Twenty! Hitting a milestone of props this week! Ed and I got to talking last week amid the autumn breezes, throwing our brains out in an informal storming session when the topic turned to the potential for a world take-over by robots. On the one hand, there is plenty of fodder, past and present, to fuel these nightmares (fantasies) including tales from I, Robot by Ray Bradbury to the Terminator and Matrix movie trilogies. The missing element from these stories is the background, the precursory stories leading up to the desperate state of humanity envisioned in these futures. Regardless of what the future holds for the human race, the future is here. The problem is, it sounds like a very large, annoying mosquito. And while these swarm bots have the right idea, there is no WAY that a small child is going to sit still this long. A patient child is a missing child   Robots from Above!   Settling back into the natural world, a couple of coders developed a new tool to track surface currents on the Great Lakes, our inland seas. Although there are no tide on the lakes, the surface of the water is constantly on the move, cover 94,250 square [....] Read More >>

Props! In this unbounded realm of creativity, I find it difficult to filter out the everyday scrum of information and boring type from the merely interesting and distill the final essences into a formidable post for Friday props. Surrounded by the visual cacophony of color exuded by the maples, ash, birch, beech, sumac and other deciduous trees turning at this time of year, I stare at the contrast of the rich green fields lying in the river bottoms on my drive to work. With our props today, though, I refuse to succumb to these natural beauties and ignore the increased population of white-platers and tour buses on the road. "With such natural beauty, how could you possibly focus on optimizing websites or jumping into vibrant search engine marketing strategies," you ask. "Friday Props," I reply. "Friday Props." I've never been to Wisconsin. Traveling to that Midwestern state, a prominent rival in cheese and dairy production, could get me shot. I did, however, have a friend who visited and told an amazing tale of The House on the Rocks. To prove that this place existed, she even brought a book back with her. This adventure happened many years ago and while I still am [....] Read More >>

Welcome to Friday Props! A delicious part of this nutritious breakfast! Fall, fall, fall. Leaves, chilly nights, cider....yeah, yeah, yeah. There's plenty of people talking about that these days. "D'ja git yer cider up ta Ellie's yet?" Not yet, sir, but I assure you I shall. The comforting regularity of the seasons is grounding for everyone here, but one reason we consider things creative here is when the expectation, the normalcy is changed; bent or gently twisted at such an angle where it gives us pause to think deeper. We all walk a fine line between our reality and our imagination. Personally I prefer to dance and hop around that line as much as possible, exploring what shouldn't work and why, but making an effort to try it anyway. When the universal laws of physics come into play, that's when reality can truly become distorted. The Balancing Barn of Suffolk, England Imagine walking through the fields of Ye Olde England whistling some bagpipe music (because you know full well that the bagpipes are Scottish) and coming upon this Airstream-style trailer. From one end, everything looks reasonable and fine. From the other, it seems the landlord has found a creative way to evict [....] Read More >>

Welcome back for this week's installment of Friday Props, the only props you'll ever need! Here in Vermont we are beginning to feel the chill in the air as fall muscles its way across the green mountains. In many ways, this changing of the seasons is a welcome change and brings with it the familiar sights, smells, sounds, tastes and opportunities for creativity. No, we won't feature foliage shots or the latest pumpkin-based beer, but a few things that signal the coming of fall for us. The World's Largest QR Code I'm not one to hem and haw about an inclusion into the Guinness Book of World Records. That institution is so out of whack and overblown I'm surprised that my cat doesn't have a world record for SOMETHING. On the other hand, it does inspire creativity in a myriad of forms. Combining the digital and natural worlds makes my heart melt all the more! Therefore, the first Friday Prop goes to the Kraay family of Lacombe, Alberta, Canada for their corn-formed QR code.The code covers 7 of the 15 acres designed by the family and, if you can hold your smart phone up high enough, the code will bring up the [....] Read More >>

Edgeworks Creative - Junior Web Developer, Adam LaCombe, from Randolph, Vermont has an in-depth interest in coding and enjoys spending his off-time playing video games. As a young child he was very interested and enjoyed taking electronic devices apart to see how things worked and then would re-build them. In the year 2010 he built his first computer and then used it as a web server for several websites he had built. One of his favorite websites he built and hosted on his server was his very own search engine. He first built the search engine just using a MySQL database, but soon realized it would be too slow and therefore implemented the Sphinx Search Engine. Soon after he had indexed over 1 million websites and images. Adam is a self-taught web developer who learned almost all of his skills by reading online documentation and tutorials. Adam's skills include: PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, GIMP, and much much more... Read More >>

