Tim Hibbard

Good Morning Kansas interview on ABC 49

Well, like I said yesterday, I was pretty nervous for my interview with Good Morning Kansas on ABC 49 in Topeka. Kyle was nice enough to go along and we got there around 5:45 AM. Heidi greeted us at the door and said that she had been watching on Where's Tim and already knew I was here!! We went over some basic stuff about the site and she explained that I would be going into the studio around 6:00 and get familiar with the set and the anchors. We went in the studio and she introduced me to Blake and Jessica. I wouldn't say "star struck" is how I felt, but I was definitely like, "Wow, TV people!!" They were both really nice and genuinely interested in the site and EnGraph and everything about it. During the commercials and off air segments we would chat about how we started the site and what EnGraph did and after watching them do a couple reports and talking with them, I was comfortable with them. Not yet comfortable with doing the interview, but at least comfortable with the anchors!!

The Where's Tim segment started around 6:20 AM and it seemed like it lasted but a second. It was about 3 minutes, but Jessica did such a good job asking good questions and keeping the conversation rolling that it was easy and over with before I even knew it. She made a funny comment about psycho ex-girlfriends!

After it was over, we talked with Heidi for a bit more about their commitment to the internet and RSS and podcasts and her sleep schedule. She gets into work at 2:00 AM, that's nuts. And to top that off, she switches back to a normal "day life" during the weekends after sleeping during the day during the week.

They have uploaded the interview to their website, check it out here.

posted @ Tuesday, March 28, 2006 10:55 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ EnGraph Where's Tim ]

Where's Tim featured on Good Morning Kansas tomorrow

KTKA 49 is interviewing me tomorrow for the Good Morning Kansas show. They found Where's Tim a couple weeks ago and talked about it here (warning, uses quicktime, fix here), and they want to do a follow up interview. So if anybody in the Topeka / Lawrence area wants to check it out, it is supposed to be on around 6:15 AM (Sunflower cable channel 12) or so.

I was pretty nervous for the podcaststudio.net interview, and I am REALLY nervous for this thing. I've never been on TV, and it's live, yeah...I'm a bit nervous :)

posted @ Monday, March 27, 2006 1:49 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ Where's Tim ]

_IG_FetchContent "bug" in Google Homepage

When developing modules for Google Homepage, you use the _IG_FetchContent command to fetch data from an external source. Google is "nice" enough to cache that data source (for days) and that causes problems with dynamic sources like Where's Tim webservice. To get around this, put a random number at the end of the url as a query string, like this:

_IG_FetchContent('http://www.timhibbard.com/webservices/engraphgps/engraph.asmx/GetTimsLocation?' + Math.floor(Math.random()*16364), function callback(response) { worker(response); });

This will generate a new url so google will go outside their cache to get your real data.

posted @ Saturday, March 25, 2006 5:03 PM | Feedback (1) |

Jersey

I made it to New Jersey tonight, after the standard flight delay out of KCI. Check out the Get History feature on Where's Tim for today (03/19/06), it's pretty cool to see the jump from Kansas City to Philadelphia.

I'll be working with our clients in Salem trying to resolve some .NET remoting issues. We have a really neat GPS system in place here. The data is downloaded wireless from the vehicles and then we use .NET remoting to transmit the data back to headquarters. I think we have some port forwarding issues. Good thing I double as a network admin...not!

posted @ Sunday, March 19, 2006 6:52 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ EnGraph .NET Remoting Where's Tim ]

Mashable talks about Gabbly

Pete Cashmore gives his review on Gabbly. It's not as bad as 3Bubbles he says. I think Gabbly is a great service and I only wish I could design something that looked that pretty. According to one of the guys that developed it, they have more cool stuff on the way, so subscribe to their blog.

Their site has been up and down all day. Maybe they are having growing pains. They should do a better job of letting us know.

posted @ Wednesday, March 15, 2006 1:34 PM | Feedback (0) |

Mileage on Where's Tim

We added a daily mileage calculator to Where's Tim. I don't really like how it's set up visually. I've never been very good at UI design, so I'm looking at other examples on Mapki to find something that looks good that I can use as an example.

We also added a GetMileage function (that takes a date parameter) to the Where's Tim Web Service. And added mileage to Where's Tim Mobile.

If anybody has any ideas how to make the mileage look better, please let me know. Or better yet, get on the Where's Tim Gabbly page and let me know.

posted @ Tuesday, March 14, 2006 7:14 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Where's Tim ]

MMOD

CBS is broadcasting the first 3 rounds of the NCAA tourney online. I'm excited to see it work and curious to see if it actually does work. EnGraph will be happy that Kyle and I will be at least be by our computers!

PhogBlog says "They have no idea what they're going to encounter."

posted @ Tuesday, March 14, 2006 7:37 AM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ Sports ]

I want to learn how to do this

I cannot get over this killer UI. The functionality is cool too, but the fact that it places an IM like client on top of the page is awesome. You can try it with other sites too. Here it is on Where's Tim.

posted @ Tuesday, March 14, 2006 6:21 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ .NET Where's Tim ]

New stuff on Where's Tim

We added some stuff to Where's Tim today.

We trimmed out some of the redundant information that the Where's Tim webservice was returning on the GetTimsHistory call.

We added my speed to the Dump History to XML file.

When I am actually moving, we use a green icon to indicate my current position. When I am idle, the icon is the default red one.

I messed with using different color polylines to indicate my speed on the Get History function, but it was too slow because I had to create individual polylines for each history point, analyze the speed and add each overlay individually. Trying to navigate the map with all those overlays would peg out the cpu, so I scratched that idea.

posted @ Saturday, March 11, 2006 3:46 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Where's Tim ]

New laptop

Testing w.bloggar settings from my new laptop. Thanks EnGraph!!

posted @ Friday, March 03, 2006 1:25 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ EnGraph ]

Server crash

One of our servers went down today. It's been on its way out for a while and today it just would not boot up. It keep blue screening at startup. I tried Knoppix like Jeff talked about earlier, but that didn't work for me. So I stuck the hard drive in my other desktop and after many bad sectors in scan disk, the computer booted up. When I tried to open the drive in explorer, it would say "F:\ is not accessible. Error performing inpage operation".

So I called Alex over at One Stop Technology Solutions here in Lawrence and he was nice enough to came by and pick up the hard drive. Hopefully I'll know something tomorrow.

posted @ Thursday, March 02, 2006 1:47 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ EnGraph ]