231 Erwin Road

My experiences as a Northern transplant down in Chapel Hill, NC, 2005. And now my experiences back up in NYC.

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Deep Throat Revealed!

Was anybody else as disappointed by the context of this breaking news story???

A Picture Share!

Yo


Thanks Matt for telling me about go.blogger.com. I didn't know about it. A few months ago I played around with emailing posts to blogger, but they would take 24-48 hours to actually post. This seems to be instant. It'll be great for posting that quick pic to the web. Also, the SprintPCS photo emailing app sucks, it would add all this extra Sprint PCS info and send a link to the photo. However, it seems as if go.blogger.com realizes this and compensates for it.

Friday, May 27, 2005

I'm up $68 at the moment

Last night was a blast. Got a reserved table at Studio 54 with a bottle of Kettle 1. We tipped the waitress $40 and she acted like we stiffed her, wtf? I'd say she needs a stiffing.

It turns out that this trip is for two bachelor dudes, Josh and Philip, I just learned about that fact last night. I feel so cliche telling people I'm down here for a bachelor party. At the same token there are a shitload of bachelorette parties down here with their damn lists of things to do and items to get: underwear, condoms, bj shots, .... You'd think it was a bunch of high school girls. I'm not giving up my boxers, maybe a trade, but not just giving them out.

So we played roulette at the end of the night (start of the morning.) BlackJack would have been a mistake. It was my first time of 'real' play. Before this, I would just walk up, put $20 on black, loose, and walk away. This time I was playing the thirds, placing bets on 2 out of the 3 and some other random spots that I had a feeling on. Started with $40, walked away with $108. Let's see if I can keep this up.
OK, so on the flight in from SLC these chics come in that look like possible strippers (tight/little clothing and big tattoos.)

Turns out there were as I overheard them talking about giving lapdances and one of the girls "is too professional."

For me, this was the equivalant of heading down to disney world as a kid and seeing micky on the plane.

vegas baby, vegas.

[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Whuz up y'all. I'm in Salt Lake City on a stop over. SLC is pretty cool cause it is surronded by mountains and lakes. It's all so close.

While I was at JFK I was thinking, "a flight from nyc to vwgas probably has a lot of strippers on it." looking around to my disapointment it dawned on me it wasn't q direct flight.

[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]
i'm blogging on the broykln bridge in a cab while listening to a podcast by the ceo of oracle. am I a geek?

[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

You have not partied until...

You have not partied until you heard me hum a few bars of "Connection" by Elastica.

I'm going to Vegas in 3 days! But that's not what's keeping me awake. A powerpoint presentation that I'm trying to clean up for 9am is keeping me awake.

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Billboard article on Creative Commons

If you are not familiar with the Creative Commons I'm always boasting about, give this article a read. A very independent, non-biased view.

I've been making tough choices lately

I find myself at home and not out partying on yet another get-down-and-party night in nyc. I have so much work these days that I'm forced to make a choice of going out and boozing it up or staying in and doing work. And I'm actually choosing to stay in because it's work that I'm interested in. It's just such a weird choice to have to make. It's not that I have to, but that I choose to?

And yet I still feel like I don't have enough time. I'm halfway though David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD for all you hardcore folks.) I should finish it up on the train into Delaware Monday morning. I have it as an audiotape from audible, but I got fed up with their damn DRM technology that won't let it play outside of their software. So I ripped it to OGG format so I could listen to it with a much better player on my Treo then they provide. I'm pretty sure that's illegal, but I don't think it should be. I paid for and own the hardcover book, I paid for and own the audio copy, shouldn't I be able to listen to it in any form I want?

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I have a bunch of mail I still need to go though from when I moved back up to nyc. That may not look like a lot, but it's only about 15% of my total pile. The nyc USPS is pretty horrible as most of that should have been forwarded down to Chapel Hill, NC.


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That's a picture of the $125 speeding ticket I had to pay to the Durham court for racing to get to Waffle House the morning of our Extreme Blue Expo. It's kinda bogus, the ticket is only like $30, but the court fees are ~$95. What's up with that?