Cyndi here this week. I watched the conclusion of the Democratic Convention last night with a 19 year old and the discussion we had after left me cogniscent how the scope of some of the problems we face as a nation and as a world can lead to feelings of powerlessness--the problems are so big that is seems one individual can't make a dent in them. But the truth is that creativity, thinking outside the box, and a "can do" attitude can make for surprising solutions for even the largest of problems. This weeks props go out to inventors who think on a small and local scale about how to solve big global problems. And yes--I know this truly granola crunching hippe save the world kinda stuff...but that is a part of who I am. Clean Water From Almost Anything  Wet--The Slingshot  Dean Kamen, best known for his inventon of the Segway, a personal transportation favorite of Ed's grandfather "Pops", is busy working on several other inventions including the Slingshot Water Purification System. Clean water is a huge problem for much of the world. Kamen's invention uses distillation to produce clean water for about 100 people a day from a machine that costs [....] Read More >>

On the eve of the Labor Day festivities, welcome to another edition of Friday Props, another way to bend your mind closer to the weekend. Last week I visited a friend of mine who lives in the flatlands of Minnesota, taking in its foreign cultural landscape and an accent thoroughly entrenched in the letter 'O.' Spectacularly different from Vermont, I spent most of my time bug-eyed wandering around Minneapolis-St. Paul and think that I owe the cities a bit more respect than I had before. First props go to the Skyways of Minneapolis. Constructed to help pedestrians navigate through the city through the winter, the Skyway links 69 city blocks using 2nd and 3rd-story bridges over the streets throughout the city. The climate-controlled walkways make it possible to travel practically throughout the entire city without ever stepping outside and boast restaurants and shops. ELEVEN MILES of walking. Yup.   On the food scene, Minneapolis and the Minnesota State Fair were playgrounds for my stomach. I could rave about the amazing Bloody Mary's, the bratwurst and the Pork Chop on a Stick, but the best culinary innovation I experienced was the Juicy Lucy. There's no dispute on what eatery invented the Lucy, but as [....] Read More >>

We're thrilled to be able to announce that we've provided a new web site for the fine folks at the Waitsfield Elementary School just in time for the new school year! When principal Kaiya Korb approached us with the project there were only a couple weeks to get the job done. We worked closely with Kaiya to develop the structure and design of the new website and are pleased as punch to be offering a greatly improved resource for all the intended audiences of the website:  Teachers, Staff, Students and Families. The Waitsfield Elementary website is built using the Edgeworks CMS for Schools.  We have two more planned release cycles for the Waitsfield website that will round out the schools' offering with Teacher Blogs, subscription services, print-friendly pages and more. Congratulations to the Waitsfield Elementary School on a successful launch of a brand new website to go with the opening days of a new school year! Read More >>

Ed is coding away on a tight deadline and Phil is on vacation, so I get to do Friday Props this week. I was "noodling" (as Ed would say) what my theme could be when I saw a Facebook post by Ed's son, Addison, about "liking" all the colors of the rainbow. I completely understand that. When someone asks "what color is your favorite?" all I can think is "how in the world do I answer that?" It's like asking which of your children is your favorite. None--each is uniquely themselves--perfect as they are. OK, to be fair there are a few colors I prefer less, but overall color and me--we have a love affair. Soothing greens, energizing reds, happy making yellows--well let's just say I am "for them." So here is my Friday Props going out to big, bold, fantastic, daring, exuberant COLOR!!! First--let's start with an architect who is after my heart.: Emmanuelle Moureaux. Here's just a couple of photos of her work. Check out her website and you will see why I am enamoured; she brings fun into her spaces with her use of vibrant color!     Every Christmas for years my fabulous sister-in-law, Cathy, has presented one family member [....] Read More >>

We had a great response to our Friday props request from Jeanelle Achee. Enjoy! So I heard that Ed Rooney likes fish tacos. I guess that spending time in California will do that to you... Anyway, it seemed like a great Friday Props! I just recently returned from Alaska where I learned how to make traditional Mexican tortillas (it's actually pretty darn easy, it involves two ingredients...) and to place inside the newly formed tortillas we made beer battered fish. Here's how to make fish tacos: 1. Buy a boat load of tilapia 2. Cut that tilapia up into strips 3. Mix fish batter and beer and dip the tilapia into it and let it soak 4. Buy a vat of peanut oil and deep fry that shiz 5. Put into a corn tortilla, add lettuce, mexican creme, fresh salsa and limes 6. Stuff your face (and if you are of age, 21 in the United States, add some tequila) It looks something like this when you are done: Another way to do it is you can just catch them in the wild... like this: That seems way more reasonable to me, but whatever. They wanted to do it the traditional way. It seemed important to learn a little about Mexican culture since [....] Read More >>