Here’s my del.icio.us tags (a good way to see what I think is interesting online):

Also: The book of Ephesians.

• The Sun has returned to Oregon! We're set for nearly a week of sun, Lord willing. Cool evenings, clear skies, temps in the mid-seventies. Heaven!
• I'm trying to get back into the pattern of regular exercise. I feel pretty good today (Friday, as I write this), and am already trying to decide what I want to do today for exercise. Probably end up playing at the park with kids, mostly.
• I got the opportunity to meet with Dan Merchant, the Portland-based filmmaker behind the new film, "Lord, Save Us From Your Followers!" He gave me some free tickets, and I'm hoping to bring our PUMP Summer interns along for a great event. It's showing at the Hollywood theater through the 18th if you want to catch it.
• I may write more on this later, but I wanted to highlight a recent blog project I did for evangelist Andrew Palau, son of evangelist Luis Palau (also my employer). Andrew has done festivals recently in Cairo, Jamaica, and just the week before in Bucharest, Romania. Today he's in Myrtle Beach, S.C. for Beachfest, and there's lots going on.
  Blogging can be tough for organizations - new ideas, managing the "voice" and juggling multiple contributors. The dialogue aspect - two way, not one - can create anxiety among managers who have traditionally had tight control of messaging. We're navigating these at warp speed, and doing pretty well so far. I'm very happy with the blog design & features (a two-day project initially). We've worked hard to integrate photos (flickr), video (Blip.tv and soon Mogulus), and audio messages and set up some good training and procedures for managing comments and editing principles. It's been a very ad-hoc project, but our Electronic Media team was up to the task! Check it out at andrew.palau.org.
• I've just started using Automator with Aperture, initially to import scans. Wow, how awesome is Automator paired with Folder Actions? Easy to set up: the images hit the folder (say, from a scanner or email source), get tagged and titled, and import automatically into Aperture. I know this is nothing new but I hadn't messed with it until this week. Love it, automate me!
• It's the season: I'm having lots and lots of in-depth political discussions with friends, co-workers and relatives. Just remember, kids: keep it civil, speak thoughtfully and with respect, and check for logical fallacies. I want to write on this area more, but it's so time-consuming to do properly I'm keeping it inside for the moment. Any choice political stuff you want to drop on me? Bring it! Love you regardless.

More later - gotta get out into the sunshine!

I played b-ball yesterday at the park; my legs and knee did ok, but boy, my lungs were killin’ me (Oh, and we went swimming afterward, so we were all pretty beat by the end of the day). I barely lost at crunch 21-20 (botched the last free throw), so it wasn’t a total loss. Connor has discovered basketball, and is pretty good at sinking the layups on the 7-footer in PUMP’s backyard. His nearly limitless energy and ball-affinity is perfect for this game. I’m trying to help him come to terms with the fact that not every shot is going to go in. I used my last game as a teaching point: Daddy lost (one point!), but did his best, and still had a great time! What should I do? I should practice and get better at basketball. He gets so frustrated when he misses, or his shooting partner pulls ahead in baskets. A great lesson we can all work on, no doubt.

Since it’s Father’s Day weekend, have a look at some more lessons from our dads over at Art of Manliness.

Speaking of manly arts, I’d really love to get into some kickboxing or MMA workouts - ones that won’t leave me with a broken nose or too much mockery. Suggestions?

The geek world waits with bated breath for the latest iBling from Teh Steve. So far: iPhone 2.0 updates - not out until July =(; games, games, games!

Following the WWDC livepage over at Macworld.

I so don’t have time for this today, but it’s a big deal for my work world.

Updated: Apple iPhone web page, new ad trailer for iPhone. Big news, for me: only $199 for an 8GB, $299 for a 16. That’s very affordable for what you get. Anyone want to buy a solid 1.0 iPhone?

This is old news, but clearing out the feed-reader means finding some forgotten gems. Robert Hodgin of Flight404 fame coded a “beauty engine” (my term) by visualizing a Radiohead track. The entire video is generated by code, with no post processing.

You can watch the low-res video, but after looking at the full-res video there’s just no comparison. Details - and there are many - emerge with the larger video that just got muddied to oblivion with the small vid.

He originally wasn’t going to enter it into the Radiohead video contest, but fans convinced him to try. He says this of his work:

Firstly, its got some mad crazy super duper beat detection going on. I reused the application I wrote to make the Goldfrapp piece but went a few steps further. I manually input each bass beat, snare, highhat, and arpeggio note, not to mention all the vocals and syllable breaks. Crazy! It took about 6 hours but I think it was the right way to do it. I would have wasted much more time than that had I chosen to do the beat detection algorithmically. But man, scrubbing through that track, over and over, marking every note… it was a carpal pain.

Readers will note I’m a huge fan of his work. I’m just fascinated when I watch music being visualized in real-time - like watching painting and music making each other, or at least synthesizing something that didn’t exist before. This is light-years beyond most music visualizers. I’m very interested in the concept of building a system - the creativity is on the front-end, and the system is sort of… unleashed on the music. In this instance, he’s manually mapping tones and beats for the software to pick up on, but the potential exists for realtime input or music analysis to fill in that gap.

Create Digital Motion is always good for some inspirational approaches and good ‘ol DIY video hacks. I’m wanting to learn Quartz Composer - a dynamic video tech that Apple makes - and plug it into ProPresenter for some realtime audio-driven animation under lyrics for worship and other gigs.

Ah, the tag cloud. Only mostly useless, it does tell me I talk to Big Mike Lewis and of course, KristiCW.

Speaking of mostly useless, that’s what Twitter is when it’s not working. I do love their cool pix about it, though:

I really like Twitter for microblogging - quick posts that show up in my blog. It’s also great for keeping up with friends and family - enhancing real-world relationships - and I can do it from my phone. It can increase blog traffic by referring this now-additional community to your blog. Since I’ve fallen to number two in search results for my name, I better get on top of that. Update: that search put me over the top! Thank goodness.

I also like the constraints - constraints are good for you. I may try my hand at short poems on Twitter (Pwoettry?), that might be fun.

There’s been a lot of chat about Twitter and its value, the flames of which have been fanned recently by its white-hot growth in popularity. I’ve heard from lots of bigwigs asking whether they should try it; the answer is usually, “it’s hard to explain - yeah, try it. You can use it in more than one way”.

On top of all this comes frequent downtime from too much traffic. It was, at its heart, a one-day experiment in keeping people updated via SMS; it’s morphed into a community and messaging system. Lots of armchair developers are weighing in with their ideas on how to “scale”, but the fact is that this ”problem space” hasn’t really been explored before. It’s a unique beast, with many new challenges.

While the outages are disappointing, I think I’ll stick around. These technical issues will be solved with time. Whether Twitter can come up with a revenue model that works - ensuring their survival - is another chapter that hasn’t been written yet.

Excerpted from Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, via Presentation Zen.

Spring is here - more like Summer, actually, with temps yesterday in the upper 90’s. To escape the heat, we headed up to Forest Park for some creek hiking.

The previous day, we went hiking up on Mount Tabor, where - to our delight - there was a pro bike race! Wonderful.

Today is a bit cooler. Trinity got up at 6 a.m. this morning to be my assistant on a video shoot in Vancouver. We were covering a cleanup event there for Portland CityFest. A beautiful morning. Enjoying being outside — I feel like I’ve been in a cave for a long Winter.