CivicActions

DrupalCon Szeged is fast approaching and though we are a sponsor, I'm sorry I won't be able to attend. A number of my colleagues from CivicActions will be there though including Doug, Robin, Kevin, Jozef, look for them in sessions and at the Day 1 Exhibition.

Via Noneck

The New York Times reports that TV networks including CNN are creating one reporter bureaus to file stories, not only from far flung countries but also American cities.

I really don't like Captchas, the squiggly words that many websites use to protect forms from spam bots. Unfortunately, sometimes they are the only thing that can protect a site from clever spammers.

Yesterday I heard a great story about reCaptcha, captchas that are used to crowd-source digitizing of old print books and newspapers on NPR. If you have ever tried to use a scanner with OCR, you know that it can be pretty hit or miss.

Last night I was scheduled to fly from New York's JFK to Seattle on JetBlue. As the storm clouds gathered and a crazy thunderstorm gathered over the NY region I called JetBlue's automated flight status service and was surprised to hear my flight was still on time. That was at 6:10pm.

Ethan just sent an email out to the CivicActions team about an upcoming training in using OpenOffice, the Free software desktop office suite that most of us use.

Owen put up a website that uses a math problem to get people to think about a very important number, 350ppm CO2.

I just turned is math problem into a short animated video using a website called GoAnimate.com.
Watch my video below:

A few months ago I joined a new coworking space in Seattle, Giraffe Labs. Giraffe Labs grew out of a Seattle group called Saturday House. Well both got a mention on John Cook's Venture Blog over at the Seattle PI.

As founder Anders Conbere was quoted:

Yesterday while waiting at the Cancun airport with Aaron, Henry, Mirasol, Nedjo, Owen and Justine, a few of us got to talking about FriendFeed, Twitter and del.icio.us.

Aaron and I are avid del.icio.us users, tagging all sorts of interesting sites. And we follow numerous lists and feeds thus pulling together some great information and redistributing it through the company.

A few months ago when I started using FF3 beta I was being driven mad by the default behavior of the browser when you clicked on the url in the address bar, a single click would highlight the entire url.

Typically I click on the url with the intention of appending the url with something like "admin/build/views" and the entire url would get wiped out.

Well, Owen heard my plight and taught me out to change this behavior:

Wow, what a great 2 days! We had over 80 people show up over 2 days for some great sessions at DrupalCampSeattle.

I think that the highlight, had to be Greg Dunlap's Deploy Module Presentation, again! And of course some great hallway conversation and little show and tells.

A big shout out to all the sponsors, and everyone who pitched in to help.