botWerks

my latest obsession has been elimination of base weight from my pack for travel and backpacking.  this resulted in the purchase of a postal scale and a bit of time wasted weighing every item i might possibly be tempted to stick into pack and the creation of an overly complex spreadsheet to estimate base pack weight for my wife, stepson and myself.

i was unable able resist the replacement of our existing stainless steel sierra mugs with a shiny titanium sierra cup from snow peak.  unfortunately, i can’t seem to purchase this locally and a purchase direct from snow peak was the result.  (such are obsessions) this was an entirely painless purchase experience, but i was surprised at how heavy the package that arrived was.  my titanium sierra cups had been co-packed with a 2 lb. glossy printed catalog.  WTF?

i’m increasingly impressed with the impact of the seemingly small optimization of adding flashblock to my browser (chrome | firefox).  things are just snappier. life is just a little bit more efficient and my browser interaction experience, just that much better.  sometimes it really just is the little things.

i honestly don’t quite know what to make of this.  i realize that there’s a strong stigma to showing up in a publication such as this.  but wouldn’t purchasing this also imply that you know the folks that are going to be in there? the tag … “Now Even MORE Registered SEX OFFENDERS in Your Area” seems to indicate that this is a good thing, or at least a selling point.  odd.

for those interested in the answers to  ”Match the Perp to the Crime”, it’s B, C, A.  though, i’m really not quite certain as to what masterbating in the public library consists of.

i had a need to stretch and do something moderately nerdy and anti-social this weekend. i’ve been poking at foursquare over the last month or so and i  must say, it’s kind of cute. i don’t wander around the ‘hood as much as i’d  like to, but the app’s been a little more interesting to me than your average social media app.

i was a little curious as to what kind of checks were implemented with the API and how interaction with the API actually worked. it turns out that the API operation is dead easy. however, they don’t do some things like check the realistic time difference between checkins or the distance between venues for consecutive checkins.  as such there’s no notion of physicality associated with the application and the check-in process and the game.

of course this means that they’re dependent upon well behaved client behavior. to that end you only have to present the coordinates for the venue(s) you’re interested in, in order to obtain (or maintain) mayoral dominance.  you can use this to periodically check into a venue, even if you’re not physically there to pick up the GPS coordinate.  given that there are often perks associated with being a mayor of a particular venue, there might be some value in squatting on a particular location.

this begged a little experimentation. yielding foursquatter. a perl foursquare client script which can be trivially used to squat on a venue, or venues.

code and such is available on github.