jpreardon.com

For those of you getting ready to, or already, celebrating Christmas, I leave you with the video of what is probably the best Christmas song of all time: Christmas in Hollis.

¡Feliz Navidad y próspero Año Nuevo!

Yesterday, I pointed to a roundup of 10 Web 2.0 APIs. I also stated that I wanted to see more of OpenID. Well, Simon must have read my mind because I’m pretty sure he is not reading my blog. Today, he has a step by step guide on how to turn your homepage into an OpenID. If you have control of a URI, you can make it your OpenID so it is portable between providers.

For example, you could start using LiveJournal. If, in the future, you wanted to use another provider, you simply set up an account on the new provider and change the mapping on your index page. This means you do not need to change your OpenID URI on all of the sites that you use OpenID to authenticate on. In other words, as long as you have control of your domain, you can use it as your OpenID no matter who your actual provider is.

If you want to cut the third party provider out of the equation, you can run your own OpenID server. phpMyID is quite easy to set up (less than 5 minutes) so long as you can run PHP scripts on your server. This will allow you to create your own OpenID without opening an account somewhere else (like Livejournal).

Update: If you are scratching your head and wondering how this OpenID stuff really works, check out this screencast.

LinuxWorld presents Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use. Many of the usual suspects are there: Google Maps, Geonames.org and Amazon S3. One that I would really like to see more of is OpenID which seeks to make user identity easier on developers and users alike.

via Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Juice Analytics Weblog, is chock full of good information, but a couple Excel visualization techniques have caught my eye recently. The in-cell graphing technique is quick and simple but can help one make sense of some types of data without creating a full on chart. This post got so much attention, that there is a follow up post that offers a few more techniques.

More recently, Chris challenged the readers to come up with some different ways to create square pie charts in Excel. The results are impressive! Two sample spreadsheets and a screencast are available to get things started.

Spruce up holiday (or non-holiday) photos at Flickr by adding a santa beard and/or hat. Just add a note to a picture, type in “ho ho ho hat” or “ho ho ho beard” (without the quotes) and get a sizable hat or beard. Hours of fun for sure!

via lifehacker

Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg presented his plan for preparing New York City for the future. He outlined 10 ambitious goals that focus on housing and transporting a growing population, improving our infrastructure and improving the environment:

1. Create homes for almost a
   million more New Yorkers, while
   making housing more affordable
   and sustainable
2. Improve travel times by adding
   transit capacity for millions more
   residents, visitors, and workers
3. Ensure that all New Yorkers live
   within a 10-minute walk of a park
4. Develop critical back-up systems
   for our aging water network to
   ensure long-term reliability
5. Reach a full “state of good repair”
   on New York City’s roads, subways,
   and rails for the first time in history
6. Provide cleaner, more reliable power
   for every New Yorker by upgrading
   our energy infrastructure
7. Reduce global warming
   emissions by more than 30%
8. Achieve the cleanest air
   of any big city in America
9. Clean up all contaminated
   land in New York City
10. Open 90% of our waterways
    for recreation by reducing
    water pollution and preserving
    our natural areas

The City has set up a planNYC website with more information. The site has many opportunities to offer one’s opinion on how to improve things. It also offers a fair amount of information on how citizens can take action.

Even if the temperature doesn’t feel so much like December, the holiday season is in full swing here. This photo that popped up on Curbed today just screams Christmas in New York. Someone should really make a greeting card out of it.

Happy holidays and watch out for giant rats (and trees)!

Photo by silk cut

This is the fourth, and last, in a series about Getting Things Done with Outlook.

Of all the major features in Outlook, I use Notes the least. Well, with the exception of the Journal which I don’t use at all. Nevertheless, notes are handy for a few different things especially if one is using a PDA device that the notes get synced with.

Notes are great for keeping checklists (Weekly Review, Travel, etc.). I keep a few checklists as templates. When I need to use one, I simply make a copy of the template and delete line items off of the copied list as items are completed.

This is great for the Travel Checklist. If I am getting ready for a big trip, I will probably be doing so on and off for a couple days ahead of time. This preparation will probably occur in several places like the office, at home or points between. Being able to reference the checklist no matter where I am is very convenient.

Notes are also useful for other random lists one might want to reference once in a while. I keep lists of restaurants and bars I would like to try as well as things to do in other cities that people have recommend. All of this could be stored in text files on a PC, but having these synced up to a PDA puts them in my pocket pretty much all the time. This makes it much more likely that the information will be available when it is most needed.

Update 2007-11-06: Sorry wine enthusiasts, it appears that CyraKnow is now offering only language instruction.

CyraKnow offers an instructional series on wine with Mark Phillips. Currently, they have 3 programs to choose from on their site: Enjoying Wine, Selecting Wine and Wine Regions. According to the system requirements, this only works with iPods (except shuffle or first generation). Download
a sample track and see if it might make your wine drinking experience more enjoyable.

via slashfood

There is still enough time left to place a holiday order for Why Mommy is a Democrat. Take a look at the sample pages to get a feel for what this “different kind of children’s book” is all about. Pay special attention to the story unfolding in the background. It seems to follow a less fortunate fellow and his brief encounters with a couple of fat cats, their lap dog and their son (a recent Yale grad).

This is going to be the bed time story pick for 2007!