Things to do when bored

As you may know, I find myself on the road for business from time to time.  Being married, with a family forming, this is far from ideal.  Beyond just being home sick and missing my wife, I find myself bored out of my mind.  This particular trip is nicer in that respect though.  I've been bitten by the development bug of late, so I've been doing a bit more hobby tinkering than normal.  Being on the road gives me a lot of time to tinker with random things that I normally wouldn't want to take time for during the week.

Yesterday I took the time to write a short script to set my timezone based on my fire-eagle location.  Tonight I converted afterfate.net to use the fire-eagle api directly instead of parsing the eaglefeed.me atom feed.  The performance increase is at least 2x based on some quick tests with time/wget.  This also means that time-zone information doesn't require me to contact a second service because the fire-eagle response contains that data already.

Tomorrow I think I'll take a shot at having the service I wrote on apps.afterfate.net take my location data and find the closest weather station.  I'm hoping I can find some way to use this information to automatically update my gnome weather applet data.  Of course, I don't actually have trouble setting my own time-zones or new weather location, I'm doing this only to say it's been done :)