Hurley's World

Here is Marcus Lonsberry in the 1880 Census.

[Image from Ancestry.com]
Source Citation: Year: 1880; Census Place: Fishkill, Dutchess, New York; Roll: T9_824; Family History Film: 1254824; Page: 121.2000; Enumeration District: 36; Image: 0245.

Marcus Lounsberry W M 51 Head Pilot New York New York New York
Amanda Lounsberry W F 49 Wife Keeping House New York New York New York
Harry Moshier W M 9 Grandson At School New York New York New York

Here is Marcus Lonsberry in the 1870 Census.

[Image from Ancestry.com]
Source Citation: Year: 1870; Census Place: Fishkill District 1, Dutchess, New York; Roll: M593_925; Page: 154; Image: 310.

District 1, Town of Fishkill, Dutchess County, New York
Post Office: Fishkill Plains

Marcus Lounsberry 42 M W Pilot New York
Amanda J Lounsberry 41 F W Keeping House New York
Albert A Lounsberry 20 M W Works in hat shop New York
Sarah ? Lounsberry 18 F W at home New York

I'm testing out the new ecto publisher program. Ecto allows bloggers to write blog posts on their computer (rather than through a browser). It's useful since writing in a browser window can often be a pain and it helps many people who aren't as handy with web interfaces. If you have a blog, I definitely suggest you try it out.

I've been trying out a fair number of social networking tools lately and besides Facebook, I find my self using Jaiku and Pownce quite a bit. They both offer similar features, the ability to send a short message to your friends. However there are features unique to each one that makes them completely separate tools. Pownce focuses much more the social aspect of the site, you are able to make friends, group them, and share messages, links and files with just the people and groups you specify or with the whole world. Jaiku on the other hand seems to be a bit more of an aggregator at the moment. Unlike Pownce, I can add all sorts of RSS feeds to my Jaiku account and anyone watching my jaiku feed will get them.

I had a little bit of a distraction this morning involving my Quantcast account. I received 11 emails in the course of about 2 minutes stating that my password had been reset. This got me a little worried that someone was trying to hack into my account, although I think the more likely possibility that is that someone accidentally put my username in the field instead of their own. Either way, 11 messages can get to be a bit annoying.

I decided to do something that I don't ordinarily do, I called the company to let them know. I spoke to a nice gentleman named Mark on the phone and he thanked me for my feedback and told me he would tell the project manager about it. He also asked me what site I use their product on. Then, within minutes, I got an email from him again thanking me for my feedback and for using their service. The fact that they took my call at 8:30 am their time and were so nice to me on the phone, already puts them above many of the companies I pay to do business with, but the email just makes me incredibly happy.

This is just about the coolest thing I've ever seen.

Programming Collective Intelligence looks like an incredibly interesting book that I just can't wait to read, especially since I'm in the midst of developing a social shopping site that hopes to aggregate and make use of the "collective wisdom." We're always looking for ways to improve our related coupons/topics/sites listings and, since we're going to be adding user comments soon, the portion on spam filtering looks awesome. On top of it, I've heard lots of great things about Python but haven't had the chance to use it much, so I'm really interested in looking at the code samples provided.

I recently read a great book by Jason Beaird about the fundamentals of web design called The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. It has a great overview of concepts such as layout and composition, color, texture, typography, and imagery with some how-to tips throughout the book. Even more importantly, he believes that anyone can learn how to design beautiful web sites, even developers/coders like me!

In the beginning of May, I left my office job to become an independent contractor, again. I am now the lead (and only) developer at a great coupon and promo code site, Deal Locker.

For my new job, I got a shiny new Mac Book Pro. For the most part, I love it. I can run Windows on it so I can test my web pages in Internet Explorer. Some cool features exist in Tiger that I really like. But setup hasn't been as straight forward as I had hoped it would be. Don't get me wrong, I still love the mac and OS X, but I've been a bit frustrated the past few days.