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This animation by the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center shows a beautiful view of the past 30 years of asteroid discoveries, using data culled by Ted Bowell et al. As time passes, asteroids are highlighted white and then colored by how closely they come to our inner solar system. Earth crossers are red, Earth approachers are yellow, and all others are colored green.

Dunster Castle is the historical home of the Luttrell family located in the small town of Dunster, Somerset, England. Colonel Sir Walter Luttrell gave Dunster Castle and the greater part of its contents to the National Trust in 1976. There has been a castle at the top of the hill at Dunster for more than 1,000 years. The Domesday Book records one on this location before 1066. The castle was granted by William the Conqueror to William de Mohun, whose family lived there until the castle was sold in 1376 by Lady Joan de Mohun to Lady Elizabeth Luttrell. Lady Elizabeth’s descendants owned Dunster Castle until 1976.

The castle dominates a steep hill overlooking the picturesque village of Dunster. The hill has been fortified since Saxon times, although nothing now remains of these early defenses. During the early medieval period the sea reached the base of the hill offering a natural defense, and strong walls, towers, ramparts and outworks protected the other sides. By the 15th century the sea had receded and the Luttrells created the deer park. When Sir George Luttrell inherited in 1571, the castle was dilapidated and the family were living elsewhere. In 1617, Sir George employed the architect, William Arnold, to erect a new house in the lower ward of the castle. During the Civil War, Dunster was a Royalist stronghold under the command of Colonel Wyndham. In November 1645 Parliamentary forces started a siege which lasted until an honorable surrender of the castle in April 1646. Dunster shared the fate of many other Royalist castles and had its defenses demolished to prevent any further use against Parliament. All that now remains of the medieval fortifications are the impressive gatehouse and the stumps of two towers.

The house was modified and developed over the following centuries, and much of the current appearance dates from the 18th century when the park was landscaped and the Green Court, terraced grounds and follies were created. Much of the furniture in the house also dates from this period.

Links Related to Luttrell Family and Dunster Castle

• Dunster Castle Slideshow
• A history of Dunster and of the families of Mohun & Luttrell (1909) – Volume 1
• A history of Dunster and of the families of Mohun & Luttrell (1909) – Volume 2
• Medieval Rural Life in the Luttrell Psalter
• A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain. Colburn. 1835. pp. 143.
• Allied families of Read, Corbin, Luttrell, Bywaters, by A.M. Prichard
• Notable Souther Families – Volume I – Luttrell (page 124)
• Britannia Entry on Dunster Castle
• History of Luttrellstown Ireland
• Sir Geoffrey de Luterel (1175-1218)
• Robert Luttrell of Luttrellstown, Ireland (bef 1390 – 1436 or 1437)
• Sir John Luttrell (c. 1518/19 – 10 July 1551)
• Luttrell Family in England and Ireland
• Luttrells in England website

This is a great visualization of the colonization and occupation of North America from 1750-2008 by Non-Native Americans. I found this graphic while doing ancestral research on wikipedia. It does a fantastic job cycling you through 79 frames that show how North America was colonized and by whom and when. It is a shame you can show this in a book, perhaps eBooks will one day support this sort of thing.

Arno Ghelfi for Bloomburb Business week published a visualization this week breaking down current U.S. social media internet usage by activity and age. From top to bottom are the more active users to the more passive. Age groups run left to right. I particularly like the categories of social media users not only because it seems to be logical breakdown but because it resonates with me relative to my own internet usage. Though I really think that Boomers and Seniors are more active in social media than this report is giving them credit for. I’d actually like to see the data and review the methodology by which it was collected. Nevertheless it is an excellent visualization.

Pictures from our summer trip to tube at Deep Creek North Carolina (Bryson City). We also mined rubies at the Sheffield Mine.

Click here —> Full Screen Slideshow of Deep Creek Adventure

I’ve been on a diet for several months now and when I travel it always presents a challenge in terms of having the proper discipline to eat light. Nothing like cold fish soup to help out a diet right? But seriously, this is simply the best Ceviche I have ever had. If you are ever in Ventura California take the Vista Del Mar exit and head towards the beach. In about 3 blocks you will find Dukes on your left. They make the worlds best Ceviche fresh each morning and it is to die for. You MUST try it!

For those of you with the Ceviche itch to create your own. You can find a pretty good Ceviche recipe on allrecipies.com.

Sorry for the blurry iPhone photography.

I need an iPhone upgrade.

Productivity and Project Management

• Google Apps – Get constant enterprise innovation with Google, saving your company the time, money and hassles of managing these IT solutions yourself.
• www.centraldesktop.com – Central Desktop’s is a web based SaaS solution for businesses to collaborate, manage projects and connect their people. It has great centralized document management and version control capabilities.
• www.tomsplanner.com – Create and share Gantt charts online with Tom’s Planner Gantt chart software. No more messy excel spreadsheets.
• Mingle – Mingle, the agile project management tool, was built from the ground up to adapt to constantly changing processes, business priorities and program/project structures within your development environment.
• MindMeister – Free web-based realtime collaborative mind mapping tool for brainstorming and project management (with iPhone app).
• FreeMind – A Free Open Source Graphical Mind Mapping solution written in Java.
• www.basecamphq.com – Trusted by millions, Basecamp is the leading web-based project management and collaboration tool. To-dos, files, messages, schedules, and milestones.
• 5 PM – Web-based project and task management application for your team. The powerful features are accessed through a smart customizable interface.
• Goplan – is an project management and collaboration tool for individuals and teams. Tasks, Tickets, Calendar, Time tracking and Documents.
• Bananna Scrum – Banana Scrum is a Web-based Agile tool for teams that use agile development methods, primarily Scrum.
• Time Meter – Application designed for time and expense tracking that works under Microsoft Outlook.
• @Task – Offers project management software as well as task tracking, project life cycle, workflow, gantt charts and other project tracking software and services.

