January 22, 2012 by Joel.

It’s a cool, damp January Sunday afternoon, so it’s a great time to spend a bit of time with the new ITunes U app, sampling course content. I’ve been wanting to learn iOS development, and have been working my way through a book on the topic. I decided on a whim to load the new app on my iPad, checked the top courses, and the #1 free course was a Stanford course from fall 2011 on iOS development, updated for iOS 5. I “subscribed” and took the first class. The production values are outstanding and the professor does a very nice job with the material. The slides are beautifully integrated with the video and illustrate the points well. This lecture already clarified several points that were confusing me.

The iTunes U app uses a bookshelf metaphor like iBooks. You can put courses or collections in your library, but I’m not really sure about the differentiation as there seems to be some overlap. However, the point is more about the tool, running on an iDevice, as a portal to a wealth of free material presented in a convenient format. This is likely to be huge in several niches…continuing adult education, K12 home schooling, tutoring/remedial learning in K12 and at the college level. It’s a continuing part of the evolution of academic pedagogy. Self-directed non-degree-seeking (for now), but surely an interesting development on the eLearning scene, and more bites at the heels of brick & mortar education, especially when combined with Apple’s new textbook publishing tool.

Time to get back to the next lecture on iOS development

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December 29, 2011 by Joel.

Drupal is one of the most common content management systems (CMS) on the web today. Well, they actually call it a content management “platform” and I guess that given the extensibility (>13,000 modules that can be added in), that’s an appropriate description. I’d wanted to get more familiar with it, at least from the standpoint of building a site, so in the summer of 2011, I set up a skeleton (very easy if your ISP supports PHP and MySQL) and had my son Jeff, home from college for the summer, help me with building a new site for Orange District, Boy Scouts of America. He set up some directory views for me as we both fumbled through the paradigm. Once you realize that you have content, and you have views (a module) that display that content, and other modules that are like “apps” for the environment, you begin to see the beauty and flexibility that’s inherent in the platform. I picked up a book, “Beginning Drupal 7″, from Amazon that was pretty helpful as we started out.

One thing that really drove home the data/display (view) design was work that Jeff and I did on setting up a calendar. He created a data type for events and a calendar view last summer, but it broke after an upgrade this fall. I found a calendar module I liked better (Fullcalendar) and set that up. I had it query the old event data type, and it worked like a champ. Also, used the ability to bring in a Google Calendar (the US Holidays calendar) so I didn’t have to set those up.

Drupal has all the features you’d expect. Granular permissions for managing content and the ability to extend the model. Distributed content creation. Effective indexing. Easy to patch/update. Diversity of themes to alter the appearance of a site, w/o changing the underlying content. It’s got a huge and dynamic developer community. I don’t know if I’ll ever do any coding on a module, but it’s nice to know I could if I wanted to.

I’m just scratching the surface in terms of what Drupal can do, but am very pleased with the look and feel and ability to present distributedly-generated content that this tool affords. If you are looking for a platform for a webstite, take a long look at Drupal.

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December 4, 2011 by Joel.

It’s December, and that means it’s time for the cold weather trout fishery to start up in central NC. Trout can’t summer over here in the piedmont, and the closest naturally reproducing trout are a couple hours drive toward the mountains. However, the local Trout Unlimited chapter partners with some local folks here to stock a spring-fed pond with trout during cooler weather. Fishing runs from November through April. Sam and I usually sign up for a couple of trips, and today was our first day of the season. We’ll go again in March. Last year, it was cold and wet on the first weekend of December, with an inch of snow. This year started with frost but warmed to shirt-sleeve weather by the end of the day. Fishing was slower than usual, but we did catch some nice fish. Here’s Sam…

I LDR’d some but eventually got this really nice one to the net…

It’s fun to be able to catch a trout within a 15 minute drive of home!

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November 28, 2011 by Joel.

While Thanksgiving day was blustery, the weekend was warm and sunny, with light winds for both “Black Friday” and Saturday. The Dunns decided to head to the coast for the weekend on Thursday night. The plan was to have a family lunch at my sister Susan’s house in Swansboro on Saturday, and then head back to Chapel Hill so we could take Jeff to UNC-A. An added attraction was that Friday evening was the Swansboro Christmas Flotilla. We made plans to decorate the Sandbar Hopper to participate in the parade. We brought two holiday yard decorations, a cactus and a coyote, that have been used over the years to highlight the annual Chili Party. I mounted them on the boat, added some chili pepper lights that Susan had bought, hooked it all up to an inverter, and we were ready to go!

We assembled at the EI bridge at 4:30.

