Mullet, mullet, mullet…

The DARPA Network Challenge is quite interesting in that the location of the red balloons is undisclosed. Ten needles in ten-thousand haystacks. Intelligence must be gathered from points spread wide and far and Geocaching.com believes they have the tools and the community to get the job done. Their viral intelligence gathering strategy is outlined in this email I received from Geocaching.com.

Fellow Geocachers, As part of the nationwide DARPA event to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Internet, we’re enlisting geocachers to be part of a fun social networking/GPS technology challenge. The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States that will only be visible during tomorrow’s (12/5) daylight hours. The winner will receive $40,000.

If Groundspeak wins the challenge with your help, we will throw in another $10,000 of our own money. The full $50,000 prize will go to schools that need GPS equipment through DonorsChoose.org.

Tomorrow, December 5th, a group of Groundspeak Lackeys will meet up in the DARPA War Room at Groundspeak’s Headquarters to gather information online of the possible locations of the 10 weather balloons. We hope you will follow our attempts to win the challenge and help us along the way by gathering information both online and on the ground.

Do you want to help? Visit http://www.10balloonies.com – our official web site for Groundspeak’s team. We’ll provide up to the minute updates there and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/10balloonies. Also, if you are out geocaching, running errands or taking a morning stroll and spot one of the balloons, send us an email at darpa@groundspeak.com. The balloons will be numbered, so we need to know what number is on the balloon along with the coordinates for the location and any additional information (such as “saw from afar.” Coordinates need not be exact, (within 1 mile of actual coordinates will do) so an address will work.

Even if you aren’t in the continental US you can still help! Information will be spreading through social networks, blogs and news outlets. If you hear something helpful for us to find any of the 10 balloons, let us know! With a global community of millions of GPS enthusiasts, we believe that geocachers are ideally suited to this challenge. With our collective efforts, we can accomplish something really positive! Jeremy Irish President & Co-Founder, Geocaching.com Also one of the balloonies

According to the DARPA site the competition will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

This is so cool. A mere ten years ago several military divisions with advanced communications networks would be required to pinpoint the location of 10 objects dispersed in unknown locations across the US.

I wonder how long it will take to find all the balloons? If this can be done in a single day, the implications are significant. If it only takes a few hours… wow!

UPDATE: MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team Wins!

Well, if you’ve been feeling the pinch of rising gasoline prices over the past couple of months, take note:

I’m tellin’ ya, times are hard and thirty cents a gallon is not chump change. I don’t know how many people will rush out and get a checking card from TDECU — a lot I bet — but with just the current TDECU card holders flocking for cheap gas you are not going to be able to get into a Bucees during the month of October.

I’m predicting this promotion will be a great success for TDECU and Bucees.

UPDATE: The response to this post has been incredible. People really care about the price of gasoline. Watching all the traffic flow in has led me to thinking about the size of this promotion which leads an inquisitive mind like mine to thinking about the cost of the promotion.

Using a couple of different estimations, I think it is safe to say the promotion has a price tag of at least 1 Million Dollars; if not much more, depending on how much gas Beaver sells during October. I think Beaver will be able to sell as much gasoline as he can get his hands on, which I hope doesn’t turn out to be a problem.

I don’t know how much, if any, of that money will actually come out of someone’s pocket or if it is taken as lost profit, but that is not the point. The point is that whatever the cost of the promotion, it is the equivalent of money being injected back into the local economy. Money that would normally go in Beaver’s pocket is being left in the customer’s pocket. Many people taking advantage of the savings will be small business owners who have three or four vehicles they have to fill up a couple of times a week. Like I said before, the savings on this promotion are significant. This is real economic stimulus they way it should be practiced.

For the average person who can take advantage of this promotion, the economic stimulus received from buying your gas from Buc-ees during the month of October will dwarf any stimulus you will ever receive from the government.

Leveling jacks and slideouts lead the Coach-Net Top Ten RV Fixes for 2008 list, which tallies the items that generated the most phone calls in 2008 for Coach-Net assistance regarding coach- and towable-related components.

Coach-Net, a leading provider of emergency roadside assistance for RVers, provides a 24/7 on-call staff of RV Master Certified Technicians to help RVers, either with over-the-phone instruction or by arranging assistance from authorized mobile mechanics and RV service centers.

“We are releasing this list to give RV owners a heads-up about the kind of things that RVers have found most troublesome or annoying, so they can pay extra attention to these areas,” said Patrick Cipres, RV technical service manager for Coach-Net. “These all involve components that RVers should make sure are in good working order before they hit the road, and which they should know how to handle and how to troubleshoot if necessary.”

“Of course they can count on our expert help if needed, but we hope that it won’t be,” said Cipres.

Here is the complete list of Coach-Net Top Ten RV Fixes for coaches and towables in 2008:

1. Leveling jacks
2. Slide room
3. Electrical, 110-volt
4. Batteries
5. Electrical 12-volt
6. Plumbing — fresh water
7. Water heater
8. Exterior accessories
9. Generator
10. Furnace

via CampsterGuy

Have to put this on the to-do list.

Originally I created the Mu environment strictly for the blogs but the more I tinkered with Wordpress Mu it became clear everything should be in the same database. All GCT content with the exception of the Photo Gallery is now managed in one application, Wordpress Mu.  The Gallery will have to be moved eventually but that task is not currently very high on the to-do list. In hindsight, using PixelPost for the Gallery was a mistake.

