halfdawn

The triathlon season officially runs from late March through October. For much of the country, fall and winter actually present themselves, and play a major role in a triathlete’s training outdoors. For those of us in much of Texas, however, that is not really an issue. Part of me is excited by the fact that I can head out on the bike at 8AM on a Saturday in January and only require arm warmers and maybe some thin glove liners to be warm for a few hours. But the other part of me really likes the idea of a proper winter, with snow, icicles and strange winter skies.

So, this weekend, we hit both days hard, with me having a good long ride on Saturday and a long trail run on Sunday with E and friends. That, I enjoyed, although with the extra 10 degrees, it was what is best described as an…omen…of the summer to come. So, I will be basking in the chilly weather that remains over the next couple of months, and desperately trying to recall it when July rolls around. Please don’t tell me that you are tired of the cold, because I guarantee you will be much more tired of the heat in just a few months and wishing you had that biting chill on your cheeks when you walk out of your house in the morning. I know I will.

‘Nuff said. On to 2008!

Tonight was the fourth or fifth time in recent months I’ve been to the climbing gym after a hiatus of several years. It has been fun, but it has also been hard. Tonight was also the first night I went simply to boulder, do some laps and just get a sense of where I stand (pun intended) on the wall. Elisa has been coming with me the last few times, along with our friends Katherine and Ashley. Tonight I flew solo. Elisa was tired after a hard week of end-of-semester projects and tests. It’s like coming home again, but also like starting over. I’m lucky to be in a place where some of the faces are still the same, and where you literally recognize a lot of the holds, albeit in infinitely different route configurations. We’ll see how it goes over the next few months. I would love to be back at Reimer’s soon, and before the rock turns drippy come summer.

Join local (and not so local) Facebook app developers and app fans at SMU for a full weekday event charging through ideas, implementation and realties of getting your Facebook app out there for one and all. See the signup page for the latest info on speakers and program:

http://facebookdallas.eventbrite.com/

Event Info from Facebook:
Event: Facebook Developer Garage Dallas
“fb platform peresentations & app expo”
What: Convention
Host: Blake Burris
When: Tuesday, November 13 at 9:45am
Where: SMU - Umphrey Lee Center

To see more details and RSVP, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=754100482&k=Y3F625P5323MZ1BBUGWZQ

Ron Hall put together another successful Dallas Typo3 Users Group today. A few new people showed up, and I got some good suggestions on moving some extensions forward, as well as an opportunity for us to get possible user experience/usability involvement on some core changes.

http://barcamp.org/DemoCampDallas2

DemoCampDallas 1 was great and drew a good-sized crowd to see some of the most innovative work and innovative thinkers in Dallas. DemoCampDallas2 is coming up on Monday, April 23, so make an effort to get there and go signup on the wiki. You won’t be dissapointed.

‘Nuff said.

This week I’ve been trying out Mind Maps as a device for managing all of the people resources (and their skills) I am using right now on all our projects, as well ones I am in conversations with. I really like the format, and the tool I am using makes it very easy to extend and edit. I’m new to mind maps but not new to project management, information architecture and all the fields that utilize organizational tools, both visual and otherwise. This may make a believer of me.

I can’t stop gushing about Yugma. (Thanks to Blake at Voodoo Ventures) It’s finally broken the barrier for inexpensive, interactive screen sharing between Macs and PCs. It’s fast,  it works, it’s cheap and seems to have all the core features of the big guys like Webex and GoToMeeting. It amazes me that it took so long for someone to develop a product like this. Java has been there all along, VNC has worked across platforms for years, and Citrix, whose technology is behind both GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting, has had a Mac Winframe client that works fine for years. Yugma provides a conference calling number with each session and in the slightly more expensive paid version (starting at $10/month and $100/yr.) allows shared control, session recording, etc. I’ve heard that Leopard iChat is supposed to have screen sharing but nobody has made it this easy to share between platforms and the new iChat won’t either. Use iChat for video and Yugma for screen sharing and you have a home run for remote conferencing, UX/Developer team reviews, QA sessions and more. My only problem with this service is the name. It is difficult for me to remember the last few days whether it’s yugma, yumga or something else, and my brain doesn’t seem to easily wrap around that word. I appreciate the sanskrit reference and think it’s cool, though.

I’ve been using Twitter for several months, along with several of the local Dallas webnorati. Come SXSW in Austin last week, Twitter went supernova. It’s somewhat surreal to get immediate, alternative perceptions of the same panel, or event, via your phone, in realtime. The brains were abuzz with new ideas, and my own experience was flavored by all of the mobile panels I attended (which were great, by the way.) Anyhoo, with a couple of buddies and one new friend, hiding out form the rain at Ironworks BBQ, I brought up the idea of using Twitter almost as a command-line UI to do all sorts of things, at a SSH/VNC level. Think about extending the ‘D’ type commands across the entire alphabet! Today, I’ve seen the combined mention of both Twitter and home automation in the same article over at Ars Technica, which also references this article by Gordon Meyer Now that’s what I’m talking about! I’m still very interested in exploring this idea further, perhaps even connecting Twitter + iChat + Applescript + Automator?

