Recap of 2010 Resolutions

So luckily was on the same blog for a entire year, and did not have to go hunting for a database backup to find what my resolutions were last year.  http://wp.me/pxTzx-19

I have to say, I did pretty well, except for the first 3.  I was on a workout kick for a few months, but quickly became very busy and ultimately cold outside. There is always this year right?

I technically did start to learn a new programming language.  I started looking into Ruby on Rails for a project I am working on, and lets just say coming from the .NET world it is very confusing, because there is hardly ANY code to write.

Branching out concert wise was one of the best things I did this year.  I only saw three, but they were all awesome.  I did the yearly Dave run, along with seeing Butch Walker and a face melting Appleseed Cast concert.  Man do I want to see Low Level Owl vol. 1 & 2 again.

I have to say I had a excellent year.  I branched out and became a little more active in the Cleveland Tech community, from Give Camp to Startup weekend.  I would not be where I am and have the opportunities that have been presented to me over the past 2 months if I did not branch out into the Cleveland Tech community.

Look for my 2011 resolutions post soon. (ok maybe in the next week)

Cleveland Startup Weekend 2010

This past weekend I participated in Cleveland Start-up Weekend.  Yes it is Friday, and now just getting around to writing a post.  Lets just say there was a lot to catch up on at home for not being home for 3 days.

Start-up weekend was much like Give Camp with the work load and the schedule, but no sleeping in a tent.  Friday night started off with dinner prepared by Mary from The Good Fork (http://www.thegoodfork.net/) and all fresh ingredients provided by the Fresh Fork Market (http://www.freshforkmarket.com/).  After dinner pitches began for the work that needed to be done the rest of the weekend.

There was five pitches that were chosen by Cleveland Start-up Weekend, but ultimately two teams combined their resources.  The remaining teams were Hall Renters, DreamKomo (http://dreamkumo.com/), Fantasy Congress (), and QloudSitter (http://qloudsitter.com)  who I grouped up with.  The rest of Friday night, the QloudSitter team met and learned more about what the project was about.

Saturday morning was when the fun began.  We began working on a voice recognition service using Google Voice to implement into our project.  We quickly learned that Google Voice voice transcription was not very accurate.  As we were discussing how we wanted to proceed, John Sheehan from Twilio walked in the door and overheard the issue we were having.  John was awesome and set us up with a demo account to use, and helped us throw a really quick menu together for their phone application integration.  The rest of the day we spent working on the Twilio integration and started to build our database and work on behind the scenes code.  After a long day of coding what is better than a few seasonal ales and complaining about t-shirts?  I really can’t think of much.  I can’t forget to mention the other half of the team that handled scripting, shooting, and editing the video that was used in the final presentation.

Ah Sunday, the body begins to tell the brain that you need to sleep.  What did we do to overcome these feelings?  What any good coder would do, load up on caffeine.  The developers worked on putting together the layout of the site and also continuing integrating our concept with Twilio.  While the developers were finishing up the prototype, the business half of the group worked on fishing up the video and most importantly the presentation.

All of the sudden it was 5:30 and time for presentations.  QloudSitter was second in line and had a very solid presentation that equally focused on showing off our prototype.  Overall all 4 teams had fantastic ideas, but one could only win.  After a quick drive down the road to the Lean Dog boat for dinner.  Dinner was again provided by Mary from the Great Fork and the Fresh Fork Market.  As you can see, this was dinner!

After dinner the winner of Cleveland Startup Weekend was announced, and team QloudSitter won!  Group shot time with the trophy!

Since we won the Cleveland Start-up Weekend, we were able to enter the Global Start-up Battle with the Qloudsitter concept; however we did not place first.  What will be next for QloudSitter you ask?  The team is regrouping to continue to work on the QloudSitter concept.

I would like to thank all the sponsors this past weekend, the event organizers, Cleveland State, Lean Dog, and of course the awesome QloudSitter team!

Cleveland GiveCamp 2010

After 6 days of decompressing, I decided to stop being lazy and write about my experience at my first GiveCamp. What is GiveCamp you ask?  GiveCamp is a weekend long event where geeks code for charity.

The 2010 GiveCamp was hosted at LeanDog Software in downtown Cleveland.  LeanDog is located in the old Hornblowers restaurant right next to Burke Lakefront Airport.  Lets just say, working in the LeanDog offices was one of the most relaxing and serene settings I have ever worked in.  There was times when my brain needed a break, and being able to walk outside or go up to the top deck and look out over the lake was very relaxing.

We started at about 5:30pm on Friday and we finished up at about 8pm on Sunday.   The organizers were only expecting about 75 volunteers for the weekend and 15 non-profit projects.  It turns out, the Cleveland GiveCamp was the largest first time GiveCamp ever!  The final count was over 100 volunteers and 20 projects completed in just over 54 hours.

