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Jarrod wanted this pattern, but there was no way anyone but Mary could have carved this (at least at our house).

I started feeling better around 8pm Sunday, at least feeling better enough to help Ian and Jarrod start mutilating the pumpkins we picked last week (pix coming of The Farm Trip: Part Deux, I promise). We went with the whole "trace the pattern" thing that seems to be all the rage with the kids these days. Unfortunately, the pumpkins we picked were extra thick-walled, making delicate carving almost impossible.

I'll post a picture of Ian's tiny one when I post a gallery of all of them, but you can sate your curiosity – in part – via this rendition of Strong Bad in all his Halloween- and winter squashery-glory.

This is a quick test from iBlogger, an iPhone blogging tool from the makers of ecto.

Upon updating Google Gears in Firefox today, I noticed that ScribeFire (a Firefox add-on) was "featured". ScribeFire is an in-browser blogging tool. that seems to have a rich feature-set, comparable to the venerable MarsEdit.

Wish there was a way to use these add-ons in Safari (I understand why not, but it would be great fun if there was a plug-in that enabled it over in my favorite browser).

RDN should look a bit better on your iPhone these days. I migrated the whole site over to an updated version of Drupal and then made some tweaks to auto-check for the browser-type and render appropriately for mobile devices, with some special attention paid to the iPhone.

There were some "canned" solutions for this I had hoped to use that wound up not working. I am also a bit disappointed in the state of the Drupal 6 series and hope Drupal 7 kicks some serious butt, otherwise I'll be heading elsewhere for content management.

I'll be tweaking the iPhone rendering over time, but I wanted to get something up quickly in the event folks feel the need to visit the site while mobile (or if you're using a mobile Twitter client and click a link that goes to a post I made here on RDN). Once I get a decent base I'll see about submitting it to drupal.org and will definitely post a "how to" here.

If anything is broken that you relied on, let me know in the comments and I'll try to get it back in. I went light with the modules this time and disabled some features.

UPDATE: It should look even better now. Added some additional CSS and a few elements from the iUI toolkit.

Whilst on my ride yesterday, I was testing out a SPOT tracking device along with the SPOT integration into the new Yahoo! Fire Eagle geo-social service.

I'll do a longer post when our house is not in so much chaos (birthday part deux is going on), but here is what this cutting-edge, super-cool (HTML 6 needs a <sarcasm> tag) device/service managed to pick up yesterday:

I had it in tracking mode (phones home every 10 mins) most of the time and actually deliberately sent a few "OK" check-in messages (that Fire Eagle picked up but does not show in the messages history of the SPOT site). It missed the whole island trek and the trees on the Burke-Gilman seemed to cause it major angst. Those check-in messages were also supposed to make it to my phone & e-mail but never did.

Again, I'll go into more detail about how it all is supposed to work, but I wanted to toss up a quick post on cautioning folks to perhaps wait a bit for the device and/or service to mature a bit before investing in either.

Mary was gracious enough to let me burn a day off work to get in a long ride. I knew Friday was going to be gorgeous and we needed to do other stuff for Tori's bday anyway, so it worked out pretty well all 'round.

This is one of my favorite long rides in the greater Seattle area, partly because it involves crossing the Sound. I modified the route from the Seattle Bike Tours folks as this one is easier to follow, was over fresh asphalt that was very conducive to cranking on the road bike and also kicked it to a full 50 miles.

Ascent says I did 53.3 miles with a total climb of 2483 feet and an average speed of 14.4 mph. Here's the summary data and the elevation chart for the ride:

The full Flickr set of snaps I took along the way is available for viewing, but be warned they are iPhone camera phone pix, so the quality is "meh".

I've posted the GPX and KML files for anyone's use (despite my pathetic pace & cadence stats). KML is really cool since Google Maps and Google Earth both import it well (though Ascent has a feature to do the import and put Google Earth into "fly-by" mode automagically).

I've got a decent number of folks on Twitter who are also in my OS X Address Book and I wanted an easier way to keep their Twitter avatars in sync than just manually downloading and updating the images. Enter Taabu [297K DMG], my Twitter Avatar to OS X Address Book Updater.

As long as your OS X Address Book contacts have one URL field with their http://twitter.com/twitterid account in it (and you are following them), you will be able to use Taabu to update their OS X Address Book pictures with their Twitter images.

This currently works for up to ~98 contacts (all depends on your current Twitter API rate limit status, which you can use the widget in the previous post to keep track of) and is fine for me since I have far fewer than that I need to sync. Post a comment if you need that functionality as it will mean some coding to allow processing of your local contacts in batches (due to the rate limit situation). There's a "README" in the DMG download that gives a bit more info and some additional screenshots.

Requests, bug reports, complaints, accolades, etc are all welcome. (And, yes, there is a spelling error in "Downloadig" - will fix when I post the next release which will also contain the full, ugly Objective-C source code :-)

For those who are developing anything that uses the Twitter API or even if you just like to experiment with Twitter standalone or alternate web-clients there is a hard limit (currently 100) on the number of calls per hour. This, however, is not made obvious since it requires grabbing an XML file from an http Basic Auth protected URL.

