Vacation Day 4: Fishin'

Cole and Logan really had a good time all day. We spent the morning with Ma' Fuller. Ma Fuller's house is not, how do you say, kid friendly? She has tons of little extremely breakable nick-knacks and keeping toddler hands off of them can be a disturbingly mind-assaulting task. I came prepared and herded the boys out into the back yard with some balls. We eventually ended up on the side porch and rolled/tossed the balls back and forth. It was actually a pleasant time, despite my misgivings of how I was going to entertain them. Thank God for toys!

From there we went to Boomie's for some fishin'! We took a quick detour down to Wrightsville beach to visit a Wings and Trolly Stop, then we piled out onto the pier to the very end on the floating dock. I was videoing with one hand and attempting to keep all of my children on the dock with the other . There were a ton of boats in the water towing skiers and this made the dock bob. All told the boys were bouncing around like a bunch of druken' sailors.




The expedition started slowly, but after a bit the boys both showed hot hands, bringing in numerous fish! Cole brought in a "rare" fish called something like a "Papanou". Other than that it was all pinfish (the type of fish Cole is reeling in in the video).

Upon commencement of melt-downs we headed home and the boys slept til about 4, which is way later than they normally do. The rest of the afternoon was spent in the pool and then we went on to dinner at a nice seafood restaurant.

All in all, it was a great day!

Vacation: Day 3

Wow, what a day.

The day started off bright and early as always at 6:30 am. I did get a little extra sleep, after we got the boys up and rolling, but we were all ready to roll by 7:30. It was on to the beach ASAP despite the rain and overcast. The boys were able to work out their fear of the water and after a couple hours Cole, Logan, Gary and I were all bouncing in and out of the waves on the shore. I actually had to start restraining the boys from going in too deep.

With that we moved on to the pool where Cole honed his swimmie skills and Logan got used to wearing his. We swam for about an hour and then headed in for some lunch. My brother Todd showed up and so we all had some lunch.

About 12 Logan was ready to drop and asked to go to bed, which is always so cute. "Bed. Me. Bed." Todd left shortly thereafter and Cole went down at 1. Dalynn and I grabbed a quick siesta and then Ava was up.

From that point on, the day went a little crazy. I took Ava so Dalynn could take a shower. Ava and I woke Cole up after he'd been down for about 45 minutes. Cole was up and he, Ava and I then woke up Logan. So, no one really got a sufficient nap!

I took the boys to the park and then we all piled into the van to go to a birthday party for some family friends. We went down to Wrightsville beach and the boys played, and played, and played, and played, and... Holy cow, we ran and ran til they were ready to drop. We left the beach at their normal bed time.

We all got home, they got rinsed off and now their in bed. I have a good salad to eat. Man, I'm tired. I wonder if all of this vacation will be this exhausting? If it is, it'll be fine and we'll have an awesome time.

On the Road

Today we left for our week and a half family vacation. This will be the first real family vacation we've ever taken. I'm quite excited and am ready to kick my feet up a little bit and do what relaxing I can with 3 children under the age of 4.

On the right you'll see a picture of what the back of our van looked like before we left. If you can believe it we had the middle of the van completely full, too! As one friend asked, "Was there room for the kids?" Yes, on the roof. Some full coverage face masks and they were good to go. Cole wouldn't have abided bugs in the teeth...

We headed south towards the Port City! We had a stop-off in Washington, NC to see Grammy for about an hour, and then we headed on down to Wilmington, NC to spend several days with Granddaddy Gary and Gradma Ira.

The really cool part of our trip comes Sunday, though (not that half a week spent on the beach of Wilmington isn't cool). We have been blessed with a trip by an organization and ministry called Jason's House. Jason's House is in the business of giving week long trips to Myrtle Beach to the families of children with cancer.

We're being put up in a Holiday Sands on the beach with a ton of amenities. We'll be given a stack of coupons for food and attractions as well as some cash to even things out. We're being put up for a week. To say we're stoked is an understatement.

I'll be keeping you updated throughout our

An Analyst's Development Environment

Here in the land of academic research we're working with a "new" take on mashups. It seems like a no-brainer to me but a lot of people have expressed interest and surprise when I explain to them what we're doing. For now let's call it an analyst's development environment (ADE).

One thing that mashups are really, really good at is taking disparate data sources and allowing "momentary" relationships in the sources to be created. This in effect creates a new data source that is a fusion of the inputs. As is often the case in fusions, this new source tends to be more than just the sum of the parts. You often come up with new views on the data as you add extra sources.