Post-Apollocamp, Adobe released the Apollo SDK and runtimes for Macintosh and Windows today. The majority of airtime has been positive, but there are a few dissinters so far regarding the introduction of another locked environment. At a minimum, there promises to be an interesting game to watch over the next 18 months between Microsoft’s WPF/E and Apollo. Microsoft recently released Expressions Blend as well. I am very interested in finding a project to develop in Apollo for. Nothing like diving into a new project to leanr new technology. How will this affect the UX side of things?

Innerecho is an official sponsor of BarCampAustin II. It’s shaping up to be awesome. Kudos to Whurley, CKS and everyone else for keeping up the momentum. We’re big fans of the BarCamp spirit.

I was just reading Ryan Stewart’s Universal Desktop blog. He was dropping a little knowledge about Adobe Creative Suite 3 and how it may be much more integrated than everyone expects, making the designer/developer workflow that much more efficient in the production of RIAs. I find myself pretty excited by the one-two punch of Intel native + RIA focus/convergence.

We’re starting to take a serious look this week at Aptana as our general team IDE. It’s looking pretty good so far. It’s built on, and optionally works within, Eclipse. It’s also free and there is a huge amount of video content at Aptana.tv. More later.

I think one of the core issues around really accelerating the the Amazon Mechanical Turk ecosystem and HITs is the adoption and uptake by both HITs operators and developers in general. The most important activity that can happen right now is not the HIT creation itself, but the creation of drivers to the service itself. This means creating tools or ideas that create and evangelize mass awareness of the Turk and AWS. When the ecosystem is there and when there are enough people doing the work, some amazing ideas and solutions can be implemented. The other side of this is encouraging developers themselves to begin thinking about “humans” as an optional point in traditional software business logic/workflow. To be continued…

Refresh Dallas February originally had Mike Culver, from Amazon Web Services scheduled to present, but he had to reschedule. No worries. We’ve got some serious pinch-hitters lined up to throw down an AWS mashpit/roundtable. If you need enlightenment on AWS, come one, come all to spin some ideas on S3, EC2 and The Amazing Mechanical Turk.

UPDATE: We drew a great crowd of around 30 people and got some great discussion around the main services going. CKS, Adam Keys and Bill Burcham really stepped up. I hope some new brains were fired up by the possibilities.

After a great Dallas kickoff last week, it looks like local instigator Christopher St. John is putting DemoCampDallas 2 in motion already. A lot of great people and ideas made the trek to Southlake and Sabre Labs (thanks, Jay.)

Dallas has been burning with activity in the social media/Web*.* space in the last year or so. BarCampDallas, in January of 2006, somehow managed to bring out a huge amount of people with similar interests and made great , lasting connections for many of us.Whether it’s geography or lack of common gathering areas, it has always seemed difficult to do so in the past. For me, it’s been a great way to learn about a lot of the innovation and innovators in Dallas. Seeing that there are people as passionate as I am about exploring new ideas in technology, user experience and media is exciting.

DemoCampDallas1, on February 15 at Sabre Labs, will be another generation of BarCamp goodness. Whereas BarCamp is definitely about the participation, DemoCamp is about the show. A tiny version of the DEMO conference, it’s about showing what you’ve got, quickly and succinctly. Perhaps it can be considered a warm-up for that pitch you are itching to make. It’s free, easy to use, and well worth the visit. No participation required, but input always welcome.

Get all the info and signup at the DemoCampDallas1 page.

Those of us deep in software or the web know how easy it is to be confused for a tech support genius…”Oh! You do computers!”…and those inevitable calls from family to help. They can be painful, agonizing calls.

I saw this little app/service awhile ago and thought it might be a perfect fast way to do tech support for family or friends. Well, I tried it out today as my sister needed help getting her WiFi connection working properly from here in Dallas. She lives in Austin. She was able to connect on the wire, but no luck with the wireless. CoPilot is mighty simple to use. I just entered my payment info for a $5/24 hrs. daypass and called my sister. CoPilot gave me a code and I read it over the phone to her. I also downloaded a tiny app to my system. She entered the code in her browser, downloaded an app and seconds later I was looking at her screen. I know at this point you are saying Remote Desktop! VNC! but really, this is for on-the-spot, instant support with people who probably don’t have any of the above installed. The nicest feature by far was that, when I had her unplug her ethernet cable, it automatically reconnected the next time an IP address was acquired, whether by Ethernet or Wireless. Very nice and well worth the $5. It is produced by Fog Creek Software, the makers of Fogbugz, which has steadily gotten to be a very nice issue tracking system, but that’s another post…

