Posts Tagged ‘codemash’

Web bound

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

I handed in my notice at work today.  I’m headed to a digital media company doing web related work.  It’s another exciting and scary situation I’m putting myself in.  Looking forward to the challenge.  Hopefully I’m up for it. (hansoninc.com)

I’m finishing up my first week of 2010 with Hopslam in the fridge.  It’s been a wonderful week.

CodeMash was awesome.  I’ve gotten a few new directions to explore in my side projects.  I got a little taste of Ruby, which I need to continue.  Plus I won a Scala book, and have started reading that.  Not to mention that I talked to another person who said I need to learn Groovy and Grails.  Looks like my year is going to be busy.

I don’t know if you noticed the new page I put up related to my Android apps.  I created a Google Android app that displayed the CodeMash schedule.  I really enjoyed creating the app and am trying to come up with a new idea for phone app development.

On this day…

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CodeMash 2010

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Only one more day of work before I head to CodeMash.  I can’t wait.  It was painful not being able to go last year.  The problem always is trying to fit in all the great sessions that I want to go to.  Plus, I plan to keep an eye on the Open Spaces topics for Android topics or other things that catch my eye.  So session wise, it’s going to be tough.

This year they are even having a game room and a coding jam room.  Add in that the evenings are usually filled with something (opening night panel, cocktail party) and I doubt I’ll make it to the water park area again.  Just too much to do.  This is such a great conference for the price.  I hope I can continue to go every year.

On this day…

  • 2009: Mini review: Santa’s Butt Winter Porter — Santa’s Butt has a rear view of Santa looking over a list and holding a mug of brew while sitting [...]
  • 2009: 2009 Goals: Professional — These are my goals of the professional variety.

    Continue to work hard and enjoy my job.
    This hasn’t been a problem so [...]

  • 2007: Spam, VASSAL, Exercise — Sorry, no The Mighty Endeavor after action report yet. Hopefully this weekend I can put some time into that [...]
  • 2005: Wellies — Tonight was a very entertaining evening for me. For once I wasn’t the target of my children’s laughter.
    My wife [...]

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What’s the probability you know the probability?

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

I remember taking a probability class in college.  I found it very interesting.  I wish I would have kept the book, but I think I sold it back for quick cash.  Here’s an interesting little brain teaser for you.  I admit I got it wrong.  Probabilities are something you really need to take the time to think out in some cases.

Here’s another interesting thing I happened upon today.  Just when you think there are no good useful ideas left to be created on the web, here’s a great example of something useful.  It’s gives me hope that maybe I still have time to be hit by a good idea.  Sure you could manually do the same thing with Google Maps, but they piece everything together in one package.  I could see myself using this to find a golf course between here, Sixftunda, and L-town for a golf scramble with him, Poobah, and brother of Six.

I heard about this on a DotNetRocks podcast.  It was at CodeMash and Carl and Richard interviewed Joe Fiorini and company about a 48hr Ruby programming contest that their site won.  (.Net?  Yep, I subscribe to the CodeMash philosophy of finding something useful across the language divides.  While there’s a lot of episodes that don’t give me much, there’s enough programming and design philosophy discussions to usually maintain my interest.)

I actually met Joe at the 2008 CodeMash though I doubt he’d remember me.  He and Kevin Fonner spent some time at the bar that first night, wagering for my soul as they tried to convince me which dynamic language I should learn.  Joe was for Ruby, Kevin for Python.  Took me a while to get to it, but I’m finally getting around to tinkering with one, though it’s Groovy.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to make it back to the mash next year.

Is it just me, or does it seem like there are a ton of people from the Cleveland area doing cool tech stuff these days?

On this day…

  • 2005: Time — Well, I finally got around to attacking that little punchlist from Friday. Here’s the update. Haven’t imported any CD’s, [...]

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No mash or junk

Monday, December 8th, 2008

In sad news, it doesn’t appear that I’m going to make it to CodeMash this year.  This was a great little convention that I went to last January and really learned a lot and got a lot of energy from.  I also got to spend some time with Sixftunda.  I’m still supposed to post a recap of the conference.  I’ve got my notes still.  This conference is worth paying for out of my own pocket, but I’m not keen to use 3 days of vacation so early in the new year.  So maybe next year.  :(

In amazing news, tonight marks the end of a personal journey.  That journey has been accumulating baggage over the course of probably 11 years or so.  I’ve been cutting through that baggage for the last couple months.  Tonight, I finished it off, cutting it down to only a remaining 3.  What the heck am I talking about?

My addiction to collecting everybody’s old piece of junk computer that they were throwing out.  Besides the actual running 3 desktops and 1 laptop that make up my personal network, I had near 11 old pieces of junk that I had been holding on to over the years with thoughts of refurbishing into a Beowulf Cluster.  While I went through many an iteration of installing Linux here and there, I never really kept anything running for long before abandoning it.

So another good thing that came out of this move is finally parting with a bunch of this crap.  I’ve also managed to junk out a couple tempermental old deskjet printers as well as an 80’s era line printer.  Two or three monitors went to Goodwill.  I stripped all the hard drives and memory (as well as a CD-ROM, few network cards, and some wire strips) from the old computers and deposited them in trash over the last couple months.  Tonight finished it up.  What I’m left with is one extra monitor, 2 working scrap desktops for if I get the itch to play, and a relatively new desktop that I think has a fried motherboard.  I’ll probably transfer the hard drive out of that one if I can’t get it running again.  Anybody know how to test whether memory is still good?  I’d love to transfer that also, but that may be what fried it.

I would so love to be able to replace all my massive monitors with LCD’s, and replace a few of the desktops in use with laptops.  Don’t see that happening for quite some time though.  The girlywogs grew beyond the desktops I have for them long ago, but I’m still pretty much keeping my best desktop software-crud free.

On this day…

  • 2009: Moving shop — So it would seem that Shindo and I are the only ones who have noticed that floydwing.com is back.  The [...]
  • 2005: Tis the Season — Had one of them there doctor checkups today. The old blood pressure is continuing to be nicely controlled. [...]

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