I just saw that my last post is dated November 10th. Yikes. Bad Jason.

I’m still thinking about topics for the blog, but I’m having less and less time to actually write them (or cut photographs, or find useful links, etc.).

Practically Green is going very strong, and running product and tech for a company inside the tornado takes some attention. Serendeputy is still (shockingly, given how I’ve ignored it for a while) gaining users; though the joy of a web application is that it just runs itself. Sadie and Lucy occasionally request my time. Plus, I’m out shoveling the goddam driveway every three hours. Need more hours. I’ve haven’t been this continually stretched for this long since Seattle.

Alas. I look forward to returning to this soon. My ten-year blogging anniversary is coming up in a couple of months. I’d like to do something nice for it. We’ll see how it all turns out.

Throughout this year, A. and I have been working to become a little greener in our life. Partly because we feel like we should, partly because it’s often cheaper. (Composting saves me from having to pay extra for Concord trash pickup, for example.)

This morning I got to “Adventurously Green” on Practically Green. I think it’s a nice little accomplishment. (And, I get a pretty tree!).

If you’re interested in seeing how green you are (and, at the same time, testing out my new product..), take the how green am I quiz. I’d love to hear what you think (and how we compare).

I’m driving four hours today for a meeting. My companions? Four podcasts I’m excited to hear.

Jorge Garcia dissects The Package on Geronimo Jack’s Beard.

Firebrand of the American League does its Red Sox Preview

Andy Ihnatko talks about the iPad on a special episode of MacBreak Weekly

Dan Carlin does his regular bi-weekly Common Sense show.

I can’t live without my radio. But my radio is now almost exclusively podcasts.

Susan, over at the Practically Green blog, writes about when couples fight over how green to be.

I’m sure some couples have serious green battles, particularly if one person is just starting to think green and the other isn’t there yet . I feel pretty lucky that our green differences seem to lead only to a few eye rolls and snarky comments.

Are fights over the goddam paper towels this generation’s version of fighting over the new set of golf clubs? I hope not. One of our resolutions this year is to be a little greener — not to upend our life, but to be a little bit better. My green living tag over at Serendeputy is helping me out…

Merry Christmas, everybody!

I’ve been a poor correspondent. Sadly, that’s unlikely to change at any time in the next couple of months. I have a major new release of Serendeputy in its final stages, and I’m also working a separate super-secret project. Lots to do. Blogging suffers.

But, I should be able to have some pictures up this weekend. I have a feeling that Sadie and Lucy are going to be happy with what Santa is going to bring them.

In the meantime, here are some sites I’ve recently added to the Serendeputy catalog which are really cool. It’s worth checking them out.

Fashion Served: I’ve been building out the fashion tree, and I found this site. It’s a showcase for some of the best fashion photography around.

(And yes, I understand the irony of someone who wears shorts and a t-shirt in his home office all day building out the fashion tree.)

Roger Ebert: Roger Ebert can’t talk anymore, but he sure can write well.

Wend Magazine: I’ve also been building out the green tree — we’ve become much more involved with green this year — and I found this site. All sorts of interesting links, articles and stories.

Clients from Hell: Freelance and design clients say the darndest things.

Special bonus, here are my top 25 Most Popular Sources at the moment: Fail Blog, Sadly No, Balloon Juice, Fashion Served, Techdirt, New York Times, Work it Mom, Consumerist, Roger Ebert, TechCrunch, Business Insider, Boston Globe, Wend Magazine, Steve Blank, Holliston Reporter, The Atlantic, Clients from Hell, ESPN Boston, Tracker Editor’s Blog, SEOMoz, Harvard Business School Publishing, The Baseline Scenario, MLB Trade Rumors, Entertainment Weekly, and Cracked.

Make of that list what you will.

Serendeputy doesn’t lie. That list is pretty much what I’m paying attention to right now…

The New York Times has written an ambitious application where you can enter in a zip code and get all the water polluters for the town. Holliston looks clean, which is reassuring.

