Ever purchase a shirt.. wash it.. wear it.. then realize that you left one of the little plastic things in the collar?

I did. And, it turned out to be a pleasant surprise. I started bending it.. and soon had an “S” type shape. Rather than throw it away, I kept it sitting on my desk. Back to work I went.

A few hours later I was ready to watch the latest episode of Diggnation. I synced my iPhone, touched the iPod icon, touched “videos”, and then selected Diggnation. As it started playing, I went to prop it up against my mac mini and wedge it in with my dock, like I usually do. At that moment, a little piece of white plastic caught my eye. There it was, shining in the sun florescent light, like a gift from the heavens! I grabbed my iPhone, and as if transfixed by the blessing, slowly and carefully set it in the little white plastic thing. It was a moment of magic, like a kid on Christmas morning, I had the widest grin on my face. I now use it daily, as my little iPhone stand. Have a look:

BONUS: the white matches the Apple supplied dock. hells-yea! Oh, and sorry for the blurry pic, the iPhone doesn’t handle close-ups too well!

Sketch of my bike using my iPhone, originally uploaded by kenseals.

There’s a 3rd party app available for the iphone/itouch if you have it hacked called “Sketches”. Took 5 minutes at lunch and decided to see if I could actually make a legit sketch with it. I found it was difficult to make precise strokes, so I used that to my advantage. The squiggly lines and inaccurate strokes were great for portraying movement. I think they really brought this sketch of my Harley to life.. woot!

Maybe I’ll start a weekly sketch using this app.. would be cool to see how good I can get with it if I spent more than 5 minutes on a sketch. Hmph.. there’s some food for though.

A friend from high school turns out to be Captain Planet. If I had only known. Earth!

A few months ago I wrote about Andrew Skurka’s quest to be the first to thru-hike the Great Western Loop. Two days ago, Saturday November 3rd, Skurka finished his hike. Not only was his journey a personal one of self-discovery and pushing his limits, but he sought to bring attention to the reality that is Global Warming.

“The reality is that change has already taken place that has potentially catastrophic consequences. There was a drastic difference in the size of the glaciers on my map and the size of glaciers right in front of me. The snowmelt is shocking,” said Skurka. “With record high heats and record low precipitation along the trail, I felt a foreshadowing of what is to come in our climate.”

I applaud Skurka for his accomplishment, and look forward to (surely) another awesome trek in the future.

I’ve been quite busy with work, and TWN projects lately so I haven’t been able to get this site where it needs to be. However, yesterday I took care of one issue that has needed some tackling. I added some RSS feeds to the site! I should clarify that. I was already dishing out RSS 1, 2, and atom for those self-discovery FireFox/Opera/etc. kids out there. What did I change? First, I wanted to put a visible link to my RSS feed(s) on the site. After deciding where I’d put them (in the sub-content section and in the footer) I needed to know how many feeds I’d have. Well, I wanted a feed for the blog, obviously. There’s one. I decided to add one other feed as well.. for now at least (I may add twitter soon). The second feed is for my “Recommended” links section. Speaking of that.. I need to give a run down on how I’m serving those links up. I’ll post another entry later about that. So, subscribe to my RSS feeds and you’ll know when I post that entry.

Ok, we know how many feeds you have and where you put them. Fun. Got anything else for us? Actually, I wanted to talk a little bit about what kind of feeds I’m serving and how. Like I said before, I used to served up RSS 1, 2, and atom.. albeit-was “behind the scenes”. Now, I serve up only RSS 2. However, for you atom pushers out there (0) you’ll still get your atom feed. How? I’m sending my feeds to feedburner. I then have feedburner set up to send out RSS 1, 2, or atom based on what kind of RSS reader you’re using. That’s cool, eh? The other advantage to using feedburner is that I can get some statistics (subscribers, views, etc.) from my feeds. It seems like a pretty sweet setup so far. We’ll see how it works out.

Some other details.. I’ve got Wordpress set up to dish out the full entry each time, rather than a summary. I did this because it puts ALL of the content in your hands via your RSS reader rather than simply a summary. Any hoot, grab my feeds and look out for the next post where I share how I’m dishing up my Recommended links section.