EDIT: The Big Picture is featuring powerful and scary photos of the damage.

We’re just starting to find out how bad today’s M6.3 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand was.

A former professor of ours when we were in New Zealand in 2006 dropped us an email this evening and let us know that it was going to be bad. He also informed us that the iconic Christchurch Cathedral in the center of the city was destroyed.

It was an absolutely beautiful building – originally built in mid-1800’s and completed in 1904.

As we saw it in 2006:

And as it lays today:

[via TwitPic]

My heart goes out to everyone in Christchurch. This is going to be fairly bad.

Lately, I’ve been on this crazy kick in looking for some sort of lifestreaming software or application. Basically, I (and most likely you — if you’re reading this and one of my internet friends) create a ridiculous amount of data each day. From my tweets, to my foursquare checkins, to my Instagram photos, to uploading things to Flickr, to blogging, to liking videos on YouTube, and sharing articles on Google Reader.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately for one reason: this would make an incredible diary of my life. I’m not the first to think this (just read the Wikipedia article I linked to — people were thinking about this in the 1990’s), but it’s something I’ve found myself becoming obsessed with.

When FriendFeed was announced in 2007, I thought, “this is perfect!” It aggregates data from nearly every web service you can imagine. I happily started plugging things in and letting it archive all my data. It ended up being awesome for a number of reasons.

“Oh, man! What was that thing I tweeted about 2 years ago, about some guy bunting a home run?” Well, Twitter search goes back about 7 days, so that was useless. FriendFeed to the rescue! I could easily search for things I tweeted about (and [website-verb]ed about) from the moment I started importing things.

In August of 2009, Facebook acquired FriendFeed and proceeded to let the site rot. Since then, there’s been no easy way to export your data, and their search function eventually broke, making the site useless for searching archived data. To this day, FriendFeed is happily pulling in everything I do on the internet, but sadly, I have no way to search for it.

Earlier this week, I found a brilliant PHP script by Claudio Cicali. It scrapes your FriendFeed profile and saves all your data to a JSON file.

After accumulating over 3 years of data, I ran the script (which took an entire evening) and it scraped something like 300K different things I’ve done on the internet in the past few years. The resulting JSON file is over 300MB (now I need to work on a way to parse the data and feed it back into a MySQL database). Incredible!

Sadly though, I don’t think this is a tenable solution. It’s great for fetching all my past data, but who knows how long FriendFeed will remain around. I’d like something more permanent, open-source, and that I can potentially run on my own server.

Locker sounds like it may be what I’m looking for, but it still has a ways to go. Momento on the iPhone sounds exactly like what I need, but you need to manually kick it off (and it won’t pull in data too far in the past).

Anyone have any ideas or thoughts on this?

It’s supposed to rain for something like 9 of the next 10 days. Well, it had to end sometime.

http://yfrog.com/h2os8xdj

[image via Twitter]

What?! Who knew that Social Distortion had a new album out?

http://www.rdio.com/artist/Social_Distortion/album/Hard_Times_And_Nursery_Rhymes_(Deluxe_Edition)/

(Mainly posting this to see if I can embed Rdio playlists via the Embed.ly plugin)

Wow! Not too shabby.

[via @jayzombie on Twitter]

GIF is a graphics file format that all of us encounter each day while browsing the internet. One problem? The Atlantic takes a look at the word and wonders why no one seems to know how to pronounce it. Is it “gif” or “jif”? I’ve always said “jif.”

So, which is it: GIF like a present or GIF like the lube?

“It’s embarrassing because you don’t know if it’s Mr. Gick or Mr. Jick,” lamented William Labov, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. As Dr. Labov explained, in modern English, no hard and fast rule exists for the ‘gi’ combination. Some words take the hard sound, others take the soft sound — it depends on the word’s specific history. Compare gift and gin, for example — same ‘gi’ combination, different ‘gi’ sound.

The Atlantic has really been nailing it lately and is quickly becoming one of my favorite publications.

Beers – One Stella and one Black and Tan, originally uploaded by Dave Schumaker.

February marks the return of Strong Beer Month in San Francisco. Hell yes!

Protip for those intending to play along: Don’t try them all in one sitting.

This is an epically awesome photo by Chris Kotsiopoulos taken over the course of 30 hours near Athens, Greece.

[via Kottke]

This is pretty fantastic! Eric Jacqmain built a “solar death ray” using 5,800 mirrors glued to a satellite dish.

The R5800 is my latest and greatest solar creation. Made from an ordinary fiberglass satellite dish, it is covered in about 5800 3/8″ (~1cm) mirror tiles. When properly aligned, it can generate a spot the size of a dime with an intensity of 5000 suns! This amount of power is more than enough to melt steel, vaporize aluminum, boil concrete, turn dirt into lava, and obliterate any organic material in an instant. It stands at 5’9″ and is 42″ across.

Seeing kids and young adults do science experiments and create things like this gives me hope for our future!

[via @papermodelplane on Twitter]

It was worth a shot., originally uploaded by Dave Schumaker.

Chase has an iPhone app that allows one to take a picture of their checks to deposit it. I decided to take a picture of some money — same thing, right? This note is legal tender for all debts public and private. Hah, it was worth a shot. 😉