While the world watches Boeing’s struggle to get the much-delayed 787 Dreamliner assembled and off the ground, great progress has been made on another very cool Boeing product, the 747-8 Freighter. This plane is 18 feet longer than the already-massive 747-400, with an overall length of 250 feet.

I ran into a few cool links over the last few days and I need to close some browser tabs, so here goes:

• Randy’s Journal has a 2 minute time-lapse movie of the crucial FBJ, or final body join.

• The SeattlePI’s Aerospace News blog has had some short blog entries surrounding some amazing high resolution pictures (click on the small pictures, wait for download, ooh, ahh):

  • Two Sets of Wings.
  • Wing Attachment to Body.
  • Final Body Join.

By the way, Boeing folks, I’d love a special tour if you happen to read this!

I haven’t had the time to do a real post for quite some time. Here’s what’s been happening:

• Daughter Tina graduated from Eastlake High after spending her senior year in the Running Start program at Bellevue College. She’ll be entering the University of Maryland in the fall and plans to study Journalism.

• Son Stephen graduated from the University of Washington with degrees and honors in Applied Math and Economics. He drove cross-country at the beginning of July and is now in the Finance Ph.D program at the University of Rochester.

• After taking an intensive (5 credit) course in Portuguese at the UW, son Andy departed for Brazil in early July with plans to visit a number of cities. He’s been having a great time and will return in mid-August, just in time to help out at Gnomedex and then return to the UW, where he’s studying Math, Physics, and Astronomy.

• My wife Carmen has been forging ahead with her real estate career. Despite a tough market, people are still buying and selling and she’s staying busy.

• Our other daughters (Bianca and Grace) spent a week in York, Pennsylvania with my mom and her husband before catching up with Carmen and Tina in Maryland.

• I spent the early part of July working with my Amazon colleagues to get ready for the Amazon Career Fair in Second Life. I did some of the building and planning, but the majority of my time was spent putting together a great statistics package using LSL, PHP, and Amazon SimpleDB. We had a great turnout and are already making plans to run another fair later this year. As a result of some contacts I made at the fair, I have been invited to speak at the SLCC (Second Life Community Convention) next month.

• Also on the Second Life side, I will be participating in the ThinkBalm Immersive Internet Professional Networking Event on the 4th of August. Sam and Erica Driver have done some really good work in the 3D immersive internet space, including some very readable and informative reports.

• I am hard at work on a programming book, to be published this fall by SitePoint. Early this year I was asked to be a secondary author, with responsibility for writing the PHP code samples. This seemed pretty easy and I was eager to get started. After the primary author had a change of heart, the publisher asked me if I would take on the whole project. I got permission (and a generous time allocation) from Amazon and I’ve been writing since mid-May. I am now about 65% of the way through the first draft of “Build Your Own Cloud Computing Application Using Amazon’s EC2.” Writing is hard, but enjoyable (coding is a lot easier) and I suspect that this won’t be my last book.

• I am looking forward to a busy fall, with a trip to Hong Kong in mid-September to speak at SIBOS, with another stop or two (ideas are welcome) in the Far East as a possibility.

• We’ve got some maintenance and renovation underway on our home. Last week, Ryan and his crew from Red Ox Roofing replaced our dingy old cedar shakes with fresh and durable composites. They did a great job, showing up early, working late, and leaving everything clean. Trevor Bean of [Bean Construction])(http://www.beanconstruct.com/) is renovating our guest bathroom, starting from the bare walls.

I think that covers the highlights!

• jquerylist.com: The Ultimate jQuery List – “A really big 1-page list of plugins and examples for jQuery.“
• 9 Lessons: Load Data while Scrolling Page Down with jQuery and PHP – “We have lots of data but can not display all. This script helps you to display little data and make faster your website. Take a look at live demo and scroll down.“
• Smashing Magazine: 50 Fresh Useful Icon Sets For Your Next Design – “This large collection of recently released icon sets is supposed to help designers improve their designs on their web-sites and in web-applications. All icon sets are free.“
• The News Tribune: The Tunnel: Seattle’s Big Dig – “The tunnel boring machine for the Alaskan Way project will have to dig a single tunnel that is large enough for four lanes of traffic – two lanes stacked on top of two other lanes, each pair carrying traffic in opposite directions.“
• Paul Allen: New Employee Checklist – “Because Yammer is such a powerful tool for internal company communications, the first thing on my checklist would be to invite the new employee to Yammer, ask them to update their profile with all their contact information, and to browse the org chart to see who reports to whom. I wish the org chart could link directly to every employees LinkedIn profile–because I would require all the new employees to review the LinkedIn profile of all current employees. I’d also like them to spend a few hours browsing through various Yammer posts, doing searches, and seeing who has been involved in past discussions on topics that are relevant to them. All this would really give them a feel for who is on our team.“

• Ralf Ebert: Visual git tutorial I – “I hope I was able to provide a good starting point for using git. I’m a big advocater of versioning projects with the git system. I have been using it for one and half years now to keep track of all my projects and git has never let me down.“
• Github: MozRepl – “MozRepl lets you program Firefox and other Mozilla-based applications from the inside. “
• Cool Tools: Park Tool AWS-1 – “Peer behind the service counter at most bike shops and you’ll see a Park Tool workstand. There’ll be a waist-level tool tray on the stand, and unless it’s already in the hands of a mechanic, the triangle-shaped AWS-1, which features a 4-, 5- and 6mm hex wrench, will likely be one of a handful of tools resting in the tray.“
• IdeaPaint – “When you’re confined to the space of a typical whiteboard, your ideas are destined to be small. IdeaPaint turns virtually anything you can paint into a high-performance dry-erase surface, giving you the space you need to collaborate, interact and fully explore your creativity. No matter where you use it, big ideas follow.“
• Massively: Second Life objects to become HTTP-aware – “The HTTP-in method, will allow external services to push data to in-world objects and receive simple responses, saving significant quantities of bandwidth and server resources. That, right there, stands to revolutionize a lot of scripted systems.“
• Second Life Wiki: LSL http server – “While llHTTPRequest lets scripts in Second Life request data from HTTP-accessible sources, this HTTP-in enables outside sources to request data from scripts in Second Life. The key difference is that llHTTPRequest exchanges data when the script in SL wants; HTTP-in allows outside sources to determine when they need to communicate with scripts in SL.“
• Mark Forster: Get Everything Done: The Autofocus System – “The system consists of one long list of everything that you have to do, written in a ruled notebook (25-35 lines to a page ideal). As you think of new items, add them to the end of the list. You work through the list one page at a time in the following manner.“