I’m wandering around Kentucky for a few days. Yesterday morning visited the Bourbon Heritage Center at Heaven Hill Distilleries. Got to visit barrels and taste a few bourbons. Great way to start off the day.
A couple hours later we visited The Colonel.
After a long and winding three month journey, my lawn gnome is now home. Along with him he had a small Trollfjorden pack from IKEA that is just his size! Inside was a bunch of treats and trinkets such as a brochure from Niagara Cave, an Alien, smashed pennies, one of them from the Spam museum and a bunch of other things that mark various parts of his travels. Wow, what a treat. Speaking of treats, he had some Cloetta Kexchoklad and he let me have two of them. Quite yummy!
Everyone asks me if I know who was helping the gnome in his travels. Honestly I don’t have any proof. What I do have though, is a large footprint from one of his fellow travelers and check out who takes photos with a Kodak EasyShare Z730 in Minneapolis and posts on Flickr. Looks like my lawn gnome and primarily one other person. My gnome hasn’t said a word, though. Also, those gnomes that showed up behind my house? I think they’re unrelated! I have yet to introduce them to my lawn gnome on the other side of my house.
Either way, regardless of who’s responsible for helping out, my gnome and his friends got a fantastic three month journey and I’m very glad he’s home.
(Post originally on Minnesota Meow)
Names: Kitty Carryall and Tapioca Puddington Kittensworth III
Nicknames: Carryall: Corky, Corky Nuggets, Baby Nuggets, C-Nug, Corkas Cats, Downsy Kitten; Tapioca: Tappy Cat, Tapas Cats, Taps, Tap-a-keg, Creep
Born: 2006
Lives in: East Calhoun, Minneapolis
Lives With: Tara Johnson, her boyfriend Scott and their dog, Dirk
Carryall and Tapioca are dubbed “the tripods” by their cohabitants as they both have only 3 legs. As well, both of their tails are “nuggets” as Tara describes.
My boyfriend got Tapioca from a cat sanctuary where we volunteered. She was so cute and just stumped around on her three legs and we loved her. Then a month or so later, my very old dog died so we had an opening. When I looked on Petfinder I saw another female, gray, three legged cat at the same shelter! I knew I had to have her.
They became best friends quickly. Their favorite spot is a 1950’s slipper chair in their living room. They also sometimes cuddle with their dog, Dirk. Carryall also is small and hasn’t grown much. Tara says “this could be my fault considering that since she was a baby, I would tell her over and over, ’stay little!’ So I guess she listened and stayed little to please me.”
Tara is a consultant and Scott works for The Hartford. They love their three-legged cats: one of Tara’s emails to me closed with “VIVA LA TRIPODS!”
I sent out cards to friends and families for the holidays once a couple years ago. Wow, what a pain in the ass that was. Anyway, this post serves as your card.
I did, however, wanted to pick up a few real cards to go along with the few gifts I got for my family this year. I love Corazon (link warning: music). Their location in Longfellow is a few blocks from me. A ton of locally made and even some handmade cards and gifts. If I ever want to give someone a very nice and unique card, Corazon is where I’d go. Trust me, their store is much better than their website.
I was surprised to find this unusually simple and straight to the point card (pictured). It’s made by Lunalux here in Minneapolis. They even have a blog too. Wow. The card’s perfect. I’m giving it to my dad.
His gift this year? I sent a decent donation to Second Harvest Heartland on his behalf. He doesn’t need any more shit and we’re both a lot happier giving to people that need more than we do.
This gnome and his two friends showed up on my back porch today. None of them are my lawn gnome which is still wandering around doing strange things, most recently taking a trip on the Brackett Rocket and somehow ending up in Macy’s Nutcracker display.
He also recently visited my sister and brother-in-law’s house and left them a note. I’m glad my sister took it in good humor; I figured she might be a bit freaked out when a photo of my lawn gnome visiting their house showed up on the Internet.
I can’t help to think that these three gnomes are somehow related to my missing gnome. Maybe they were expecting him here. Or maybe they were here to send me a message. Perhaps holiday greetings. I don’t really know.
Seriously, I am not kidding. I do not know what’s going on.
I was lucky enough to see this nine minute short on the big screen at the Riverview Theater about a year ago. “Lump,” by Sarah Jean Kruchowski has been shown at a number of festivals and won “Best in Fest” at the Portland International Short Short Festival. It was shot locally and it features music by Jessy Greene. It just recently showed up on YouTube to share. Enjoy.
Want the boombox from this Brother Ali video?
Bo Hakala is throwing it sold it on eBay.
The Twin Cities Interactive Community, headed up by Andrew Eklund, is having its holiday bash at The Bulldog Northeast from 5:30 to 11:30 PM. The Twin Cities Interactive Community is a loosely organized and very open group of interactive professionals, online marketing gurus, bloggers, developers and internet culture junkies. Open invite to anyone. If you’re on Facebook, add to your events.
Starting around 8:30 PM, Kyle from Reveille Magazine and More Cowbell celebrates his 30th birthday with a bash at the Nomad World Pub with Martin Devaney, Stook and others. Again, if you’re on Facebook, add to your events.
I got my XO Laptop shipped via FedEx this morning. In the box was the laptop itself, a battery, a charger and two sheets of paper, one of them being a thank you note from Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and CEO of One Laptop per Child and the other simply shows how to open the laptop, what the ports are and a short description of the home and neighborhood views. There’s no other documentation.
This is my second time with one of these, the first being in DC with Mike. The first things I’ve noticed right away compared to the pre-production unit I played with: the logo color on the top is different, the applications and interface feel a bit more refined and the applications feel a bit snappier.
I was reminded that it is small. Even my small cat thinks its small.
