All posts by Dona

Indian Summer

Memories, , ,

It’s Indian Summer here in the DC area. How do I know? I know because we had a frost and now the weather’s turned warm again. That’s my definition of Indian Summer. Other people have different definitions, but I’m sticking to mine.

When I lived in Illinois, the sure sign that winter was coming was the Chicago Tribune‘s annual “Injun Summer” cartoon by John T. McCutcheon on the front of their Sunday magazine (if I recall properly). I’m pretty sure that now it is considered a politically incorrect view of this weather phenomenon and I don’t know if the Trib still runs this in the fall, but you can purchase a copy for $5.95 from their store.

I always looked forward to that cartoon. It meant Halloween was on the way and Thanksgiving not too far behind. It was a tradition in a time that traditions were becoming rarer. My first taste of nostalgia perhaps — a reminder of what the summer was like, and would be again after the cold winter of the Midwest.

What if my House Used Twitter’s API?

Musings, , ,

Do you know what an API is? Me neither, but it has something to do with the inner workings of web applications like Twitter, LibraryThing, GoodReads, Facebook etc. When web application developers let their API’s into the wild strange things can happen.

For instance. I’m on Twitter. I’m also on GoodReads. I clicked a button on GoodReads that allowed my activity there to be let loose on Twitter. So when I add a book to my “shelf” on GoodReads it goes out as a twitter. That’s fine. Except that when I just change my status of what page I’m on in a particular book on GoodReads it also sends that to Twitter. So yesterday, for much of the day my twitter status said:

So, that was a little embarrassing. I checked GoodReads and there is no obvious way to turn this off. I don’t know whose API is at fault here, so I’m avoiding GoodReads until I figure this out.

This got me to thinking.

What if other things were to tap into Twitter. Like my house for instance. What if everything I did were to be broadcast to Twitter. It might look like this. (And yes, the House made a few typos).