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That's a photo of the two mints they left on my coffee table at the Homestead Hilton Hotel.
This is after I ate one:
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And this is after they are both done:
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I tried out a new Hotel, that Homestead I just mentioned. It's not so bad, for one, it's bigger then my apartment. It's a one bedroom with a kitchen. They hotel sports a fireplace and heated outdoor pool (not open until memorial day.) They even have free breakfast and dinner, both of which I enjoy.

The kitchen comes with a whole spectrum of culinary delights, including a toaster and an empty refrigerator.
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If you couldn't tell yet, I photoblog everything, why not, right? If you are really hardcore, you can subscribe to my flickr feed and get a live update of all my photo postings. But I'll make it easy for you by posting them all here.

This are two pics that I think look cool cause I'm taking the picture from behind me, it just looks weird to me.
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And finally to our last post. Well, since I live in this world were I seem to have no time, I've fixed my TV so I can't watch cartoons on Sunday night. That's pretty much the only TV I watch, is Fox Sunday nights and Adult Swim. Who doesn't love ATHF (that's aqua teen huger force in case you don't love them.) My TV is now fixed.
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I think I'm going mad in this apartment.

A rant

BitTorrent Facilitating Illegal File Swapping of Star Wars On Day of Opening

That's the name of a press release that the MPAA (Movie Picture Association of America) release on May 19th. Quote from the PR:
Washington, D.C. - - Responding to news reports today that BitTorrent is already facilitating the illegal file sharing of the final Star Wars episode, Revenge of the Sith which opens in theaters today, Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) President and CEO Dan Glickman made the following statement:

“There is no better example of how theft dims the magic of the movies for everyone than this report today regarding BitTorrent providing users with illegal copies of Revenge of the Sith. The unfortunate fact is this type of theft happens on a regular basis on peer to peer networks all over the world.

That just gets me outraged for a number of reasons. First, some of you may not be familiar with BitTorrent, but it is a network technology for moving VERY LARGE files around the internet. I use it all the time when I download Linux distributions which are 600+MB. I can download them in less then an hour and I don't have to kill somebody's server because it distributes the load across the network. It is a perfectly legitimate service and I don't believe I've ever downloaded any illegal content on it.

Furthermore, IBM uses similar technologies internally to download software to our machines. The technology is needed in order to save costs on hardware and bandwidth.

To me, it's like saying email allows for software piracy and therefore should be illegal. Where are all the damn gun zealots??? I don't have a position either way on gun control. I'm just saying it would seem like the NRA would be all over this, it's the same principal.

More info here.

Saturday, May 21, 2005

Review of Camtasia

So I spent the past 12 hours making a screencast for IBM using Camtasia. I picked Camtasia for a few reasons, one Martin used it, and two, Mr. Screencast himself, Jon Udell uses it. However I find some serious flaws with the program.
  1. It doesn't have very advanced audio editing capabilities. I can't *insert* an audio clip in the middle of an existing clip. Am I missing something here?
  2. It was really buggy for me. If I was editing a lot of clips, it would mess up my future frames and either slow them down, or delete minutes of footage. I have no idea why and I sent an email to Camtasia.
  3. I would have hoped that it would have allowed me to select a range of capture and say 'take out every other frame.' So if you were typing text, you could make it fly by twice as fast. But it didn't have that option.

Friday, May 20, 2005

The Virtual World

I just listened to Peter Theil's Virtual Money on IT Conversations while eating $5.75 kung-pow chicken.
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This was an awesome podcast and I recommend it. It was really high level, very abstract, very deep. Todd would appreciate it.

UPDATE 5/22 03:02 - I should have added that Peter Theil started Paypal, and while that originally turned me off to his podcast, I figured I'd give it a try and I was very surprised. He is a bright guy. His high-level talk isn't so much about money, but about really thinking about the 'physical' world and the 'virtual' world, and what they really represent. Very deep, very cool.

