Here are a few things I'm working on right now, along with a personal nod to some heroes of mine. If you see something you like here, please contact me and/or check out my resume.
PeepWeather.com
My 'at a glance' weather site peepweather.com is live and in color! It came about from a simple idea I had to show 'traffic light' colors for each hour of the day for a seven-day forecast. It is general to any outdoor activity that involves ground weather parameters like temperature, wind, percent of precipitation, cloud cover, etc. I developed it partly to get familiar with web development tools - currently Python, Flask, and Heroku for deployment - and it's been a ton of fun :-) To the right is the widget feature in action.
The next step is promoting it, which I'll do through specific communities of outdoors enthusiasts (such as my original audience of radio control aircraft) and moving on to sports (bicycling, motorcycling, running), hunting, and more.
Critical thinking apps
I'm in the early stage of brainstorming projects that might help raise the level of online discourse. What bugs me greatly is the preponderance of unsubstantiated claims made in comments sections. The big challenge would seem to be the nature of personal belief, which responds in contradictory ways to facts that conflict with it. Stay tuned.
Edison (past project)
I had a lot of fun leading the development of Edison (formerly edison.thinktrylearn.com), a tool for treating life as an experiment. I stopped development for a number of reasons, and I have mixed feelings about doing so, but so be it. Still, as a friend pointed out, how many web sites do you come across that are actually novel? I think this one was. You can read about Edison here, and about my Think, Try, Learn philosopy here. My main page has a link to my piece in Mindhacker: 60 Tips, Tricks, and Games to Take Your Mind to the Next Level (Amazon link here) called Hack 54: Think, Try, Learn.
Screen Shot Gallery (past projects)
Here are some screen shots from past projects, which all used UI technology available at that time (Java applets, Swing apps, etc). For more detail, see the Projects section of my LinkedIn page.
Heroes
Some people whose work I greatly admire:
- Richard Dawkins, founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation
- Science educators Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye
- Ralph Nader, founder of Public Citizen
- James Randi, founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation and the Million Dollar Challenge
- Michael More, documentary film maker
- Francis Bacon, considered the father of the scientific method
- Paul Kurtz, founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
- Ricky Gervais, film maker and comedian
- Bill Maher, political comedian
- Stephen Fry is pretty awesome, too
- Dan Barker & Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation
- The Atheist Experience TV Show and the feisty Matt Dillahunty