I’ve also (finally) had two very, very important things sink into me when working with these devices. First, I needed to remove my initial conceptions and expectations on what a laptop is and what it’s used for. For example, the first time I played with one the two applications I initially opened were the web browser and RSS reader. While web browsing and RSS work fine on the laptops, it’s not exactly the primary reason why these laptops exist. Secondly, I’ve learned to realize that these were truly designed for very young children from the ground up, not for adults using adult software and existing ideas on how interfaces should work. For example, Nicholas Deleon wrote at CrunchGear that the idea of porting Windows XP to this laptop “gives [it] an air of legitimacy.” I was so disappointed in his post showing how little some people understand the XO Laptop’s purpose.
What is it’s purpose? The XO Laptop was created as a tool for children for spreading information, learning and collaborating with others, especially in countries and remote areas where technology and educational materials are sparse. Likely, many of the kids that use an XO Laptop have not used a web browser before, let alone an RSS reader (or the necessity to be compatible with Microsoft Windows).
Opening up and booting my new XO Laptop for the first time lead me put in my name and then to choose my avatar’s color scheme. It then put me on the home view where you can choose activities to load from the bottom, similar to an OS X dock. On the top right of the screen as well as the keyboard are four icons that are a way of navigating. On the far left is the neighborhood view, which shows your laptop in comparison to everything else it sees on the network. The next is the group icon, which shows other laptops you are collaborating with. Next is home, which shows your laptop and the activities it is running. Finally, the far right button is activity, which shows your current running application.
Moving your mouse cursor at any time in any of the four corners of the screen brings up a frame containing those four icons at the top as well as the available activities at the bottom to load another application.
The bundled activities have a wide range of depth including Memorize, which is a simple memory game to programming languages such as one similar to Logo called TurtleArt and Pippy, a front-end for coding in Python. There’s also some other applications for building other games and programs from scratch which are currently way over my head. I thought about the appropriateness for such a young age for awhile and then remembered when I started writing my own code: at age 5 on an Atari 800XL. I realized that many people my age that are involved with technology now started by writing stuff on machines like that or others such as the Commodore 64. Man, learning languages is a lot easier to pick up at that age. 
Bundled as well is a very simple application for playing live music and another for recording audio and video. There’s a more advanced application for sequencing music too. There’s a basic calculator that has advanced algebraic functions, a word processor, chat application and a number of other applications including a full terminal (deep down it runs a stripped down version of Fedora Linux). Again, the applications really do range from extremely basic to advanced. A lot more applications are in development.
The key ingredient to making the XO Laptop work, in my opinion, is its collaboration features. The XO Laptop is designed to build its own mesh networks, and most of the applications are designed to communicate and share information with other laptops on those networks. For example you can have a project that was built on one laptop, and immediately share it with all the other laptops on the network. The mesh networks will also share an internet connection if it’s available.
Also a teacher or a school can have a server that delivers information to all the laptops when kids are near, and they can then take that information home to their communities and families and share it. The future of how books in classrooms and information is spread really gets my gears turning on the possibilities of these devices… and this is just version 1.0.
My XO Laptop came with a US AC outlet charger, but the port is designed to take a very wide range of power sources for charging the battery. Foot pumps, hand cranks and solar panel grids are possibilities.
I’ve had a few hiccups with it so far. For example, while it seemed to see a ton of wireless networks in my area, I had a hard time staying connected to my home WiFi. I couldn’t get WiFi working at all at the Town Talk Diner but could use it fine from my phone. Also, when the screen is folded back there were times where it would cause the mouse cursor to move by rubbing against the trackpad underneath.
Peter Fleck asked what I plan on doing with the laptop. Honestly, I don’t know. I support the One Laptop per Child project and wanted to donate one through the Give One. Get One. program. That was my primary reason for getting one. I can’t see myself using this as a normal laptop by any means as it isn’t really designed to be really fast or use a lot of applications simultaneously. It doesn’t match up with my device habits currently so I don’t know in what capacity I’ll use it. I don’t plan on writing applications for it. Also, the browsing speed is comparable to my iPhone on WiFi. I’ll probably tinker more and learn more of the applications. It’s only my first couple hours and I’ll be diving into it further. Honestly though, I think it’s possible that when I’m done telling everyone I know about the project in the next few months I’ll donate it to an organization that will have more use for it than I will.
See more photos with my OLPC tag on Flickr.
Last night I crashed The UpTake’s Correspondents’ Meeting to check out their brand new office space. The last time I saw them was at their fundraiser in October.
The UpTake is a media and technology services organization that publishes and trains citizen journalists with a strong focus on video. While there are a lot of citizen journalists and unaffiliated bloggers, videographers and writers out there, there are not many part of an organized group. The UpTake is trying to fill that gap and already is doing a great job. They have correspondents in Minnesota, Colorado and Iowa and they’re growing quickly. The UpTake helps people develop and capture stories as well as train people on equipment, software, journalistic ethics and storytelling. They’re also a backbone for people that need help covering stories, editing and publishing. The UpTake also keeps track of events and stories so multiple people aren’t covering the same thing. It’s a pretty interesting model.
Their angle is to cover what the mainstream media isn’t covering or can’t cover or don’t cover enough of. One figures, it wouldn’t be as valuable for citizen journalists and The UpTake to cover what is already being covered elsewhere, right?
While not really a political organization, their focus now has been on covering local and national politics. Their new office is located a block away from the Xcel Energy Center, where the Republican National Convention will be held in 2008. You can see the whole center from the roof too. A former dentist office, it has at least 12 rooms which will be converted into editing suites, offices and small studio spaces.
A couple friends of mine are deeply involved and I’ve been impressed with the organization. They really know what they’re doing and are ramping up very quickly. They’ll be a big player around RNC time.
