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?

“Alcoholic Eruption” – January 5th, 2011

Kerry surprised me for my birthday and took me out to the Tonga Room for dinner and drinks. It was my first time there. It was a fun little place!

One of the drinks we ordered, pictured above, was called the Lava Bowl. It was dangerous.

“Better Luck Next Time” – January 4th, 2011

It’s few and far between that I ever play this, but with $355 million up for grabs? Why not?

The results? Things went about as well as expected!

Ringing in the New Year with some simple light painting in our apartment. Here’s to hoping 2011 is awesome!

Is it that time of the year already? 2010 has absolutely flown by! One of my favorite ways to reflect on the past year is to look back on it through the photos I’ve taken.

See previously, my photographic year in reviews for 2009, 2008, and 2007.

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The Justin Bieber of bullfighting?

I can say for a fact, this is something I never considered doing as a kid.

Though he stands just four feet ten—short, even for a kid who is about to turn 13—Michelito has become internationally renowned for his exploits in the ring. By his own estimate, he has already put the sword to 300 bulls. Ask him if he remembers his first kill and he says, “It was October 27, 2005, in my mother’s home state of Tabasco. I was 6 years old.” Four years later he tried to set a Guinness World Record for novice bullfighters (novilleros) by slaying six bulls in a single appearance—and succeeded, but Guinness refused to recognize it. (“We do not accept records based on the killing or harming of animals,” its website explained.) This past June, Michelito became the youngest matador ever to perform in the world’s largest bullfighting arena; he was such a hit that he was invited back in August.

[Via Daily Dish]

Mini Me, originally uploaded by Dave Schumaker.

Hah, I was a rough looking kid!

Probably mad that my John Deere broke down or something.

Weird. Answered, but AT&T dropped the call.

Alright, so someone keeps emailing me, thinking they have someone else named Dave Schumaker. This actually happens a lot. After receiving a number of recent forwarded joke emails, I decided to respond. Check out conversation.

It reminds me of this earlier thread I wrote, about receiving strange email.

Update: I just realized that it’s the same Donna in that post!

From: Donna M.
Date: September 17, 2010 3:10:41 PM PDT
To: Dave Schumaker
Subject: FW: Poor mushroom

Forwarded message:

Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 12:26:44 -0400
From: [some random person I don’t know]
To: [some other random person I don’t know]
CC: [a bunch of random people I don’t know] Subject: Fwd: Poor mushroom

This is the second or third random forward I’ve gotten from her. I considered adding a filter to my account, but I thought that maybe, I should inform this person they have the wrong email address.

Subject: Re: Poor mushroom
From: Dave Schumaker
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2010 15:12:34 -0700
To: Donna M.

I think you have the wrong Dave Schumaker’s email address.

Best,

-Dave

There, I think that does the trick! Wait — I just got a reply from her,

From: Donna M.
Subject: RE: Poor mushroom
Date: September 17, 2010 3:42:22 PM PDT
To: Dave Schumaker

I don’t think so 😛

Mom

What?!

You are not my Mom! I have NO IDEA who you are!

Update! I just received a follow up email. It looks like things have been cleared up, folks! It looks like I only have one mother again.

From: Donna M.
Subject: RE: Poor mushroom
Date: September 17, 2010 4:54:53 PM PDT
To: Dave Schumaker

So, so sorry I just talked to my son and I did have the wrong e-mail. Again, I’m sorry

I noticed that someone reached my site via the following Google query: “Dave Schumaker ugly”

I object to that description! I believe the correct phrase is “horrible faces.”

It’s a face that not even a mother could love.