Reintroductions

December 12, 2011 by Eric Richardson

It's been a bit, hasn't it?

Various topics that I've neglected to mention here over the past year and a half: starting a newspaper, closing a newspaper, looking for a job, taking a job with a public radio station and moving twice (though only a few blocks each time).

And yet with all of that, it is actually a vacation that has me getting this blog back up and running. On Saturday, Kathy and I will board the world's largest airplane and head off on a 15-hour flight to Australia, where we'll spend a few days in Sydney and a week in Melbourne.

Back in 2000, when I did things like blog, I spent six weeks in Sydney. It only seems appropriate to bring the site back up to speed before I return.

I do anticipate taking more photos this time around. Back in 2000, most of the visuals I left with were crappy camcorder video. I think I've gotten a little better at taking a picture since then.

PBX-ing

December 23, 2010 by Eric Richardson

I spent most of the day today building out blogdowntown's phone system, in preparation for a new employee we're adding in January.

Back in 2007, I wrote about playing with Asterisk and adhearsion for some phone work I was doing at Cartifact. I left the company before we finished that rollout, so I'd never really had a chance to sink my teeth into a more complete system. — Continue Reading...

London - Day 1

July 03, 2010 by Eric Richardson

Eric Richardson

Kathy and I flew from L.A. to London yesterday to spend a little over a week visiting her sister and parents (the former of whom is living here, the latter of whom flew in yesterday as well).

We got into Heathrow a little before noon, checked into the Kensington Hotel and then toured Westminster Abbey and the Parliament building in the afternoon.

I've spent the early morning getting some work done, taking advantage of our VoIP office phone setup to make a call back to Ed to chat about a pair of stories and finding that my Starbucks card works here in the UK and enables WIFI access. Handy.

Photos from day one are posted on Flickr as a set.

Tonight's Project: Write a Twitter Live-Blog Listener

June 16, 2010 by Eric Richardson

For several years I've wanted a little piece of server glue to take tweets and turn them into a story on blogdowntown. Something for those times when I'm out on scene and really just have the phone to work with to let people know what's going on.

This evening I'm sitting down to write that piece of glue. Basically, it needs to be a daemon that connects to our Ruby on Rails application on one side and to twitter on the other. It should listen to blogdowntown's twitter account(s) and recognize certain commands that trigger live blogging. — Continue Reading...

silence again

June 16, 2010 by Eric Richardson

Sorry about that... It's been a very quick four months since that last post. I'll see if I can do a little better over the next four.