During hurricane season, my attention turns to the Atlantic Ocean. I keep an eye on swell-producing storms and use a variety of forecasting tools to get to the right spot for the best surf. But I never really thought about the data behind the tools I use.
There are many different stats brought together by today’s forecasting technology: Continue reading
Where do you start to standardize legislative information for all 50 United States? Blazing an open data trail for one state government isn’t easy, so shifting 50 must be nearly impossible. Or is it? The Open State Project is making progress towards the impossible—and closing in on the goal.
When I first heard about this project I thought, that’s cool—I wonder how they do it? Then I thought, this must be a nightmare. Can you imagine trying to scrape, sanitize, and standardize data from hundreds of different sources? Continue reading
The apology and explanatory email started off with this:
It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.
True. I don’t want to use two websites from the same company to achieve the same thing. Continue reading
We’d like to highlight a few blog posts from GovLoop about open government and technology. In a previous post, we talked about GovLoop and the diversity and experience their community offers. It’s a social network for the government community, focused on connecting people and sharing information and boasting more than 45,000 members.
Here are a few posts that we think you’ll enjoy about capturing public comments, Code for America, and a new job and career resource. Continue reading
Surf from Hurricane Katia
I decided to work remote from the Outer Banks during Labor Day week. I got lucky with a plethora of surf. I was hoping for it, but didn’t expect the surf to be this good. On Friday, September 9th, Katia delivered. In the morning, it was head to 3-foot overhead. (6-9 foot surf.) By the afternoon, the swell had dwindled, but it was still 6-8 foot surf.
MB, Zander, and I headed to the Outer Banks on Sunday (9/4), after the NC State season opener against Liberty. The football game was a blast and the Wolfpack won. We arrived at the beach around 2pm. All of our friends were hanging out on the beach and there were a few waves out there. I surfed for about an hour. Continue reading
Hurricane flags fly in Wrightsville Beach
The Jetta was packed last night with two surfboards, my surf gear, and other essentials. I was ready for an early morning trip to Wilmington to surf. The alarm went off around 5am and after I woke up, headed East.
Hurricane Irene is looming off the East coast and the surf window wasn’t very big. I didn’t think the surf would last much past noon today–and I was right. I arrived at Wrightsville Beach just after 7:30am. I took some pictures and got in the water. Continue reading
Anyone who manages a Google Group may have noticed recent changes to how they administer their users. While the Google Groups team calls this a spam improvement, I call it a huge oversight, a lack of innovation, and a step backwards. Especially for admins who have to deal with adding users not familiar with mailing list or groups.
On the Google Groups announcement page, they detail this change on July 19th as follows: Continue reading
Here are some posts from other places that I write, including opensource.com, Raleigh’s Creative District, and CityCamp Raleigh.
See what else I’ve been saying around the web over the last few weeks. Continue reading
We had our work cut-out for us last weekend. The project list looked something like this: weed the garden, mow the lawn, weed eat, edge, trim the pond liner, add protective netting to the pond, re-pot elephant ears, plant new tomato plants, mulch the front gardens, accessorize the upper deck, and plant our new Knock Out® Rose garden.
We decided to document the creation of our new garden with a few photos before, during, and after. We hope you enjoy.
At last night’s TriDUG meeting, we had two stellar presentations and a preview to a new logo and identity for TriDUG (Triangle Drupal User Group).
Matt Kennedy from Four Clouds gave a great introduction Drupal Views. Andrea Ross from UNC, FPG Child Development Inst. wowed us with an introduction to Drupal Theming. Continue reading