New Goal – 175. Then I will begin moving back to a more normal diet leveling out around 180 over a month or two. I have to say I feel really good though. More like I felt when I was in my 20s.

End Weight: 179.4
Previous Weight: 179.6
Loss: -0.2 lbs
Net Loss: 30.2 lbs
BMI: 23.03
Percent of Old Goal (180 lbs.): 100% Complete
Percent of New Goal (175 lbs.): 12% Complete

God destroys New Orleans and Nashville when Philadelphia is just sitting there.

This ancestory visualization uses  a couple additional pieces of software that  integrate with www.ancestry.com. You’ll need to buy Family Tree Maker 2010 and Charting Companion for Family Tree Maker in order to pull this one off in addition to some photoshop chops. I had to bring my fan and Caroline’s Fan chart both into Photoshop and combine them there in order to get this chart to look the way it does. This should obviously be an option in the software but for now that doesn’t exist.

I finally broke 180 lbs!! Never thought I would get there. New Goal – 175 by end of May.

End Weight: 179.6
Previous Weight: 181.8
Loss: -2.2 lbs
Net Loss: 30 lbs
BMI: 23.04
Percent of Goal: 100% Complete

You must watch this to the end to get the point.

Totally Killer Open Source Solutions

• Fedora – A Linux-based operating system that showcases the latest in free and open source software. Fedora is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. It is built by people across the globe who work together as a community: the Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is open and anyone is welcome to join.
• MySQL – Open Source Relational Database.
• MyPHPAdmin – A free software tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the World Wide Web. phpMyAdmin supports a wide range of operations with MySQL. The most frequently used operations are supported by the user interface (managing databases, tables, fields, relations, indexes, users, permissions, etc), while you still have the ability to directly execute any SQL statement.
• WordPress – A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
• Drupal – open source content management system.
• Joomla! – the dynamic portal engine and content management system.
• Magento – The PHP based eCommerce software platform for growth that promises to revolutionize the industry because of its modular architecture and unprecedented flexibility.
• GIMP – GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). Freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
• SugarCRM – Commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM). CRM software for sales force automation and customer support deployed on demand or on site.
• Open Office – A multiplatform and multilingual office suite compatible with all other major office suites.
• OSTicket – Open source support ticket system simple, lightweight, reliable, open source, and easy to setup and use.
• Elgg – A leading open source social networking engine which can be used to power your social network. It includes blogging, networking, community, collecting of news using feeds aggregation and file sharing features. Everything can be shared among users with access controls and everything can be cataloged by tags as well.
• Open Atrium – is a platform for building team portals that can be extended to meet highly custom knowledge management needs for large organizations’ intranets and extranets. It starts with “out of the box” features like a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a case tracker, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage content. These features can be expanded to meet unique needs for large organizations so that full scale enterprise collaboration sites can be built with Open Atrium as a base. By fully leveraging Drupal, all of the strengths of Drupal can contribute to creating custom features for Open Atrium within a framework that is already tailored for team collaboration.

I got inspired to post this recipe this morning after making them for the family. Enoy.

New Goal – 175 by end of May. I hope by going down to 175 it will be easier to ratchet up my calorie intake and level out at 180. But first I have to break the 180 barrier which I intended to do in the next 2 weeks. Notice the spike and weight gain last week on Vacation, but mmmmmmmmmmmmmm was all that food good.

End Weight: 181.8
Previous Weight: 182.8
Loss: -1.0 lbs
Net Loss: 27.6 lbs
BMI: 23.34
Percent of Goal: 94% Complete

Nothing like a good traffic visualizations. Governments and organizations have been releasing lots of GPS data, and as a result, we get to see some impressive animations and explore some slick interactives. Attached is on showing air traffic over the united states during a 24 hour period. The activity feels very organic as traffic peaks during rush hours and slows down at night.

India is fast becoming a superpower, says Shashi Tharoor — not just through trade and politics, but through “soft” power, its ability to share its culture with the world through food, music, technology, Bollywood. He argues that in the long run it’s not the size of the army that matters as much as a country’s ability to influence the world’s hearts and minds.

Below is a example of a website service for data visualization offered by a company called Tableau Public. This particular visualization is from Stephen McDaniel of Freakalytics and demonstrates how to display complex relationships between multiple metrics by looking at the stock market patterns relative to economic conditions from 1901-2008.

Back on Track. Goal was to be at 180 lbs. by the end of March. I’ll probably be short of that by 1 lb. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

End Weight: 182.8
Previous Weight: 185.8
Loss: -3.0 lbs
Net Loss: 26.6 lbs
BMI: 23.47
Percent of Goal: 90% Complete