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Mr. Kevron snapped this photo of the girl this weekend. Today, by the way, right about now, actually, marks the very first day in my life wherein my loyalties split between my wife and my girl for the very first time.
Three years ago was the first time wherein I was honor bound to be by the side of not one, but two people who needed me. It has been my privilege to do my best by both of them ever since. It's hard, but we do ok. I hope.
The girl spent the weekend attached to my hip, and we went to Bucketworks to help with the physical wiki weekend, and set up for Urban Scrawl. SHe painted a board that got used in the Urban Scrawl show, and she was soproud.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Gaia. Thanks for being an awesome three-year old.

Robot Parade from Jared Foster on Vimeo.

Love this idea. A Robot Parade at Bucketworks would be an awesome fundraiser/outreach project.

Got a weird assignment at work today. Had to write a postcard for people who treat depression. So, you're not really selling anything to people who are depressed, you're selling something to people who know about depression. Or want to know more. Or something.
Regardless, I was really stuck. One of the things about being a "create on demand" professional is that you have to have little tricks to get your creative mojo cooking. I like to do mind maps. Especially to songs I love. So a mind-map on Depression Treatment: Rilo Kiley's "Better Son/Daughter" yields the following results:

There is a lot going on these days.



BarcampMK3: We're in the hard push for sponsorships: If you have access to $200, you could do more foolish things than spend it on BarCamp Milwaukee 3. There are a couple of promises I want to make regarding this year's BarCamp:

• Bandwidth
  We will have bandwidth for all at BarCampMK3. Dammit.
• Bucketworks
  We will be at the Mighty Bucketfor this years event.

There are other promises I want to make you, but at this time, I'm really not ready to make them. I think we should have electronic check in. I'm working on that. I think we should have webcasting. I think we should have a Creative Commons Salon/lounge. I'd like to have a band. I would like to screen "Steal this Film." I would like to have a *gasp* keynote session. (Appalling, I know.)
But before any of that can happen, we need sponsors. Send us $200. You can do it by PayPal or any other way you're comfortable. We just want your money. We need your money. This can't happen without your sponsorship.
BarCampMk3: October 4th/5th 2008. Starting at 10 a.m. at Milwaukee's famous Bucketworks.

My buddy Mike Rohde over at Rohdesign.com often posts some amazing, incredible, super-awesome Sketchnotes of conferences he attends. While attending a few sessions at the OCF Conference in Boston this weekend, I, too, took a few pages of sketchnotes. The difference between Mike's notes and mine should be obvious to you. Mikes are beautiful works of art, are clean, legible, and done by a man who helped create the genre.
Mine, on the other hand, are illegible, childish, and any of the words you happen to make out will probably be misspelled.
That being said, I think I will post some after I can get them properly scanned. Until then, I am going to enjoy this delicious sandwich. There is a video coming about that, later.

Dear NowPublic,
Because my photo is already licensed under BY NC SA Creative Commons Terms, you don't need my permission to use the photos so long as you meet those terms. Any other use remains prohibited.
Feel free to use my photos under the terms I offer them without asking me to create an account on your site or agree to your terms of service.
If you feel that the terms I'm offering my photos under are too restrictive for your use, please propose a specific use and make me an offer as to the terms you'd like to extend.
Your Pal,
Gabe

Editor's Note: I'd probably be interested in getting to more about NowPublic.com, except that the strange flickrmail that initiated the above response set my Nigerian Email Scam feelers into a tizzy. Anybody know anything about NowPublic?

It's a lot of work, this content creation thing. I think that creators tend to under-estimate the amount of work that goes into producing quality content-- even publishing stories where the bulk of the content creation has been done for you is a lot of work.
Case in point, I just published an article over at Ocono.com that has been on my plate since July 9. Today is July 27th. Holy crap. It's not exactly a pulitzer candidate, but it's an example of decent blog content, you know? More than a Link, less than a full blown article. It took me 2 hours to write it today.
Granted, I had some formatting troubles that slowed me down-- Evernote text cuts and pastes kind of weird-- and I was sloppy with my HTML-- but that's not the point. the point is that a small but quality article for a blog takes about two hours to produce. This is a lot of time to give away for free.
Fortunately, I don't feel like I'm not getting anything back for my investment-- so don't worry Pete, I'm not going to ask for a raise. With Ocono.com, I get value back in two parts: 1. I have a venue to put thoughts about Oconomowoc, Wisconsin-- old habits die hard that way. 2: I enjoy supporting Publisher Pete's efforts in suburban Blogging. I think, and I am admittedly biased,' Ocono.com is Oconomowoc's best online news and lifestyle magazine-- If the folks at Oconomowocfocus.com knew what they were doing online, they could take the cake, but they don't so they haven't. I enjoy that.
But free content don't come cheaply. It's a sacrifice I'm happy to make, but I feel badly that I just can't put the love and attention into Ocono.com that really needs to be put into it. Maybe it's time to expand the staff?

