The newest version of the Statistical Abstract of the United States for 2006-2009 is now available online from the US Census Bureau over here. Invaluable data reference. Murders! Price indexes! Agricultural output! Metropolitan Statistical Areas! Prison counts! Per capita income! Banking and financial stuff! The list goes on.

I was that kid who read history textbooks for fun, so I hope you’ll excuse the geeking out.

We’ll be interrupting service quite briefly on Tempo and PingMe tonight to push some service updates, around 10pm EST.

• PingMe: Greatly improved reliability on Twitter follow-backs
• Tempo: Fix to that nagging issue with Basecamp project imports
• Tempo: Reverting to context-scoping of tags displayed in Include and Exclude drop-downs

We’re using our own version of the Twitter Ruby gem that has some additional support for exception handling that we needed. Caveat emptor, but it works pretty well for us, solves the issue of being able to respond accordingly to errors as the come back from the Twitter API. Not all 403’s are the same, that kind of thing. You can check it out over here. At some point I’ll get a blog post together describing how it works. Bit busy right now.

I just want to quickly point out what a great website they have over at WNYC.org, a radio feed that I usually leave running all day while I’m hacking away. Aside from the fantastic programming, they have a really keen integration between their on-air programs and the website. While you’re listening to their shows you can hop on over to a thread of the particular segment you’re listening to and interact with other users in the comments. Simple thought there, nothing really new technology-wise, just expertly positioned and well-made.

The brevity of PingMe’s current syntax isn’t for everybody, but once in a while we run into somebody who totally gets it!

This is crazy week where we try to get an absurd amount of work done before the holiday. More blogging to follow, stay tuned.

We made a quick update to Tempo today, will make this brief:

• Display of start and stop times in entry notes is now a user preference.
• In addition, you can specify append or prepend for timer display.
• There’s a new API field ‘timer-sessions’ on the entry resource
• Dashboard Widget prevents double-submission of an entry.
• Dashboard Widget is a little bit taller.

You can download the updated Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X here.

The timer-sessions field presents the start and stop times one after the other, semi-colon delimited. It looks like this:

  <entry>
    <id>99999</id>
    <command>posting about new changes @blogging</command>
    <is-timing>true</is-timing>
    ...
    <timer-sessions>11:16 AM - 11:16 AM; 03:56 PM - 03:57 PM</timer-sessions>
    ...
  </entry>