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News

Visit to Wilson Daily Prep

Last week Renee, and I took a short day trip to Chappaqua, New York to visit Laura at her new (to me anyways) office of Wilson Daily Prep). I visited her first office when we first started working on WilsonDailyPrep a few years back. How quickly time passes. Chappaqua is about thirty minutes from NYC and in a beautiful town. WDP is located on a walking street downtown lined with interesting cafe's and small businesses. The new WilsonDailyPrep office was a former bank. While it is on the ground floor, it has floor to ceiling windows. It looks like the ground has been dug out so from the inside it seems like you are in a nature observatory (see pictures below). Just like the loft here it can get warm with all the windows. But just like the loft here, I love the light and won't give that up for anything.

Laura is always busy. There have been times that Laura has traveled to our office for 9 in the morning, leaving Chappaqua as early as 5 AM. It's only fair that we take the drive down for a change to save her some time. Of course we got lost a little and was late. I blame the iPhone. It is no match for a real GPS.

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The second to last picture is outside the front door of WilsonDailyPrep from the Graph It Forward campaign to give tools to underprivileged students. WDP has gotten tons of SAT prep books by donors.

My Accidental Connection with Senator Ted Kennedy

Being Chinese in Boston, I always hear positive stories about the late Senator Ted Kennedy helping immigrants. In addition, I agree with most of his political views, he seemed like a good Senator. After learning of his death, I felt we had lost a great man. I added one of his biographies to my Amazon wish list, to learn even more. Other than media, that is the only connection I have had to Ted Kennedy. Until Thursday.

I was instant messaging with my designer on a project, NPR news streaming in the background when a bit of white noise filtered in. “Did I just heard that the Kennedy Funeral is going to be held at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help?” I am familiar with this church, often called the Mission Church, as it is located on Tremont Street, Mission Hill.

About a year ago, my friend, a supporter of the church, asked us to revamp their website. The previous site was, let's say, a pre FrontPage era website. Donating our services, we redesigned the site. With the limited budget, I photographed the site images myself. Corrie, our designer, touched them up digitally. You can read about the design process on her blog.

After hearing the Funeral location on NPR, I immediately checked the Google analytics for the website we had worked on. It went up over one thousand percent just yesterday, upping a few hits a day to 6,000. But that was before the radio announcements.

[*Update*] The site traffic spiked to a 14000 visits (about 30,000 hits) on Saturday. During the funeral I did embed a live stream from ustream.tv onto the news section, since I assume most visitor at that time wanted to watch it.

I quickly made changes to the site to ensure it could handle the spike in traffic. I notified our hosting company, Web Faction and they agreed to keep an eye out for us on the status of the church site. So far, we have received about 20,000 hits in the last eight hours, averaging one hit every 1.5 seconds. People are hitting the visit us page, and the news page looking for details on the funeral.

I am glad the site has stayed up, and that I caught the news about the Funeral location. We really cannot fault the Church for neglecting to notify us of the pending event so that we could better prepare the website. The church has their hands more than full and I am sure the web site is not top priority.

I am glad we were able to make a very, very small contribution to the Senator's legacy.

For the techies, the site is done in Django, our web application framework of choice. It uses a custom content management system from my company, Imperial Consulting. The dynamic content is pulled from a Postgresql database. While we provided the Church with bi-lingual capabilities, they have yet to create all the Spanish content. It is supported by some busy and dedicated church volunteers, after all. The pages are cached by memcached at the URL level by the Django cache framework. So far, it is handling the traffic with ease. Keeping our fingers crossed.

Some books on Ted Kennedy

If you can recommend a good biography let me know!

My New Bicycle

I did it. I bought a rebuilt single speed bike from Bikes Not Bombs last week, and I am on my third day of commuting by bicycle. Yes, my new office is only 0.6 mile away from home. But I actually use the bike to head to meetings in other parts of town, to the bank, etc. It really works well. It helps that the weather is getting better and better too. Having not rode a bike for many years, it was not easy. Together with the lacking of general aerobic exercise thru the winter makes for a challenging start. There are also the other related things like getting the bike thru doorways, carrying it up and down a flight of stairs, finding good places to U-Lock it, that are all part of the commuting experience.

I'll have to give an update each week to see how it goes.

And here is the bike: A Jetter with all new JIS single speed parts, and a wald basket. Apparently there are very few Jetter's around. Googling found almost nothing about this NJ manufacturer. It was "love at first sight" at the bike shop. I like the bright blue with the well worn look. It has just the right urban and unique feel to it.

My Old New Bicycle

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Broken iPhone replaced

I blogged this before, the ringer on/off switch on my iPhone fell off soon after I bought the phone (yes, on launch day). Last week, the audio jack broke as well. The mic-input is not working anymore. This is a problem for me as I use a wired headset all the time with the phone to listen to music and to make calls. Of course, one quick schedule and visit to the Genius bar, and I have a new replacement phone. The only quirk that I ran into is that when I restore my phone from backup, it did not restore everything. Specifically:

  • I have to re-enter all my email account passwords
  • I have to re-arrange all my apps on the screen pages

One additional observation that I have is the new ringer on/off switch feels different from my old one. It is much looser and snap into position quicker. The old on was much stiffer -- and I wonder if that's the reason why it broke so easily.

iPhone Crashed

My iPhone just crashed. I clicked on the iTunes Remote app, the phone went to the "silver apple" screen, which I think is the restart screen. It stayed there for a very long time. I ended up doing the reset sequence -- holding down the sleep/wake and the home buttons for 10 seconds or more, which also shows the silver apple screen. It stayed there again for a long time. It maybe coincidence but when I plug the phone into iTunes it went into "sync" mode.

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Subscription Model, the Make Magazine Way

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I am getting back into electronics. To access all the back issues of Make Magazine, I decided to start a print+digital subscription. I was wondering, as a subscriber, if I have access to all the digital back issues. The answer is:Yes if I become a "premium member", meaning that I enable automatic credit card renewal. That, is a clever way to get to the recurring subscription model.

It's a great magazine. Highly recommended.

"MAKE: Technology on Your Time Volume 13: Technology on Your Time (Make)" (Mark Frauenfelder)

Or buy their book.

"Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects" (Tom Igoe)