Easy to believe we lack the opportunity, time, money, talent, mentors, luck, DNA, etc. when what we really lack, sometimes, is the desire. Kathy Sierra

The template: PersonA: “I’d give ANYTHING to be able to do [X] like you.” PersonB: “Bulls***. What did you do last week in your spare time?” Kathy Sierra

Also, I really recommend a blog post from Giuliano Valentino the other day on how action is more important than “awareness”.

It’s been over a year since we dropped our DirecTV subscription. At the risk of sounding like a pretentious hipster, my life is so much richer since I “killed my television”. Oh sure, we still follow a few shows: The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory, and Doctor Who mostly. And, we’re re-watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and catching up on classic Doctor Who episodes, Red Dwarf, and The Prisoner. But we’re doing it on our own schedule, when time permits the two of us to be cuddled up on the couch with nothing else to do, and largely dependent on when those big red envelopes arrive from Netflix. In fact, most of our Doctor Who viewing happens at Chronicles of Who meetings, where we get out and watch new & old episodes with other fans, then go out for a hearty meal and conversation. Usually, believe it or not, we talk about things other than our favorite Time Lord.

Being free of the “boob tube” has freed me of some constraints. Most importantly, there’s $100 more in our checking account at the end of the month. And, if nothing’s catching my eye on Hulu, Amazon, or iTunes, then I don’t sit there flipping channels, I get up and do things! That’s really the best part: I’m more involved with the things that matter to me, and I don’t have to worry that all those channels I’m paying for are going to waste. Believe me, it’s more exciting to hack on my WordPress plugins or take an extra shift at the cat shelter. I’m not saying it’s wrong for anyone else to plop down in front of the TV after a long day at work, but I certainly feel better being more productive.

I’m not like Google or Bing, who get access to the whole firehose of real-time Twitter messages. Instead, I had to settle for the 20 latest public tweets from a publicly-accessible API, and I only ran my “learn” script every minute (every other minute toward the end) to be nice to Twitter’s servers. Still, at the time I decided to call it quits, 18,520 tweets had been processed.

I didn’t want to assign categories myself, so I decided to make use of the hashtags that are so popular on Twitter. 3456 of those 18,000+ messages (~19%) contained hashtags, and they consisted of 995 unique hashtags which my program was able to turn into categories. I had some success initially. I got a big kick when it started putting posts with bad grammar in the “cheezeburger” category. Posts with the words “gay” and “movie” were assumed to be about “New Moon”, the new Twilight sequel. A post that said “#weloveyoujustin #weloveyoujustin #weloveyoujustin…” was correctly categorized as “weloveyoujustin”.

Aside from a few outliers like that, it rarely was more than 20% certain about the categories it was assigning. The same words appeared in all sorts of posts, and Twitter’s 140 character limit discourages big, specific words. I started running it on a Friday, which meant there were a lot of #followfriday and #ff posts adding noise to the mix — it really liked assigning this category when it didn’t know what else to do. And, cross-posting tags like #fb and #in to duplicate posts on Facebook and LinkedIn led to some bad categorizing as well. Aside from #ff and #fb, other tags weren’t used very often. It seems hashtags are mostly used by specific communities like an inside joke or their own internal categorizing system.

A few posts that my program tried to learn from:

• Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!! (Doctor Who) #pudsey
• #Whatdoyoudo when ur not on twitter?
• I hate wal-mart #fb
• Thanks @swinmill back at ya! #ff
• @HankYeomans : – ( #FAIL

As you can see, there wasn’t much to build a database of word frequency from.

I ended up killing off the “learn” program last night when it hit a scaling limit. The classifying library I was using was taking forever to assign categories because it had so many to choose from. Don’t forget, programs like this are usually just dealing with two categories: “spam” and “not spam”. 995 categories required too many calculations for my poor Mac Mini to handle.

In conclusion, I don’t consider this exercise a failure. I got to play with a Twitter library and a Bayesian classifier, which was cool. I got to play voyeur and read all sorts of strangers’ tweets. And I got a few chuckles out of it along the way. But, if a Bayesian strategy is going to be used to categorize Twitter messages, it’s going to need some serious hardware behind it.

