My facebook app has been overhauled and is now feature complete - including GPS tracks, although the testing of those has been minimal.
Please give it a look if you have a mind and let me know what you think. Even if you don't use face book you can play with the demo user.
(links and other stuff inside)
Coding with Google Maps and Google Charts has been a lot of fun; Facebook not so much - the apis are apparently in constant flux and poorly documented. They also severely lobotomize javascript, so I can't directly put google maps in an FB app, they have to be in an iframe... and by FB rules that means I can't have the maps pop-up when you click a button, they have to appear in a new page altogether.
Minor nits, I suppose. It's been very satisfying, though to think about applications from a user viewpoint instead of from the bit-shuffling point of view. I just realized last night... after I submitted the app to Facebook for approval... that I needed a real security model to restrict who could look at whose data. The good news was that my code wasn't that far wrong, I just needed to think it through. Similarly, the only hard part about writing Maps mashup is that I'm barely at the cargo-cult stage as a Javascript coder - I just don't write it enough (or PHP, really), so I can read it and understand it, but writing it from scratch means spending a lot of time googling around and looking for tutorials and examples.
Meanwhile, my reputatation at work for being the guy you give insane problems to remains undiminished. The current one involves a customer's performance issues which we can't reproduce and performance problems with an opensource project - which I had thought was the source of the customer's problems but, no, and btw, the opensource developers can't duplicate the bizarre degradations I'm seeing.
Sorry, can't really be more clear than that without various incarnations of $THE_MAN coming down on my head.
What else? I've been riding like a maniac this year, but almost all short 10-15 mile rides - my weekends have been too booked to do anything longer. I'm planning on running out to Lancaster Real Soon Now and do a tour. (I actually linked the preceding to a graph showing my rides, but then I realized that the new security model says you can't look at it unless you're my friend.... Sigh.)
One thing I did do recently, though, I started helping some boys get their merit badge in astronomy. That turned out to be a lot of fun, because I got to lecture and joke for about 60 minutes and then show them my scopes - which both worked perfectly. I was worried because when I turned on the electronic one I discovered we hadn't been out observing since 2007. It was a lot of fun watching and interacting with people who were still blown away by the Moon, Saturn and the Hercules Cluster.