You are browsing the archive for March 2009.
Growing up in rural Wisconsin, Maple Syrup was a big business, that I seldom thought of. We were too poor, or never really thought of it, but we seldom had maple syrup unless it was given to us as a guest. However, taking a field trip to a maple syrup business was a staple field trip. Even in highschool, a few friends Jeremy and Mike started their own syrup business that sounds like is still going. They built themselves a “sappin’ shack” that I never personally partied in but often romanticized the tales of debauchery that occured there. Aww Wisconsin, how wonderful ye be. Now that I am rooted in Minnesota, the memories of driving past a forest of trees with buckets hanging from them are mostly just that – memories.
The adventures in gardening continue. A few weeks ago, Arika and I planted a bunch of seeds. Since then, we planted a few more. With the awesome sunny warm weather in the last week, the plants popped up like they had somewhere to be. We have tomatoes, poppys, asparagus, basil, mint, green peppers, fennel, oregano, and Arika planted a few seeds from some apples i bought. The next step is to transplant the sprouties into separate pots since each little hills has 3-10 sprouts coming up in it. Yaaaay for green thumbs.
I graduated from the U in ‘06. People have always complained that a disproportionate amount of money goes to the research side of the University of Minnesota. While I am definitely a fan of checks and balances, I think everyone can stand back for a second and praise this news from yesterday:
At work last week we launched a “share story” tool. It is a tool to allow you to share a story with up to 25 each of mutual friends on the site, your groups, and e-mails. I worked on the original version for Netscape.com as well as the new one that integrated the groups aspect for Propeller.com. The feature had been noticeably absent since the re-launch of the site over the summer. I hate to pat myself on the back, but it is a pretty slick feature.
After hearing about Edible Estates I decided I must have a food garden this year somehow.
Here are some interesting bits and media coverage – both social and traditional, about the Web Challenge 09. Enjoy.
The Overnight Challenge wrapped up around 10:30 or so today. The overall winner of the event was the organization District 202 (old site here) and their team Praxis. I can’t say for sure on how the judging was conducted, but I’m sure the key was the overall impact to the organization on fulfilling their mission rather than merely the things that “geeks” would otherwise hold dear. If I remember correctly, Praxis set up some sort of 3rd party community platform through Ning. I don’t know much about Ning, but the theme this year was definiatly reaching constituents through social media integrations. I also think most groups ended up going with some sort of pre-rolled CMS too. We, and a few others, used Wordpress – which after this long weekend, I think more and less of as a piece of software.
Weee. Programming is wrapping up and I think we made it. Everyone is just shuffling around like zombies… zombies on Redbull. We’re about to do our presentations and get the F out of Dodge. In retrospect, this was a thumbs up… but I will definitely be glad when it is over.
Here is some video footage we made of our group as example videos for YEA Corps. We set up some hip crazy cool you tube integrations for their projects and posted this for some demo content. Spladoinkle.
Wee…. still working… listening to Smodcast re-runs since I don’t have any music on my computer. Why does it seem that so much of my life is dedicated to building form styles? Lame. This needs redbull…