Day: September 5, 2008

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Did Chris Brogan just steal my PULSE?!

Did Chris Brogan just steal my metaphor of Twitter to a pulse in answering his own question? No attribution!

My answer: it gives the web a pulse, a voice, and connects me to your brilliance when I need it. You are the value.
29 minutes ago from txt

I jest. You know, the great minds thing. Since I caught the Twitter bug, I have been trying to answer the question "What is it? What does it do for me?" Recently I cemented my thoughts in Can you rely on Twitter for breaking news? Ultimately, I decided to explain Twitter as a pulse. Generally speaking, the more focused the people you follow are on a subject matter coupled with a larger number of those people, the more rapidly you will know about matters concerning that subject.

For example, If you follow a whole bunch of people who are really obsessed with dry ice and that’s all they really talk about, then you will know through Twitter anything that happens in the field of dry ice as quickly as it becomes public.

If you follow random people who all talk about different things, you’ll get noise but you will still get a feeling, a sense, of the commonalities of those people, a pulse. In my case, I follow:

  1. friends and family
  2. people in Knoxville
  3. some breaking news sources
  4. the movers and shakers in the technology world
  5. ColdFusion and PHP developers (yeah yeah…some of you .NET guys too)

As Chris Brogan and I came to the same conclusion, I believe more and more people will begin explaining Twitter as a pulse on a topic even if that topic is the world.

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Oops

Lost my temper with the twelve year old because he acted like a 12 year old boy. No! Not that. He was supposed to be watching the little ones while I did some programming and worked on the plumbing but he got drawn into his Playstation2, the one I told him not to play. I demonstrated anger, made 2 children cry, and now everyone (mostly Mom) is justifiably mad at me. Sometimes I wish I could roll the clock back just a few minutes and have a little do-over. Hugs, humility and apologies went all around. Tears were brushed away. But the damage is done. Self-flagellation ahead.

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Lessons of the night

In my plumbing exploits, which really should be documented on video, I’ve learned the following:

  • Brass fittings strip easily.
  • No matter how sure footed you think you are, when doing the splits between the top of a bar stool and a two by four bracing the hallway drywall suspended over a stack of paint cans and a mop bucket, applying torque to a monkey wrench that is above your head will cause you to fall down.
  • Swinging a two foot steel bar with your left hand against a drop forged pipe wrench (often mistaken for a monkey wrench) being held with your right hand is a mistake if you are not left handed.

Last time I did this, this plug came out much easier. Surely I’m doing something wrong.

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Evening is upon us – Football!

Bearden High School has a home game tonight. Sarah will be demonstrating her excellence. Last year we discovered it was neither cost effective or prudent to take the whole family so Cathy and I take turns going to the games to support the teamflags. Alright, usually Cathy goes. So tonight’s evening chaos is brought to you by Liquid Plumber, The BHS Band Boosters, McDonald’s, and the RedCross babysitting training. Participants in tonight’s chaos are Amy, Evan, Noah, and Dad. Absence from this evenings show is Tommy who stayed at the college to chill with his hommies, Sarah who when not flirting with Zak is spinning flags on the field, and Mom who is taking pictures of Sarah flirting with Zak. Mom shoves down a McDonald’s cheese burger and is out the door leaving Noah instructions to get the trash out of the kitchen then help Dad with Amy and Evan. Amy is told to help Dad with Evan. Mom leaves. Noah goes to the back of the house and plays video games. Dad blinks at the trash. Amy and Evan erupted into loudness contests. Dad tries to figure out how to divide time between refereeing Amy and Evan, working on the tub, and coding web applications. It’s quiet upstairs… too quiet…

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Coder’s High

I’ve got that coder’s high right now. I’m in the zone. Yet the clock still speeds by. I can feel the seconds tick in the pulsing throbbing of my wrists as I type at top speed.

Update: Eek! Technologies merging. I just tried to use JavaScript syntax in PHP and when I went to look it up in the PHP docs I searched for a ColdFusion function. May need to slow down just a bit!

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Milestone Rewards

How do you encourage yourself to reach a milestone? I know smoking programmers who give themselves a smoke break (7-15 minutes) when they accomplish a task. I don’t smoke, so I do a chore that doesn’t involve the computer. Today’s milestone breaks are brought to you by "Crack Plumbers, we’re just cheeky!" After Sarah did an art project involving rocks and the bathtub, our drain slower terribly. Now its stopped completely. This could be a coincidence. We have enough longhairs in this household to clog the public waste system so periodically I have to open the drain and pull out the alien creature that grows in there. It will be about 4 feet long, black, sluggy, and psuedo-intelligent. The most frightful thing I ever saw as a child was a Twilight Zone episode that involved a housewife vacuuming a dust ball out of her air ducts that turned out to be an alien creature that ate her. Since then I have never been fond of dust bunnies, air ducts, or alien looking snake-like gooey lengths of beyond description filth. However, I do want to bathe today…

So I just accomplished a very big deal on my current project involving combining functionality of two different parts of the application into a single page. It also involved altering the roles based security. Implementing roles based security on custom apps can be a time consuming pain in the neck. But fun! Time for my 7-15 minute break. Here creature creature!

Update: Pipes-1; Doug-0. Expect @cathymccaughan to report on my highly anticipated trip the emergency room during my next milestone break.

Update: Pipes-2; Doug-0. Done until Saturday.

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Send the Girls to BlogHer

Registration ends next week!

BlogHer has announced the desire to close registration next week. We’ve had our first contributor! We are a 7 person household and 6 of those people have blogs! (that doesn’t include Facebook and MySpace etc.) With BlogHer coming to Nashville I think Cathy and Sarah should go! I created a ChipIn to see if we could get them sponsored and two days ago we received our first contribution of $5! Awesome! Now if we can get 59 more people to do the same, the girls get to go! I think it will be some good bonding time for mom and daughter. I think they will have some great social networking opportunities with bloggers they only know in print. And I think they will come back excited to try new blogging tools, technologies and writing techniques they discover at BlogHer. Plus Barry will write snarky things about them!

Registration ends next week!