Most people stop here at the fusion stage. Once they have the new view onto the data they rely on other tools outside the scope of a mashup to do interesting things. They might pipe that data into a tool such as Fusion Charts in order to visualize it or they might pipe it into an analysis tool such as a model or sim. But, why do they need to leave the scope of the mashup to do this? What if that analysis or the creation of the Fusion Charts XML was an automated part of the mashup itself?

Mashups deal with web services primarily (though there are some nifty products out there that allow you to mash more than just web services). A web service is usually considered to be a data source. But, in practice they are much more than that. Consider all of the specialized web services provided by Google for geolocation or Amazon for looking up aspects of books. The simplest example I can give you is Google's web service which converts an address to a lat and long pair (called geocoding). With these in mind let's take a different look at web services. Let's look at them as processing units.

A processing unit has 3 criteria: it takes input; does something interesting with that input; and provides output. Processing units are the basis of modern programming. They're known as methods, functions, procedures, etc. depending on context. We can most often build bigger processing units from simpler units.

Web services fit these 3 criteria handily. You can easily provide input, they can easily do something interesting with that input and then just as easily provide output. All communication is done in a standardized protocol driven environment.

The interesting thing about web services is that we can string them together (with the right tools) rather easily into processes. That's exactly what we're doing here. Each web service is either a data source or a processing unit. Given the ability to ferry data from one web service to the next (in an easy way) it is possible to create mashups that do more than just mash data. They actually do some form of processing.

Consider what it would be like if you had a web service endpoint attached to a model? You could pre-mash your data from various sources then run it all through the model and create a new output that would be very interesting. It would be so easy.

Using Presto we recently put together a demo which worked along these lines. It made our demo come together in several weeks rather than over several months. We used Presto to access databases then ferried that data (in XML format) into a custom built web service that took said data and ran XSL transforms on it. That produced Fusion Charts XML which we then piped into our presentation layer for visualization. It was easy.

Here is a diagram of what the actual flow of the mashup was.

Here is a screen shot of the actual chart produced by the generated Fusion Charts XML.


An ADE would work in a similar way. Using provided tools which allow for ferrying of data from one endpoint to another and given a grab-bag of analysis and transformation web services an analyst could create some amazing things with little effort or technical know-how. The only developer support would be in the creation of any custom web services. It could be a very powerful tool.

The Walled Garden

Let me hereby declare that I love my iPhone. It is useful and wonderful and keeps me connected all the time. I have been using it in lieu of my computer at home for quite some time now. I write emails on it, craft witty 140 character tweets on a regular basis, listen to books on iPod and even play extremely enjoyable games. It is a great experience.

I have, however, begun to chafe under the strictures placed on my iPhone by both AT&T and Apple (often in conjunction with each other).

My gripes against AT&T are especially aggravating. I pay them enough money as it is for the privilege of using my iPhone, why do I need to pay them even more in order to use my iPhone as a modem? It does not seem fair that I will have to shell out an additional $30/month to do what is freely available on other, older and less capable smart phones.

What's worse, if AT&T sees an app as competitive to it's business model, it will limit that app, or flat out deny it! Consider Skype: Skype offers free calls over the Internet to other Skype users, yet AT&T will not allow Skype to make calls over its 3G or Edge networks. They pull the undue competition card.

On the Apple front, a nifty app came to my attention recently that I thought was a truly innovative and awesome use of the iPhone. Given an iPhone 3GS (with its video capabilities, compass and GPS) an "Augmented Reality" app has been developed called TwitARound.

TwitARound looks at the tweets from Twitter in your area and plots them on a map. The AR part, though, comes when you hold your phone up. The app takes your GPS position and your bearing from the compass and lays the tweet on the screen. So, as you move in a circle with your iPhone in front of your face, you can see the actual locations on your iPhone of the tweets as they would appear if the tweets were layered over real life. It's quite awesome and I would like to see more apps like this.

However, because TwitARound accesses APIs which Apple has not, but should have, made public, it cannot be published in the iTunes store.

Apple plays the non-public API card too much. For instance, they did not make their "find my phone" APIs public so that they could charge you a monthly fee through mobileMe. There are already jailbroken apps which can do this, but since they didn't make the APIs public, you won't see legitimate apps show up in the app store.