"When good technology goes bad" - Treo 650

Thanks for the quote Todd.

I've been spending the past 2 hours trying to fix my Treo 650 phone which was in an infinite loop. What is an infinite loop you ask? It's when you Treo keeps reseting itself only to turn back on and reset itself.

The rest of this post will not be interesting to 100% of you. I'm posting it for two reasons. One, maybe somebody else that is having the same problem will find this post through google, and two, if it happens to me again, I can at least repeat my problem solving process..

I think what triggered this is the AOL IM (UK) program that I talked about so highly. I followed these steps to diagnose my Treo.

  1. Took the battery out, put it back in, NOTHING
  2. Left the battery out overnight, tried it in the morning, NOTHING
  3. Did a soft reset by holding the UP key while pressing reset until the 2nd Palm screen (grey) pops up. Then your phone will be on with limited functionality. It was at this point that I should have deleted any apps that were last running, in this case, AIM and Blazer. Obviouslly AIM would be the choice to delete of these two.
  4. Since it still wasn't working, I decided to do a HARD RESET. Hold the Power button while pressing the reset key. Again, don't release until Grey screen pops up. Then press the UP key to confrim. Then HOTSYNC to restore.
    1. This then caused more problems as when the HOTSYNC was done and the unit reset, pressing the HOME button would crash the Treo. So I was back to Square 1.
  5. So I did another HARD RESET, but now I needed to figure out how to stop AIM from syncing between my computer and the Treo on the next restore. I found that all the Palm program files (.prc's) are storedunder " c:\program files\palmone\SWITCH\Backup" Where switch refers to my Treo 650 name. Yes I am a geek and I took that name from the Matrix.
  6. I removed a bunch of APPS to make it easier. When I resynced, everything was A-OK. However, a few apps I removed, such as PDAnet, I need to now reinstall that program as merely copying back into the Backup folder does me no good.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

Hrmmm, Google Maps meets crime

Brent, don't you live here?????

- Crime mapped by street address thanks to Google Maps.

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Crazy Treo Case

CaseZiplockStrong

These guys did a review of Treo cases, but peep what they did at the bottom of the article, too ghetto, too funny.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Teaching Elephants to Blog

IBM formally announced support for blogging both internally and externally today, in fact, they encourage it. This is great news because:
  1. It says that blogging has more value then somebody just posting in their pajamas
    1. It's all about community and reputation folks, the landscape is changing
  2. Has my company adopting a healthy, open perspective on blogging
  3. Has encouraged a lot of IBMers to look into Blogging
IBM has taken an open perspective to the blogging community and I thank them for it.


I wonder what the future of corporate blogging will hold?
  • There will be more cases of employees being fired for inappropriate blogging against their company. I wonder if this will be frequent?
  • I wonder what will happen when a blogger releases intellectual property, purposefully? Accidentally?
  • Or better yet, what about when a blogger comes out with the next big idea, will their company claim ownership to it?
    • Technically I don't think they could, because then it's a 'published' article. However, could a company sue at the point?
    • I make these statements because when you work for a company (with a standard non-disclourse/anti-competitive agreement) they technical own all of your intellectual property relating to their core business. For instance, the Free Software Foundation does not accept code contributions without consent from the author's employer (to avoid any legal battles.)


This would be a great time for me to point out that I try to keep my blog somewhat professional and would encourage people who post comments to please keep an aire of professionalism as well. Thanks.

“The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.” ;)

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Do you live in nyc?

Do you live in nyc?
Do you have an internet connection?
Do you hate cooking your own food?

Then you should try snapfood.com. Some of you may already be using delivery.com (nyctogo.com) But snapfood.com offers a much cleaner and more intuitive interface. Plus it's run by a friend, Lon B, so you should at least give it a try. You can place orders for delivery or pick-up. Having a few friends over? Then do a group order, it makes it easy for everybody to order their own items and pay for them separately.

I fell right into it

I just got a phishing email and I feel for it, luckily, Google Gmail stopped me, just another reason I love their service.

