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The Beginning of Something New, FOOD!

May 13, 2011
Social Space
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Ok, so I’m sure about 90% of geeks & coders are also foodies at the same time. We all like to eat. A good many of us also like to partake upon a beer, whiskey, scotch, mixed drink, or all of them in a sitting once in a while. What am I leading up to? That’s simple, I’d love to get geeks together; .NETters, Rubiests, Railers, PHPers, Objective-Cers, Cloud/Grid/Utility Computing, Netops, Devs of this, Devops or any of a host of interests to have dinner, grab brunch on the weekend, or simply a cup of coffee. Now, the hard part, as it always is when herding cats is to get them herded at the same time to the same place. That’s when I fell into a thought, why not have multiple meals during the month and pick various days and times so people can meet up at their choice of time each month. With that in mind, here’s my first sample set of options, we can all vote, and then I’ll setup and calendar and get things arranged for meet ups. If you have food choices and such, let me know and we’ll do another vote for each meet. That way we don’t get bored or tired of the same place.

Here’s the schedule options, please vote:

…and please do, retweet to your fellow Seattleite Geek or Nerd.

Improving the Time Suck of Social Media

December 23, 2010
My Updates, Rants, Social Space
2 Comments

Social media, albeit being a great boon in many regards, has also become a massive time suck for almost everyone involved!  Sure, news is up to date, down the the minute, almost real-time with every single little bit of craziness there to read about right now!  The t0-read, to-do, to-make, to-code lists all keep getting longer and longer and longer…

…and then…

Crickets.

That’s right, you might as well be listening to crickets.  Social media is killing many productive people’s productiveness.  I’ve decided I’m going to take a break, of some sort, just not sure what kind.  Maybe I’ll schedule myself some “social media time” or something.  Similar to “TV Time” for kids.  If only parents were better about that, maybe social media wouldn’t be the ADD person’s massive time blow that it is.  Well, as I write this I’ve determined the following.

Twitter

I’m going to time box the activity and use specific tools that enable me to effectively use the social media services.  Twitter, that needs to be done on a PC with Seesmic or something that allows me to truly and quickly interact.  None of this half-assed mobile super phone poking about on the Blackberry, or twiddling about with Twitter on the iPad.  Those other tools just don’t allow the speed and ease of viewing links and other such things that using a full on PC with power allows.  I want to get in, see what’s up, filter the crap I don’t want to read out of the way, tweet, and get the hell out of there.  I want bus time, walking time, and other activities back for other uses.  I want to just read a book, or just take a walk again.  No twittering while riding or walking anymore.  Done.  Gone.  Zilch.

My time box at this time is going to be limited to 15 minutes a day.  In the morning and in the evening sometime.  In that time I have the following things I need to straighten out;

  • Get synced up on who I am and am not following, and review my list of recent followers to see who I should be following.
  • Find a better way to track tweets.  Lists are useful, but there needs to be something more.  Maybe Paper.li or something of that sort.

Both of these tasks need knocked out with the time boxing I’ve allocated.

Facebook

This I’ve already relegated to minimal use.  I might use it about 15 minutes to 2 hrs a week.  I’m actually amazed at this fact.  Simply, I have a Facebook Profile because one kind of needs to have one being in the technology industry.  Also it provides a great avenue for keeping in touch with people that I might otherwise not be in touch with.  It’s good to know people I grew up with are doing well, providing a little morale boost here and there.  :)  Plus, one never knows when a blast from the past might turn out to be a great friend, asset, or network contact here in the present!

Time boxing for Facebook is going to be limited to 5-10 minutes per day.

Blogging Here @ CompositeCode.com or elsewhere…

This is something that I find truly useful.  Not the time suck like these other web apps.  So really I’m not going to time box myself or set some arbitrary limit.  I am going to continue striving to have at minimum a blog entry per week.  One that is partially useful, even if it is just to review what I’ve done for the week, conferences or meetups I’ve attended, or something of that sort.  Hopefully I’ll be able to maintain some actual useful code how-to, cloud computing write ups, and other legit, honest to goodness, readable entries as well.  :)

So no time box for blogging, this is something I truly love to do.  Write, write, and more writing.

With that I’m off to find some time tracking software to help myself stay in the time boxes I’ve set.  Cheers, and happy holidays!

Twitter Peoplez

July 9, 2010
Social Space
2 Comments

I always see these #ff or #followfriday lists on Twitter.  I figured I’d put together a list, then I ended up creating another list, and another.  It appeared I was past my 140 character limit so here are those lists of Twitterers to follow.

Amazon Web Services Twitterers

Windows Azure Twitterers

Silverlight Twitterers

.NETters (No particular groupings…)

With that list I ponder – anyone have any additional suggestions for follows in these or other software development related areas?

Cool Places, Things, and Groups in Seattle So Far?

May 27, 2010
Social Space
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I am new to Seattle from the "I live here" perspective.  I have travelled here and visited more than a few times.  The last week or so I have been wandering a bit and checking out various groups such as Web Analytics Wednesday and possibly will check out the Startup Drinks Group in Ballard this Friday.  All in all I’m happier with my move from Portland to Seattle than I originally thought I’d be (because Portland is seriously awesome too).  Seattle is surprising me in a few ways that I actually didn’t expect, one of them is the tech scene presence is a little bit better than I originally thought it was (good job tech scene pplz).

There are a few points I am still curious about.  Maybe some readers could help me out with the following:

  1. Where and when do the people interested in Saas, Cloud Computing, and similar topics get together, hang out, have drinks, or otherwise?  I haven’t found too much going on around these topics.
  2. Ok, I have found a number of awesome coffee shops to hang out at on those days were I don’t go into the office.  So does anyone else have any suggestions for cool places to pull out the laptop and crank on some code and such?
  3. I really dig hearing about all the awesome startups in Seattle, which Seattle 2.0 is pretty awesome in relating, but is there anything else I should check out?

That’s my burning curiosities at the moment, so if any of your dear readers have any thoughts on these things, or know of anything please do leave a comment or three.  : )

I moderate, so if they don’t show up immediately it will eventually.  Thanks!

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