It seems as though the folks who lived in this house prior to our arrival, had a thing for mushrooms. Bill, the husband, would apparently grow them in the front yard. Big platter shaped things that have a remarkable look - almost like a tree stump. It wasn’t wet enough this year for those to really take off. But there are plenty of big fungus around.

I found this one in the foundation bed near our house. It looks nothing like the ones in the front yard, but it’s pretty impressive nonetheless. Into the compost it goes!

A Fungus

So there’s this thing called the 48 hour film festival. It happens every year and in cities all over the world. Teams of writers, actors, directors and photographers (and lots of others) get together for an intense weekend of film making. Each group has 48 hours to produce a 7 minute film. On Friday evening each team gets to draw their genre from a hat. Things like “western” or “romantic comedy” or “horror”.

Then all teams are given the same prop, line and character to incorporate into their film. By 7PM Sunday they will have produced a bunch of 7 minute films.

This year Katie was a part of it. She and a bunch of friends decided to make a movie! They had to include an umbrella, the line “that’s not the way I heard it”, and the character Vic Putterman. Their genre was “superheros” - A Mary Poppins kind of thing - well, if you see it you’ll know what I mean.
They had a great time doing it. And all the showings the next week were at the Brew and View so everyone who came to watch had a great time munching pizza and drinking beer. When I went, the place was packed.

It’s taken months, but now you can see the movie for yourself in the comfort of your own home at agnesfairbottom.com. Props to Katiel; she got the Best Actress award for the weekend in Asheville.

One of the things I do to keep up with my expenses is to always save my receipts. Well, truthfully, I’m pretty bad about it when it comes to actual physical paper. But receipts in the form of bits I can handle.

For a long time, I did this by hand. Back in my PC days, I would save a web archive or whatever its called when you all of the images and formatting are saved locally as a single entity. But it’s kludgy. After I got my first Mac back in 2001, I was thrilled to use all of the PDF capabilities that are built right in. For example, anything you can print, you can also save as a PDF. This made saving receipts really easy. Checkout from Amazon type Cmd-P to print, and select Save as PDF from the drop down menu. Easy peasy.

But this process really lacks grace. Every time I save a receipt I have to remember where I keep them, navigate to the folder, and then save. Plus, I have 3 different types of receipts that I save - deductible, expensable, and other.

Automator to the resuce!

To solve my woes I turn to Automator, Apple’s built in, powerful, visual scripting tool for the Mac. I don’t want to have to navigate folders and remember where I keep each kind of receipt. Plus, I want all receipts organized by day. But I don’t want to have to remember what day it is or to have to type the date in. I’m using a computer for goodness sake. These are simple problems to solve.

• Fire up Automator.
• Choose Finder > Get Specified Finder Items and drag it into a new workflow
• Choose Automator > Run Shell Script and drag it into the same workflow
• Open the Run Shell Script expand arrow and select:
  • Shell: “/bin/sh”
  • Pass input: “as arguments”

Now paste this script into the shell script window. (Remove the space between “i” and “r” on line 5 - wordpress doesn’t like for me to even mention making directories in code)

# Figure out where to save the file.  Expenses organized by day.
DATE=`date +%Y%m%d`
FOLDER=~/ESC/Expenses/$DATE
# If the folder doesn't exist, create it
if [ ! -d $FOLDER ] ; then
    mkdi r -p $FOLDER
fi
# The name of the PDF file is passed as command arguments
mv "$*" $FOLDER

Now save it as a PDF Workflow.

This little Automator action makes life so much easier. I have 3 of them, one for each kind of expense. Whenever I want to save a receipt, I just print and choose “Save to Expenses”. A directory for the date is created if it doesn’t already exist, and a PDF is saved in the proper folder without any intervention on my part. I love it!

They arrive next week. We got 2 little lab mix puppies from the Madison County Animal Shelter. They were born 5 weeks ago in the shelter - along with 4 other siblings. But we couldn’t take all 6 of them now, could we?

Last week was a banner week for me. I really began to drink from the firehose at my new job with Electric Sheep Company. What a great group of people to be working with. And how awesome is it to have as part of your job requirement keeping up with what’s going on in Second Life!?

Aside from customizing my avatar, I actually have a huge project to tackle: build an advertising network for 3D virtual worlds - Second Life being the first. Sure, there are banner ads and the like. That ground has been tread for years. We’ll do that, of course, but there really is so much more in a place like Second Life. Imagine that Apple is hyping their new iWidget. Instead of clicking a banner ad at MacWorld, you get an actual virtual iWidget to play around with in-world. And since we’re only dealing with electrons in Second Life, if you like it, you can make a copy for your friend.

Pump the brand, but also make something fun and useful for people while doing it. And imagine the metrics you can get out of this. Now it’s not just about impressions and click counts. There are real engagement metrics to consider. How many times was the iWidget copied and given to a friend? How many times was it used? How many people were in the vicinity when it was used?

We’re now well underway with the design and have an excellent opportunity to partner with a large media company. Time will only tell how this will all pan out, but for the moment anyway, I’m really excited about it all.