This was a small flotilla, as I found out at the Captain’s Breakfast on Friday…only about 15 boats, and the Chamber of Commerce was enthusiastic for any and all participants. We followed the Coast Guard as they headed west on the ICW towards Swansboro, as dusk came on.

We soon realized that we’d taken the “newbie” position, next to the “swan” which had a massive array of lights on a swan frame, charged by a generator, and a sound system blasting Elvis and “Blue Christmas.” Next year, we’ll lag behind a few positions . It was really a great time. There were many people on the docks as we passed through Cedar Point, and huge numbers on the bridges, docks and shore in downtown Swansboro. We made three turns through the darkened harbor before heading back to Island Harbor.

What great fun…until we got back to the marina and my Yukon wouldn’t start . We used Susan’s RAV to pull the boat out and back to the house. The Yukon visited the Swansboro Chevy dealer via a tow truck. We pick it up tomorrow, the diagnosis being a failure of the “neutral safety switch.” Oh well!

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October 31, 2011 by Joel.

As we continue our quest to be happy with entertainment solutions without a monthly cable bill, I decided to add a Roku to the mix. We’ll use this at Emerald Isle, where we’ve got an Apple TV box hooked up to the set, but didn’t have a way to stream Amazon Prime (at home, I’ve got a Mac Mini that we use for Amazon). Apple TV offers a beautiful interface as well as access to the iTunes ecosystem, Netflix, and streaming radio. As a multiple-iPhone/iPad household, AirPlay is a great feature, as is PhotoStream. However, no Amazon Prime streaming, and given the relationship between Apple and Amazon, it’s unlikely that the Apple will sprout an Amazon streaming client. The Roku box fills that gap. I picked up a Roku XD for $69 with free shipping (had a $10 coupon) so I thought I’d give it a try. Given that Amazon’s streaming library is rapidly approaching Netflix, it may be that not too far down the road I can drop Netflix. I get my money’s worth from Amazon Prime on free shipping for some “subscribe & save” grocery items that we order regularly, and movies/TV are a bonus.

The Roku is another small black box, very similar to the Apple TV, but a little taller and narrower and lighter. It does have a little tab on it that lets you know it’s a Roku, as does the remote. This is really a very handy feature on a remote, since it’s often confusing to look at pile of remotes and sort them out . The Roku is a nice box, all kidding aside. It does exactly what it says it does, provide Netflix, Amazon, Hulu+ and many other video sources. I use Pandora, and it logged on just fine to my account. I like the weather service apps on the Roku. I’m hoping that Apple will open up app development on the Apple TV (since it runs iOS) but I’m not holding my breath. The thing, though, about the Roku, is that while it works well and the video quality is excellent, the user interface is just plain ugly. It looks like it was designed by 1st year CS student. Contrast that with the elegant interface of the Apple TV. Oh well…

What I’d really like is the flexibility of the Roku, with Apple’s user interface!

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October 2, 2011 by Joel.

In mid-August, we decided that we’d had enough of paying $116/mo (nearly $1400 per year!) for TV that we hardly ever watched. We had ATT U-verse, and it was much better than Time Warner, IMHO for value for cost. However, we were paying for 3 U-verse boxes, HD tier, some movie channels, and watching very little other than network (CSI, NCIS, Hawaii-50) and local news/weather. We already had a Netflix subscription, Amazon Prime (for recurring grocery purchases), an Apple TV on one set, and a Mac Mini on our primary set, so we had options.

I put in an over-the-air antennae on the roof (a Channel Master 4228), a +8 db Channel Master powered splitter, and bought a d-to-a converter box for our oldest TV set (total about $200 for all this). With streaming movie/TV from Netfix, Amazon, Apple iTunes and Hulu, we had plenty of choices for on-demand programming. When we first did this, we knew that we could stream shows from TNT, which was one of the few cable channels we watched with any regularity. We knew that we were going to miss ESPN, but in keeping U-verse as our Internet ISP, ESPN3 was a viable option though we’d still miss some games. C’est la vie. I did decide to spring for a TiVo for $170 (including the wifi adapter) and $20/mo. to record network shows. Given that I can get about 45 channels OTA it makes a reasonable setup. The quality of digital OTA TV is actually better than cable, as there’s no compression…but just like satellite, it is affected by weather.

We did have a minor crisis last week when we discovered that TNT had gone behind a pay wall that was only accessible if you subscribe to a TV provider that carries the network. That knida defeats the utility of streaming access, I think. I would consider a streaming subscription for a la carte channel access. I’d pay $5/mo or so for a channel like TNT or ESPN. Then, I realized that I could buy episodes of “The Closer” and others from iTunes, and that while you pay $2 to $3 per episode, the iTunes TV library is extensive and an option when Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime wasn’t an option for a show.

