Rather than relying on external sites, services and aggregators, I’m going to try and use my blog as the dumping ground for the meta I speweth into the river. I realize that there is no silver bullet or perfect solution for this, but I’m hoping that with a few new tools, APIs, services, and techniques, I can piece together a reasonably complete archive. Once I have the archive, I can continue work on the LifeSplicing Engine I conceived a few years back.
Just an early sketch from a couple years ago.
To start, I’m looking at the Lifestream WP plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lifestream/) to see how many services I can pipe in for free. For services, sites, and data sources that don’t readily make themselves available, I’ve got a few ideas I want to try using some RSS/ATOM/OPML trickery to normalize the floe.
This is likely going to be a very messy, noisy, and disruptive exercise. Please forgive any unwanted noise I spill into the river and remember that you can always block/delete me from your social graph if I become too much of an annoyance.
Happy 4th of July!!! We’ll be streaming live all weekend. Come join in the fun and watch the fireworks over Lake Union. This stream has a pretty clear view of the fireworks barge.
The hashtag for this party/event is #july4eastlake and we’ll also entertain the Friendfeed crew in this new group I just created: http://friendfeed.com/july4eastlake
My day started at Zoka Coffee in the University District.
Coffee, breakfast, and some light coding / app config. Then bailed for home, which is where I’m at right now. As it’s a holiday weekend, where many our out squeezing in one last extended summer weekend, I’m pretty well tied up with the reality that are my unavoidable deliverables. I’ve got no problem spending my weekend this way, as I know I am working hard towards something much bigger. So with that, here’s a list of what I’ve got on tap this Labor Day weekend.
What are you all doing? @infinitelymeta me on Twitter or *Like* this post on Friendfeed to get in on the conversation. That’s where I tend to hang out on socnets these days.
Happy Labor Day everyone!
Brian’s Uber List
New range/oven delivery for unit 2214 (one of my new tenants stove broke so I replaced it with this:
Put out For Rent sign for my soon to be available 1BR apartment in Eastlake, Seattle WA 98102. It rents for $1400 and is the entire lower floor of an historic Victorian home that was built in 1908. An excellent spacious unit with great lighting. Email eastlakeassociates at gmail if interested or call 206.328.3379 and leave a message.
Java/JSF/AJAX – I’m putting the final interfaces and code tweaks in place for a project that I’ve spend a quarter working on. Final interfaces in place, but still have 75+ line item bug list. Need to go code complete by Monday evening to begin FTP transfer of Development VMware image from one side of our network to an internal only host. Still have A LOT of work ahead of me to finish this project and go into team only beta next week with Public Beta (internal corp net) on Sept 8.
Landscaping & trim to prep for fall. Luckily, I really enjoy this task. Especially when my 5.5 yr old nephew Logan joins me. He makes some pretty good coin and he’s a GREAT helper.
Working with my friend Thom, the Ichthyogenius on our latest project, Reef In A Box that we are looking to launch in the coming months.
Working on the YTranslate.us engine. Coding in PHP/mySQL/Python/etc. Toying with new SMS gateway (thanks to Mona’ Friendfeed post).
Meeting with contractor on some fix-r-up-r projects for 3 of my apts in preparation for Fall/Winter.
Looking for electrician to install some motion-sensor aware lighting in my back alley and in between my building to deal with my unwanted-persons-on-my-property challenge.
Water changes & general maintenance on my 300 gallon reef tank.
Prep/meet with GC on new reef tank project. Wait till you see what I’m going to build. It’s gonna pop!
Shade garden v2. Part of the landscaping stuff I suppose, but definitely worthy of mention.
Replace fire extinguisher in common area to be in compliance with recent Seattle City Fire Department inspection.
OMFG. I can’t muster the energy right now to capture the energy, passion, class, & inspiration that is Gnomedex. Until I come down off cloud 9, here’s where my attention’s currently at.
As I continue to juggle what is roughly the equivalent of three full time jobs, I’m starting to run up against that magic barrier that is the space – time continuum. I’m going through a significant amount of change right now at my day job, am having to go through an eviction process with one of my tenants (night job), and I’m still feverishly trying to get Infinitely Meta and YTranslate off the ground. Needless to say it consumes nearly every waking hour of my life. I’m not complaining, as I am already hyper-efficient in managing all of the things I CHOOSE to spend my precious time on.
