William M. Hartnett

Python class this afternoon gave me more hope that it’s the language for me, replacing my previous choice Esperanto, which, frankly, just wasn’t working out.
The classes on Google Maps mashups taught by Maurice Tamman of IbisEye fame would have been more interesting if not for technical trouble and the fact that it was way overbooked. [...]

Derek Willis points out that this year’s conference “is by far the Webbiest that it has ever been,” and it’s hard to overstate how true that is. There are the actual demos and panels, of course, notably the three separate “CAR and the Web” sessions, but the shift toward webbiness is probably even more noticeable [...]

Not really conference notes, but I am at the conference, and this is a note, so there you are.
Looks like quite a few people are landing on my site while looking for info about John and Greg Rice, prompted by recent news from the lawsuit Greg filed against the hospital where his brother died. If [...]

I taught an introductory Excel class this morning in something called the “Rockefeller Board Room,” which was a truly excellent setting. Generous wood paneling, numerous paintings depicting a fox hunt. Throw in a couple of elderly white financiers, industrialists and railroad barons with ample beards and/or carefully groomed mustaches and Rockefeller himself would have felt [...]

A bit of Django this afternoon, and a dazzling, if utterly confusing, panel about “smart text” at The New York Times. I’ll confess to not understanding large portions of the technical aspects, but it appears as though the NYT people are building the newsroom information equivalent of WMD. They probably have this very post indexed [...]

Interesting session at the conference this morning in which Daniel Lathrop and Chase Davis compared Perl and Python. I’ve hit a few Perl books and hated every second of it, so Python sounds more up my alley. My dark, foreboding, programming-phobic alley.
Decent panel discussion on newsroom intranets, despite the fact that neither of the scheduled [...]

I don’t know if Cleveland already has a motto, but I offer up the title of this post as a worthy candidate, for it highlights all the noteworthy characteristics of the city. Obviously, I kid.
It is very cold, however, and that is definitely upsetting my delicate Florida constitution. I brought my ludicrously large, Costanza-style jacket, [...]

As a native Floridian, I’m not at all happy about the weather outlook in Cleveland, where I’ll be through the weekend for the CAR Conference. Compare that to the forecast here in West Palm Beach, and you’ll understand why I’m so upset.
Snow? What the hell do I know about snow? Do I need special equipment? [...]

To trace the super-sizing of the NFL athlete, I built a comprehensive database of professional football rosters. Though the report focuses on the modern NFL, the database stretches back to the formation of the American Professional Football Conference in 1920. The database was built by digitally scanning thousands of pages of paper records stored in [...]

For the second year in a row, we produced a Fourth of July package that featured maps pinpointing the hometowns of every American service member killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. New to this year’s package was a 3D map that I made in the ArcView extension 3D Analyst. I made a slightly different version for [...]