I learned how to knit! (you can learn to knit). It’s pretty neat. I’ve taken apart my scarf three times or so but now I think it’s good to keep going. There are few different knitting techniques and I was trying them out in quick succession. This got a little confusing so I am just going to stick with the basic garter knit for now, which you knit both sides instead of alternating between purling and knitting.
I also went to the store and got some bamboo knitting needles and I like them. I think I may switch to using the circle knitting needles but I’ve yet to figure that out yet.
Oh and if you didn’t know, they even have luxury yarns! Cashmere even! But I’m waiting to invest in that till I can knit something worth it.
There are also extreme knitters these days. One group of them plays a game, the name of which I can’t remember, but it sort of like this: People register on some website or something, and they put their address and sock size. Then they pick someone to “kill” that is also a player in the game. The way you “kill” someone is to knit them a pair of socks in their size and mail them to them. When they receive the socks, they are “dead”. So the fastest knitters can “kill off” everyone else, last one alive wins. Your socks are in the mail!
I’ve been doing a lot of research for a presentation I’m giving at BarCampOrlando2 in April. There is a ton of super interesting things going on in the Semantic Search space right now. Yahoo! just announced a new Yahoo! Search open platform which will have support for a number of semantic web standards.
Think of sites like LinkedIn that are loaded with microformats and now think of your search results loaded with that informations. Currently meta data provides some useful information to search engines about the content of a page. Semantic Web standards provide even richer information about the page contents and it’s relationship to other content.
Over the next year this space is going to become the focus of marketing departments that have tapped the potential of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and are looking for a new SEM (Search Engine Marketing) strategy. The need for experts with the technical expertise to understand semantic standards and how to implement them and at the same time are able to communicate effectively with marketing teams and understand their goals is grow tremendously. If you are the technical lead in a marketing team, you should pay attention to whats happening here.
While the above is really interesting I think I’m much more excited about the potential for mashups that do really handy stuff with all this semantic data. Woohoo!
I recieved a phone call from the younger of my two older brothers today. “Hey Kevin, it’s Brian. Whats up man?” he asked in a voice jaded from confusion. “I was thinking about you the other day so I just wanted to call and say Hi”, the tone of his voice telling me he wanted me to know he was still alive; yet not certain I cared. My hesitancy to speak and the surprise in my voice surely didn’t ease his nervousness. I tried to tell him I loved him but he may have hung up the phone to fast to hear me.
Today I was reminded of what might possibly be the saddest thing in my life. I’m sorry you lost your dignity Brian. I’m sorry that happened to you. I wish I could give it back. I wish I could of protected you. I wish I could help you. I’m sorry I couldn’t.
I don’t know what’s harder, to have someone you love die, or to have someone you love loose their self esteem, dignity, and sense of worth; and then their mind. That’s like being dead without the peace. He was a good person once. He really was. He made everyone laugh.
