I have just finished a website for author and teacher Jane Katims. I know Jane through her husband, Dan Perlman who I have coffee with weekday mornings at Peets. With this web site, I was able to combine information about Jane's talents with the beautiful paintings of Linda Peterson, whose website I completed about a year ago.

To quote from the web site:

Jane's work includes poetry, fiction, and radio plays and documentaries. She teaches courses at The Cambridge Center for Adult Education and Tufts University, as well as teaching private creative writing workshops. She has earned several awards for her work in literature.

On all pages but the first page, the banners rotate among a group of beautiful abstract oils by Linda Peterson. I really like the colors used in these paintings and Linda was very kind to let me use them for Jane's website.

Very neat javascript to show you a sampling of your flickr photo selection. http://www.flickr.com/fun/zeitgeist/

I notice that Google has now acquired the web application Writely. I've been using Writely for several months now -- primarily for my mother-in-law's MacMini where I didn't want to run any native apps that would have to store files in the file system (In the past, I have found that to be very confusing for her). This is the latest in the push towards Web 2.0 by Google (and many others) trying to provide full service applications over the internet. Google is trying to assemble a list of web applications which, when taken together form a very nice use-anywhere, share-anywhere web based implementation of all the applications you will need on your computer. This, of course, has been the promise of the Internet for a long time. more...

"I want to - a page of utilities that help you do stuff you want to on the web"

I started a HowTo page, but this one is better. Lots of interesting stuff that is a little hard to characterize. And multiple ways of doing each of these things. Impressive.

I have just installed a SlingBox in my home. SlingBox a device that is as difficult to describe why you need it as the TiVo was. When you see it, you understand. You connect a SlingBox to one of the several outputs of an audio/video device, in this case, my TiVo. In addition you connect the SlingBox to your local area network, as well as an infared blaster which you place in front of the infrared receiver on the audio/video device.

Inside the SlingBox there is hardware to digitize the audio/video output of the connected device, send the digitized stream over the ethernet to a PC running a client that can decode the stream, and simulate the remote control for the connected device by using the infrared blaster in response to buttons pushed on the user interface presented on the PC client.

In addition, to accessing the stream from a PC on the local ethernet, it is possible to connect to the device from anywhere in the world over the Internet.

It was very easy to install and worked perfectly the first time I tried it out. The net result is that anyone I authorize (including me) can watch programs recorded on my TiVo as well as control the TiVo using the TiVo interface from anywhere in the world. Impressive device. Here are some screen shots of what I see on my PC.

Bella

My sister Jane is a wonderful person: warm, loving and a nut about animals -- not to the point of certifiable (yet), but crazy about dogs and cats. So, although I was a bit surprised, I wasn't astonished when she called me one day and said "Harry, I just purchased a minature longhaired dauschound for us -- we will own her 50-50."

Now, over the years, various of my comrads have have taken certain strategies to get Marsha into doggies, but this was pretty unusual and I commend Jane for her going at the problem head on.

Last Tuesday night, I met Jane and Bella at Jane's son Andy's in Framingham and Jane handed me Bella and her support equipment. We have all been having a wonderful time with her this past week and I know it is going to be hard to give her back on October 10th when I said we would return her. More pictures...

Marsha and I are leaving tomorrow on a three week trip to Thailand and Cambodia. We are attending the wedding of our nephew Andrew in Bangkok next week. Then we travel north to Chiang Mai for a week and then to Siem Reap, Cambodia to see the Angkor temples. This is a whole new experience for both of us, having never traveled to Asia as tourists (I went to China on a 7 day whirlwind business to Hong Kong and Shanghai in 2000). In addition to our standard real-time travelog, this trip we are trying something new: Travels with Harry and Marsha, an audio podcast. I have my iPod equipped with an iTalk microphone and we plan to record the sounds of our trip along with Marsha's excellent commentary -- I'll also be contributing, but I sound a little too dull to call it excellent.

We can't wait to leave - which explains why I am up at 4:30 in the morning typing this! But, I can rationalize that I am just getting a jumpstart on the 12 hour timezone difference...

I have started a new web site, Lexington Digital (www.lexdig.com) whose focus is my professional activities. I decided on the name because it captured both where I do my work and the focus of my work. Although the tag line is "Innovative uses of computers and networks for small businesses and non-profits", I am interested in projects of any size where I can add value. The web site describes a lot of things I have been working on and can now do for others, large and small, on a contractual basis.

