For Work And Play

It’s that time of year again, when the twain of the festive and the athletic meet. It’s time for the Jingle Bell Run. For those unfamiliar, “The Jingle Bell Run & Walk Event consists of a 5k Run, 5K Walk and 1K Children’s Run with the Elves. The Jingle Bell Run & Walk is an annual fundraiser to benefit the Arthritis Foundation.” Put another way, it’s a festive and fun way to demonstrate your Christmas Spirit and get some exercise.

I did the Jingle Bell Run last year and had a great time! Just like last year, I’ll be running in the second wave “Dasher’s Dashers”. Unlike last year, I’ve created a team - “Jingle Nerds”. So now you can join my team. I look forward to seeing everyone. One last thing, if you’re a particularly festive person, you are encouraged to dress the part.

The election of the next U.S. President has occurred, and the results are in. Barack Obama is now the President-elect. Now is the time when he will be narrowing down his choices for who will be in his administration and work with for the next four years. He’s already begun the process, as evidenced by his new site Change.Gov. On this new site, he describes his agenda and lays out the key positions to be filled. I have an idea on how to do the latter - POTUSCamp.

POTUSCamp is a BarCamp-style event where President-Elect Obama would hear presentations from prospective personnel. It starts by selecting and inviting a large group of businessmen and politicians. Over the course of the event, each attendee prepares and delivers a presentation on why they want the job and how they’ll add value. They would describe what they want to achieve pertinent to their desired position. Their goals should comply with 2 directives:

1. Should make America better 4 years from now than it is today
2. There can be no budget increase

The presentations should be about 30-45 minutes. Barcamp typically has multiple tracks. However, since Obama needs to see every presentation it needs to be run as a single track event. Obama understands the power of the internet, as he made good use of it throughout his presidential campaign. So, it only makes sense to me that he should continue. So I’d like, and expect, to see POTUSCamp streamed over the internet. The American people would be able to post comments. If everything goes well, all the attendees will hear alot of great ideas and information, It’ll save Obama time since he’s not reading political TPS reports, everyone will have fun, and the American people will be enriched by it.

i want a way to keep track of the things I want. Being the geek that I am, I did a search for wishlist applications. Amazingly enough wishlistr.com came up. Taking a brief look at it, I decided it had potential. I thought about what I wanted in my desired app. Here’s what I came up with:

• publicly viewable
• use clean urls
• login with OpenID to edit my list
• easy to use
• works with any product (not just products on a single site)

i asked my followers on Twitter for recommendations. The Amazon wish list was mentioned by several people. It works very well with anything on Amazon. Supposedly It works for non-amazon items with a little extra work.  Deciding that i didn’t want to do any extra work, I signed up for wishlistr.com to try it out. It met all my criteria so I created some entries for my shiny new account.

The lightweight entry of wishlistr was nice and simple. It felt familiar from the first entry i made, but couldn’t put my finger on why. Then I was visiting my friend Cassie Wallender’s website, and she has her own wish list, which is driven by delicious.com using a tag ‘wishlist’. Of course! It’s so simple! Wishlistr felt familiar because it’s similar to my magnolia.com bookmarks. I’m now using Magnolia with a tag of ‘wishlist’.

Remember to bookmark my wishlist and keep it in mind for the holidays

I created my first ever video, as a response to a challenge put out by Mel Kirk on her website randommel.com. It was an interesting process. One that I think I could get used to. However, if I’m going to do more street footage, I’ll definitely require a video camera. It felt a little silly to use the iSight camera on my macbook. People were a little baffled, but that’s probably because it was raining today in seattle during filming, and my laptop is not waterproof. It’s on youtube but for convenience i’m adding it below, so you can watch it now. Enjoy!

I’ve moved my website from GoDaddy.com to Dreamhost.com today. Its a superior hosting platform from a developer perspective. For one it’s far more flexible. More importantly GoDaddy’s websites are setup so when you login to your website with FTP, your home directory is the website root! That’s very bad from a security perspective. As developers we’re taught that some things should be outside of your website root, and GoDaddy made that impossible. Additionally, Dreamhost gives you SSH access and Subversion!