I used these libraries:

• PHP Naive Bayesian Filter
• Twitter by Tijs Verkoyen

A co-worker and I were discussing Apple’s new Magic Mouse, and we agreed it would be neat to have something like our MacBooks’ touch pads, only desktop-sized. I immediately thought of the Wacom devices I looked at the last time I went to Fry’s. The online reviews of the Bamboo Touch were mixed; people either loved it or hated it. How did it work out for me? Read on.

I got the smallest Bamboo Touch, a 8.2″ x 5.4″ pad that’s only 1/3″ thick. There are four ExpressKeys along the side, and a white LED lights up to show it’s connected to your computer’s USB. The LED glows brighter when you touch the surface.

The packaging has the coloring and design from the Bamboo Fun line, and the inside of the package was laid out really well. You could tell this box was designed by someone who loved the feeling of opening up a new Apple product. This unboxing video from leopardsoup on YouTube walks you through the box and its contents:

My Mac Mini recognized the Bamboo Touch as a mouse right away, and the drivers supplied with the tablet enabled the two-finger multitouch features. The Bamboo Touch supports a fixed set of gestures: left click, right click, drag, scroll up/down, scroll left/right, zoom in/out (pinch), rotate, and back/forward. Some reviewers found the absence of three or four-fingered gestures confusing, but my 2006 MacBook doesn’t have them either, so I don’t feel like I’m missing much. On the contrary, I get annoyed by my MacBook’s primitive gestures now (just clicking & scrolling).

The Mac drivers install a System Preference pane where you associate each of the ExpressKeys with an action (such as “Switch Application” or “Show Desktop”) or assign a custom keystroke. They also let you pick left or right handed operation and adjust normal mouse settings like pointer acceleration. And, trust me, you’ll want to keep this preference pane open for the first day or two as you get used to using and adjusting the pad. I think a lot of the complaints about the pad’s accuracy could have been fixed by adjusting some settings.

I still keep a wired optical mouse around for gaming. I think Quake Live forces the pointer speed all the way up, because even the lightest touch sent my character spinning. But, the Bamboo Touch excels at all the other tasks I use my computer for. Be careful highlighting text, though. It can be tricky. And, with “drag lock” turned on, I sometimes forget to click the pad a second time to release the text or icon I’m dragging.

A couple of other reviewers complained about arm fatigue, since you can’t rest your hand on the pad like you would a mouse. You do have to hold your hand above the pad, or rest your fingers outside the pad’s active area (outlined in gray). A $10 beanbag from Allsop gave me a handy place to rest my hand, and I haven’t had any problems with strain or fatigue. Rather, I feel more relaxed using it since I don’t have to grip a mouse.

One of my reasons for wanting a new pointing device was that a wireless mouse would let me rid myself of Turing’s favorite cord to sit on. It’s hard to move a mouse around when there’s a cat keeping you from moving more than an inch. The Bamboo Touch is corded, but it doesn’t need to move. You’d think this would be an improvement, but Turing just sits on the pad now. His furry butt registers as a finger, keeping me from getting any work done. So, be careful using this around cats. Also, I don’t know how much weight this pad can support, so be careful around big kitties and dogs. Children should probably be watched around this thing, too. In fact, why don’t you put it away in a drawer when you’re not using it?

The Wacom Bamboo Touch might disappoint folks used to Apple’s current multitouch offerings, but it’s a great addition to my computing arsenal. At only $69, it does everything I’d expect a desktop touchpad to do. Budding artists out there may opt for the Bamboo Pen (also $69, but no touch features) or the Bamboo Pen & Touch ($99).

A grey longhair upstairs left a huge hairball in his cage. Seriously, I thought this was a toy at first. So, I had to take time out & brush him. Then, I left a few notes and sent a status update from my Blackberry.

About 8:00pm, just as I was about to pack up & go, I heard a sound the could only be described as a cross between our electronic doorbell and a cat being jabbed with a cattle prod. I guess that’s the noise it makes when you barely press the button after leaving a tabby at the door and before running to your car before someone sees you.

After calling one of our reps and getting the new cat settled into a cage, I finally had a chance to go to Jewel and do my grocery shopping. Since the shelter was down to a half bag of litter, I picked up five 20lb bags. The woman in front of me saw my haul and asked if I would like a kitten.

I bought a rose for Amy, just in case I was in the doghouse for being at the shelter so late.

I think it’s time to soak in the whirlpool tub, read my book, and have a vodka martini.

