Couple Grammes of Soma

On the way home from Jereme’s house last night I stopped off at the I-4 pedestrian bridge in Lake Mary to take some pictures.

You can’t park right next to the bridge so I used my new deck to skate down there. Pretty fun deck I realized, super fast. It’s a little strange trying to book it on a board while holding a tripod and camera bag and water and a book but I survived.

Pictures turned out significantly crappy though. But I’m happy that I did it. Felt good to do something I wanted to do, and be creative. Even if what I made wasn’t that good. It’ll get better. I think early morning would be a cool time to do some shots of Lake Monroe, with fog and such.

OK, so I tried to not need to do this. But it’s better than other options.

My mentally insane brother misses me. Poor guy. I miss him too.

On Sunday May 4th I folded up and threw away a post-it-note that had been in my favorite book since 7:45ish PM August 11th, 2006. It had been in place for approximately 1 year, 7 months, 22 days, 14 hours.

So as things turn out, I am not getting married.

Now while I realize not everyone is interested in this, I also don’t care. hmm, yes I think that was a bit bitter. Not to worry, I’m keeping it in check overall.

It will most certainly take more than the past few days for me to stop thinking about that post-it-note. I don’t believe that is at all hard to understand, I mean I ran across that note at least five times a week for 85 weeks. 425 times, at least.

It’s a strange although not entirely unfamiliar feeling I have, trying to think of what to put in all this space that is empty now. From what I know of mental problems, and desperation, positive thoughts would be a good start. I can do that. But I also don’t want to coldly refuse to morn the loss of something precious to me.

What predictable, and yet tenacious, questions crawl into my conciousness. Will I? Can I? How? Why did? What did? Is it?

Yes, I’m quite sure it is my son.

I’m glad someone told me something I didn’t want to hear a few months ago. It’s helping now. I was rather peeved at “their nerve” when I heard it originally. But it was true and I couldn’t fault them for that.

“Put your spine in your back” is right. I mean that with no disdain whatsoever. I’m sure that both of us are actually winners here. This outcome may not have been the preference, but it is real, and that is a tremendously valuable thing.

It will be hard to trust, in the future. I can say that with some certainty. But then again, to trust another’s heart is no more secure than trusting your own. So frankly that shouldn’t really be blown out of proportion. Sincerity counts with me.

So what exactly is to become of this old bag of bones I see in the mirror? One things for sure, I’m getting fat.

I’ve resolved to hold off on dramatic decisions for a month. I think that should be long enough for me to stop thinking only of disappearing and start thinking at least a bit about the long term and how I want to get there, and where exactly there is.

On a positive note, I have not become a recluse. True it is only Wed. Give it time they say, right?

“If I go to the rain, you’ll never see me again” and other melodramatic quotations coming to a soppy boy near you.

It’s a touch strange to me that one morning (in about 3 minutes) 600 days and 14 hours of “us” can be made totally null. Null is a strong word, but still. Impressed I am with how unsure the best laid plans of mice and men are. At least I haven’t lost my temper.

I’m just not sure which one of us is supposed to meet at the river.

I wont hold on to you when there’s nothing to hold.

I gave a talk about Microformats at BarCampOrlando this year. Overall things went OK, however I’d like to see a lot of improvement in my presentations over the next few.

First things first:

microformats talk slides

In my talk I covered some reason why it would be wise to start implementing microformats across the gamut of disciplines in the areas they apply. This means that if you are a designer, developer, front-end developer or marketer you should pay attention the microformats space and add it to our tool-kit. Especially since the bar to entry is about an hour worth of reading and 9-30 extra characters in your mark-up. I mean c’mon, that’s just too easy.

Semantic Search

• Yahoo! Micro Search (was returning a proxy error as of this posting.)
• Yahoo! Open Search, 1st announcement
• Google Social Graph API (uses XFN)

Browser Support

• Firefox 3 support
• Safari Microformats Plugin
• IE 8 will support Microformats (Chris’ blog is good reading in general if you don’t already read it, smart guy)
• Flock supports them

Getting Started

• Microformats Wiki
• hCard hCard Creator
• XHTML Friends Network (XFN) XFN Creator

Design Patterns (these are neat!)

• Include Pattern read the feedback

Presentations that are way better than mine

• presentation by Tantek Çelik Video
• Microformats for Developers by John Allsopp
• Microformats for Designers by Dan Cederholm

Thanks very much to everyone that came and participated in the talk and in barcamporlando this year. I had a great time meeting people and sharing ideas (and sarcastic comments). Feel free get in touch with me if you have any questions or just want to say “Hi”.

I learned how to knit! (you can learn to knit). It’s pretty neat. I’ve taken apart my scarf three times or so but now I think it’s good to keep going. There are few different knitting techniques and I was trying them out in quick succession. This got a little confusing so I am just going to stick with the basic garter knit for now, which you knit both sides instead of alternating between purling and knitting.

I also went to the store and got some bamboo knitting needles and I like them. I think I may switch to using the circle knitting needles but I’ve yet to figure that out yet.

