evatt.com

Wordle “word cloud” for evatt.com.

Adine, Hala (@TheHza), Katie (@nadnuk) and myself formed Team Fashionably Late in yesterday's Scavenger Hunt. The scavenger hunt started at Onion Creek and finished at Big Top Lounge. We had 6 hours to take photos of as many items on their list as possible. Most items could be found inside the loop. We wound up in 6th place out of 16 teams. I would definitely love to do it again.

We all had a blast!

On my way to Albany, I listened to Resistance, an fun sci-fi short story on Escape Pod by Tobias Buckell. Resistance is about a society that is a "techno-democracy", that is every person in the society votes on every issue. After some time, they realize this is impractical. Their solution is to create computer models, "avatars", for each person to vote the way they would have voted. Eventually, each of these "avatars" does the same thing and creates a master avatar to rule as a "benevolent dictator".

I really enjoyed the story, especially the timing of it being around the election. I only wish the story had ended about two minutes earlier.

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Adine and I took my nephews Andrew and Sammy to the Houston Zoo for the day.  Afterward we celebrated Sammy's birthday at Red Robbin with his Grandparents.  Today was tiring but fun. Photos of the day at the zoo are on flickr.

Last night I was the guest of honor on the Linux Journal Live show. It was my first time on a live video program. I had a great time and think everything went well. Maybe they will invite me back sometime.

The Linux Journal had some very kind words about me in their promo for the show.

Tonight's show is about disaster. Steven Evatt knows a lot about the subject as he and his team were responsible for keeping Houston's newspaper on-line during Hurricane Ike --using Linux of course. Not only did he have to keep chron.com up and running during a natural disaster but he did so while their traffic increased nearly six-fold. We'll talk to Steven about his awesome ninja skills, the Chronicle's infrastructure, CMS, etc., and how Linux saved the day.

Online video chat by Ustream

My Hurricane Ike photos can now be found on flickr. The storm hit Houston far harder than expected. It was unbelievable how most of Houston lost power for so long. I was without power for over 10 days.

The photo to the right shows how broken glass is still all over down town. The glass I have in my hand came from the Chase Tower which lost most of it's windows for the first 50 floors on one side.

After much hassle, I finally have an iPhone 3G. It's my first "smart phone" and I love it.

My biggest complaint with the iPhone is it's battery life. After setting up the iPhone to sync both my gmail and exchange mail, I was lucky if the battery would last until I got home from work.

Turning off the Wi-Fi helped a lot. Over the weekend I turned off the auto syncing of mail and all of a sudden, the battery seemed to last forever.

Thus far, I have found two "killer apps" that are really making me love the iPhone.

The first is Shazam. Ever heard a song in the background and wonder, what song that is? Well, you don't have to wonder any more. Shazam has the ability to pick out songs in loud places and determine what is playing. It then provides links to iTunes and YouTube for the song.

The second apps is Pandora Radio. You tell Pandora a song you like, then it starts streaming songs similar to it over the iPhone. A few votes up or down on what it selects, then you have a stream full of songs you like. Now I have the ability to stream internet music in my car. Sweet! Best part, it doesn't seem to kill the battery (that fast).

I spent today at BarcampHouston3. I had a fantastic time. It was the best Barcamp yet.

I enjoyed the panels on Mobile technologies (David Herrold), Public Relations (Ed Schipul), Creative Thinking (Kelsey Ruger), and Using Flickr Professionally (TheFuzzball). Houston is full of talented, intelligent, and motivated people.

I can't wait until the next barcamp.

My photos of Barcamp Houston 3 are on flickr.

I have given my SEO talk twice in as many weeks to groups at chron.com focusing on basic SEO principles. Both talks were fun and I believe helped the users to understand how they can think in more of a SEO frame of mind while they produce content for the web.

Welcome to the Green House Gallery. We are opening our doors on August 7th on 716 West Alabama, east of Montrose. Our grand opening reception is on Oct. 3rd.

The Green House Gallery is a dynamic new artists' collective, offering beautifully diverse paintings, hand made ceramics, metal sculpture and jewelry.