The Jeff R Project

I don’t have any pictures of it this year, it seems to have come and gone quickly. I’m referring to the annual pink budding of Vancouver. For the last few weeks, thousands of trees have sprouted their pink blossoms and come to life during the amazing weather we’ve had.

Unfortunately, and fortunately, that’s coming to an end. I say unfortunately because it’s so pretty to walk down the street and see hundreds of trees festooned in bright pink – a sure sign of spring here. It also means that we now get “pink snow” with sidewalks covered with millions of rotting pink petals as they drop from the trees making way for the green.

I say fortunately because it means that summer is fast approaching and the weather will stop being as unpredictable. Plus seeing Vancouver return to it’s lush forest-like state is the way we all want to see it.

It also means that Chris’ birthday is approaching. Early April and he’ll be, well let’s just say turning another year older. It always causes him stress and last year I didn’t exactly help alleviate that so I’m going to try to do something special this year. Not a big party, but something nice.

We’re also planning on a small mini-vacation either that weekend or the one after. Just a quick trip out of town for 2 nights to re-group and see someplace new. Technically it’ll be the first vacation we’ve taken as a couple. A few years ago we went to Calgary for a long weekend, but we stayed with my family the whole time and had a tight agenda of things we had to do. Not really a vacation.

This will be all about us – relaxing, no agenda (other than getting to the destination), no interruptions. The dog is coming with us, but he’s low maintenance generally.

Spring is in the air!

It wasn’t the best weekend, mostly because Chris was super sick all weekend. It didn’t entirely stop us but slowed us down. It’s now Monday and he’s not 100% better, but improving. Poor guy.

I spent the majority of the weekend working on my WordPress plugin. Standout Comments runs the comment system on this blog and many of my other personal blogs. My partners in this, Alex Shalman and local marketer John Chow hope to launch this to the public on March 25.

I’ve been struggling with Tweetbacks, a system for tracking tweets about your blog across the Twittersphere. I think I finally nailed it 100% this weekend, but it cost me about 8 hours of tracking, testing and coding to get it. The main problem was that it sent thousands of requests and Twitter would rate-limit me. When Twitter rate-limits you, they send back an error that says “Enhance your chill.” Cute, but not helpful.

We had to cancel some plans with friends and the weather wasn’t great for getting out or having the windows open too much either, it seemed like I was opening and closing windows every 5 minutes, or turning the heat on or off too.

Combine that with “Spring Forward” and the new early morning darkness and it was a little confusing. Oh well, now it’s Monday. Which can only mean one thing…

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Nathan Sawaya is a Lego Artist – a job title that not many people can lay claim to. And man is he good.

Take a look at his latest creation over there —>

Nathan has created this Lego model of a BlackBerry for the BlackBerry developer conference coming up and this is just the latest example of his work.

Like I said, this is my kind of job. I’m sure it’s not easy and something like this one must be a technical challenge since it has to be vertical, support it’s own weight – oh, and contain a functioning television!

My brother, Brad, and I used to spend many, many hours in the basement playing building with Lego. We built entire cities, a fully functional and accurate football stadium and many abstract creations. The football stadium had concession stands on the outside and a store! It was huge and we were very proud of it. I won’t tell you how old we were at the time.

Unfortunately time moved on and we moved out of the house. Neither of us could afford to, nor had room to, take the Lego we had amassed with us and it was left behind. Eventually Brad managed to sell it but for a LOT less than it should have gone for. I miss it.

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At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper “laptop”.

The original article is on IndiaTimes here.

Mistry demonstrates some amazing technology including projector and camera systems that the user can wear transforming any flat surface into a computer system. He started by pulling apart 2 ball-based mice and transforming their physical rollers with some string and springs into a gesture based input device. You know those wearable gloves that let people manipulate 3D objects on a computer? Yeah, that – from spare parts!

If Mistry can bring this kind of tech to live, then we’re going to be living in some amazing times. What’s cool is that Mistry and his team have actually developed this tech. It’s not just theory, but actually working! He even plays PONG! on the floor of a subway. He’s promised to release the open source code to all of his development, which means just about anyone could pick it up, build on it and start releasing consumer products for a fraction of the cost.

Thanks to Susan and Pardeep for sharing this with me.

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So Chris and I are big fans of the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory with Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons. I haven’t mentioned it before for some reason, but it’s true. We have seen every episode, we have Seasons one and two on our phones etc. I love being able to say we have 2 seasons of a TV show on our PHONE! 2010 rocks tech geek hard.

I’ve downloaded the theme song from The Big Bang Theory partly because it’s fun, but also because it’s by Barenaked Ladies! There’s way more than the first 30 seconds we hear on the show each week.

The cast is a great ensemble with the aforementioned Parsons and Galecki, joined by Kaley Cuoco (8 Simple Rules), Simon Helberg (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) and Kunal Nayyar (um, he’s new). They’ve done some great stunt casting ranging from Summer Glau through Wil Wheaton to Stan Lee.

Stan Lee was the guest star last night making a special appearance at the boy’s favorite comic store. Must be nice to be in L.A.

My favorite part of the show was the beginning when Raj was wearing his Personal Soundtrack Shirt. It was pretty geek-cool and it’s real!

Basically it’s a t-shirt with a speaker in the middle, and a remote control. it comes pre-loaded with a variety of music and sounds, but it also has an SD slot to let you load it with just about any sound or song you can think of!

You really can have your own personal soundtrack to life. Raj plays everything from Darth Vader’s theme to the Jeopardy theme. He also punctuates with a buzzer and the “duh duh” sound from Law & Order! It’s awesome.

If I don’t get one of these for my birthday I’ll just have to find a way to go on with out it.

However, if you want one for yourself, or someone you like, simply click here to buy one from ThinkGeek.com

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