ages, but Annie was still updating and I was fascinated. I would be describe her site as a collection of personal essays and she was a good writer. Heck she has become a professional writer. While her site has a habit of going dorment, taking vacations and the RSS feed seem to always be broken (RSS hasn't updated since 2011? come on annie), I still follow it and she still updates. When she moved out to San Francisco we even met up a few times. Now she if off to the east coast and recently engaged (congratulations!). While her updates are less frequent, I still look forward to continuing to read the small personal essays on her life.

When I joined The Twitter right after it debuted at SXSW - none of my friends were on it and so I started following strangers. And it was really quite interesting being connected these strangers lives and micro-updates. Alas - all of those people have dropped off the twitter over the years.

When I saw the #followateen meme start trending I realized that I am not currently following any strangers! None! So it was time for me to start looking for some random teen to start following to get back into the game of learning about randon people's lives. But how to find a teen? You could search for "i hate highschool," "im only 15 but," or "i hate the SAT" - but I thought I could one up it. Why not find a teen who is currently attending the highschool I went to? A little bit of searching on The Twitter and BAM! I'm following him. I'll see if I have anything to report back in a few months (years? (decads?)).