I’ve been volunteering as a developer for Christmas Future, a local charity founded by my good friend Jay Baydala a few years back, for quite some time. What with my return to the world of working etc etc, I have decided to put about 4 - 8 hours a week into doing a bit of CFoo work.

My current project is building up a small REST API to expose a bit of the data in the DT core to outside developers. Though in this case those outside developers will also be me. I (and Charlie Godsoe) will be using this API to build up a few widgets that will be plugable to all your favorite social networking apps (Facebook, Blogger, MySpace etc) as well as a Dashboard widget and a Vista Gadget.

So all in all there is lots on the go here in C town, so stay tuned, as I finally have something developer-ey to blog about.

.joe

Alas my running has been put on hold as I hurt my ankle on monday. I think it’s I aggravated a sprain from earlier in the year, but hopefully it will be back to normal some time next week and I’ll be able to get back on it.

.joe

Those of you who know me in person (which I’ll just go ahead and assume is 100% of the readers) know that I am a huge Star Trek fan, well perhaps less so in recent years with the advent of the much superior Battlestar Galactica, but none the less I grew up on the trek.

In any case,  my thoughts have recently have been of this poster my dad got me when I was maybe 7 or 8, which read - “Everything I need to know I learned from Star Trek”, and it listed a few clever lines form the show (Can easily be googled for and example). As you may have seen in my earlier post we dressed up as the crew of the enterprise for halloween, in preparation for our parts we spent a month or so watching old Star Trek:The Next Generation. Watching the old shows a few things dawned on me.

- This show looked a lot more bad ass when I was 7.

- There are only four sections of hallway, and they all seem to curve for some reason.

- These characters are mostly pretty boring and one dimensional with the exception of Data.

But most importantly it occurred to me that more so than the religious teachers of my child hood (I went to a Roman Catholic french school for much of my upbringing) Captain Picard and his group of trekers shaped my view of morality. There is some guy out there on the web that wrote a song “What would captain Picard do” and I feel to a certain extent this has some resonance with the geeks of my generation. Picard was a great renaissance man that everyone should aspire to be, he was well read, charming, played music (the tin whistle never sounded so good), he was diplomatic when he needed to be, and tough as nails when the situation called for it (THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS).

Kirk on the other hand was much more brash, and seemed to see the world in two contexts. Something to be seduced, or something to be judo chopped. He was a cowboy who tended to think in terms of absolutes, in contrast to Picard’s more thoughtful approach. Kirk possessed a moral dichotomy similar to George W. Bush, the with us or against us black and white galactic view. Though it should be noted that I am talking about TV show Kirk, in Star Trek 6 they attempted to round him out a bit more, and there was that search for God in Star Trek 5. 

At the end of the day I think Kirk represented more of the kind of hero figure children have, who always knows right from wrong acts on it, and has beautiful women dripping off him. Where as Picard is more the kind of man that one comes to admire as they get older.

So which are you, Kirk or Picard…. or God help us Janeway… (I guess Sisko was pretty rad too, but he wasn’t really human so that doesn’t count)

.joe out.

So I managed to hit a new distance record of 5Km yesterday, again really starting to feel like this half marathon thing is within my grasp given my recent bout of successes. Though at present I have a monster blister on my arch which is probably going to limit me running over the next few days anyway. There is something interesting though about having a bit of an acute pain when you are running, but powering through it. In any case I’ll update more on the run progress as I have information. Oh, the cool bit, upon completing my 5km Lance Armstrong spoke into my ears saying “Hey I’m Lance Armstrong, congratulations on your longest run to date”, I love automated inspiration!

In other news I couldn’t help but turn on CNN last night and find my self amazed at the goings on. It’s been said millions of times before  that the media sensationalizes news, and more over reports on the minutia of everyday poloitics. However I was shocked to hear how CNN in particular was just laying into Obama (perhaps trying to downplay their liberal media bias….). Set aside their going on and on and on about what he wore to work on a saturday, what he eats, etc. The fact that he made a few little bobbles here and there (tapping a few seemingly corrupt people to serve in his cabinet) means that it’s back to business as usual on capital hill, as the put it on the daily show last night “The Honeymoon is Over!”

I guess his campaign of Change and Hope requires immediate change and hope… with no delay. I have started to get the feeling that he has set the bar so high for him self, and that if he is anything short of the panacea of our woes (I speak in the american sense of US) then he will be regarded as a failure of  a president.

I think Bush had a much stronger strategy in some regards, he aimed much lower, and so we were mostly impressed when he didn’t choke to death on his own food. 

I think I’ve learned something from this experience…. turning on the TV is a bad idea, or I should just watch the BBC from now on.

On another funnier note, which only Paul may appreciate, I was on hold with Apple today and the hold music was Cupid De Locke by the Smashing Pumpkins. I felt both dated for a song from my youth being relegated to hold music, and annoyed because I’ve always hated that stupid song.

.joe out.

I guess this doesn’t really affect anyone but me, I upgrades to word press 2.7 so far I really like it. They have used the dashboard metaphor quite nicely so now I don’t have to click to much to remove all of the spam comments and such.

Long live open source.

In other news, I’ve hit two more 4 KM runs, and am really starting to believe that this half marathon thing is going to be possible.

UPDATE: I also fixed the Nike Plus plugin to work properly for me… and turned it metric… since miles have little to no meaning to me.

.joe out.