Well, I tried Quicken Online…

And I was sorely disappointed.

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Weekend website updates

I spent much of this weekend inside, out of the snow, working on a couple of geeky/cool website updates.

First, I sent out about 150 online Christmas cards. For the last few years I used Yahoo Greetings, but this time I decided I wanted something a little more personal. I included a Flickr slideshow and a short holiday letter to the people I haven’t talked to recently. Plus I got to play around with some cool new technology like sIFR and the Amazon CloudFront CDN. If you didn’t receive a card but you’d like one, let me know in the comments.

Second, I developed a dashboard to monitor the health of my web server. I wrote a small script which captures statistics every minute, and then built the dashboard to go along with it. I’m using Flot, a JavaScript graphing library, to generate the graphs. It probably would have been wise to use an existing component to capture the data, but this works fine for now.

Geeky/cool indeed.

The Popular Vote

My friend Paul and did some polling last night, and we uncovered some surprising results! See who the public thinks will win the election: http://www.pkgraham.com/popular_vote/.

Yosemite

Last weekend I travelled to Yosemite National Park here in northern California. It was stunningly beautiful — just amazing, really. My photos from the trip don’t really do it justice, because they don’t really capture the magnificent scale of the landscapes, but they’re still great photos. Enjoy!

17 Mile Drive

Yesterday I made a short day trip to Pebble Beach, Carmel, Monterey, and Santa Cruz. I wanted to see some of the Pacific coast before I move to Seattle in June.

All of the cities were pretty, but 17 Mile Drive was especially beautiful. It’s a private road in Pebble Beach — it costs $9.25 to use the road — but the views are amazing. There are great views of the Pacific coast, the Pebble Beach golf courses, and some spectacular homes. Here are some photos from the trip!

A chance encounter with Hiroshi Ishii

I was reviewing some old outgoing email this morning, and I found a message I sent last month, regarding a book I had listed for sale on Amazon Marketplace. A few weeks ago, a man named Hiroshi Ishii attempted to place an order for one of my listings, but there was an error processing his payment. He emailed me asking if I could take PayPal, but as a diligent seller, I said we had to complete the transaction on Amazon. He never did, and I eventually sold the book to someone else.

At the time, the name “Hiroshi Ishii” meant nothing to me.

I now know Hiroshi Ishii is a professor at the MIT Media Lab and the author of a seminal paper in Human-Computer Interaction. He’s coming to speak to my Research Topics in HCI class in a couple of weeks.

I should have just sent him the book for free. 🙂

My calendar

I’ve started to publish my calendar on my website so that everyone can see when I’m busy or free. It may not be terribly useful, but it was pretty easy to do, and a fun little programming exercise. Read on to learn how I did it.