If you don't know what phishing is, it's basically a fake email in disguise of a legitimate service. In my case it was eBay asking me to update my Credit Card info. The reason I fell for it is that I know my CC info is out of date on eBay, so I figured this was a reminder.

Gmail removed all the hyperlinks out of the email and put a little red note at the top that this email is probably a scam:
Warning: This message may not be from whom it claims to be. Beware of following any links in it or of providing the sender with any personal information. Learn more
I didn't even notice that though, but thought it was funny that none of the URL's were hyperlinkable. So I copied the legit URL, http://ebay.com/.... to find out that it was a broken URL. I went back to the email and noticed the red box. I then realized I was scammed, and I'm supposed to be on top of these things. I looked at the source code and noticed that the email takes me to http://ebay.is.dreaming.org.

Thanks Google for once again helping to save my life.

Friday, May 13, 2005

I got lit at Lit

So I'm back to loving nyc again. I went out to Lit last night. I used Dodgeball.com to tell all my friends (like 2) that I was there. Nick was there and got my message, dodgeball.com rocks. He knew I was at the bar before he even saw me.

I got to hang out with much of the BU gang, including a visitor from L.A., Matt F.. He works on American Dad which I think is completely awesome. He's a celebrity in my mind. I'm sure Patrick B. would think so too. Matt has Cleveland from The Family Guy introducing him as his voicemail message. That is so cool.

A really funny line from the night from Matt B. "Why don't you go tell those girls over there I work on the Family Guy so that we can hit on them." That's just funny on so many levels.

Lit
is a great bar/lounge. The DJ plays some great mixes, all over the board, 80's, punk, beetles, ... The beer was cheap. $2 for 2 bud's until 12am, then open bar downstairs until 1am (I don't know how that happened.)

We had some train troubles on the way back from Delaware last night. I had to rent a car in Trenton and drive up to nyc. I didn't get in until 11pm, luckily, that's when the night starts.

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I had to go some small ass airport to pickup my car, then I made a food stop somewhere along 95. It's amazing the quality of people that hang out in rest stops on a Thursday night. I nice old man sat behind me as was kind enough to hack out some spit every 5 min.

Fat Kid Singing

This will bring a smile from your face, the first 15secs are unbelievable.

Fat Kid Singing

Thursday, May 12, 2005

!Cellphedia

A Ubiquitous Social Encyclopedia - Cellphedia

Basically, you post a question to the community via your cell phone, and hopefully somebody in the community answers. I think the thought is more along the line of trivia, but I'd like to see it help you find information. For instance, let's say you are traveling and need train times leaving from NYC. I would hope that you could send a text message to the community asking for a train schedule and they could do the leg work for you. This way, on a cell phone, where you have limited input capabilities, you could leverage the community, sort of like your own personal assistant.

Very cool stuff!

BBC Opening their content

BBC has created a backstage website. From what I can tell, it's an API to all their content, so you can mix it up and do with it whatever you want.

THIS is what I want to see more of, and there are some independent content/media startups, but I'm happy to see a Network jump in. Way to go BBC.

Other independnent content/media providers:
* Open Media Network
* Ourmedia

Critical Thinking

The New Yorker has a book review on "Everything Bad is Good For You" by Stephen Johnson.

The article has some interesting insights, such as the educational value of videogames and how their complex worlds offers lessons in thinking and problem solving. I want to touch on a point mentioned at the bottom of the article though, about Elementary and High School Homework.

Now I've been out of HS and elementary school for quite sometime. While I was there, I never did my homework and I never wanted to do my homework. Come to think of it, that's sounds a lot like college for me too. But let's step back for a second. Is homework really productive for kids? I think I'd have to say "No."

I work 40+ hours a week now; while I don't have homework, I definitely have work and stress that I take home with me. When I was in H.S., I may have not been interested in homework, but that doesn't mean I wasn't interested in the material or learning.

I must have been in well over 20 clubs in High School. I was in Science Olympaids, National History Day, Schreiber News Line (TV News Show), The Schreiber Times (our school paper, I was the graphics editor), the Holography Club, the backstage Crew of Drama, Academic Decathalon, and a lot more that I can't even remember. My point to this is that although I may have seemed like a slacker from the homework standpoint, I was one of the most active students in my school. (Ohh yeah, I was even Executive Officer of our Student Council.) Those were all excellent activities for learning and growing. Was that reflected in any of my grades? No.

I actually enjoyed the clubs I was a member of, and that's why I did them. I'm sure there were kids that enjoyed the homework they were given, whether it was reading American history, some famous novel, studying chemistry, or solving physics problems. For different people, different things can hold their interests. So why not make school more like work, and have us do all this during school hours. Let them study and problem solve during the day. Let kids decide what the want to do after school, whether its playing sports, participating in clubs, taking bike rides around town, playing video games, or doing anything else that's part of being a kid. However, we do have to have to keep our kids excited about all these extracurricular activities. Otherwise, it would just be anarchy. I don't have suggestions on how to motivate kids to do productive things, that's different for every individual, maybe it's painting, maybe it's playing music, who knows.

So in conclusion, I think homework is a pointless activity of schooling. As Mark Twain once said, "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education."

So who's with me?

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

I am in love with my phone

It's a little sad, but tonight I fell in love with my phone, a Treo 650.

I downloaded a new program, Pocket Tunes Deluxe. Among all of the amazing mp3 playback features it has to offer, the most outstanding for me is the ability to listen to streaming internet radio stations. That just blows my mind. As I type this, I'm listening to Virgin UK streaming Shoutcast radio. Why don't I just listen though my laptop you ask? BECAUSE I CAN LISTEN THROUGH MY PHONE.

Why does this make me so happy?
  • I now have a virtually 'unlimited' library of music I can listen to on the go
  • It's nifty
  • Imagine a day when this feature is integrated into your car radio. Forget satellite, I want my InternetRadio
I have to figure out a way to set up a proxy server at home that will allow me to do a few things:
  • Listen to my paid internet subscription, Yahoo's Launchcast Radio.
    • I like Launchcast because I can skip to the next song and rate my music. It makes recommendations for me based on my ratings and the ratings of the community. I find this an excellent way to learn about new music.
      • The only problem with this is that I will not be able to 'skip' or 'rate' songs. I wonder if I can build some sort of webpage that I could access though my phone that would allow this. Any ideas?
  • Have access to my entire mp3 collection while on the go (which is larger then the 1GB SD card I have in my treo.)

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

City of Brotherly Love

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I'm up visiting Josh J in Philly. Spending the night here, it's only 30 min from Wilmington, Delaware. I've gotten a lot more geeky in the past few months (thanks to Martin D of the IBM EB program.) I think I'm now too geeky for Josh.

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He showed me his lab. The lucky bastard gets a 30" Mac LCD screen. He does hardcore studies on the brain, trying to figure out how they work. It appears that running around in circles counterclockwise spurs a lot more activity then does clockwise.

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Josh and Erika just bought a new place. The wedding is August 13, you're all invited. They're giving me a room for the night, so I'm skipping out on the hotel tonight. I think I'll get a hotel up here one night and we'll throw a kickass party, let me know if you're in Philly and want to come.

Flickr meets Google Maps

Geobloggers has made a great little hack to overlay geo-based photos onto Google Maps, check it out.

Seeing Around Corners With Dual Photography

teaser

Read an
article on /. today about a project that can 'see around corners.'

So in the photo above. Picture A is the normal shot, with the light source coming from the right. Picture B is a recreation of what the light source sees. All of that was digitally recreated from Picture A!!! That is AMAZING!

Dumb Free Stuff

2 free things:

1. Palm AOL IM
For your phone. It seems that AOL will charge you $19.99 for a copy of AOL IM to run on the Palm OS, however, AOL UK is dumb/smart enough to provide it for free. I read it on this post, you can download the .prc here.

2. Free AudioBooks
The NYPL (ny public library) offers free downloads of many books via Adobe eReader format. This is a GREAT. It dumbfounds me though. An obvious good step, but what type of leaps and bounds had to happen in order to facilitate this? There are a number of people that would be willing to help this effort with public domain materials if the U.S. didn't keep extending the copyright every time Disney was about to go public.

The problem I'm referring to is that there are a number of good materials that should have been released into public domain a few years ago (80 year lifespan expired.) But Disney and Sunny Bono had copyright extended another 20 years. So while they did save Mickey, they blocked access to thousands of materials that serve no benefit to publishers/content holders. Think of all the early 1900's American literature that could have went public. Lessig proposed a solution to this problem. Charge a $1 fee every 50 years or so to renew copyrights. This way, only content with commercial value will be re-registered. All the other content can then enter the public domain. Don't lock all content up just to save Mickey. The content owners (publishers/recording industry, ...) didn't like this idea because it creates COMPETITION. Institutions like the RIAA are afraid of competing with the public domain. They are scared of the thought of customers having a choice between $15 CD's and content that is $0. I understand that fear, however, there are plenty of business models out there when they can still make some dough. For instance, I'm listening to Jet right now on languages for a $3/month subscription (just like cable TV.)

Monday, May 09, 2005

Meet me @ the corner of Independence Mall & Nirvana

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I'm chillin in Wilmington's hottest Indian resturant, Nirvana, waiting to meet up w/ some work folks.

The pictures above are of Delaware's Independence Mall. A true feat of the human imagination.

Have I mentioned that I work in what just night be the tallest building in all of Delaware? A whopping 14 stories tall, I'm on the 9th. I can see over all the land. Although I shouldn't knock it. It really is an amazing view because all the trees are different colors (like fall.) Wilmington is right on the water and I get great views of the river coastline and bridges. I even had my own office last week. This week that has changed though as I'm being bumped into a cube :(

Damn I love my Treo (as I am posting from it.)

Saturday, May 07, 2005

Social Network Search

John Battle mentioned a social networking search portal, Multiply. I signed up under my gmail address (vincent.lauria@) Rather then inviting all of my friends (spam) I'll just post it up here. I don't think it's a great website, but it's a step in the right direction.

Basically, it allows you to tailor searching content based off your network of friends. From the example they give, let's say you are searching for a trip to Rome, it would return all the photos/blogs of your family and friends that visited Rome. Cool concept, but I don't think there service has what it takes.

On a side note, let me start a poll below, with just simple YES or NO comments. How many people know what RSS Feed Readers are? Readers will aggregate a number of news sources and blogs into one convent area. The benefit is that they fetch content for you, so you don't have to keep returning to a blog to see if new information has been posted. I use bloglines.

If a number of people aren't sure what Feed Readers are, I'll make a webcast on what they are and how to use them. Once you start reading lots of internet content, they are a must. If you're not using one now, you will be in a year.

On a side note, I just realized that Blogger doesn't support TrackBack'ing. There is a third party add-in that supports it, HaloScan.

Friday, May 06, 2005

Morse Code faster then txt mssgng

From Engadget:

93-year-old telegraph operator Gordon Hill delivered a resounding ass-whoopin’ to his rival, 13-year-old Brittany Devlin, using Morse Code. Of course, Mr. Hill does have nigh on 80 years of practice under his belt, which was enough to help him triumph even despite Brittany’s liberal use of texting slang (Mr. Hill transmitted the chosen phrase verbatim). The showdown was sponsored by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, and the rivals had to transmit the following message: “Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing.” Damn straight! Screw the T9, Engadget’s switching over to Morse from now on.

Roofinex

As a consultant in the pharma industry, I think it is my right to let everybody know about a new product out on the market. Thanks Will.

Roofinex

I've invented internet graffiti

So my wiki has turned into graffiti and I don't mind that. Some people would call in vandalism, I call it free expression. However, it has taught me a few lessons.

  • If you are to run a personal wiki, you'd should have everybody create an account in order to make changes. One person cannont maintain a wiki like a community can.
    • This would allow you to 'audit' the changes quite easily. Right now it's too difficult for one person to do all the editing to clean up the content. For personal wiki's this is bad, for community wiki's (wikipedia) this is okay.
    • Wiki software should have some sort of hightlight/track changes system, this way it's easy to find all the individual changes made. Instead of combing though my paragraphs for "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills" or "I am finding out that wiki is NOT a good idea."
  • Wiki's need RSS feeds, maybe some of them do, but my software doesn't.
  • The wiki editor is AMAZING. It is a little flaky on formatting, but it offers so many possibilities. Everything should be like that; blogs, wiki's, homepages. They don't have to take the concept that anybody can edit, but they should all use a really sophisticated text editor.
So I'm gonna let the wiki run wild for a while, do with it what you must. What will come out of this is some new ideas.
  1. Not allowing people to change your personal content is probably a good idea
  2. Wiki's can be fun, they just need some more auditing/change tracking features
My plan is to take a snapshot of the last good wiki and make it static (un-editable.) I'll then create some sort of new blog with a wiki on the side.

I still need to post all the photos and stories from my roadtrip, I really dropped the ball on that one as it was too much work to keep that up and running 100% on my roadtrip.

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Hi... I'm in Delaware!

As if I thought I would never quote Wayne's World another time in my life.

So I'm in Delaware. This is my first real travel gig as a consultant. It's a lot of fun for this first day, let's see how long it takes until it sucks. I'm only scheduled here for the month.

I took a train from Penn Station down to Wilmington, Delaware. I liked the train, it was only 1hr 36min and I was able to work off my laptop the whole way down. If you are traveling, trains with tables, ac power, and internet are awesome.

Wilmington, DE will seem vaguely familiar to you as it is where you mail all your credit card payments. Can anybody think of anything funny for me to take a picture of in front of a Credit Card company? Delaware may also ring a bell from the movie, Fight Club, (which makes sense, they were blowing up CC companies.) If you curious why all the CC companies are located here, it's because DE has some pretty low business taxes.

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I had the privlege of renting a Purple Kia Rio. I've been spoiled with my Ford Taurus for 3 months. Kia's are damn small. If I put my foot on the gas and try to remove it and apply it to the brake, I can't. My foot gets wedged on the gas pedal, between the brake and the floor. It may be hard to picture, so just picture me driving around a barbie-mobile. Also, it has power NOTHING. No power locks, no trunk, no windows, no nothing. The FM antenna isn't even motorized. You have to pull it out with your bare hands, what's up with that?

Wilmington is a little scary, I'm not sure what to make of it. The license plates hold the claim to "First State in the Union." To me that's like telling everybody you're the 35 year old at the frat party. (Because your baldness didn't give you away.) Also, it has this weird ghetto yet safe feel to the neighborhood. I'm not sure what to think of it.

I ordered room service for dinner. And although that sounds like a lot of fun (which it was.) The food was terrible. It was cold. I ordered a soup and didn't get a spoon, maybe I just have to high of standards.

Wiki vs. Blog

I've seemed to have thoughly confused most people on my Wiki def, (vinnie.net) vs. Blog. Basically, a wiki is a website that ANYBODY can edit. I'm experimenting as it allows me to see how technologies can be pushed. I think I'll fall back into the blog style, but I still have to make a few final roadtrip updates to the Wiki.

Eventually, there will be one site, it will be http://vinnie.net. I hope to have it all settled by the end of the month. What that means is that 231 Erwin Road will come to a deadend, it will become a snapshot of my life in Chapel Hill. I will continue to blog, just under the name vinnie.net.

Monday, May 02, 2005

It's a little late now

It's a little late now to tell everyone, but I've been using the Wiki on http://vinnie.net to blog my trip. I mentioned this before, but I guess it got lost in the postings.