The Jeamus

Recently, I was tasked with the honor of producing a signature cocktail for a betrothed pair of buddies (buddy and buddiette?). It was a daunting challenge, made so more by my own expectations than by anything that was asked of me. Really, they just asked "Can you make drinks?", but I heard "Can you make us a drink?", which of course meant "Can you invent for us a cocktail that is singularly representative of our respective personalities AND the love that we share?" ... Oh, well since you asked: Challenge accepted.

So the race was on. After questionnaires, focus groups, and weeks of 'research and development', I put together a recipe that told the story: A spicy Irishman who moved to Baltimore falls in love with a sweet, nuanced girl, and together - with their bubbly personalities - they can make it through the bitterness of a dark and stormy world to live a happy and fruitful life together.

The recipe for this success is below...

The Jeamus
2 oz Cinnamon-infused Whiskey
1.5 oz Rosemary-infused Simple Syrup
1 oz Dark Rum (Gosling's)
1 spiraled Kumquat
Top with Champagne (~3 oz, or to taste)
Dash of bitters
Pro-tip: Mouse-over each ingredient to see how they fit in the story above

Simply combine in the order listed.

Cinnamon-infused Whiskey - Mix whiskey with cinnamon sticks and let them sit together. I used about one stick per 100ml of whiskey and let them sit for 48 hours. For a full 750ml bottle I'd just drop in an even 10 sticks. If you're pressed for time, you can cheat by mixing the whiskey with powdered cinnamon, shaking once in a while and letting it sit for a couple hours, then putting the mixture through a coffee strainer... This is not as good though. Originally, I planned to use Jameson, but mostly because of the Irish groom and similarity to the intended name of the cocktail. Ultimately, I decided that the richer taste of rye whiskey worked better, so went with Pikesville Rye.

Rosemary-infused Simple Syrup - 500ml granulated sugar, 500ml water, lets say... 20 sprigs of rosemary? (However many come in your standard supermarket bundle), put on the stove, bring to a boil while stirring, remove from heat and let sit anywhere from 3 to 48 hours. At the end of all that, you'll have about 750ml of rosemary-infused simple syrup. This is the most delicious thing you have ever put into a cocktail. You know how much sugar went into it, so you probably won't go drinking it from the bottle, but keep it away from your guests as they won't know any better and will give themselves a belly-ache. If you remove the sprigs, I'd probably trust the resulting syrup for a week or two... Add a couple shots of liquor and it should last you months, but I don't work for the CDC, so you have no reason to trust me on that...

P.S. Be careful. This drink can destroy you. Drink Responsibly.

Happy Holiday Fireplace

Happy holidays everybody! Tis' the season to be merry, and to huddle around a crackling fire, which can leave those of us without fireplaces with a distinct sense of something missing. Fortunately, thanks to these internetz, we can enjoy the experience of cozying up to the fire and settling into a Christmas mood without breaking the bank on renovations or burning down the house.

See below for a link to my favorite Jazz Holidays station on Pandora, and a high-quality "Yuletube" fireplace set to loop, so you'll never have to add a log to the fire! Click the Pandora link to load the music in a separate window, then come back, switch the youtube video to high-def, click "Full-Screen", sit back, relax, and enjoy the happiness.

Pro tip: Put a space heater underneath your screen for a more convincing effect

Pandora Jazz Holidays Station

Disclaimer: Author not responsible for damage caused by real fires. If you start a fire doing this, blame Darwin.

Javascript Event Handling for Touchscreens

Ok guys (and gals) this one is shameless utilitarianism... I'm still hard at work on my last post, which is/will be by highly customizable version of the game Jeopardy, but as the mind bubbles are popping capillaries like popcorn all over my brain I wondered how different javascript/jquery events (like .click, .keyup, .mousemove, etc) might behave... on a touchscreen like my glorious android phone or fancier people's iTabletmajigers (to be announced in Nov).

So welcome to my playground...

Note: If you are looking at this on your computer, you can load this post up on your phone to play along by using this QR code. Just point your phone at it with Google Goggles, or some such other QR reader:

Clicking works as you'd expect, just tap and it hears you. Note that if you move your finger at all during a tap, the browser picks it up as panning the screen and the click listener at least gets nothing...

