floating atoll

Casual grouping

I've been sitting in the lobby for hours now; starting with three people, we've been as many as eight, and now we're back down to 4. Nope, make that three.

Discussion has ranged back and forth; we've been through activism, politics, the world view of US politics, fixing flash player, and anonymous chat with people upstairs.

There's a journalism BoF tomorrow; I've found a group of people that share my viewpoint on things; I got to see a cool The Daily Show, and I've shifted my political views slightly.

There needs to be community places to do this. Living without this kind of ebb and flow of interesting, interested people is unacceptable :)

Live resources

It's amazing being able to solve a resource issue ("opengl laptop", "trip to fry's", "who is magdalinski") by asking people at the table.

Very awesome. Must be awesome people, too, or something. :)

Small-community learning groups

Someone I know from way back when is apparently responsible for a project in one of the local school districts; they're studying technology stuff, like Flash MX and SNMP, and a few of them have come to the conference with the teacher.

Pretty awesome stuff; even in the midst of the totally destroyed Oregon educational budget issues, something intelligent is being done in the school system. Cool.

Screw that.

Okay, I'm just going to change the format of crystalflame.net. Forget this double-blog thing.

If you liked the essay-only blog style, it's going to be a lot noisier for the next couple days; might want to check back in a week.

Who knows. Change is good. Only had to split the site to learn that lesson :)

Greetings.

Hi there. Opalescent Tome is my journal blog; I finally decided I'll need one, at least for the conferences I'm going to this year.

The entries will continue here as usual; I prefer floating atoll to be for published works, as it were.

RSS feeds are available for both floating atoll and Opalescent Tome.

Thanks for listening, and now back to your regularly schedule programme.

Weather feed

I'm going to be traveling soon, so I'd like to watch to long-term weather report for the areas I'll be visiting. This should be done via an RSS feed, and I prefer Weather.com's service.

Sample output is available at this site; the 10-day forecast near the end of the page is what I desire most.

Site-wide word links

I'd like for MovableType to allow me to search and surround with an (and an ) tag all links matching a search term, and let me review each change on a big "yay/nay" change list. Then I could attach a list of links to that word, and share them between articles. That'd be pretty awesome.

You could do this by sucking the database down, doing a search & replace, and reuploading it; not wonderful, but it works.

Friend-seekers

Take an army of the recently-described feral hunting robots . To each robot, add a GPS chip and wireless mesh networking .

Give the people and dogs smart name tags , and have your dogs exchange your "business card" with the other smart name tags. Publish the FOAF url in it, so you can immediately check for compatibility and give the new information to the dogs.

Study the discovered FOAF files , each describing individual traits ("attributes").

Instruct the feral robots to find other people with compatible personalities , but to stay near you. They'll roam around, seeking people whose interests relate to yours.

For bonus points, add solar panels to generate power as it roams around, and electronic boundaries to keep it in safe areas, away from motor traffic.