Cullect was very focused around sharing your list.  It had a number of options for sharing to services like twitter, del.icio.us, facebook, whatever you could think of.  That is fine for sharing individual items, but the real gain would come from sharing a whole list.  You see the importance rank can work for you: it will make the best items from all time come to the top.  In this way, you put Cullect to work as a curation tool, hiding things that are irrelevant, and recommending items that you would like more of.  As a bonus, you can have multiple people who are curating a list, recommending and hiding items as they see fit.

Now we get to the skitzophrenia though, because a list couldn’t serve two purposes at once.  If you have a reading list, you would hide items as soon as you had read them, because you’ve already seen the information.  Even if it’s the most important item tomorrow, you won’t want to read it again.  If you’re curating a list however, you never want to hide the most important items, making it a pain to skip past the ones that you’ve read every time.  Even on the most active topics, the most important items are static for hours or days.   If I’m curating a list, I always switch to the latest feed, so that I can look at the newest items and bump them up by recommending them if they are good.  Multiple curators make this an issue though, because my fellow curators may hide items that I could recommend.

You have two tools: a great reader that you can just sit down at and read for 10 minutes and know you’re reading new, interesting, “important” things, and a excellent tool for showing the best content in a particular area.  You can’t have your cake and eat it too though, which might be a feature that could push it over the top.   You can fix this by splitting the “read” and “hidden” flags in the database, so that curators can choose between the “important and not read” view and the “important all time” view.  You might even extend the concept to allow a user to decide how to time-limit the importance view.  This type of time-limiting is a powerful tool – you could build feeds that only show a single item from each day (or week.. or month), just the one that is most important.

This “concept problem” has been bouncing around in my head for a while now, but it’s still not fully formed for some weird reason.  It could indicate that I’m just not seeing the forest for the trees, or that I’m getting a little too hazy on the problem because there is so much which was done right with Cullect.

Next, I’ll talk about a feature that I’ve been wanting for a while in any reader, that seems like a slam dunk for Cullect.

The first of these features, and the one which was most visible and that I want the most, was the way that it made reading a lot of feeds a trivial task.  This was because it included a recommendation system that would rank the stories that you hadn’t hidden (which is somewhat, but not exactly analagous to “read”, a topic I’ll take on in a later post).   It used the fact that you liked some feeds better than others to put those at the top.  I don’t know the whole algorithm, but there was a hidden social aspect as well – if some other people “recommended” the story, then it would get more importance.   This was brilliant, because you could spend ANY amount of time looking through your feeds, sorted by importance, and be sure that you weren’t missing the big story of the day.   When you got bored with the stories, you would just leave, knowing that you wouldn’t be missing anything that was more important.

Some other aggregators would like you to think that they have something similar, sorting by something like times recommended, or amount of comments, or votes, but they are not the same.  Importance score was tailored to each post, and to each Cullection (a set of feeds).   This made it personalized to you, and presented the things that YOU wanted the most.   Unfortunately, I think that one of the reasons Cullect ended up shutting down was because recalculating all of the importance scores was very CPU consuming, and it was taking too many resources.

Since the takedown of Cullect, I’ve been using Google reader as a passable replacement.  Recently (as in, like the last year?) they added a bunch of new features, including “liking” a story, sharing stories with friends (another thing which Cullect excelled at), and “Sort by magic”.  It’s not exactly the same as sorting by Importance I am sure, but it is the most likely the closest thing out there.   It seems to have a little more in common with the “popularity” indices that other aggregators are using, but I was happy to see something at lease somewhat similar show up in the reader that I ended up using as a replacement.    Still, I hope that Cullect can come back in some form in the future, as it was hands down the best reader that I had ever used.  That’s not to say that there weren’t problems with the site, though.  I’ll cover some of it’s disconnects in part 2.

Garrick is still making cool new properties.  I’m using kernest on this site to get fonts that I like out to every modern browser with little effort.

Because I love the iPad, it’s such a great piece of tech.   I can even buy into the “new world” of non-multitasking (noone really multitasks anyway) and non-filesystem world.  I can see building apps for it, but I don’t want to work in the closed system which is the Apple universe, where everything is gatekeepered by a process which has been opaque at best.  It’s all of the arguments against the iPhone’s development model, except on a larger scale.  There were companies who wanted to develop software for the iPhone that were niche apps – things like warehouse inventory systems.  The iPad is larger, it’s about the perfect size to walk around with and read stuff off of.  10 hours of battery life means it lasts through the whole workday.

Of course, there is a back door into most of the new apps – the web browser.  The best part of this may be that you can use it perfectly as a portal to a web app that can build you anything you need. Apple may be getting what they wanted at the start for the iPhone with the iPad.  We all remember the few months before there was an SDK when the party line was that you could do everything with web apps?  It’s much more likely with a nine inch screen and a blazing fast browsing experience.  Web apps are also the end-around of all the restrictions that Apple places on their “approved” apps.  You want a picture of an iPhone in there?  It’s just a GIF.  Want to put some “adult” content in?  HTML5 video to the rescue!  The only thing you can’t do is background processing, but you can’t even do that with real apps.  There’s no API bugs to work around.  It’s not exactly the same as a real app for low-latency things like gaming.

At any rate, I’m still going to develop web apps, and I think that the iPad will be the kick in the pants that the industry needs to make a decent tablet.  Android phones are getting better, and accelerating, in large part because the iPhone changed the smartphone ecology forever.  If the iPad does the same to the tablet market, it will be a very exciting future.