In January, my friend Tom Fortmann sent me an announcement about a bicycle trip titled "Mountain Madness". He was thinking of taking this trip and at the end of his message said, said somewhat whimsically, "Are you interested in coming along and driving the SAG van?" After an instant, I responded saying "Sure, why not?" So, I contacted Scott Effner and offered to drive the van. Scott greeted my offer with pleasure because it meant that he and the other riders wouldn't have to take turns driving the van. Thus, my start in experiencing an amazing group of people and their even more amazing trip in Colorado, traveling 1200 miles in 14 days over 12 passes, with an accumulated climb of 82,000 feet.

This was an experience I won't forget.

A friend of mine from my morning coffee group at Peets asked me if I could help with her web site. Linda Peterson paints wonderful watercolors and has a large body of work that has not had a good web presence. I helped Linda organize her work, make digital scans of 35mm slide photographs of her paintings, and develop a web site, Linda Peterson Fine Art that is suitable for displaying her work as well as interacting with viewers of the web site using simple mechanisms that result an eCommerce-lite web presence. Nothing too fancy. I am happy with how the site turned out and am interested in working with other artists to give their works the exposure a graphical web site can give. If you are an artist and interested in me developing something like this for your work, please contact me at harry@forsdick.com

Florida 2005
In Mid-February, Marsha and I started out on a 6 week adventure down the East Coast to Florida and back. We visited Jamestown, Yorktown, Williamsburg, Savannah, St Augustine, Daytona, Miami, The Everglades, Fort Myers for Red Sox spring training, Cedar Keys, Atlanta, Charlotte, Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway, Staunton VA, Philadelphia and finally Lexington.

We had a great time, and took a lot of pictures. Marsha and I have created a web site that cronicles our trip in words, maps, and pictures.

design*sponge
Nice blog for people interested in design. More importantly, I've got to come up with some light-weight way of recording interesting blogs and web sites.

2004

Once again, we have produced a web site with pictures of what we did this year. In addition, we sent out two different postcards, this year pictures Marsha and I took in Paris:

Red Nose Studio
I occasionally run across an artist that immediately catches my attention and appeals to me. In the New York Times last week, there was an article in the Circuits section about Electronic Gadgets (my speciality) to buy for the gift giving season. The banner of this page had the illustration below.

After checking out the photo credits, I started poking around the web to find Red Nose Studios. There are two great places to go: 1) The Red Nose Studio web site and 2) A dealer ArtPick that represents Red Nose. Both fun places to view interesting objects de art.

Ben and John Kerry
Last Saturday night the New Hampshire Democratic Party held a reception for all of the Kerry campaign workers in New Hampshire. Ben and several of his friends who worked on the campaign went up to New Hampshire, and Ben returned home with this very nice picture. These are the kinds of pictures which years hence you look back on with good memories. more...

Right Tool for the Right Job I have been looking for a solution to organizing the various lists of "Things I Need To Do" that I have floating around my desk. When I was at Genuity, outside of each conference room, there was a plastic "gravity roller" note holder -- a clever thing where you could slip a piece of paper up into this device and a roller would grab onto the slip of paper. The roller was free floating in a channel and gravity pulled it down, jamming the note and holding it. To remove the note, all you had to do was to push up on it and silde to the right or left.

I have been looking for such a device for a long time with no luck. Recently I was in Bertucci's Pizza in Lexington and I looked up and saw what I needed: an order holder that the cook uses to keep track of what he is doing. Perfect! Same idea, different domain. Instead of going to Staples, I went on line and searched restaurant supply houses, and found exactly what I wanted. Instead of specially made rollers, this device (which costs $12) uses marbles. It works great!

Helen Estelle Forsdick

My mother died this past June. As with my father Harry, and my dog Malcolm, I created a tribute to her on the web. This page contains several links to other pages that include a slide show with music, a collection of photographs, a booklet I wrote about her life, and the eulogy I gave at her memorial service.

A Visit With A The Red Sox Fan
Harry Forsdick

November 25, 2004

Earlier this week, Will and and I paid a visit to Nancy Hollomon to see some of her Red Sox Memoribilia. And boy, what a collection! For Nancy, the ultimate Sox fan this year has been the apex of her Red Sox fan-career.