Another event completely unrelated to the IA Summit is Coachella. 2007 looks to be a very independent mix of big and small artists. Previous year’s headliners included the likes of Massive Attack (who I regretfully missed, but did catch in Austin), Depeche Mode, New Order, NIN and others. Madonna even made a showing last year, making some question how corporate the event had become. This year’s lineup, just announced, heralds the ?temporary? return of Rage Against The Machine, and a slew of indie artists seen at places like Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza in 2006. Bands usually continue to be added up until the start date, so I look forward to see who else pops up. Anyone else from Dallas/Texas headed out there?

The IA Summit is looking pretty good again this year. I haven’t been able to go in the past but I think it’s looking like a good idea to go this year, particularly as we are starting to do some innovative stuff in several different areas, and I am beginning to do more UX management versus tactical work. I think there will probably be a strong Dallas contingent as well.

Raven passed this interesting meme on to me, sparking my guilt over not paying attention to this blog lately, while gushing over Vox. So, for anyone interested…my list of 5 Things you may not know about me.

1. I was a mobile DJ for several years all over Texas, with an agent, self-supporting my early web development career.

2. My grandfather was in the army and was stationed in Los Alamos, New Mexico when it was still the “Secret City.”

3. Until my parents gave me my first Mac (LCII) as a high school graduation present, the majority of my life was spent doing art and writing and that is where I always imagined I would be, not computers or business. No regrets. It all connects nicely.

4. I once had a couple of bit parts in an independent western flick. I actually have an IMDB identity.

5. I once lived above a bar in a small town in Colorado, but I never actually drank anything there as I was underage. It was really cheap quarters.

So, I’ll pass this to…Jim, John, Blake, Steve and Jay

Our friend from Mexico City, Desiderio, popped into town for several days of helicopter certifications and training. We caught up with him near Alliance airport. We had several great hours of shared broken-Spanish and broken -English conversations, with a little Portuguese and French thrown in for good measure. He and his wonderful family, who were also on vacation, took us on a perfect night on the town in Puerto Vallarta when we there in August, including a visit to the Malecon and La Bodegita del Medio (a Cuban restaurant with excellent Mojitos.) Tonight we realized we both met in the middle with our high school French classes under our belts. Suerté mañana, señor!

See the news. It just makes sense…the wind never stops where we all used to go hiking and camping and taught ourselves how to rock climb - about 20 miles northwest of Snyder. I was too unconnected to get a viable wind power business model going, but always imagined the big turbines out there when I was a kid. I would still like to hear from anyone doing anything or interested in doing something along the lines of workforce retraining (for traditional energy - oil and gas) employees to transition to wind and solar skills.

A few of us got together for a little sendoff for Raven. John was in town from Portland, so I hopefully hooked up a couple of great guys who share a love of some great coffee in PDX, not to mention finally introducing Elisa and the other John to Raven. We met at out collective favorite Thai place in town - Thai Lotus. Blake attended as well as he and Raven have been sharing some office space together near Deep Ellum for a few weeks.

The crew at Omni Group released the first public beta of their new Project Management app this evening. Looks very nice so far! Task lists behave similarly to OmniOutliner, which I am a big fan of. Blake at CocoaRadio also just pushed out his interview with Greg Titus tonight. I love Omni. More later….

Daniel Eran has a great round-up of several gestural and alternative interface components built-in to the Mac experience. I’m very interested in getting a hack/project going around the idea of making a fully-functional and useful gestural prototype application of some sort with only what’s already available on OS X and perhaps a bit of scripting. It’s something Ive been thinking about for years and am excited about what is possible right now, not to mention just a few years out.

Well, I don’t know if I will be able to get a hard copy easily, but the latest edition of this little guide is like gold for finding the real gems out there - from one of the coolest record stores on earth. Amoeba Music on Haight always gets a visit from us when we’re in SFO.

Inhabitat is a great site for keeping abreast of eco-friendly modern design and general sustainable living topics. They launched their summer series today with a short list of issues around locating your home and the LEED standard. nterestingly, and ironcially, the first LEED certified building in the US just opened north of Dallas in McKinney. We chanced upon it one day while attending Angela’s sister’s grand opening down the road, but had seen it mentioned in the DBJ. I think it’s great that someone in the DFW area is moving an idea like this forward.

Just found this great site on Collin County Trails and surrounding areas.
There are a lot more trails and nature areas around Dallas than one would expect. Arbor Hills is great, and nearby. Cedar Hill and Joe Pool are a bit of drive, but I’m eventually finding more places like these listed in Collin County. I love new trails.