What happened to the rest of my blog you might ask? Well, its funny. I did a database backup for my wordpress installation at GoDaddy before shutting off my hosting at GoDaddy.  What I never noticed was a Export option in the Wordpress admin panel. In fact, it wasn’t until I was working on the configuration on the new Dreamhost version of the blog that I noticed it. so, I’m hoping to be able to do  a database import with my backup file. That would be awesome! However, it might not be that easy. the Dreamhost version of wordpress is 2.5 where the GoDaddy version was much older. So we’ll see what happens. I need to do some research to see what my options are. Wish me luck.

As I was returning from my lunch at Pike Market today, I spotted a celebrity. This particular celebrity is beloved my millions of kids and adults alike. That was clearly demonstrated as they were walking through downtown Seattle, WA greeted by cheers of adoring fans calling out their name “Cookie Monster!”

I’m going to create a company to represent myself as a web developer in the next week or so. In the future, its likely I will have some employees. Because of that, I don’t want the company to be named after me. Besides I’m just not that vain. So I’ve been brainstorming, and I’ve come up with a few names that I like. I’m asking for your help, dear reader, to assist me in creating the best name. In addition if you any suggestions - please tell me. Express what you like or dislike in the comments below.

• Biourban (pronounced Bee-YOUR-buhn)
• Strummer Studios
• Lime Blue Studios
• Shank Piston
• Mastodon Labs
• Amber Chrome

Ok, so here’s my thoughts. I’m thinking the name doesn’t have to be descriptive of my business. A perfect example is Red Hat. The name Red Hat doesn’t infer that they are a Linux Distro. That association has been created by their marketing department. So this naming style opens up possibilities. I basically, am just thinking up words or phrases that sound cool together. I heard from a friend about an idea to name the company what you might name your kid.  Full Disclosure: the name “Shank Piston” came from putting my first and last name into the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator. It’s a silly tool that my twitter friends sent me, but i happen to like the output. Any name that sounds feminine doesn’t fit me. Androgynous names like Terry, Pat, and Jaime  have the most flexibility. With that said, this feels like the wrong path

One thing I’ve done intentionally is to avoid words that imply technology - systems, design, development, tech, web, net, and synergy. Those aren’t the only words, but they’re the most overused. Another thing I want to avoid is cheap sounding phrases/LOL speak like “websites 4 U”,  “U Can Haz Website”, and “The Web R Us” .  The message I’m trying to communicate is I want the name to stand out.

Thanks in advance. I look forward to hearing  your feedback.

I’ve created two manga avatars using the Face Your Manga application. The first one I created was meant to resemble me in the real world, but with the limited options this was difficult to get precise. The other is just a goof! I made one of a software pony-tailed geek, gave him blue hair ( because blue is cool and my favorite color) and added some lime green to complete the web 2.0 color palette.

Because I’m a fan of the democratic processs, I’m letting all you guys and girls vote. Which ever gets the most votes will go on my twitter, brightkite, flickr and facebook profiles. So place your vote in the comments below.

Normal Web 2.0

Last night I received a tweet from Chris Pirillo. In the tweet, he offered a contest. Send him an email and tell him why you should get the free ticket to Gnomedex. So I wrote an email. Here’s an explanation about the contest from Chris. I’ve posted the email in it’s entirety below. If I win, I won’t be able to tell you until they say it’s ok.

Chris,

Last week I was a regular seattleite - living in the city, working on the eastside doing php development, and with a healthy interest in social networking sites and microblogging. Then I learned about Gnomedex and my world changed. I suddenly wanted to be great. I needed to surround myself with the thought leaders of new media. I wanted to do great things.

Gnomedex can enable me to do them. I know all things are possible. However, desire is not enough, and I’m going to need to take drastic measures to pay my bills _and_ go to Gnomedex. I may need to solicit myself on the streets. I fear this could lead to my imprisonment by a Jabba the Hut like entity and be forced to wear the gold bikini. I’m not in the best of shape, so trust when i tell you that no one needs to see that! Save me from the gold bikini!

So in my best holographic voice “Please Chris Pirillo - you’re my only hope”

-Andrew

Update: I’m going to Gnomedex!

