What I have been up to in January 2011

Its been a busy month, the start of the year always is.

• Built my first Android APP with Phone gap. Its a happiness survey that lets users report there current happiness level once an hour. The reports go back to my website and get stored in a database. I hope to run this survey for a year and see if i can see any patterns in peoples happiness. The app prompts them once an hour (during the day) for input so hopefully they will report in good times as well as bad times. The first version had 5 different buttons but i found that people only the middle option. I have since switched it to using an analog progress bar and has produced must more varied results. Currently I have 32 people running this survey and I plan to add more as I refine the app. This app is not available to the public.
• EveryDayFiction IPhone/IPad app. Again I am using Phone gap with JQuery mobile for theming. its not going as well as the happiness survey. This app when it is done will be available to the public thou iTunes or android market.
• I been making/downloading and building a stencils collection to decorate VHS. Simple one layer images. Archive of collection
• Me and Jordan submitted a short video to the The peak Commercial contest. Our entry, everyone  else's entries To create this video, we downloaded several days worth of the Peak's 12 hour playlist, then wrote a program that downloaded the lyrics to each song from the web (we're only fabulous commercial producers at night. During the day, we're software engineers). Next, we wrote out the phrases that we wanted in the commercial and used a special program to find each word in the list of lyrics. Some words weren't available (apparently no one sings about "bacon". Go figure.) so we rewrote our "script" several times to suit what we had available. That gave us a list of songs where a particular word was used. From that, we chose songs where the word we wanted was enunciated clearly by the singer (which was super hard, cause rock stars mumble). Finally we added subtitles to help the viewer understand the word, spent countless hours editing the heck out of it so that it was 30 seconds long and our entry was complete. Since this commercial is a transformative work, rights are covered by Fair Dealing (the Canadian equivalent of Fair Use)
• The script I used to scrape the lyrics pages for certain songs. The script its self only took about 30mins from start to finish to write. No wonder there are so many spammers out there that scrape other peoples websites for content and publish it as their own... I wouldn't have even bothered if i knew about this project. Million Song Dataset that seems to have done the same thing I have but better and more organized then I could have with my limited time.
• Moving people in the rain sucks...
• Most of my time has been occupied with the launch of http://raygunrevival.com all the steps that you need to go thou to launch a website are exhausting. I think it turned out okay.
• Me, Jordan Lapp, and Andrew LeBlanc filmed a short trailer for RayGunRevival to launch the website. The trailer has taken longer to edit then I would have thought and has missed the launch of the site. But hopefully we can still use it as a advertising medium. I will post it as soon as its ready.
• I have stopped development on http://www.camilladerrico.com/ my other paying projects and pet projects where taking up too much of my time. I could not keep up with updates that Camilla needed and was falling farther and farther behind. I regret that I can't make time for her but my other projects are more important to me at this time. Good luck!
• Everydaypoets book was launched this month by the fabulous Camille Campbell. It looks great and is available on Amazon
• Started reading a new book Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds. The first few chapters have been really engaging and I am looking forward to reading the rest of it.
• Started rating movies again. Lets see if I can keep up with it this time. This wordpress plugin isn't the best and if i ever find some time i will rewrite it with some social elements. (Facebook updates, community taging, ect)
• The Every day fiction anthologies are in the Harvard library