Enter the "Twitter Rate Limit" Dashboard Widget:

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With it, you will know how many API calls you have left and when the counter gets reset.

This is version 1.1. Version 1.0 was inspired by @aadom who was also the UI designer of 1.1.

Version 1.2 will be out in a bit as I really need to fix the gauge colors.

Drop a note in the comments with your suggestions/gripes/accolades.

I was musing on Twitter about the need for the ability to get the status updates from friends who only use Facebook incorporated into my Twitter feed (so I do not have to view Facebook as often). While writing a bot would have been cool, I dislike re-inventing the wheel and came up with a way to do it by pairing some web "services" together (not actually using web services per se).

To do this, you'll need to setup a new Twitter account (I suggest using your "TwitterUsername_fb"), unless you want all your followers seeing all your friends' updates. You can secure the updates to this account if you wish. You'll need to use a secondary e-mail account (Twitter does not allow dups). I also really don't like giving my main Twitter credentials to external services.

I also suggest getting an OpenID as one of the sites you'll be using is twitterfeed and it prefers OpenID logins (I have a free OpenID through Verisign, but you already have one if you are an AOL, Blogger, Flickr/Yahoo, or WordPress users [and others]...full details on the OpenID link I provided).

With those credentials in hand, fire up your browser and head to Facebook and then choose to use the old Facebook (it's just temporary, but one step will fail if you're not in "old Facebook mode"). Highlight "Friends" and select "Status Updates":

On the status update screen, look on the right under "Subscribe" for a "Friends' Status Feed" link. Right click on it and copy it (however you do that with your browser/system). Save and protect this URL!!! It has direct access to the status updates of your friends (and, hence, part of your account) so you should not disclose it without consideration.

The next step is to go to twitterfeed and login:

Once you login, create a new feed and populate it with your alternate Twitter credentials and Facebook Friends' Status RSS feed URL. I highly recommend testing both your login and feed (via the provided links). You can tweak the other settings to match your preferences. The only downside is that if your friends have any more than five (5) updates since the last check, you will miss them. You can choose an alternate feed-post-to-Twitter provider (or roll your own) if this becomes an issue).

The last step is to follow your alternate Twitter user id and you will begin receiving updates every 30 minutes (or longer, depending on how often your friends post status updates).

This setup is only as robust as Twitter, Facebook RSS and twitterfeed, so you have no guarantees from me on how stable it will be, but it has been working well since I configured it.

If you have an alternate solution, definitely drop a note in the comments!

Today was our last official session with our counselor, Bent Meyer (Grace Groups NW). While we'll be checking in again in about a month, we are heading out into our new, uncharted waters together.

God has been doing some amazing things in both of us. More on that in another post, tho. I just wanted to drop a quick note to let folks know the good news and progress update.

Those who use cadence sensors have probably had their fair share of pedal magnets fall off. Between accidents and just minor wear, I go through 1-2 of my Garmin magnets per year, partly due to how poorly they are designed to attach to the pedal.

I was at Gregg's Cycle up near the Alderwood Mall (Lynnwood, WA) and noticed a cheap replacement Cat Eye cadence pedal magnet and decided to give it a try. The way it attaches is much more secure than the Garmin magnet and it works perfectly with the Garmin wheel sensor.

You can grab it directly from Cat Eye for less than $2.00 USD (hit that page and search for "169-9766") or from Gregg's for just a bit more (but, it's local if you happen to be in the greater Seattle area).

I have been remiss in blogging but not without excuse. My MacBook Pro took a power dive and was in repair, Liz visited and we've had quite a bit going on all around.

Life continues to be challenging, but the counselor Mary & I have been seeing has been extremely helpful and much progress has been made on that front. Daughter #2 could really use some prayer (just pray that He would become the center of her life...can't get into more details).

God has truly been working in my life as evidenced even today in something that occurred on the way to Thursday Men's Morning Prayer @ Mars Hill - Wedgwood. Down towards Lake City, it was very apparent that a nasty accident occurred sometime earlier that morning and that the responders needed to use some serious gadgets to rip the roof off of the Volkswagen that has been pretty mangled. There were still tons of response vehicles on the scene and one could easily see what was left of the VW.

My heart sank and my stomach severely churned. I immediately thought of whomever was in there and their friends and family members. The state of the car had to mean some pretty serious injuries, possibly fatalities. Bob 2.0 - without pause, and now communicated without boasting - immediately asked God to be with those who were hurt and their friends and family members. This is solely as a result of His Spirit working and directing my thoughts and actions.

I can tell you what Bob 1.0 would have thought: he would have assessed and analyzed the damage, made some calculations as to the likelihood of the scenario and wondered how long the cleanup had been going on. He would have acknowledged that folks were injured and been thankful that the responders were there. He probably would have also been glad that it was on the other side of the road and that it was not going to impact how he was going to get where he was going. The whole thing would have been objectified and colored through the lens of self.