I think right now I need to continue to focus, not lose track of what is most important, and constantly assess and re-assess my priorities in how I spend those 24 hours each and every day.
Tomorrow I have a VERY special meeting with one of my advisors who is going to give me a personal tour of what he is working on. I’ll take lots of pics, ask questions, and blog it when I get back. Then it’s off to the Tweetup and finally the Gnomedex 2008 kickoff.
Hopefully this torrential rain will let up soon. Currently looking strikingly similar to the Pineapple Express weather pattern that we had back in 1997. Time will tell. Personally, I don’t mind the rain. What I do mind are the CRAPPY Seattle drivers who seem to not know how to drive in it.
I predict this will be the buzzworld du jour today and in the weeks/months ahead. “Everything as a Service”. Makes perfect sense to me. Cloud computing, which really started to take off when Amazon launched it’s AWS platform, is here to stay.
Today, Techcrunch broke the news that they alluded to over the weekend. Essentially, a partnership between Intel, HP, Yahoo!, and a few others to build a new cloud computing platform to allow developers and researchers to test the next generation computing model.
This is a very important development that holds promise for Infinitely Meta, and the engines that we want to build and deploy to the cloud. Our original plans were to leverage Amazon’s AWS cloud and Google’s App Engine (and related sites/services) as the deployment vehicle for our engines, but this new project may trump both Amazon and Google. Remember that we can’t yet discount Microsoft, as they are also working on building their cloud under the Mesh umbrella.
As we continue to build our prototypes, we will likely deploy our engines to whatever cloud we feel will meet our needs. Most likely we will deploy our engines across all available clouds for the highest degree of fault tolerance and redundancy.
I find it VERY interesting that the last domain I registered was http://federatedclouds.com
After reading this conversation thread on Friendfeed, I started to comment, but did a quick cut and paste into this here blog post. What follows was my original comment (not posted) that I would like to expand upon here. Then I’d like to get your feedback on Friendfeed, Twitter, or whatever stream you like to post your comments to. I really could care less where you reply, just make it findable!
Regarding my use of Linked In -
“I must admit that I have a LI account, but I have not updated it in probably 6 years. I’ve been working with the same team for 8+ years, having weathered 4 M&A events and countless reorgs. I’ve come to ignore Linked In because after having gone through the first M&A event, the only time I would get Linked In email would be when friends are riffed and forced to move on to other new positions in the industry.”
*Expanding on comment here*
This became a recurring pattern after a while, where the only times I’d ever get email updates From Linked In were from people who were let go or less often just quit for other opportunities. I found myself trying to avoid accepting any of the “friend requests” or whatever their term is for adding people to your network, and I just stopped using it altogether.
I haven’t logged into my account in years and if you check out my profile, you’ll see that the last position I posted was “Senior Product Manager”, which was 2 companies and three job title’s ago.
I’m tempted to login to Linked In and update my profile, just so my stuff is accurate, but I have this recurring fear that all those people who tried to “friend” me and all of my CURRENT colleagues are going to come out of the woodwork and start picking my profile apart.
Many of my professional colleagues are not on Twitter, Friendfeed, or most of the other social networking sites I use regularly, and I’m not sure that I want them to “invade” the communities that I participate in outside of my dayjob.
I’m all for transparency, but I’m having a very hard time figuring out the right balance between personal vs my professional uses of these socnets.
What do you think? I’m very curious to hear what other people think and where I’ll find the most valuealbe advice.
I’m in countdown to vacation mode, which requires hyper-productivity on my part. Tying up loose ends with Eastlake Associates LLC, digesting major org changes at my dayjob, and moving rather quickly with startup activity around Infinitely Meta.
I’ve finally got some talent working on my personal & corporate brand. Mad props going out to Sean Blake (aka @bluefox) who has graciously agreed to help with this effort. Here’s what he sent me after I briefed him on the idea / concepts behind Infinitely Meta. What do you think of the new logo/brand?
