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Blissing Out on the Details

September 12, 2009 in Uncategorized, life, programming | View Comments



Bookbinding Project Gains Momentum, originally uploaded by johntynan.

I remember, years ago, reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and how Robert Pirsig blissed out on attention to detail. Well, I don’t know what precipitated this, but lately, I’ve been absolutely pleased to take my time with any number of projects, from restoring a pair of $100 Rockport tennis shoes that I trashed during a painting project, to raking up a years worth of detritus and pruning every living thing on our front lawn, to this, my long-time bookbinding project.

In addition to getting back up to speed with the ReST to Verse process as described here, I am now getting up to speed with some of the finer points of the Verse and Booklet plugins for LaTeX. Next step is to bind the printed signatures and more.

Either way, I hope to maintain this attention and keep writing about the results.

Recent Efforts Creating an NPR Timeline Mashup

July 25, 2008 in programming, publicbroadcasting | View Comments

If you haven’t heard from me in awhile, this is why. Some of you may know I’ve been working recently on an NPR / Timeline Mashup:
http://johntynan.com/scripts/timeline/
(Note: These scripts are in their early stages and are certain to change).

I mostly have been doing this to learn about JSON and to create an example of what can be done using the new NPR API.

This script owes an incredible amount to the NPR Digital Media team. You can find out more about the NPR API here. You can also read about what they’re up to on their blog Inside NPR.org

This also owes a great deal to the Simile Timeline project. You can read the documentation here, or ask a question about the timeline widget here.

I’ve learned a great deal. In particular, the idea of cross-browser data exchange using a “callback parameter” is great! See this simple tutorial. Then too, it’s great to be working in Javascript again.

Let me know if you have any comments on the scripts. This is definitely a work in progress, but I think it’s a work that could definitely go somewhere.

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