Maine Power Outages Map
Working in a NOC, I often consult the two Maine power companies that have online outage information (there is a third that does not have such a feature). If I see many circuits go down at the same time I'll check to see if there is an outage in the area by checking both those websites, then going to Google maps to see how far away the sites are from the current outages. This is a tedious process and I finally decided to do something about it by creating my own Google map with their wonderful API. I'd never used it before so this proved a great way to learn how to use it as well. After setting up the screen scraping to pull info off the power companys' websites, getting the app to do just what I wanted, and working around some minor speed bumps, it's done!
Google's API is quite easy to work with, and I'm very pleased with the results. For most people this map isn't very useful, and at any one time there are only a few markers plotted on it, but for myself it will be quite useful, and it was a great learning process. You can view the Maine Power Outages map at http://euicho.com/power
Monospaced fonts CAN scale
Like many programmers, I have a couple of favorite fixed-width "coding fonts" that I use for writing and viewing source code, however most of them are bitmap based and do not scale up "prettily" by any means.
Fortunately there are some great monospaced fonts that do scale up nicely. In my experience, it is important for me to use both my own favorite fixed-width fonts, and the great fixed-width ones below. This is because at small sized, most vector-based fonts like some below look fantastic at larger sizes, like on web pages or in print, but look fuzzy or blurry in the 8-12pt range in notepad++, gedit, etc. Conversely, my favorite bitmap based fonts only look good at one size, usually in the 8-10pt range, and are pixelated and blocky at larger sizes.
Twoosh Spotter: A Greasemonkey Script
EDIT (10/6/2009): Twoosh Spotter is now up to v2.0. I've fixed it so that the tweets shown after hitting the "more" button get checked for twooshes, and also fixed a bug where "&" was converted to "& a m p ;" and counted as 4 characters instead of 1.
I recently came across a new portmanteau on Twitter called a "twoosh" (TWitter swOOSH)!
Coined by rentzsch, A twoosh is a twitter that hits the 140 character limit exactly on the nose. This is just one of those fun little oddities that people like to play with, but unless the poster follows up their twoosh with another post pointing it out, the twoosh goes unnoticed by all but the equally twoosh endeared... and those with OCD.
Recent Photos
Lifestream
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Booya! http://twitpic.com/2j58ac [euicho]
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Shared 3 links.
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I couldn't figure out why I felt so shitty all of a sudden. Then it hits me: I had coffee for the first time in a week and I'm crashing now [euicho]
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Frack does Fairfield stink of manure! It comes through my AC vents! [euicho]
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Shared Deep Surplus.
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Checked in at Work
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At the fair, eating fried dough. Don't tell our Midwives! [euicho]
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Checked in at Eastern Maine Emergency Veterinary Clinic
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Packin and mooovin! Found a lot of dust bunnies! [euicho]
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Checked in at Verve
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The new Automata guest strips are effing awesome. (Original: http://j.mp/26LCa3, 1st set: http://j.mp/b0azD, new start: http://j.mp/9qfPKA) [euicho]
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OMG The Pillars of the Earth mini-series! [euicho]
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Watched Pandorum last night. I love dead ship exploration movies (space and sea), so I really liked it. Sorta like Survival-horror meets SGU [euicho]
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