Mike Ton

I really loved learning things as a collective group.  

And a few years back, during Christmas break, my 10 year old nephew and brothers(software engineer and med student) spent time playing with stop motion animation.  

The best part was how my sister was genuinely stunned by what her little boy could produce(her expectations for the kid's uncles were already high<g>).  

The highs of game development, in my opinion, building more than what you think is possible as part of a collaborative effort.

A timelapse of a sunrise out at Hood Canal.  It was a weekend with a bunch of friends building a potato gun canon.  We manage to complete two variants:

• Aerosol      : http://dangerouslyfun.com/spud-gun
• Pneumatic : http://www.spudgundepot.com/pneumatic-modified-sprinkler-valve.html

Lazily firing potatos into the canal was fun. And I recall one of my buds managed to launch a spud out as far as 50 yards.  He pumped up the psi far beyond what the gun was specced for to manage that<g>.

I've been using Posterous for almost two years now, but it's only recently that I've dug in and discovered how much it rocks.  Here are my favorite finds:

• Landing page posts can be sorted by tags.  I use Posterous to document some of the experience and tools I've developed over the course of my career.  I also use it to share social posts about personal projects, product reviews...etc.  Using tags I can directly share a url to a landing page sorted for disparate topics:

1. http://miketon.posterous.com/tag/top -   Portfolio and career topics
2. http://miketon.posterous.com/tag/fluff -  Social and personal posts

• (An added note is how remarkable Posterous support was: I received answers to my specific questions, from a person, in only a few hours!)

• Posterous themes utilizes standard CSS formating.  To simplify my page, I removed a number of fields to free up some page real estate. (Theme edited from Contra by Cory Watillo .) 
• Archiving : Posterous blog can be downloaded and locally archived by running a chron task on : http://posterous.com/api/readposts?hostname=miketon&num_posts=50

Posterous is by far the most hassle free and simplest way to blog, and is definitely worth leaning on for my posting needs.

Here's a comic strip that I posted to a friend's FaceBook wall for her Birthday a few years back.  She had also recently been accepted to Dental school...which she seemed a little too excited about?  Anyhows, she liked it, and I saved a buck or two on a more conventional retail gift<g>.

Attached are also a few quick throwaway thumbnails trying to hash out the idea.

I'm a dabbler by nature and generally have about a dozen projects going on at any given time.  It's the things with purpose, that I'll move to the finishing stage. 

Just got an e-mail from YouTube to describing how my channel may be eligible to earn revenue, if I'd agree to have ads on my uploaded videos.  This got me wondering how many views/subscribers does it take to receive an invitation.

Currently my channel has:

• 28,064 views total over 4 years (created in 2007)
• ~1,000 views every two weeks for the past half year
• 32 subscribers
• 29 views

It's pretty gratifying to receive such an offer.  On the one hand I'm really curious to see how the revenue system works.  On the other this channel is being used to host portfolio and family videos: It'd be worth seeing if it's possible to create a 2nd private/personal channel that would be low view count, but ad free.

Anyhows, one of the nicer things that the internet has offered beyond convenient shopping and naughty pictures.  For that I'm very much grateful:).

Been using this lock for close to a year now.  It may well be the last one I buy.  

My experience with conventional locks, will inevitably involve either losing the key or forgetting my numbers.  This little Master Lock invention solves both issues.  And rewards video game skills:

• The button slides in 4 directions - up, down, left and right.  From this, you can build your own combination sequence from 2 to 90.
• You can also unlock it one handed.
• The build quality is highly sturdy and solid.

My personal combination utilizes a code that'll be familar to anyone who played games in the mid 80's.  Many Konami fans will easily guess this.  However, this is primarily used for the sweat locker at the gym...it's unlikely that folks are going to want what's behind that door<g>.

Been using the Mac Book Air for almost a year now, and this is the first computer (that isn't a tablet) that I actually love.  My interest in hardware is fairly neutral: You can get work and play done with just about any device IMO.  But the Air distinguishes itself by nailing the day by day values:

• Instant On
• Magazine Like Form Factor  
• Human-centric Touchpad
• Sharp Vibrant Display

I was especially surprised by how much 'Instant On' matters in practice.  Going back to anything else feels painfully sluggish.  

The Mac Book Air may have yesterday's spec, but the user experience oddly feels like it's from the future.

Been using the Nook Touch for a couple of weeks now and are loving it.  A good deal of my reading recently has been on Google Ebooks.  After massing a couple of hundred dollars of books in my library, it was time to get a dedicated reader. Reading on the Iphone was starting to strain my eyes, particularly when I'm out and about during daylight hours.

I rooted mine : http://youtu.be/eFZVpCSRpeI .

And it surprisingly makes a great web browser(provided that your web usage is mostly about reading; as opposed to watching videos) with Opera Mini installed.  It's even really great at reading Kindle books:).