Oh and if you didn’t know, they even have luxury yarns! Cashmere even! But I’m waiting to invest in that till I can knit something worth it.

There are also extreme knitters these days. One group of them plays a game, the name of which I can’t remember, but it sort of like this: People register on some website or something, and they put their address and sock size. Then they pick someone to “kill” that is also a player in the game. The way you “kill” someone is to knit them a pair of socks in their size and mail them to them. When they receive the socks, they are “dead”. So the fastest knitters can “kill off” everyone else, last one alive wins. Your socks are in the mail!

I’ve been doing a lot of research for a presentation I’m giving at BarCampOrlando2 in April. There is a ton of super interesting things going on in the Semantic Search space right now. Yahoo! just announced a new Yahoo! Search open platform which will have support for a number of semantic web standards.

Think of sites like LinkedIn that are loaded with microformats and now think of your search results loaded with that informations. Currently meta data provides some useful information to search engines about the content of a page. Semantic Web standards provide even richer information about the page contents and it’s relationship to other content.

Over the next year this space is going to become the focus of marketing departments that have tapped the potential of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and are looking for a new SEM (Search Engine Marketing) strategy. The need for experts with the technical expertise to understand semantic standards and how to implement them and at the same time are able to communicate effectively with marketing teams and understand their goals is grow tremendously. If you are the technical lead in a marketing team, you should pay attention to whats happening here.

While the above is really interesting I think I’m much more excited about the potential for mashups that do really handy stuff with all this semantic data. Woohoo!

I recieved a phone call from the younger of my two older brothers today. “Hey Kevin, it’s Brian. Whats up man?” he asked in a voice jaded from confusion. “I was thinking about you the other day so I just wanted to call and say Hi”, the tone of his voice telling me he wanted me to know he was still alive; yet not certain I cared. My hesitancy to speak and the surprise in my voice surely didn’t ease his nervousness. I tried to tell him I loved him but he may have hung up the phone to fast to hear me.

Today I was reminded of what might possibly be the saddest thing in my life. I’m sorry you lost your dignity Brian. I’m sorry that happened to you. I wish I could give it back. I wish I could of protected you. I wish I could help you. I’m sorry I couldn’t.

I don’t know what’s harder, to have someone you love die, or to have someone you love loose their self esteem, dignity, and sense of worth; and then their mind. That’s like being dead without the peace. He was a good person once. He really was. He made everyone laugh.

I setup a google calendar of the schedule for barcampmiami

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=paa02dt1priqb2vne4io2tr0d0%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/New_York

So finally after Sean, Elliot, and I did some hard work redesigning the site from the ground up, we have launched!

I personally am very excited about the new design and look forward to the continued improvements we have planned over the next few weeks.

Also the 2008 Future of Web Apps conference and BarCampMiami2008 are rapidly approaching, only one more day!

We are posting screencasts of the presentations we give at BarCampMiami on our personal blogs and at the Statiksoft Blog.

Topics we plan to cover include:

• Web Development and Distributed Revision Control - Elliot
• Optimizing MySQL Now! - Sean
• Introduction to ReviewBoard - Kevin
• Modding Ubuntu using PPA on Launchpad - Elliot

It’s hard to say what things are gonna be like 250+ are registered for BarCampMiami and there should be about 50 demos. I’m getting there early to make sure I get a spot.

We will be posting pictures from the two days of fun and code at Flickr so check them out.

On another important note BarCampOrlando2008 registration opens on Thursday Feb 28th. Don’t forget or you’ll be sorry. It’s going to top last year for sure with two days of mayhem in downtown Orlando. I know what I’m presenting on, do you?

See you in Miami…

So I was working on my schedule making application tonight. Fun stuff. Frustrating at times since I’m new but very fun for the most part.

I ran into a problem when I was trying to extend the Auth application that is bundled with Django. I was adding some more fields via a profile model or really changing some I had already added and obviously my database sync got jacked because of that. It’s pretty simple to fix, it was just late when I started to try and figure it out so more painful.

I keep meaning to write a post on howto add client side form validation to ExpressionEngine forms (e.g. Contact Form) but haven’t had time. There is a post out there talking about how to do it with prototype. I used Sean’s excellent MC-Validation so I was going to write it on how to do it with that. Hopefully I’ll get around to it sooner than later.

Trying to have the new Statiksoft site up by end of the month. Just need to find some time to hammer on it.

I have had so much Project Management these past few weeks. Meetings, meetings, and more meetings. I start to forget that I actually can be quite productive and build things if I’m not constantly preparing for meetings and trying to piece in development work in half hour increments.

1 day = 25 pages

At the beginning of the day the site was at best 15% complete. At the end it’s more like 90%.

You know for being as new to ExpressionEngine as I am, and even though I would change the way I did a lot of stuff in my templates, I built some good stuff into those. Today I found myself styling headers exactly the way I wanted them styled, with out styling them, just taging them from memory with the header tag I thought applied. And amazingly enough my mind 4 months ago agreed because they showed up styled exactly how they should be. Isn’t that an extra little perk.

MyEasySchedule and OTSBmusic.com are on for the evening.