I’ve been using Brightkite for a while now. If you’re not familiar with it, Brightkite is a location-based mobile social networking site. What does that mean? you ask. It’s like Twitter, but it keeps track of where you posted from. If you haven’t tried it yet, I suggest you try it. I’d love to hear your thoughts. For now, I’ll give you mine.

The great thing about Brightkite is that you can meet people based on where you are. Someone that you might have never met is now within reach just because you both use the same service. This is the advantage is has over Twitter. However, the userbase needs to be increased dramatically to enhance the interestingness. If they can accomplish this, then you’ll meet others who are currently checked in nearby, as opposed to a few days later. This happens to me quite a bit - where I’ll see someone of interest who posted, but the post is dated from several days ago.

The folks at BrightKite have done some great things with their web application .

1. Map view of your friends. They display where your friends are checked in on a google map. This is great when you don’t recognize the street names and when you want to get a quick sense of where they are in relation to each other.
2. Privacy Control. You may not want everyone on the internet to know where you are all the time. Brightkite has built-in some controls to manage your privacy. They let you mark which friends are trusted. Those are the people who can see your exact location all the time. There are also just normal friends. Below your menu, is a privacy switch. When set to public, everyone can see your location and posts at full accuracy. When set to private, strangers see your checkins at the city level but no posts, your normal friends can see your checkins and posts at the city level, and your trusted friends get to see your checkins and posts at full accuracy.
3. Sharing with other sites. Under “Account Settings” there is a sharing tab. It identifies other sites that you can send your brightkite information to. Currently they support Twitter and Fire Eagle. I’ve never looked at Fire Eagle, but I’m actively using the Twitter sharing. Brightkite sends my info to Twitter when I post a note or photo. I did for a while also send my check-ins but that has zero value to a Twitter user, imho.

There are some things that I would change. Lets call them opportunities for improvement.

1. Email interface for photo uploads. Brightkite assigns a unique email address to you. They instruct you to send your photo to that unique address. A simple as email is , sending photos to brightkite doesn’t work for me. the mobile version of gmail doesn’t allow you to send attachments. It’s just not available. You can make the argument that this is a gmail problem. Never the less, I’m still not able to post photos from my mobile. If Brightkite had a file upload on their site for uploading photos, this would be a non-issue.
2. Placemark names not utilized fully. Placemarks are used to identify places that you go to often, and allows you to assign a nickname to it. The nick names are not used when you check into a place that doesn’t already have a name, like an intersection. For example I might have an address of “9th & Pine, Seattle, WA, 98101″ with a nickname of “Bus stop at Paramount”. When I write a post from that location you will only see the address. I think it would improve the user experience to use the nickname as well.
3. Streamline the interface. Do a place search and enter a business name. If you want to check in at one of the places, you need to click the name. On the new page click the “Check In Here” button. It would be great though if I were able to click “check in here” from the search result. The “visited places” and “place marks” both have that functionality. So why I cant I have it here too. Another thing that bugs me is all have very different looking listings. If they could bring them in line with one another, it’d reduce the time it takes the learn the web app.
4. Symbols. One symbol that you see alot of brightkite is an orange circle icon with a white ‘X’ in the middle. Other applications, outside of brightkite, have taught us that an ‘X’ in a icon means close or delete. So when I see that icon in the placemarks listing, I’m thinking that I can delete the item by clicking the orange circle icon. It will actually bring you to the place stream for the location. That’s confusing to me, and probably to others too. I’d like to see brightkite use the lime green trapezoid in their logo, as that is the placemark icon. It would have a couple of benefits - the ‘kite’ icon doesn’t have any external meanings like the ‘circle with an x’ icon, and it strengthen the association of your location with BrightKite.
5. Editing Placemarks. There is no way to edit a placemark. Many placemark redisplay the address as the name. So, when you checkin and post a note from that location, the address is written out twice. People like names, computers like addresses. That’s a lesson we’ve already learned with DNS. So, I’d like to be able edit the placemark name so that everybody can benefit from it. Also, people make mistakes and there’s no way on brightkite currently to correct them. This alone should be enough to add in the ability to edit.

I’d love to hear what you think.