During the move today there was some downtime while I figured out how to show a specific home page template  for the magazine and another template for the blogs. Got that all sorted out by renaming the home.php page for the magazine to home-mag.php and renaming the page-blog.php template to home-blog.php. Then I created a new home.php whose only job is to execute the following php statement:

<

?php
if (1 == $blog_id) {
    include(TEMPLATEPATH."/home-mag.php");
}else{
    include(TEMPLATEPATH."/home-blog.php");
};
?>

Works like a charm. The only problem now is the Featured Gallery Content plugin does not work in Wordpress Mu. Not that big a deal (especially since I haven’t added a new feature since Christmas!) but it creates more work as I need to plug some cool looking content in the now blank feature spot. There is another plugin I’m looking at called Dynamic Gallery Content that does basically the same thing.

Really the only reason I bring this up is that I haven’t posted anything in a while and also to say that if you tried to view your blog today and it was looking funny, my apologies. These things happen sometimes.

View Larger Map

With more recent satellite imagery you would see my kayaks on this map if you zoomed in a bit.

iframe is another tag that for security reasons Wordpress Mu filters out of any content, similar to the embed tag discussed here. I made the hack necessary to embed stuff and then made an additional hack to the hack to allow for the iframe tag.

To get iframes to work in wpmu I appended the following onto the end of the array defined in the ‘Allow Embeded Video’ plugin’s php file and voila the iframe links copied directly from Google MyMaps works:

 'iframe' => array(
        'width' => array(),
        'height' => array(),
	'frameborder' => array(),
	'scrolling' => array(),
	'marginheight' => array(),
	'marginwidth' => array(),
	'src' => array(),
	)

Now instead of making my maps with an image editor I can lay in any Google map I want as well as integrate GPS applications like geo-caching, route tracking, etc, etc. So cool.

After getting the iframes to work I looked into the xml Google Maps plugin and since it doesn’t use iframes you don’t have to open up the potential security hole by allowing the iframe tag. Just paste in a link to a GPX or KML file and the xml Google Maps plugin automatically converts the file to a google map and injects it into the post. Here is a google map published with the xml Google Map plugin using a simple anchor tag:

A nice 5.5 mi paddle with many photo opportunities

Yes, that would be cool. But if you don’t have a map room to occupy your interest in maps check out The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps.  From the about page:

The Map Room is a blog that points to maps, map collections, map-related resources, and material about maps on the web. Anything that fits under that rubric, from medieval mappæ mundi to satellite imagery, and from topo maps to Tolkien, is fair game.

Some good stuff.

Unfortunately the stuff I’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks is boring stuff and doesn’t make for very interesting writing, or reading on an outdoor blog.

Here is some of the stuff on my list that I’ve been working on:

• Upgrade my audio recording capabilities. I finally bought a wireless mic and a lavalier mic which should be delivered some time next week. I am going to play with these for a while before deciding what else I need. Probably another wireless unit and a lot of mono/stereo converter cables. The only way to really figure out what the heck you are doing with this stuff is to use it out in the field to produce something that doesn’t suck
• Come up with and create  promotional materials, such as logos, splash screens and transitions for videos, watermarks, banner ads, letterhead, etc, etc…
• Administrative crapola such as dba’s, trademarks, copyrights…
• Clean up my hard drive which is getting low on space. This is becoming a constant battle and is forcing me to change my lazy habits of dumping crap on my hard drives and leaving it there for all eternity.  I’ve learned the best thing to do is not to record crap in the first place. Especially video. I’ve been going back through video from the past couple of months to edit out the good bits and delete the rest. Very time consuming.
• Acquire a huge external hard drive or two. These things are so cheap it is ridiculous.
• Write a business plan. Even for small operations this is a must. The business plan is one of the strongest tools you can use to help keep your focus on the next best thing to do for maximum efficiency at achieving your business objectives.  This business plan is way past due.

I’ve made some significant progress on each of the above items over the past couple of weeks but it sure doesn’t seem like it because not a single item is to the point that it can be checked off the list. That’s what I hate about working on several things at once — you can progress multiple projects at the same time but the satisfaction of checking stuff off the list can be a long time coming. Delayed gratification for someone of my temperament can be tough.

Then there are some big ticket items on the list that I haven’t touched in quite a while that really need attention before the busy season of Spring rolls around:

• Get rid of the old Dell PowerEdge 6300 server. I’ve got it down to where all it’s doing is hosting an old email account for my personal domain and a couple of old blogs that I need to move. There was a time when I never thought I would want to — much less be able to — get rid of this server without replacing it with another one. I am really looking forward to it.  The big, loud, hot, energy sucker is well on it’s way to the curb.
• Install WordPress multi user for the blogs
• Create a custom CSS template to contain all my CSS modifications which I can lay on top of any 3rd party WordPress theme. This way I wont have to re-introduce my custom changes every time a theme is updated. This is a requirement for managing multiple blogs with the same theme.
• Build a small studio with a green screen. You could have a lot of fun with one of these.
• Write a php application  to provide a user interface to the Revolution theme I am using. There are several areas, such as the menu bar and link management where you have to hack into the php to set &include/exclude parameters to specify what to show and the order to show it. This is a deal killer if you manage several blogs with the same theme but dufferent menus, categories, links and such.
• Set up the capability to live stream from remote locations. Okay, that might be a bit much for such a small operation as mine but at least I want to have a bayou cam on Sundays. I might have most of the the gear already to set up a simple cam like SurfCam but the bandwidth from bumfuck is limited.

As you can see thre is a lot of back-end work, never-ending work, that goes into running any type of computer intensive operation. Its any wonder there is any time left over to actually go outside.