But mousemove only works in conjunction with an onclick-like interaction...

Yup, and key up works on input fields, which is cool!

Jeopardy

Design and play a game a Jeopardy with your own questions using Google Spreadsheets to organize and collaborate with friends. When you are ready, simply paste the published RSS url from your spreadsheet in the field below.

Launch game...

Save game settings...

Free Conference Calls

So here's something fun and potentially kind of useful. In searching for a free conference call solution for work, I wanted to know when I had found the "best" option, but couldn't find any definitive reviews or recommendations as I routed through the internets. Unfortunately these services seemed to have saturated sponsored adds and their SEO to the extent that I couldn't come up with a search string that gave me reviews or comparisons of the services that we're at all comprehensive or satisfying. Most of the advice I found was anecdotal and seemed to be based on skin-deep experience. The "Best Answer" on this Mahalo page actually gives some very interesting background on free conference call services - how they work, how they make money - but the conclusion is simply: "Don't use them, I don't like their business model." ...good points, but not an option, bub. Now I just feel bad about my search.

Before I continue, a bit about the use case and the need for finding a "best" solution. At our office we plan to start using Skype for our weekly staff meeting, connecting those of us in the national office with our field staff scattered around the country. Great solution, except from time to time one person or more needs to call in but is not at a computer, and doesn't have Skype on their phone. Infuriatingly, Skype has no way to allow more than one phone to call in, as their Online Number solution can only connect you to one person at a time. Our work around is to call into a conference call service from our Skype call, so that if a few people do need to call in, they can call into that conference call service, which then routes them to our Skype call... exhale. We picked one and tested it (sans Skype) last week instead of our legacy paid service and: disaster. There was a noticeable delay on the call, so people kept talking over one another, which got worse and worse as people got more frustrated. It was a bad day.

I needed to find a free conference call service that has as minimal a delay as possible (and as a caveat, I need one that can disable the "hold" music that plays when there is only one participant, since sometimes no field staff call in and our staff meetings don't need a soundtrack). Which brings us to my search, the one that yielded no results. In the face of disappointment I resolved to conduct my own survey and comparison.

Methodology: I call in from my computer using gmail or skype (more on that later), and I call in from my office phone so that I can tap the reciever and hear that tap on the conference call service through my computer's earphones. I then tap at a quickening rate until I find the rate that matches the latency of the call, that is to say when the time between 2 taps is the same as the time it takes for the first tap to be heard through the conference call. Once I match that rate, I count the number of taps I can fit within 10 seconds. Dividing out, we then get a value for the delay on the conference call service.

	Service	# of taps per 10s	Delay (in seconds)
	Level 3 (paid-service used as baseline)	28	0.36
	rondee.com	28	0.36
	nocostconference.com	20	0.5
	totallyfreeconferencecalls.com	20	0.5
	freeconferencecall.com	17	0.59
	Freeconference.com	15	0.67
	freeconferencecalling.com	20	0.5

So you can see that rondee.com was the best when it comes to having a small delay, matching our legacy paid service and registering almost twice as fast as some of the other services.

Here are some other random notes about these services:

• nocostconference.com annoying confirmation lady cannot call from gmail
• totallyfreeconferencecalls.com first call from skype answered with dead air, second call worked. After second line logged in, it took several seconds before the lines were connected cannot call from gmail
• freeconferencecall.com Email, said no a lot
• freeconference.com Email, very responsive
• freeconferencecalling.com 2-code step for host log in, but no music cannot call from gmail

Moving Forward: Interested? Have ideas about how to improve this study? Want to re-run these tests or conduct it on some other services (paid or not paid)?  Know of another survey/comparison that renders mine irrelevant? Leave comments to share your thoughts or experience.

At this point, each of these numbers are determined from a sample size of 1, so there is plenty of room for people to duplicate these tests to see what numbers you get. It helps too if you do your tapping count a few times to make sure you're confident that you have the right tapping rate.

All for now, will update this later.

Head (of State) in the Cloud

It's been about a year, but I'm firing this blog back up to post about something that I find truly remarkable...

Apps.gov

The federal government - under what appears to be the excellent advisement of Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and at the behest of a techno-savvy president - has set up a clearinghouse of information and services for federal agencies to move their IT services into "the cloud".