A couple of weeks ago, Nancy sent me a message saying that she wondered if Will and I would like to come over and see a Red Sox scorecard that she had
been given by Trot Nixon and his wife Katherine. "Sure", I said and so we arrived at Nancy's home in Brookline which was adorned with the appropriate door decoration for the season. more...

Google Desktop Google has done it again. First it was the original Google web search engine. Then the Google Toolbar, the first good integration of a search engine into a browser. Then Google News, using the Google search technology to build a newspaper drawn from thousands of news sources around the world. Then Froogle, another use of the Google search engine to search for product prices. And now, Google Desktop, an application of Google technology but this time to the information on your personal computer -- integrated into the Google web search so that you can search one place for material either on your PC or on the World Wide Web. Very impressive.

Without a Doubt This is an incredible piece of writing from the New York Times Magazine of October 17, 2004. It is long, but once you start reading it, it's hard to put down. Although I obviously disagree with George Bush on just about everything, I found this article insightful about how he thinks and the direction he wants to take this country.

It seems that with little knowledge of history or of the world, and lacking the ability to analyze and think deeply about issues, George Bush falls back on his intuition mixed with the Bush-family bravado / confidence and labels his "no discussion" decision making process "faith-based" and himself "called by God" to make these decisions. The "Faith-based Presidency" is in contrast to the long history in the USA of "Reality-based Presidencies" where issues are debated and differences of opinion encouraged as a tool for arriving at the best decision.

Included is a roadmap for Bush's second term including the appointment of at least one Supreme Court Justice, with the possibility of a total of 4 Justices. I am more worried then ever before for our country and the possibility that George Bush might be re-elected. I used to think the article in Slate about the "Faith-based Missile Defense System" was a funny spoof. Now I see that Slate was prophetic about the entire Bush administration. And it's not funny anymore.

Click here to read the article.

Paris 2004   Marsha and I traveled to Paris for 16 days in September and October. We took a lot of photos and kept a diary of our experiences. Although I still have a lot of work to do to present the photos in the context of our diary, you can see what I have in place now. I will be updating this site continuously in the next month, so check back to see new pictures, panoramas, videos, and maps of our trip.

Click here to see our Paris 2004 travelog.

Interactive Panoramas

I have long been fascinated with panoramas, and recently, interactive panoramas. Interactive panoramas are 360º pictures of a scene that are presented on a web page with software that allows you to use your mouse to move around the full circle. In a new twist, I have discovered a package that not only allows you to move around, but it also shows you on an overhead view of the scene where you are looking. Very cool -- check it out.

In addition, I have recently added a "How To" document which describes how you can do the same thing. Click here to check it out.

Our Trip to Alaska

In June, we took a trip to Alaska. Marsha's mother, Anne is turning 90 this December and decided to take her children and their families on a cruise on the Inner Passage in South East Alaska, stopping at Juneau, Skagway, Hubbard Glacier and Ketchikan. We traveled on the Royal Caribbean Radiance of the Seas. Click on the snapshot of the page to the right to read about and see pictures of our trip.

Stern's Pond, Harold Parker State Forest

Last week, on a beautiful day, I put my kayak in my car and drove up to Andover, to Harold Parker State Forest. When I worked at CMGI, I passed by signs for this forest all the time, but never went to explore. Now that I have some more time, I took the opportunity and explored the pond -- with my digital camera and GPS. Here is a web page that records the results.

Project Vote Smart
Opensecrets.org--Money in politics data
Here are two excellent web sites for understanding who you are voting for and how they get money so that they can run. This is a great example of how the Internet serves the democratic process.

Live365
I have followed music on the Internet since the first MP3s were published. I remember way back in 1997 (?) writing a gushing message (as I am want to do) to Guy Bradley, my good friend at CMGI@Ventures about how MP3s were going to change the way we thought about music. This was inresponse to my first encounter with MP3.COM. more...

Malcolm
Our dog, Malcolm, died in April. This is a web that is a memorial to him: all that he meant to us, his background, his pedigree, and lots of pictures that I took while he was with us. In addition, many people sent us messages about Malcolm and these are recorded here.

Currently, I have not figured out how to make this work on multiple browsers, and so this web site will only work if you are using Internet Explorer versions 5.5 and higher on a Windows PC. I am working on fixing this. In the meantime, if your browser is detected as being different than the required browser, you will see a snapshot of the website with the only interactivity being going from page to page.

