Well, if you are, they’re laughing at you. All the way to the bank.
The photo above is a can of soup my friend Reed was served on a train from Beijing to Shanghai last week. Sort of reminds me of the Tom Bihn bag scandal a few years ago.
Ah, the simple pleasures. We finally have our bedroom furniture delivered and set up, and can now stop living like refugees. And Lynn gave me a beautiful bottle of Glenlivet 18, which will make for great sipping in the nook. Run, scotch, run.
In other weekend news, Fish has developed a taste for chipotle sauce. Run, hot sauce, run.
I’ve been playing around with Ruby and Ruby on Rails lately. Ruby is a very elegant language in many ways, but it’s not well-respected by mainstream developers and doesn’t have a fancy IDE (that’s Interactive Development Environment, Mom), so it’s the sort of language I can get excited about. I come from a long line of command lines.
Anyway, I came across the coolest little Ruby app. There are these loaner bikes available at train stations in Paris, and for an annual subscription fee you can borrow them, as part of a service from Velib. Amsterdam and some other European cities have loaner bikes for free laying around all over the place, but presumably the bikes from Velib are in a little better condition.
Velib provides information about which bikes are available at each station, through a free web service. For example, to find out how many bikes are at station number 20022 (wherever that is), you’d just go to http://www.velib.paris.fr/service/stationdetails/20022, and you’d get back some XML that might look like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <station> <available>24</available> <free>6</free> <total>32</total> <ticket>1</ticket> </station>
This tells you that there are 24 bikes available out of 32 total. (I have no idea what “free” and “ticket” mean.)
So Thibaut Barrère has created a little Ruby app that shows a graphical representation of where bikes are available throughout Paris, by calling the Velib web service to get info about how many bikes are currently at each station, and then plotting it all on a map. The map above shows availability of Velib bikes around Paris as of 1:45pm on Wednesday, 03/26/2008.
I think this is cool in two ways: it’s an interesting Ruby app to learn from, but also I love the way more and more businesses are providing free (or nearly free) access to useful data on the internet, via web services and other mechanisms. Many businesses have info that they’ll give out to anyone on the phone, and providing that same info through a web service means developers can use it in creative ways.
There’s no denying that the 3200 “HI” speed is grainy, but it’s a nicely unintrusive way to get closeup pictures of cat action in low-light conditions.
We went out to dinner with the Moms last night, and I fell into an old rut: taking countless photos of glasses on our table. Sorry, but it’s something I do. Way too much, I know, but sometimes a meal at a restaurant is a perfect chance to kick back and take pictures, and when you have a setting sun or something like that to put behind colored drinks … fun.
And a great way to kill time when the Moms are fighting over the check. This time, LaVonne put down a credit card; Lynn put down cash; LaVonne said no, I’ll get it; Lynn stood her ground. You had to be there. It was cute, like watching kittens fight.
Guess it’s our turn next time, Megan.
WTF? It’s been spring for a month. Good grief.
(First photo by Lynn. She’s come a long way, baby.)
We all have to endure stuff like rain, snow, and hail in late April or the occasional visit from the evil mother-in-law. Sometimes these things happen all at once, and all you can do is hunker down and ride it out.
Oh well, it builds character. And a bottle of Syrah helps. Let it snow.
It’s still cold and rainy in Seattle (the forecast says snow showers tomorrow), but Scott and I decided it’s time to get the season started anyway. Balls are half-price after 7PM at Interbay right now, so see you there.
I was driving through the Rainier Valley on Saturday (our only nice day lately), and say what I thought were a bunch of Tibetan prayer flags. So I stopped to take a picture, but I found it was some display done by the Rainier Valley Cultural Center, with flags created by local kids. I enjoyed some of their wishes.