For those who don't know, cloud computing is the principle where instead of keeping all your information and programs on your own computers to be managed by your own paid staff, you and many others put your information on the internet, sharing the same system to deliver your services wherever you need them around the world. For those who don't care, this means you get similar services at a fraction of the price that are easier to access and allow for greater flexibility and collaboration among your staff.

Already I'm in shock. The more adventurous among us have been moving ourselves into the cloud piece by piece over the last several years, (Moved my organization's email services over to Gmail about a year ago) and I haven't heard of anyone ever looking back. I've had many a hyperbolic conversation on how backwards the government when it comes to IT, and how much more efficient America could be if the USG would just keep up with the Jones (or the Pages and Brins, as the case may be). Surely we glossed over some of the technical, or more likely the legal challenges such a shift would pose, but the challenges seemed utterly surmountable, and the principle perfectly sound. But even as senators started using Twitter and I'd heard that whitehouse.gov ran on an instance of Drupal, I still felt a sense that the feds were dragging their feet and using new technology only as a show piece with no plans for major overhauls.

So imagine my surprise when I came across an article (found through Google's new FastFlip, by the way) heralding the arrival of the federal government's new "...one-stop source for cloud services." And more than a one-stop source, I might go so far as to call this one of the most comprehensive, and better organized repositories of web-based products and services I've ever come across. With the ability to drill down through likely department of use, type of service, and other categorizations, you can find an app (or a promise that one is coming soon) for just about anything an organization needs to do. And they're even getting outside the straight-laced, run-of-the-mill box by recommending some pretty esoteric technologies like "mind-mapping" and virtual worlds.

And perhaps most importantly, I don't think this is NOT some conspiratorial black book of fat-cat cronies and pet contractors who are on the "approved provider" list because they got a $10 Million contract to write the list in the first place... At first glance it looks like a genuine directory of the most recommendable and reasonable services for departments that should be striving for effectiveness and cost-efficiency. And the part that got my attention: Google Apps is top of the list for a lot of the collaboration and productivity categories that I (and I expect many federal departments) would be most likely to need.

Thats right all you friends in the federal government who have .gov email addresses, but use your gmail account to actually communicate effectively (with chat and all that cloudy goodness), this heralds a day when the two may be one and the same.

Flight of the Falcon

Remember this picture, its the first launch vehicle of the 21st Century.

Just under a week ago, amidst financial meltdown, high-stakes piracy on the high seas, and a looming political battle of the sexes, an upstart and his start-up made history by putting a privately funded rocket in orbit for the first time ever.

SpaceX, founded in 2003 by PayPal billionaire and technology tycoon Elon Musk, successfully launched (on its 4th try) their Falcon 1 orbital launch vehicle. This trip carried a dummy payload, but the Falcon 1 can put small satellites in just about any orbit.

This is the dawn of a bright new era for spaceflight. SpaceX's rockets are a fraction the cost of their competitors, and are mostly reusable, which could eventually bring their costs down to 1/10th of their competitors. The door to affordable spaceflight has now been cracked open, and the greatest dreamers in science and industry are eagerly peering in.

And they have no lack of ambition. SpaceX is already competing with the veteran Orbital Sciences to be the space shuttle's replacement for getting supplies to the space station through the COTS competition (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services). Elon Musk has offered a variant of his Falcon 1 to ferry small missions for Google Lunar X-Prize at a discount, and this past week it came out that SpaceX is offering NASA $80M cargo rides to the moon, which is almost laughably cheap.

The proof-of-concept success of the Falcon 1 brings great promise to the rest of SpaceX's exploits. Their Falcon 9 and Falcon 9-Heavy launch vehicles, which essentially are respectively 9 and 27 Falcon 1s strapped together, have now had their hardware flight tested. This subsequently brings great promise to others who have been waiting for SpaceX launch vehicles, such as Bigelow Aerospace and their line of inflatable space stations.

Say what you will about the state of the world, but with the flight of the Falcon 1 orbital launch vehicle, private space is at least one industry with something to cheer about. In an age of relative technological stagnation in the United States, where America sees its competitive edge getting duller by the day, SpaceX has acheived a game changing triumph that could keep the red white and blue in first place when it comes to business in the great beyond.