saturn return to sender

 Since 2004 I have been ruthlessly inflicting a water garden upon my guileless parents, who live in a 15-year-old suburban Longmont neighborhood. The latest salvo in this wholly unprovoked onslaught is codename Operation Mountain Pavilion. There is not actually a mountain in that corner of the yard, but there will be something like 4 tons of granite rip-rap up there, if I have my way. Mwa ha ha ha!

But the pavilion is funny. It’s funny because I insisted that it be hexagonal. I don’t know how to build a hexagonal structure.* Neither does my dad. Neither of us are skilled carpenters. But having not a clue how to build a pond or the consequences of building it in this climate didn’t stop me from digging a big freaking hole in their backyard one summer. So here it is anyway. When we try to build the roof, we should sell tickets. There is bound to be some serious slapstick.

Anyway, I have added this and a few other things to a list of projects I should be working on. By posting it publicly I hope to embarrass myself into action. I’m sure I’ve forgotten things. I’ll add them as I think of them. Also maybe I’ll add links and photos or what-not as the fruits of my labor … um, fruit.

I will be shooting the wedding of a couple of friends next month. I figured it was an excellent excuse to upgrade my photo gear. So I got a 40D. This is an upgrade from the early-model Digital Rebel I bought in 2004. I went up to Rocky Mountain National Park today to take it for a spin. It’s definitely a nice little camera. Of course now I need to upgrade my glass (the “I’m-a-hip-photographer” word for lenses) and get another flash, and get a carrying case. Oh, and a tripod, of course. And a bunch of memory cards. And …

This chapel lives photogenically at the foot of Mt. Meeker. A couple was tying the knot there this morning as I drove past. Other flickrites’ photos taken nearby.

A quick plug for some just-released software I helped build at Crowd Favorite: tagaroo. It’s an auto-tagging Wordpress plugin that also suggests license-appropriate flickr images. Not too earth-shattering in and of itself, but it’s powered by OpenCalais, which is a really interesting project.

OpenCalais’ goal is to capture semantic relationships gleaned from various digital sources of information. The primary API takes some text, reads it, and gives you back an RDF document with the entities it found in your text — people, places, concepts, and so on — as well as events and facts about them. The RDF model allows these entities to each use any other entity in the Calais database as endpoints in their relationships. The result is a giant and growing semantic information graph, and OpenCalais offers this service for free for both non-commercial and commercial use.

I dig on it. I’m wondering how I can get it working for me in my perpetually-unfinished 3Trace project … The possibilities are enticing.

Currently, Calais’ database is business-and-news-centric, so tagaroo’s auto-tagging feature will be more useful to blogs oriented that way. But if nothing else the UI is a sleek upgrade from Wordpress’s built-in tagging feature. The Flickr integration is sugar.

I think it’s pretty great. It’s the only plugin I’ve seen/worked on so far that I’ve actually installed here. AND — shocker — I MAY even start tagging my posts.

Via Aaron.

Ashame he didn’t spit out the word on his lips. I’d totally chip in to cover MSNBC’s FCC fines for that.