I forgot to tell you: Last night, I dreamt that I had fallen asleep on a hole in the ground that Raccoons kept squirming out of. I assume that I was sleeping on Gaia.

At my day job I work between two main computers and sometimes three. So far, I have found great success running Synergy to enable using a single mouse and keyboard between them.
With my PC set up as a server and my Macs set up as clients, I have basically configured the desktops of my computers to connect in one giant row of desktop space. The effect is so seamless that I often feel frustrated that I can't drag and drop between them.

A couple of items in the popular ordered list format:

1. Go PC to Mac. Seriously. It just works better that way.
2. On the Mac, use Synergy KM. Synergy KM is the version that uses a graphical preferences pane. Just because you can use the Command Line doesn't mean it makes sense.
3. In deference to the first point, configuring the screen locations for the server on Windows is unnecessarily complicated. Don't forget to configure your way back onto a Desktop once you've configured your way off.
4. On the Mac, the server is supposed to find clients via bonjour, but I can only get it to work by manually entering the IP of the server. This is annoying when your network doles out IP addresses dynamically.
5. The only time I've ever seen Bonjour work was when I swapped out a PC with a co-worker who then suddenly found that she kept having to fight with a phantom (Me) for control of her mouse. She had no idea what was going on and I laughed and laughed at her.
6. You'll still find yourself needing a mouse/keyboard on each machine at some points. I find it easiest to just keep the keyboard tucked under the monitor or shelf that the computer sits on.
7. By default, the client and server will dole out "special" keys as if you were using the default keyboard layout for that operating system. You can configure this, but why? I put little stickers on my keyboards to help keep track of what key is what key in what mode.
8. The processing of your mouse movements, however, is somewhat processor intensive-- and having a laggy mouse can really suck. My G5 iMac is more prone to this lag. In fact, I've never noticed it on my Dual-Core MacBook.

A fun fact: I worked for a CAD-CAM software company for a number of years whose flagship software product was called "Synergy." Back then, I lobbied against the name because it was an abstract noun that required too much thinking. I still feel that way, even about this 'OS independent input device sharing' software. Synergy is supposed to evoke the idea that by working together, two independent things are greater than the sum of their parts, right? But that's just stupid in the context of sharing a single keyboard and mouse across multiple computers. That shouldn't require synergy... that's just how shit should work.

A few computer/technology related tid-bits that in years past would have been much longer posts.

1. Look, I really kind of like K-Meleon, the lightweight, native Windows Implementation of the Geko Layout Engine. Think of it as Firefox for Windows without the Firefox part. On the Operating System of the Future (Windows 2000), K-Meleon is the browser of tomorrow.
2. If only there were a similar version of Pidgin. I am now taking applications for the windows native multi-service XAMP client of tomorrow.
3. I am currently experimenting with Windows Live Mesh. Mesh is Windows online folder syncing, basically, except that it also syncs to a "Online Desktop," so you can always get at your synched files, so long as you have access to a browser (even KM. So far, I've got my entire allotment of space allocated and it's still uploading. Nice! I wonder what that means. They say that there is a MacOSX Client coming. It has some kind of RDP or VNC built into it, but it's flaky and doesn't work as nicely LogMeIn, for example.
4. If I could add one feature to the Windows Platform, I would add Universal Spell Checking like they have on the Macs. Hands down, Universal Spell checking is OSX's best feature.
5. I still miss you, Linux. Do something awesome and I'll come back to you. Here's a hint. It's not being sold in a box at Best Buy. Hundreds of crappy software products have been sold in a Box at Best Buy over the years.
6. You should be using Evernote. If you're not, you don't care about keeping notes. I have a Ocono.com Story Ideas notebook that I'm publishing there, but it's not about publishing, it's about having your data synced up to the web and on every computer you use. Except for Linux.