I’ve posted a few photos from our Labor Day outing to Oakland’s Fairlyland.
Year: 2004
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Monitoring Blogs
The San Jose Mercury News did a piece this week on companies turning to new tools to track consumer opinions on blogs. More and more people are beginning to realize that the right blogs, if monitored correctly, can serve as an early warning mechanism for the PR flacks everywhere. With their finger on the pulse of “the next big story,” the more popular blogs can amplify little known facts and points of view to the point where they can get picked up by the popular media and broadcast to the world at large.
So how does a company keep track of the sentiment of what’s being said in the blogsphere about their product and brand? One of the more interesting tools highlighted in the article is Blabble. Founded by Rochester, NY based web designer, Matt Rice. The concept is called “thought parsing” using natural language processing to aggregate opinions expressed about a set of user-defined keywords to get at overall sentiment.
Existing software products aggregate listings from blogs, but require the user seeking a view of overall trends or opinions as represented in blogs to read through all the blog listings to make that determination manually.
Rice says Blabble goes a step farther by incorporating natural language processing that parses blog listings returned in a search into parts of speech so as to extract from them words, phrases and constructions that indicate opinion. “50,000 people may write about a topic, but you don’t have time to read 50,000 listings,” says Rice. “And I probably don’t care about one individual opinion; it’s the aggregate that I care about.”
UPDATE : as of January 2006, the Blabble service will no longer parse the blogosphere. According to the site, “we don’t know what we’re going to do with the technology.”
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Balloons
The presidential campaign is not even over but I think they’re right to say that this is the dumbest quote from the 2004 campaign:
“Go, balloons. I don’t see anything happening. Go, balloons. Go, balloons. Go, balloons. Stand by, confetti. Keep coming, balloons. More balloons. Bring them. Balloons, balloons, balloons! More balloons. Tons of them. Bring them down. Let them all come. No confetti. No confetti yet. No confetti. All right. Go, balloons. Go, balloons. We’re getting more balloons. All balloons. All balloons should be going. Come on, guys! Let’s move it. Jesus! We need more balloons. I want all balloons to go. Go, confetti. Go, confetti. Go, confetti. I want more balloons. What’s happening to the balloons? We need more balloons. We need all of them coming down. Go, balloons. Balloons. What’s happening balloons? There’s not enough coming down. All balloons! Why the hell is nothing falling? What the f— are you guys doing up there? We want more balloons coming down. More balloons. More balloons.”
–Democratic Convention producer Don Mischer, overheard on CNN having an apoplectic seizure when the balloons failed to drop from the ceiling of the Fleet Center in Boston
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Try, Try Again
Launched in August 2001, NASA’s Genesis was a delicate unmanned spacecraft designed to collect solar wind samples for further analysis on Earth. The pod was to enter the atmosphere and deploy a chute to slow down it’s speed and while drifting to the ground was going to be intercepted by trained helicopter pilots who would snag the pod mid-air and bring it down safely without damaging it’s delicate sapphire collection plates.
I knew about this mission because the retrieval methods were covered by NPR on the radio when they interviewed the helicopter pilots who were actually stunt pilots from Hollywood. NASA usually turns to the military for such tasks but they decided that the stunt pilots would be better experienced for such a mission.
Things did not go as planned. Hopefully they can piece things together enough so the mission isn’t a total loss.
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From the ground up
The price of homes are so high and the opportunities for massive appreciation on the sale of a restored Victorian that those with time and money on their hands are buying old run down houses and giving them a complete makeover. We met one couple that had this dream and they would drive the streets looking for old houses in need of repair, noting the addresses, and then looking them up at City Hall. If the house had the same owner for more than 30 years, they would write the owner and ask if they were interested in cashing out their home equity by selling. They wrote over 100 letters before they got a positive response.
One problem with the old Vics is that they were often build on a brick foundation which is crumbles over time. Modern building code suggests concrete foundations with the house bolted into the concrete which is what’s going on with this house which is down the block from us.
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Blood Check
Tyler went to the doctor on Friday to get a checkup for Kindergarten. Along with various shots and pokes, they also pricked his finger and took out some blood to test for various things. Lots of yelping, screaming, and, on the way home, sniffles.
Yesterday we told Tyler we have to go back to the doctor to pick up some test results. He then asked, “Are they going to put my blood back in?”
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Dekka Ranger
Because all of our stuff is in storage, we have to make do with whatever we have and invent what we don’t have. Here’s a bit of “inside the box” thinking by Tyler who wanted a mask so he could play out his favorite super hero, Dekka Ranger.
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Dancin’ in the Streets
Songwriter for The Grateful Dead and, more recently, The String Cheese Incident, cattle rancher and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is organizing spontaneous outbreaks of senseless dancing in and around the Republican National Convention. It’s become a movement
We just had another brilliant expedition into elephant country. We encountered many of our quarry, converted a few, and made the rest so nervous you would have thought their thin smiles might shatter their faces. One of them said that he knew we were mocking George Bush. “How are we doing that?” we asked. “By dancing,” he snarled.
And that, my pesky friends, is paydirt!
John Barlow -
Tyler’s First Day of Kindergarten
Today was Tyler’s first day of school. Here are the before and after photos of the day.
The parents got to see all the kids get settled and watch the teacher welcome the class and read them a story. I have a good feeling about the school, a nice mix of kids with two teachers to handle the twenty kids in Tyler’s class.
Before 
After