I really do like the idea of a “family values statement” though. I don’t know where my brain came up with the idea, but it’s great! Lots of people dismiss corporate “mission statements” and such declarations as just meaningless words, but they’re only meaningless words because everyone ignores them — including the people who came up with them in the first place. I personally feel we need more “mission statements” to keep everyone on the same page, and a failure to reach out goals is the price we pay for ignoring our missions.

A values statement for Amy & I might include caring for animals, recycling, keeping frivolous spending to a minimum, donating to charity, and being productive instead of sitting around watching TV all day.

It couldn’t be binding of course, but it’s a reinforcement of what we believe. I wonder if something like that might be useful when we’re ready to start a family to start our kids on the right path.

The “pregap” is a period of silence before a track on a CD. It’s usually two seconds long, but some clever disc authors store extra tracks in track 01’s pregap, which CD players skip over. The only way to get to this track with a CD player is to start playing track 01, hit pause, and rewind for the length of the pregap. If you don’t know how long it is, or you’re slow on the draw, it’s easy to breeze right past the start of the pregap and have the disc stop, meaning you have to go through that all again.

It’s worse on computers because almost all of the software out there ignores pregap. A few programs can rip pregap tracks, most notably Exact Audio Copy on Windows, and until now I wasn’t able to find one for Macs. A discussion on Reddit this morning got me thinking about it again, and led me on a search that turned up X Lossless Decoder (XLD).

XLD is a free Mac program that leverages various open source libraries, most notably the cdparanoia ripper, to rip & encode CDs. And, it’s able to rip from the pregap! I heard Strange Days this morning for the first time in three years, and immediately copied it to my phone for my drive to work.

The specs say Redfly doesn’t have a CPU or OS, but let’s be realistic here for a moment. It has to have a CPU to do anything, and it needs an OS of some point to get booted up. What they mean, though, is that a booted-up Redfly is just going to sit there looking cheap and useless until you hook it up to your mobile phone. They currently support Windows Mobile, and I just read that a Blackberry version is in the works.

This device allows you to use your smartphone as a netbook, and even has a VGA connector with 800×600 support for showing presentations on a big screen or projector.

Can I just stop and rewind here for a second?

Almost every month, I do a Keynote (PowerPoint) presentation for the Suburban Chicago PHP & Web Development Meetup. I sling my laptop and projector bags around my neck and shuffle my way into Panera Bread with all that weight on my neck and shoulders. With Redfly, I could toss my Blackberry in my pocket, toss the Redfly in the projector’s bag, and just carry one bag with me to give my presentation in Slideshow To Go.

It also supports a USB keyboard and mouse, and that’s where my vision comes in. Mobile devices are catching up to our desktops at a rapid pace, and their 16GB & 32GB capacities seem less paltry with much of our data living in “the cloud”. Notebooks recently started outselling desktops, and I think devices like Redfly will replace notebooks soon.

We’re nearing the day when our phones are immediate storage (our favorite songs and some misc. files), CPU, and RAM, and we just plug our phone into whatever dumb terminal we want to use — a notebook, desktop, media center, maybe even a server. Yes, a server — the ultimate blade!

What do you all think? Am I drinking too much of the mobile & cloud computing Kool-Aid? Leave your thoughts at csixty4.com.

• Steve Jobs — only on video, from the shoulders up
• iPods with cameras, GPS, built-in Nike+
• Bye-bye iPod Classic. Hello 64GB iPod Touch
• iTunes 9 — Mac only for now, Cocoa, integration with 3rd party players
• No Beatles announcement

• Installed Snow Leopard on both of my Mac Minis. I’m afraid to put it on my laptop just yet because I rely on it for work.
• Updated Dave’s WordPress Live Search to display thumbnail images and excerpts. I should be releasing v1.7 in the next few days
• Cleaned the cat shelter with Amy
• Took a four hour nap with all three cats
• Drove out to my folks’ place and upgraded Dad’s computer from 256MB of RAM to 2GB.
• Replaced the dimmer switch in our basement. Got a spiffy digital dimmer that works a hell of a lot better than the old dimmer, with the bonus that it doesn’t make a loud electrical crackle when you turn down the lights
• Put two Keynote presentations together for this week’s PHP & Web Development Meetup
• Watched four episodes of Star Trek: the Next Generation Season 1, the first six episodes of Doctor Who’s “Key to Time” story arc, and the first four episodes of The Young Ones 2nd season with Amy
• Learned that Porky the Pig was originally supposed to be teamed up with a chicken named Beans