Call me naive or non-business-savvy, but all of this seems like bad business to me. As a consumer, I want freedom. It's my device, I should be able to do with it as I choose.

So, while I love my iPhone, I chafe. Yes, I chafe.

Update: (on 7/29/09)

First off, it turns out that Apple will release the video camera APIs with iPhone OS 3.1 (per Ars here). Yay for Apple on this one. It's good to see that some of the "hidden" functionality is being exposed. Now, let's see if they expose the "find my phone" API or if they milk it for more money.

Secondly, the app denial shenanigans continue. In a story here (also on Ars) it appears that all apps relating to Google Voice are being pulled and any apps which feature Google Voice are being denied. The scuttlebutt is that AT&T is pulling the strings here. Some disagree, but my vote goes towards AT&T.

The Dark Side of Twitter

I've seen a very interesting phenomenon going on in the Twitter-verse recently. It has brought to my attention that Twitter (and micro-blogging in general) can be used for reasons that are not above-board. What, pray-tell, is this dark and nefarious phenomenon?

I keep getting followed by prostitutes.

The first time it happened I just thought it was some random individual with a sick sense of self. However, the next day, another woman of the same ilk followed me, and the next day another. That's when I started getting curious (not about what the women offered, but about what was really going on).

Invariably, they all posted a provocative picture of a woman with at least one post which was anywhere from lewd to slightly suggestive. That post would have a link attached. The link takes you to some triple-X "dating" service. Within a couple of days the account is shut down (you get the "Nothing to see here, move along" message when you try to visit the account).

No doubt, for some reason I am not aware of my twitter user name has been picked up by this "dating" service and they keep following me with fake accounts, all in vain hopes of promoting their "service". It's all at least partly automated, it has to be, and there's probably one person sitting behind a desk creating profiles then running those profiles through some tool they had custom made to follow a few thousand people.

The practice, though, really brings questions to my mind about what twitter can't be used for. If it can be used for prostitute marketing, why not black-market marketing or subversive political marketing? Why even marketing at all? I once had the privilege of speaking with an individual that detailed how an anarchist group used Twitter to attempt to disrupt the RNC in Colorado.

Of course, far from being upset by all of this I tend to think of this as rather ingenious. What uses can Twitter serve? What's the most creative use any of you have seen?

Nothing Left to Do...

There is a girl going through treatment with Cole named Lauren Cootes. As hard a path as we've had to walk, it pales in comparison with what Lauren and her family have had to endure. Lauren is 17, almost 18, and in her senior year of high school. She has ALL, just like Cole, but has been in the "first" stages of treatment for a year solid. In comparison, it took Cole 5 months to make it through delayed intensification, whereas Lauren has been in treatment since Mother's Day of '08 and is still not through delayed intensification.

If there is a side effect, Lauren has suffered from it. And I do mean suffered. Most recently she has been in the hospital with a blood infection that was very serious and very dangerous. I had the privilege of talking with her last night and she commented that she was in pain. Last time I had talked with her (a few weeks ago) she was in pain. I asked if it had lightened up at all, and she responded, "I'm always in pain, I'm just getting used to it."

And yet, whenever I picture Lauren in my mind I see her sweet smile. It's a tired smile and sometimes it's a little worn, but she always has a genuine smile.

Last night, while I was thinking about Lauren's latest encounter with the demons of cancer, I realized that Lauren's smile epitomizes something that we (my family and I) have been experiencing for quite some time. When everything has gone wrong, when you just can't catch a break, when nothing seems to even remotely be going your way, then you have nothing left to do... But live.

I think that's the amazing thing about living in cancer land. We see people who, day after day, are dealt the worst hand possible, yet they continue to play the game. Not only that, they continue to play the game with a smile on their faces.

Our struggle, and these people, people like Lauren, have made this scripture real to me:

Ephesians 6:13

Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.

We all have nothing left to do but live (or stand).

Join with Dalynn and I in prayer for Lauren and her family. They desperately need a break, a respite, anything. They have been hit so hard, so fast, for so long that I truly believe that it's becoming their normal. No one should have to live like that.

Pray with us that Lauren's sweet smile will stay on her lips and pray with us that her family will be bolstered and strengthened. Pray with us that they will have some time of rest and peace, some time where it's not in and out of the hospital. Pray with us that Lauren will be able to fully enjoy her first year at college and get to live life in the dorms. They need it, and by God, they deserve it.