Too damn early

Since I started being in work every day at a reasonable time (well, by 10:00) I've developed this awful, awful habit of not being able to fall back asleep once if I wake up after 8am.

This is terribly annoying at the weekends, particularly if (for instance) I've been up until 1am chatting to Julie over the webcam.

Bah!

Also in this situation:

although that's not what happened last night.

New tech toy

This morning was spent playing* with Yahoo Pipes, an incredibly simple tool for taking a web page, RSS feed, etc. and producing something new out of it.

It's a web-based gui, and very simple to get going.

All I wanted was to take the Hacker News RSS feed and change it so that the main link was to the Hacker News comments rather than to the site that the news entry was about.  I assumed I'd have to finally get around to learning javascript, Python or similar to do this.

Turns out I just had to drag a couple of boxes around.

Step 1: Swap over the "link" and "description" elements in the feed.  But this leaves the link from the "description" with an unnecessary HREF around it, and the link from the "link" withough a needed one.
Step 2: Use a regex to encapsulate the url new "description" element in an HREF.
Step 3: Use a regex to extract the url from the new "link" element.
Step 4: There is no step 4.



Looks like it has a lot of potential.

You can see the finished version at here at http://pipes.yahoo.com/andrewducker/hackernews

One of the nicest things is that you can take that one, clone it, and do your own thing with it - which is how I got started...

*It wasn't just spent doing that.  There was also an hour and a half involving a webcam and Julie.  You don't get a screenshot of _that_ though.

You have to do this!

Open google maps.
Enter:
54 Great Russell St, Camden Town
into the search box and hit "search"
Click on "street view".

Ack - forgot to thank cavalorn for this one...

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 5-23-2009

• Evaporation of the Aral Sea
  A staggering example of how we change our environment
  (tags: Russia environment photos)
• Alan Moore and Mike Patton working together
  Well, kinda. Intriguing project anyway
  (tags: music alan_moore)
• Finding flow
  U.S. teenagers experience flow about 13 percent of the time that they spend watching television, 34 percent of the time they do hobbies, and 44 percent of the time they are involved in sports and games. Yet these same teenagers spend at least four times more of their free hours watching TV than doing hobbies or sports. Similar ratios are true for adults.
  (tags: psychology motivation flow)
• TuneCore, Amazon Set to Unveil On-Demand CD Sales
  What does this leave for the music labels to do? Except for marketing?
  (tags: music amazon distribution tunecore)
• AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com
  Wow. Just wow.
  (tags: funny photos)
• The Cult of Done Manifesto
  Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes. Done is the engine of more.
  (tags: productivity procrastination philosophy inspiration)
• Giant Gundam character statue to light up Odaiba
  To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first broadcast of the Mobile Suit Gundam animated television series, an 18-meter-tall, full scale Gundam statue is currently being built at Shiokaze Park in Tokyo's Odaiba.
  (tags: gundam anime mecha japan)