m cameron jones

Hi everyone. I am moving my site over from Joomla — granted there isn’t much there, but I was tired of dealing with the horrible Joomla interface. WordPress has quirks too, but is _much_ simpler and seems to be good enough for my uses. Now that things are easier to update, hopefully, I’ll be posting more often.

My parents got a new dog today. They signed up for a Briard rescue network and got word that there was a Briard in distress in OshKosh, Wisconsin. We had a briard when I was younger, a big black dog named Kailey (sp?). This one isn’t black — more tan/brown colored with a black face. Apparently he is very big (stands about 3 feet at the shoulder my sister tells me). My mom was fishing for name today, and I think “Bear” has stuck. I’ll get pictures tomorrow when I am up in Chicago and post them here.

I recently attended the mashup camp in Mountain View (July 12 & 13). On Wednesday evening I got motivated to create a mashup that I’ve been thinking about for a while and between Wednesday night and Thursday morning I hacked together the first version of Pledge Drive (originally called Public Radio Road-Trip Planner (TrPPR). Pledge Drive is a driving directions site which shows you public radio stations that exist within broadcast range of your route. The radio station antenna information was downloaded from NPR and I used Microsoft’s Virtual Earth application for the mapping and driving directions. I also hacked in a bit for the demo, which is currently disabled, which shows my current GPS location on the map and any public radio stations within earshot.

You can play around with the current version of Pledge Drive at http://cameronjones.com/pledgedrive/

The future development plans for this mashup are to include the turn-by-turn directions and add radio tuning indicators, e.g., “Turn right onto Main St. and tune radio to 580 AM WILL”. Also, I’d like to pull the broadcast schedules off of NPR and sync it with the estimated travel times so you can see what will be playing at each segment of your trip and pick an interesting station. And to connect this service back to the listener-supported dimension of public radio, I’d like to calculate a reasonable donation for the directions based on the amount of time you are in a station’s broadcast range and allow people to donate money to NPR or local affiliates proportionate to the amount of listening they do.

Send me your feedback, it is still an active work in progress.