The ocean extended out into the horizon, and we sat on the patio (lanai) to eat breakfast which today was cereal with milk. It is quite relaxing and especially knowing that I didn’t have anything really planned for the day. We decided to make this a little excursion day, finding the nearest large-ish town and looking around. We drove down to Hanalei which is the nearest town of any size. The road down is pretty steep and includes a one-lane bridge, saying something about how many people are around here often. It is obviously one of the less-populated islands. Hanalei itself is a fairly small town which borders a very large beach. I would estimate that it is about the same size as Pella, Iowa.. maybe a little larger. It’s hard to gauge because it is very spread out along the beach. We stopped for some lunch and looked around the shops for a while. Then I bought some sunglasses because I lose every pair that I own after a max of a week.

Afterwards we decided to explore the small condo complex that we are staying in. The pool was found, and is open from 7am-7pm. The hours are a little strange, but it is not lighted, so I guess it is better for the night to be swim-less and also accident-less. I had heard about Sealodge Beach that is near the complex, accessible by trail and wanted to go down there. The trail was marked with a sign saying that it was steep, slippery, and dangerous. Thinking it was only to ward off liability, we started down the trail, which was immediately quite steep. There was then a little creek and then a steep hill that we went both up and down the other side. It was really like hiking through the jungle. The path was quite beaten though so it was well-travelled at least. After the hill we came to the ocean, where the coast is covered with huge porous lava rocks. At this point we either took the wrong way, or the trail got a lot more treacherous. It was very narrow and right along the dropoff which was rocky. People with little hiking skill shouldn’t really take the course. I didn’t realize until later how scary it was for Diana, and now I wish we hadn’t gone farther than the first view of the ocean which was spectacular and much less scary. When we finally could see the beach, we found our way to the end of the trail which was a quite large drop (>4 feet) before the beach was accessible. I think we either didn’t see the right path, or we were supposed to take some other way down the rocks. In any case, we didn’t have the right footwear for this hike – we were both wearing our sandals at the time. I think that Di got some good pictures of the hike before it got to the scary part. We went back to the scenic look of the ocean and relaxed a while, and then again back to the condo from there with some rests. We warned a couple off the trail who was also wearing sandals on the way down, and told another of how it got much harder down the way. I also lost my newly-purchased sunglasses somewhere on the way back up, setting a new record of about 2 hours from buy to lose. I’ll need to buy another pair. I’m still thinking of trying to make it there again. Knowing the way makes it a bit less scary, because you know that you can get there. I don’t think I can convince Diana to let me head down there though, she was very scared for our safety near the rocks.

After the hike to the beach, we relaxed for a little while and then decided to head for some dinner. We drove again to Hanalei and spotted a pizza place called Tiki Man Pizza. The wait was a bit long, there were apparently some large orders (the man mentioned something like 8 pizzas for one group) but it was worth it. We had a pork pizza with pineapple and extra cheese. It was some of the best pizza I’ve had in a long time. The sauce had just a little sweet barbeque in it, which gave it a nice taste. There was music at the bar next door as well, but it took a turn for the “frat boy” as Di put it, so we decided to go to another place for dessert and drinks. We ended up heading to Bar Acuda which had an interesting atmosphere which seemed a bit more high-class. We had some cocktails and wine and a nice dessert chocolate ice cream.

It being about 2am our time at this point, we headed back to the condo. It started to sprinkle a little bit and we walked out on the lawn to see the Kilauea Lighthouse flashing it’s warning to boats (although we have seen exactly zero boats in the water off the coast so far). The rain didn’t come in the condo so we just left the windows open even though it could get a bit cold at night as we found out our first night. Anyway that was Day 1. We’re headed to the lighthouse again today I think, and maybe to the beach to try some snorkeling and swimming, and relaxing.

Check out Diana’s Post for Day 1

This particular image is kindof hard to make out in the black and white which it was modified into to make it look old. The original is a little easier to see the actual lava which is flowing from an eruption happening in the center to another pool of lava rock.

There are four different types of lava, which are based on the chemical composition of the lava itself, but that correlates with the temperature. It is of course, extremely hot, with the coolest form of lava being at least 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. A lot of the lava which is in the US is in Hawaii – it would be nifty to see some of it, but hopefully not the quick flowing kind. We’re heading there on our honeymoon later this year, so it’s a possibility. One of the things that has always fascinated me is Pillow lava, which is when lava is extruded under water and instantly cools and solidifies partially. It also looks really cool. I found out that it is also used as a way-up criterion because of the way it is formed with the ridges normally on the top.

This is a microscopic picture of Radiolaria. Again the image comes from Jupiter Images. They represent a species which has been around for a very long time, since the Cambrian period, so basically 500 MILLION years ago. Because they have been around for so long, but not forever, finding fossils of the Radiolaria are important for dating things.

Radiolaria were popular with amateur scientists in the victorian era thanks to some elaborate drawings that are now part of wikimedia commons. Some of these cellular organisms can become very complex and beautiful. They are still inspiring artists today, as seen on the art page at Radiolaria.org.

Wonderful.

The image in question comes from Jupiter Images stock photography, and is labelled as “Ascaris bivalent mitosis magnified 200x”. Ascaris is a roundworm, which can infect pigs or humans. It lives in the small intestines and produces lots of eggs. This reminds me of an episode of the Soup where they had some stupid reality show doctor clip about getting tapeworms because of bad sanitation, which is where you would get these. Ascaris lumbricoides is the most common worm infection, affecting more than a billion people.

Just one more reason for me to wash my hands.

This is the first in a (hopefully) long series of posts in which I am attempting to identify all of the pictures in the opening credits of The Big Bang Theory. I’ve done some minor searching on the web for something of this nature but haven’t found anything, and I’m always wondering what the heck all of those pictures flying by in the second half of the intro are actually. I’ve decided to start at the beginning, mostly because the pictures will be easier to identify.

@cullect seems to be having issues again #

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