Matthew C Good » Randomness

Introducing the “I Heart Heart Cat Cat Map Map App App”

matt — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 08:33:18 +0000

Hello everyone! I’m rolling out a stupid little app for my greenville friends today. If you’re not in my Greenville circle of friends, you may need a little background here…
Actually, this origin story has become the stuff of legend over time, so the following may be totally inaccurate.
A while back, two of my friends Kate and Katie found this horrendous sweater-shirt thing at the Greenville thrift store. It’s clearly a sweater material, but it has short sleeves? What the heck is that all about? It has the letter “I” on it, two hearts, and two cats. The inexplicable monstrosity has been ever since referred to as the “I Heart Heart Cat Cat” shirt. We’ve all taken pictures wearing it – this has sortof become a hazing ceremony for joining our group of friends. It’s a right of passage thing.
Now that a lot of our friends are traveling the world and doing cool things, we decided to take some advice from the whole “traveling garden gnome” thing, and take pictures of us wearing the shirt in cool places, in front of historic and famous monuments, and the like. Of course, we need a Google maps mashup to keep track of all this, right? RIGHT??
Well, either way, I made one. I’m calling it the I Heart Heart Cat Cat Map Map App App.

Kristin looks awesome in that one.
From a technical standpoint, not too much interesting going on here. I did use MySQL’s spatial datatypes (only POINT, really) for storing the coordinates. This isn’t technically correct since MySQL only deals with planar points and lat/long are curvilinear, but I’ve been sorta geeking out over GIS technology lately, and I really just wanted to get used to the OpenGIS stuff. Any distance calculations I’ll have to do out of the db, but I don’t really think I’ll be doing much of those anyway.
The other kinda cool thing I did was set up an approval system. Instead of having users and junk to deal with (so not just ANYONE can post an image), The system accepts all images, thumbnails them and such, and sends an email with an approval code link. I check out the thumbnail in the email, decide if it’s cool, and click a link to either approve or reject it. Neato.
So there you have it. Check it out now and then, as we should have some new additions happening soon, coming from Turkey and London (hint hint kittermans).

Good Morning, My Name is Ed Kienholz

matt — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:07:07 +0000

a href=”http://www.dinosaursandrobots.com/2008/04/blockhead-edward-and-nancy-kienholz.html”>Good morning. Read this.

The Onion: Republicans, Dadaists Declare War On Art

matt — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:38:27 +0000

Very, very, very, very well done.

Man I dig xkcd

matt — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:28:19 +0000

oh man this comic is good.

I just had to share those with someone.

This American Life Emmy Nominations

matt — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:15:45 +0000

I’d just like to point out that the TV version of This American Life has received three Emmy nominations. This prestigious honor puts TAL in the esteemed company of such television monoliths as “Project Runway,” “Star Wars:The Legacy Revealed,” and “The 49th Annual Grammy Awards.”
woo-hoo.

Funnies #2

matt — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:18:53 +0000

Great Wave

matt — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 06:25:15 +0000

Calculus

matt — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 04:07:39 +0000

That. Is. Awesome.

Overheard in the Vicinity of My Cubicle

matt — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:32:21 +0000

Overheard in the Vicinity of My Cubicle, this 30th of January, 2007 the year of our Lord:
“Hi, do you work on the Internets?”
The speaker of said atrocity noted that she, in fact, worked on the IntrAnets. And needed a copy machine. And apparently needed one of us Internets gurus to help her with it. Funny.

Eat Communism, it tastes like chicken and… Pasta.

matt — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 01:38:48 +0000

So the app that I’m working on at work has a random wierd image pop up every time you refresh the login screen. Two of my current favorites are these:

and…..

wait… i thought the Italians were fascists…?