Pelanne.Com

The moment of enlightenment is what makes this video:

I received this spam today, and unlike most of the others, this one gave me great joy. I will highlight the phrases that imparted this joy - the first one actually seems to be a shot at honesty, for which I give them both props and the appropriation of one Kudo bar, if stale:

“I spend all my life on investment and corporate business. All the way i lost my husband and two beautiful kids in fatal accident that occur in November 5th 2003. I am a very greedy woman with all cost i don’t know much and care about people, since when I have an experience of it difficult to sleep and give rest. Later in the year 2005 February i was sent a letter of medical check up, as my personal Doctor testify that i have a lung cancer, which can
easily take off my life soon. I found it uneasy to survive myself, because a lot of investment cannot be run and manage by me again.

So that i can make available preparation on that especially women of the day, who are divorced by their husband, why they cannot survive the mist of feeding their self. Please contact me and stop weeping . Probably let me now what you really need the money for, and if you can still help me to distribute money to nearest orphanages homes near your town.”

Ah, programming. This morning was devoted to tweaking the Twitterlocal / Google Map mashup I put together last week:

• Started to use Google Map’s geocoding feature to jump you to the right point if you enter a zip or city,state into the search.
• The page can now take a starting location via the URL
• Matching on @ replies and linking them to their target on Twitter
• Fixed some HTML markup that was creeping thru
• Styled the detail page to make it more readable

Now that the page can be fed a location via the URL, we can do cool stuff like find breaking news/weather/etc, ideally from automated feeds, and feeding that to the map. If there’s some crazy weather that happens to be tearing through a town somewhere, we should be able to see peoples’ reactions while or soon after it happens…

I’ve written a script that will parse through severe weather feeds on the NOAA website, so now we just need some noteworthy weather to happen somewhere to test it out.

Yes, I’ll save you the time and suspend myself from the coathook, thank you very much.

Having been an enthusiastic user of Twitter for a little while now, I was very pleased to see a service come out not too long ago called Twitterlocal. Twitterlocal allows you to enter a zip code and select a range in miles, and it will find tweets of all the people inside that circle who have tagged their location within Twitter.

It’s a convenient way to see what’s going on in a particular community, and is especially cool to watch the local groupthink when big events happen like college graduations or concerts, or when crazy weather goes through an area. Twitterlocal offers their data in HTML, RSS, and XML.

On the other side of things, Google Maps can get you a longitude and latitude with a simple click. By combining the two using a database of the longitude and latitudes for just about every town in the US, one should be able to determine the zip code of a click in Google Maps. That in turn gives you the URL of the appropriate Twitterlocal XML feed to read from for tweets pertinent to the area.

Crappy weather outside and a willing Prototype library were all the excuse I needed: http://pelanne.com/twitter

This is one of the weirder videos I’ve come across recently - and it’s about my one of my favorite foods - the egg.

So, with mild apology, I present:

Here’s some perspective for your Monday: