Sol Young

Today’s video, shot on the way in to work at the falls behind the Philadelphia Art Museum. It’s one of the more beautiful locations in the city.

Geek Dinner:

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Photo by Peter Baer - CC

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As a tech manager I’ve got myself in to that mode. You know the mode. The one where you’re so focused on building a great product that you’re not getting to code that often, if at all. This isn’t bad - you have to do whatever you can to get things done - but if you’re a developer manager, you need to live in this space. And I’ve felt the atrophy.

So over the weekend I scraped the rust off and tried some new stuff. I’ve never coded in Python, but I’ve had Google AppEngine sitting on my account for a while. And I’ve got a personal iPhone developer SDK and ADC membership. It was time to whip out the programmer-WD40.

What did I build? Pytchfork. What is Pytchfork? You’ll find out - but not in this post. It’s something I’ve had on my mind for a while. In about an hour I had AppEngine installed and Pytchfork configured. Less than two hours later I was done with a REST library and the framework for what Pytchfork will become.

A REST feature set for input. Basic XML, RSS, ATOM, and JSON as output. In a few hours. Not bad, and it felt gooooood.

From this I’ve learned Python is a friendly animal, and not just in theory. It’s too friendly. The lack of semi-colons in my C/C++ brain feels like I’m walking up to a cliff without a railing at each line ending. But it’s something one gets used to.

Unless you’ve written a PHP or Ruby framework you’re married to, AppEngine and Python is about the best thing you could do for yourself as a way to publish a small, personal, application.

Starting a Monday without rust feels great. Stay sharp!

I was first disappointed, and then offended, when Cameron Reilly blasted the Olympics as a waste of coverage. If one is talking about the sports, sure, the amount of coverage is total overkill. How often do you usually watch ping-pong or weight lifting? No offense to paddle swingers and dudes who could crumple me like a sheet of paper, but hundreds of video streams on this would be a waste of my time.

But the point is not sports (for those of you offended by sports). There is a huge value to the Olympics, especially in regards to the real troubles the world faces. The athletes are ambassadors for the common man. These people, without realizing it, are going to a common location and meeting with other fellow competitors while the world watches. In households around the world, people watch as their country competes.

Politicians should learn from the spirit of the Olympics. We can all get along.

And so this has a chance at getting Dugg, here’s an off-the-top-of-my-head list of 10 reasons why the Olympics are still great for the world.

1. Every country comes together and meets, mostly at an equal level.
2. In most cases people are rooting for their country, not individual athletes.
3. Coverage on other countries educates citizens about foreign cultures.
4. China is growing as a superpower. The world needs to see a lot more of this.
5. Pollution in Beijing is horrible, but the country has taken action to clean it up and it’s somewhat effective. The world needs to see this.
6. Chinese human rights policies are under close scrutiny. The press coverage helps.
7. The USA may dominate, but it doesn’t win everything. Americans need to remember we can lose and can do so gracefully.
8. Small countries may be out of the medals race, but they win where they’re strong. Those citizens learn to win.
9. Athletes from each nation will go home and talk about the other competitors. Their people will listen.
10. The world is focusing on something positive for two weeks. Much of the negativity in the news is silenced by loud cheering.

After using Twitter as my push-based latest-news system for five months, I’ve gone back to the “traditional” use of Twitter. Without IM and large follower functionality, Twitter offers no way to experience a flow of tweets.

“What have I done!?”

I’ve gone back to the traditional use of Twitter. The method more than 95% of the userbase uses it for. I now use it to stay in touch with the people I’ve met and know personally, rather than using Twitter as a medium for info aggregation. It’s not possible to use Twitter how I did in the past.

If you know my series on flow (it kicked off here), you know what I was doing and how cool it was. I got the idea partially from Robert Scoble’s entry, The Secret to Twitter. His use was brilliant and it worked amazingly well!

Back in March of ‘08 I began following any interesting person I thought to be intelligent and putting out informative tweets. Primarily I found people in the software development, new media, aviation, library science, and management arenas. I ended up following 6,218 people at the high (last week). Everyone’s updates were viewed in IM and I would see an amazing flow of information.

Usually hundreds of tweets per minute, forcing me to read very quickly and get a quick read on the blogging, technology, and media areas in a short period of time. It allowed me to find articles and posts that would have filtered in slowly on RSS (arguably, if I had more than my 632 RSS feeds I’d find more information here, too).

It was great. Flip on iChat over breakfast and watch the flow while eating granola and yogurt. An ideal start to the day.

But in the last week I’ve culled over 4,000. The removed are people who don’t follow me and who I never met in real life. The chance of our interaction is very small, and if we meet I’ll follow.

I’m looking forward to having more intimate interaction with friends and followers. Focus will shift more towards FriendFeed and Google Reader (RSS).

Today we went for some property tours close to Center City in the Callowhill area (between Spring Garden and the Vine Street Expressway and between Broad and Columbus).

If you think rents and purchase prices are tumbling everywhere, you might be mistaken. Philadelphia is still a good buy and has great rent vs. buy ratios (coming from my Californian perspective).

A video tour of a property… [Read more →]

Last night was the first Philadelphia Geek Dinner. I went in with no expectations and would have labeled it a success if two people joined for a good meal and intelligent conversation.

But there were ten of us at our table. We shared in good drink, good food, intellectually stimulating conversation, and all of us were given the chance to make friends with new people in the industry. That’s what meetups are about.

The night’s crowd was diverse. Ten people. Four Philadelphians. Four imports (to Philadelphia). Two in-for-a-short-while-and-leaving-within-hours. A comp-sci teacher. Wireless expert. A few company owners. Developers (.NET, Mac, Linux). Project managers. Videographer. Pilots (four out of ten!?). Photographers. Security experts… In just ten people.

Favorite topics from the evening: Introductions, aviation (being pilots), the story of National Mechanics, wireless (T-Mobile 3G), blogging and video blogging, drive and aspirations between small and large companies.

By the way - National Mechanics feels like the quintessential starting point for intelligent people in Philadelphia to meet up. I’ve only been here twice, but I keep hearing that this is where those of us in the tech field (and beyond) can find smart people. When I was listening in on other conversations around us I overheard lots of great stuff. Bottom line, this is a must-visit-repeatedly location in Philadelphia (if you’re smart).

Anyway, couldn’t ask for anything more. So glad to have everyone in the mix.

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A reminder to those with short memories - tomorrow is the Philly Geek Dinner. Look forward to good food and good drinks while meeting up with Philly’s tech community.

Put your name in on the Upcoming or Facebook group.

7pm at National Mechanics: 22 South 3rd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106