Straylight Run

I am nothing if not timely. 

Last month, Chris Shiflett proposed an excellent blog revival idea, wherein I am to write a blog in the month of March about why I like blogs.  Of the ones I managed to read, I liked this “Ideas of March” the best. As for me, well, we are halfway through April – but I started this draft in March?  Here were the rules:

1. Write a post called Ideas of March.
2. List some of the reasons you like blogs.
3. Pledge to blog more the rest of the month.
4. Share your thoughts on Twitter with the #ideasofmarch hashtag.

So here goes…

Way before I had a technology blog, I had a blog about local issues.  Local politics, sports, development, you name it.  I started that blog because I had a lot of opinions about development that was happening around me and issues that were balloted, and I couldn’t rob the world of my enlightened positions by keeping them to myself.   Blogs allow anyone with something to say to say it.

Blogs are ultimately social.  Before there were tweetups, there were blogger meetups. And it is very easy to have something to talk about when introducing yourself to someone (“Hey, I really liked your blog about…”).  Twitter has taken that “breaking the ice” concept to new levels, but it I’d much rather have someone come up to me and say that they’ve read my blog rather than say that they follow me.

Blogs are written, and writing is a good skill to practice.  If I have to write to explain something, then I have to know it well.  And with practice, the explanation gets better and clearer. Then other thoughts get better and clearer.  Then the world just gets better and clearer.

Oh, and blogs contain a crapload of useful information that solve all sorts of problems, or just spread interesting news.

In summary, I like blogs because:

1. They give everyone a voice.
2. They help people be more social.
3. They help me improve my writing.
4. They contain a crapload of useful information and news.

To round off the requirements, I pledge to blog more in this month of March, er – how about I just pledge to blog more?  And hopefully my RSS tweeter should get out the hashtag in the title.

🙂

A coworking trend is sweeping the nation and I am involved in bringing it to Cincinnati.  I don’t know if I’ve ever undertaken something that requires so much time and effort outside of my day job before (except for Zipscene, which subsequently became my day job).  But we’ll take it slowly and see where it goes.

One of the most successful and respected coworking space (from what I have gathered on the interweb anyway) is Independents Hall in Philadelphia. Fortunately, in true coworking spirit, they have done a great job of blogging about their progress and I have been leaning heavily on it as a resource. 

But enough of that for now.  I want to save some of this for the Cincinnati Coworks blog itself, whenever I get around to setting it up.

Some other coworking resources.

• Coworking on Wikipedia
• The coworking wiki
• The coworking buzz

I was browsing through some junk mail the other day, when I came across an ad for this INCREDIBLY ADVANCED photo storage device. If you’ve already seen the TV commercial for Wallet Pix^TM, showing a bunch of older women showing pictures of their grandchildren to each other on this thing, then you know what I’m talking about. I mean, WOW!

This thing is thicker than an iPod and most phones, probably so it can hold UP TO 58 PHOTOS!  That’s like… a ZILLION photos! I’ll never be able to fill up that kind of storage.  AND it comes with a built-in stand, for, you know, when you want to display family pictures on your end table on a screen that’s smaller than a credit card.  Act now!  Only $19.99!

Well, works was the first industry conference I ever attended other than Ohio Linuxfest, and the first conference of any kind since like ACM Sigmod 2000.  (Wow, that was 8  years ago.)  I had a blast and learned a lot.  I even learned about some things related to PHP.

Here are the talks I attended:

• The Future Is Not Yet Widely Distributed (Intro To Git)
• Map, Filter, Reduce – In The Small And In The Cloud
• You Look You Could Use Some REST
• Exploring Artificial Intelligence With Python
• Extending Existing Web Services With SMS And XMPP
• Get Soaked: Streams, an In-Depth Look
• Test Drive Your Development Process

The most interesting one for me, uh, emotionally was probably the AI talk.  Brings me back to my days in SB.  The most useful topic which I could probably put to use at work tomorrow was the SMS/XMPP talk.

I managed to make it downtown one night, and got to meet some new people.

The last highlight I’ll mention were the Pecha Kucha talks on Thursday night.  It was interesting and a ton of fun.  The open bar didn’t hurt either.

See a few more photos from php|works 2008.

Yours truly is presenting at this year’s php|works 2008 conference in Atlanta, GA.  The talk is entitled: “Optimising The Front-End Using YSlow And PHP In A Continuous Integration Environment.” (I prefer the Queen’s English in this case.)

Now, I’ve never even attended a conference of this size, much less presented at one.  So this will be interesting to say the least.  I’m filled with a range of emotions ranging from trepidation to excitement (which is true of most of the things in my life of late.)  I also hope to meet some of the PHP bloggers I read regularly.

But I feel ready.  I gave this talk in April to OINK-PUG.  The one for this week is virtually the same.  Then, for practice, I also gave the talk to the Columbus and Indianapolis PHP meetups in the last two weeks.

Slides for the talk are in the next post.