The bottom line is that pay TV has just gotten so expensive that it makes sense to look at what you are spending and try to figure out a plan that works for you. The whole business model for broadcast and cable entertainment is in flux right now, and I don’t think that the cable providers are going to give up easily. Paying for what you watch and having some streaming subscriptions though, is likely to be a path chosen by many.

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September 7, 2011 by Joel.

Avast! It’s only 11 days until TLAPD! It’s September 19 each year. Arrrrrr! Don’t be a bilge rat, better bet studying up on your lines, matey!

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September 5, 2011 by Joel.

Saturday and Sunday this Labor Day weekend were about as nice as you get for early September weather on the NC coast. Mild (mid-80’s), low humidity, light northerly breeze, and the ocean was about as smooth as a lake. On Saturday, we beached “Sandbar Hopper” on the east end of Bear Island (Hammocks Beach State Park) and walked around to thhe ocean side. Lots of sand moved during Irene, but not sure where it went. All the State Park “no alcohol” signs were washed away, too . The west end of Bogue Banks didn’t show evidence of appreciable buildup of sand (or signs!).

Generally, there was very little storm damage here. The docks at Island Harbor Marina took a lot of damage, and other private sound-side docks were worse for the storm. The dunes on Emerald Isle had very little damage, but the beach is very steep right now. The steepness helped to deflect the energy of the water into the surf zone rather than the dunes, I think. A few years ago, Emerald Isle pumped lots of sand on the beach, and while it’s coarse sand and not as nice as the sand at Bear Island, it served its purpose in the storm.

We went back to Bear Island on Sunday. The tide was half-high and rising when we got there, So we easily ran the Bear Inlet access channel, and worked our way up along the back of the island very close to the inlet. We were the first boat in there, but as the day progressed, about 15 others showed up. Walked along the beach on the ocean side, and the dunes had taken a beating. The beach was very flat (still is) and the waves crashed into the dunes during the storm. The high tide line is now at the base of the dunes. It’s natural movement of sand, but clearly the sea took some island back. I expect we lost a lot of turtle eggs, as those nests that hadn’t hatched were flooded (there were 34 nests on the 3 miles of Bear Island this year). When we left, we took Sandbar Hopper out Bear Inlet into the ocean, and ran east to Bogue Inlet. The damage to the dunes was clearly visible where we were, about 1/4 mile offshore.

The ocean was smooth, with widely spaced small swells as we skimmed over the water. The bouys marking Bogue Inlet are still out of place from the storm, but on a day like Sunday, you really don’t need them, just watch the water and the breakers. As we cruised into Bogue Inlet, we looked at the crowd on Coast Guard Island (a spit at the end of Bogue Banks) and were glad we’d gone to Bear Inlet. Must have been a couple hundred boats, with huge crowds swimming, sunning, and enjoying the holiday weekend. We scooted over to the Coast Guard channel, then around to the back channel, under the bridge and back to the marina.

Grilled tuna and portabello mushroom caps for dinner; a great weekend.

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September 2, 2011 by Joel.

…well, not until September 15, actually - best I can tell, I started gingerly experimenting with the blogosphere 6 years ago, with this highly informative posting . My blogging has never been very serious, but it is interesting to look back longitudinally from time to time and see what was interesting to me.

Just sittin’ on the deck at the beach tonight, saw that I needed a blog posting for September, and this is what you get…

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August 26, 2011 by Joel.

In North Carolina, each late summer/fall brings the threat of Altantic hurricanes. For those with interests on the coast and in the coastal plain, each tropical wave coming off Africa generates interest…where is it going? Early season, into the Caribbean. This time of year, though, storms tend to curve north and catch NC where it sticks out into the ocean. Two weeks ago, I was on vacation at our family’s house on Emerald Isle. Tonight, we’re back in Chapel Hill, watching Irene creep north-north-east toward Bogue banks. It seems to be turning a bit more to the east, and may miss landfall in Carteret county. Earlier today, it had been projected to come ashore within 20 miles of Emerald Isle. It now looks like it could stay mostly offshore, but there’s still likely to be a lot of wind and rain. Right now, per the Weather Channel, the wind is ~30mph at Emerald Isle and is out of the northeast with heavy rain. Irene had been projected to carry 120mph wind onto shore, but it looks like it may be more like 95-100. Currently, it’s projected to be ~75mph at Emerald Isle. The fact that the eye is likely to pass east means that the worst winds will be from the north to northeast, and will flatten out the surf. It is likely to exacerbate sound-side flooding, as with Isabelle in 2003, but may prevent ocean overwash on Bogue Banks. Time will tell. The eye should pass Cape Lookout early tomorrow morning.

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