Tripp Fenderson

8 days ago, I started a 365 Days Flickr project—1 self-portrait per day for an entire year.

Tim should be here watching this—so tonight, I’m hanging with Tim.

I miss you man.

Health and the subsequent financial challenges from the past 15 months encouraged me to review my goals recently. With 2009 fast approaching, I’m taking the time to line things up to achieve them and have a more productive year.

Over the last few years, I’ve become a die-hard customer of Google’s services. On a daily basis, I log into Gmail, Reader, Analytics, Adsense, Docs, and others but because Google and Apple’s iCal don’t play nicely together without the use of third-party sync apps, I never bothered with Google Calendar.

The Camry rolled 150,000 miles the other day and is still going strong. You gotta love a Toyota engine. The next 150K may take a bit longer, given that I’m driving about 6 miles a day now that I use GRTC for my commute.

Back in March, YouTube released a video analytics tool called YouTube Insight. It lets anyone with a YouTube account view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload including how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, how popular they are relative to all videos, and many other statistics.

At lunch today, I was browsing a few financial forums looking for some info related to some stock I own (Activision, ATVID) and ran across this quote:

“My portfolio pwn’s yours u noob”

You gotta’ love it when gaming lingo crosses over into the financial sector. Next thing you know, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will be busting out quotes like “I’m in UR $entral bank adjusting UR ratez”.

The photo doesn’t do it justice but we had a gorgeous double rainbow appear in front of our house following tonight’s rain.

It’s amazing what multiple trips to the ER and 10 days in hospital can do for one’s perspective. Lying in a bed, especially the ultra-cushy ones in the ICU at Henrico Doctors Parham, afforded me the time to consider a number of ideas I should have worked through a long time ago.

I won’t be blogging, using Twitter, or doing much of anything online other than the occasional email to friends and family until I complete some other tasks.

Cheers.

Yesterday, I noticed that Twitter added a link for me to “share my story”. The team at obvious.com wanted to know who I was and why I use it.

I responded telling them that I was an Incognito Anthropologist interested in Twitter for four reasons:

1. Richmond has an incredibly smart, savvy, and downright friendly group of people when it comes to all things Internet. From our projects in citizen journalism to wi-fi initiatives to the general chatter on the blogs, we’re creating meaningful connections. Twitter serves to extend and enrich those connections.

2. Many local media outlets aren’t connecting with their audience in the way they used to - or rather, the local audience wants a different kind of connection. Adopting Twitter and using it to meet the needs of their audience (a crucial point that will be missed by many media companies) adds capital to the social connection that needs to exist between local media and the informed citizen. I’m interested in following media companies using Twitter to learn more about how they use the service.

3. My Twitter feed is much more entertaining than scanning the 5000+ new posts I get in Google Reader every day.

4. Twitter lets me directly connect, in 140 characters or less, with brilliant minds around the world and that’s a beautiful thing.

Stowe Boyd, eloquent as always, has his take on the survey here:

http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2008/04/my-twitter-stor.html

UPDATE: David Russell has a few photos posted on flickr from this morning’s sneak peek.

New Control Panel
Managing Fields
Content Page

UPDATE: More screenshots from Derek

The big news (although not altogether unexpected) is that EE 2.0 is built on the CodeIgniter framework. This is great news for the company, for the developers, and the two communities behind EE and CodeIgniter. With CI as the framework, a number of doors open for extending the application in ways that weren’t possible (or were too much trouble) before, expecially with regard to custom fields/data.

The other news is that the control panel has been completely redesigned by the one and only and totally awesome Veerle Pieters!! It’s powered, in all it’s ajaxy-glory by JQuery. The familiar tabs are gone and a footer area contains a number of tools and links.

There’s also some talk about how EE 2.0 will manage files and images better—but no real meat to that. I’ll be interested to learn more on this given the complexity of file associations we deal with at work.

Of course, the biggest question is, when will it be released?

The answer, “when it’s ready.”

I had to drive to work yesterday instead of taking the bus. Despite my best efforts to thwart the meter maids, I got a parking ticket. [grrr.]

This morning, John M. Lewis Jr., GRTC’s CEO, is laughing at me.