The rest of Massachusetts is a little more troubling.

After a little more than a year of work, I just launched the public beta of Serendeputy. Check it out, if you like.

My target market for Serendeputy isn’t me, it’s “Jen” a Gen-X/late-boomer who uses the computer as a tool, not a toy. So, most of the things I’ve indexed are more in line with her interests than mine.

I’ve seeded the site with sites that will appeal to Jen, including a ton of sites focusing on fashion. One of those sites (with the great name of Shopping is my Cardio) led me to Antler Magazine, a beautifully put together online magazine. The technology here is pretty impressive. I’d love to see Alan Taylor’s Big Picture in this type of a format.

I wish the newspaper industry would focus more on making incredible things, and less on trying to turn back the clock. But, that’s a separate rant.

This reminds me, I should get back to putting together the linky-goodness posts. I haven’t done any of those in forever. Bad Jason. I’ll see if I can get back in the saddle for that. After beta.

I love Consumerist. If you’re not reading it, you should be. For a sample, here’s their top 17 most-useful posts of 2008.

Ok, so my little product adapts itself to what you actually do, as opposed to what you say you do. So, though I wouldn’t have predicted this, it’s recognized that I click on every single item on the Fail Blog. Today’s Ad Placement Fail is especially funny.

The real winner in this election has be fivethirtyeight.com. It’s baseball-inflected combination of common sense and smart statistical analysis has made it more of a go-to resource than any of the mainstream-media sites.

New York Times writer Mark Bittman gave an excellent talk at the TED conference talking about our food chain and its implications.

Bittman’s cookbooks — How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian — are in heavy rotation here at the Butler household. They are the best cookbooks we have. The Cook’s Illustrated ones are good, but everything in there takes forever to set up and cook. The Bittman books are far more forgiving.

My server fell off the web this morning due to a switch problem over at Dreamhost. I didn’t realize how much I required that server to be up until I have no email and no source control for the better part of a day. Grr.

Should be all better now. Please let me know if you’re seeing any remnant wonkiness.

Not safe for work: so, what happens when Google’s parents go away for the weekend? That Snopes girl is such a buzzkill.

It probably won’t mean much if you’re not a web geek, but it’s pretty funny if you are.

If you read this on the site, you might notice that I’ve moved a little of the furniture around, dusted the shelves and repainted the walls. Let me know what you think.

Also, if you haven’t had a chance, you should check out my newly re-prettified travelogues and galleries: Tanzania, New Zealand, A Night in the Monster Seats and a day at the Franklin Park Zoo.

I have a couple of other pieces in the works. I hope to have them out by the end of the year.

I’ve been playing around with Facebook a little bit — see Jason Butler Facebook — and it’s fun to see how far a lot of the ideas we were implementing at PlanetAll have made it into the mainstream.

I downloaded the developer API, and I’m going to start thinking a little more deeply about how to integrate the social graph into the various projects I’m working on. I wonder if there are interesting ways to map journalism to relationships. Hmm….

Jay Brewer get a nice mention in a Globe article about blogging for dollars. Congratulations, Jay!

Odd: Justin.tv.

Justin has a webcam over his ear. And he never takes it off. Ever. It’s always transmitting whatever is happening in his life. It’s really weird (and a little creepy), but compelling nonetheless. It’s like being dropped into Being John Malkovich.

Wow, so an hour or so after posting my last post, I find out that Tabblo has been acquired by Hewlett-Packard.

Massive congratulations to Antonio, John, Dan, Liesel (all ex-Abuzzers) and everyone else on the Tabblo team.

Tabblo just launched a super-simple way to make a photo cube. I just went and did it, and it took 45 seconds to create and print out the sheet. Incredibly easy. Incredibly cool. Take a look at my quick photocube (.pdf).

More product information from Tabblo. Antonio’s launch announcement.