For the last five or so years I've been trying to imagine what it would have been like growing up with easy computing, and I don't think it would have been good for me. Back in 1988 when I first started seriously playing with computers they were hard to use. You had to learn a lot of obscure text commands, and most everything you tried to do required that you know how something worked that could reasonably have been abstracted away from you.

Three days ago I posted a rather lengthy entry wherein I decried the current state of open, collaborative calendaring. In it I listed six requirements for calendaring software and settled on the option available to me that met the most of them. Now I'm changing my mind.

At the time I needed a new calendaring solution fast and had checked out all the candidates before. The software package Remind had a nice interface, an expressive configuration language, web-visibility, local-storage, and was open source. It met four of the six requirements and would have served admirably for a few years. So why did I find myself laying awake worrying about my choice? (Seriously, I'm that big of a loser.)

I'm happy with my email client, text editor, compilers, IRC client, news reader, web browser, and just about every other tool I use in the process of my daily computing. The only consistent source of displeasure has been my calendaring (when the hell did that become a word?) application. I have a hideously over-scheduled life and need some sort of scheduling solution be it computerized or otherwise to keep things straight, but I've never found anything that really suits me needs.

Being a telecommuter, the closest thing I have to an office is an IRC channel. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is like a chat room minus the emoticons and pedophiles. While normally the office IRC channel is the very embodiment of maturity, there are two silly things about it that have always annoyed me. The first being that everyone gets to pick their own name, and the second being they can change their names at will.

There's a program on freshmeat called email2sms (http://freshmeat.net/projects/email2sms/) that runs emails through a series of filters until they're short enough to be sent to a cell phone as a SMS message -- which typically have a maximum length of 150 characters. The script is mostly just a wrapper around the nifty Lingua::EN::Squeeze Perl module.

Squeeze takes English text and shortens it aggressively using all manner of abbreviations. It leaves the text remarkably readable for being about half its original length.

This weekend I had a great time canoeing with six friends. We camped, swam, paddled, drank and just generally goofed around for a weekend. Two of us had brought along Garmin eTrex GPS units which I'd not previously had when canoeing. They really added a lot.

I built an 18 point route approximating our course before hand and loaded them into the GPSs. With that info and the GPS's natural data collection we were able to always know our current speed, average speed (3.2 mph), max speed (mine = 10.5 mph), distance paddled (total = 29.1 miles), and elapsed time (10 hours 31 minutes of paddling).

I get and send a lot of email. Many of the emails I send are responses to emails I received. When I respond to email I almost always quote the email to which I'm responding, and when I do my email client (mutt) inserts a line like:

On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 11:40:25AM -0600, Justin Chapweske wrote:

Knowing the time of the original message and the time of my reply provides enough information to track my response times to email. I used the inbound message ids to make sure only the first reply to an email was counted.

A chump bot (http://www.w3.org/2001/09/chump/) sits in an IRC (Chat) channel and remembers any URL (web addresses) that people say. It displays them on a web page for later reference. I spend time in #infoanarchy on the freenode network (freenode.org) where someone runs a chump bot whose output is visible here: http://peerfear.org/chump/

A wiki is website anyone can edit. Every page has an edit button on the bottom which anyone can press to edit the page. They grow organically and are great for group collaboration. Some friends and I set one up and track plan most of our group activities using it. The most famous wiki is http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?WikiWikiWeb

I run a lot of mailing lists on mailman, http://www.list.org/, servers. Most all of these lists are configured so that only list subscribers are allowed to post messages. I do this because these lists get a lot of spam messages that I don't want to get through to all subscribers.

Unfortunately, when a non-subscriber posts they're not automatically rebuffed, but instead I, as the mailing list administrator, get an email asking if I want to approve their message anyway. If I don't answer that question I get get a reminder every 24 hours. The reminders can be turned off, but there are some of mailman's questions that I do want to have brought to my attention (ex: subscribed posters who have exceeded maximum message size, etc.).

It took most of a weekend to do it, but there's now a nice website for the Minneapolis Surveillance Camera Project at http://sarinity.com . I'll be moving it to its own domain eventually, but that'll be a week or so.

The look is entirely owed to the Open Source Web Design site, http://oswd.org. I love being able to just go snarf a well coded template for a new project. Those people are doing a real service.