Presence Page

I've heard a lot of people talk about "Presence" on the Internet. The idea is that there is some set of services that you can use to keep track of how to reach you. So, I thought, how about combining my interest in internet video along with presence and new things, by setting up a page where people could go to see exactly where I am and provide some links so that you can communicate with me at those locations. Thus the genesis of my presence page.

Webcams have been around for some time -- largely the province of the voyeuristic crowd. Too bad: I think pictures and sounds are a much better form of communication for most interactions -- Thus the success of the telephone and television. So, why shouldn't we use these two media to their fullest potential for personal communication now that they are quite affordable. For example, the upper two webcams on my presence page are Intel cameras that cost about $70/camera. These cameras are attached to PCs running a program called WebCam32. The bottom two cameras are Panasonic Network cameras which attach directly to the ethernet in my home. Each camera is a standard-alone internet host complete with a web server. The lower two cameras are steerable. Click on the still image snapshot to explore.

TrackerCam
Update: I've taken this off line in favor of a more flexible set of cameras discussed in the entry above.

I've set up a fun device in my basement -- a trackercam. This is a little platform that is able to rotate a platform around a vertical axis as well as tilt the platform around a horizontal axis. Mounted on top of the platform is (in my case) a small ball shaped webcam. On my PC there is a web server running which allows you to both view as well as control the where the camera is looking. The software is able to do a lot of things, including serve as a steerable webcam, a survailance camera that can track objects that move, as well as a video conferencing camera. It's a pretty neat device and fun to watch it work. The image to the left shows the motion of the platform with the camera. To give it a try, click on the following link:

http://forsdick.dyndns.org:8090/

The best way to use it is to click on the "Live Pictures" button.

Year in Review

We have switched over to an interactive web for our annual year in review letter. It is a much better way to use both words and pictures to tell our story.

In addition, we used AmazingMail.com to send out our Christmas and Chanukah cards. I had purchased cards at Amazing Mail in the summer when they were having specials so that these cards cost only $0.25 a piece -- my full color photograph, text message and small picture on the back plus postage -- all for a quarter!

Truth in Advertising

The temptation to show images of products so that they look good in advertisements rather than be accurate is strong. So, in Sunday newspaper sales brochures, you frequently see disclaimers like "simulated picture" (I'm not even sure advertisers go to this trouble these days since everybody assumes such pictures are doctored to look good).

Well, I was struck by this image in a sony ad which shows the camcorder as it actually works when you turn the viewing display around so that you can take a picture of yourself -- the Sony logo is indeed upsidedown when you do this. Sony earns a star in my book for having enough confidence in their brand and product quality to show their name in a somewhat unflattering configuration...

How to Find Stuff on the Web
I frequently get asked "How do you find things on the Internet?" Here is a message from a friend who recently expressed her frustration in trying to help her kid with homework

"When it comes to the internet and searching I feel fairly inept.  I can be sitting down with Becca trying to help her find some piece of information for a homework assignment and it will take 45 minutes when it seems like it should take 5, at most.  Is there a site you can point me to that will help me better know how to locate information on the web in a fashion that doesn't leave me severely frustrrated?"

Here is my response: more...

In an attempt to help Lexington residents communicate with each other in an immediate, grass roots, civil, respectful, fun way, I've started up The Lexington List, a Yahoo!Groups email discussion list and web site. So far, with one message and one letter to the editor, 40 people have signed up for the list. But, it is hard to get the discussion going. I'm a little fearful of sending too many messages to get the list going. I think it will take some time before people feel comfortable expressing their opinions or even asking questions. We'll see...

For quite some time, I have wanted to see if I could host my own website. Well, now I've done it. You are viewing this web site from a server hosted in my basement over my cable modem connection. Why, you ask, would someone want to host their own website? Several reasons including 1) more control, 2) less expensive, 3) to learn what it means for someone to have a home server / digital hub and 4) because it was fun to do. Now that I have done the heavy lifting of getting all of the settings on the router and firewall, all the servers configured, etc., I hope to be able to do even more interesting things -- such as have my entire collection of digital photographs as well as digital music online, control my TiVo over the web, monitor my house with web cams, use my Internet connection as my telephone connection. more...

# posted by Harry on Tuesday, September 10, 2002 at 3:35 PM  0 comments links to this post