Going into this event, I was not sure what to expect.  I was expecting to not be able to contribute as much as others, but quickly found out that was not the case.  All the people I interacted with were very nice and helpful when needed.  I was on the team that worked on the Epilepsy Association’s website.  This non-profit had an existing website that needed updating.  Their existing site was created using FrontPage, and the contact from this non-profit was comfortable using this.  Since she was comfortable, we decided to keep her going down that path.  We moved her over to Visual Web Developer, and redesigned and wrote the site using straight HTML and CSS.  Myself and the other 2 teammates did a great job seeing as we are back-end hardware support and developers not designers.

Each non-profit had their own requirements, and the groups chose the technology based on those requirements.  There were several groups that chose WordPress to design the sites.  One team designed a iPhone application for Spaces Gallery in less than 54 hours!

During the presentation of the projects Mark Schumann really hit it home and stated “all of you have saved lives this weekend”.  The Suicide Prevention Alliance had their website redesigned and Mark was referring to the cost that they would had to have paid to a web design company.  GiveCamp allowed them to take the money that was going to be put towards their website and hire a new employee to help teens with their thoughts towards suicide.  The entire weekend, this thought never crossed my mind that we were actually saving lives.

Overall, this was an amazing experience and learning opportunity.  Will I do it next year you ask?  YES!  I am actually planning on going to the Pittsburgh GiveCamp in November.

Special thanks to all LeanDog and Burke Lakefront for giving us space to work and all the sponsors that contributed to keep us fed and caffeinated all weekend.

For more information on GiveCamp please visit the Cleveland GiveCamp site or the national GiveCamp site.

Your EULA For Social Media

Every social networking technology has some type of End User Agreement that indicates how that service should be used. In addition to the company providing a EULA, a user of these services should create their own.

The first term that you should be considered when creating your own EULA, is to not believe everything you read on the Internet, both on social media and on the Internet in general. Many of the people I follow on Facebook love to exaggerate or dubious posts. Do I fault these people for posting things like is? No! For me I understand that social media is a place to have fun. If you are looking for a serious place to talk, pick up a phone to call someone.

To go along with my first rule I believe that judging a person for their posts without knowing the person or keeping in contact with them. Since the social media playground is a place to have fun, judging posts should be forbidden. Say you personally do not know me or we have not talked in a long time and I post something in Twitter and you are a follower of mine. Contained in this tweet is a link to a video of a vertically challenged person getting beat up by another guy, your first thought should not be “Matt condones violence against any person that is vertically challenged”, where I would never condone such behavior. If you knew me as a person, I am lover not a hater.

Please NEVER misinterpret something someone may post even if you think you understand. This is a very dangerous thing to do. If you don’t understand something don’t interpret it which will inevitably lead to judging a person based on your incorrect assumptions.

To wrap this up, social media was created to follow people you know and may know in this ever crazy world. If you do not like, agree, with what someone is posting stop following them or contact the person to get the correct story.

Getting Close!

Today I got my email notification that my iPad has shipped!  YES!

Also iTunes 9.1 is out.  It is only a matter of days!

Do you still IM?

I have been wondering how many people still use IM, whether it is AIM, Google Talk or what not.  Let me know!

iPad – A Blunder Or the Next Device to Save the World?

So Apple announced their iPad this week, and from a geek’s standpoint I was kinda disappointed with it .  The one big item that disappointed me was the running of the iPhone OS.  I was hoping the iPad would run more of a OS X like operating system that allowed for multiple applications to run at the same time.  I think it would be nice to be able to install applications that are not put in the App store like Google Chrome or Firefox. (I can’t stand Safari)

I not surprised on the advertised battery life, as my iTouch only gets charged once every few weeks and I use it almost every day.  What will be interesting to see is in the 3G models if the battery life is any different.  The engineering of the device is a typical Apple product with the uni-body aluminum backing and the smooth edges.

Onto the different hardware configurations.  I understand on why a 3G chip was included in the device, but I would not buy one.  Most of the places I go have wi-fi, whether free or available for a small fee.  The best part of the 3G is that there is no contract needed for 3G service.  There are 2 options available $15 a month for 250mb of data (this is not a joke) and $30 for unlimited (cough..cough… you mean a 5GB cap).  The crappy part is that the 3G service is on AT&T.  Yes I have a iPhone and usually do not experience any issue with my AT&T service, but once more device that AT&T’s network has to deal with.  I think now may be the time for AT&T to push to upgrade their networks to faster speeds and better quality before all the techy people get one and complain about the AT&T network in large cities.

Now there are many people that would complain that this device does not have a lot of storage, but I do not see an issue.  Apple is offering a 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB device.  What are you people going to be storing on this thing that you need more than 64GB of storage?  I do not see many people replacing their iTouch or iPod for music or podcasts when they ride the train or go to the gym everyday.  Sure you can store pictures on it, but that is a lot of pictures.  Movies and TV shows can be rather large, but remove them after you watch them.  I do not see applications being an issue either.  Most iPhone/iTouch applications are rather small, and do not take up much space at all.  I do not see the books that are available in the iBookstore to be very large either.

The best part about the iPad is the pricing.  The base iPad with wi-fi only and 16GB of storage is $499.  I think this is a excellent price point for people that could be thinking about buying a Mac, but do not want to drop $999 on a Macbook, granted this will not be a apples to apples comparison but will give a user more of a Mac feel than using a iTouch.

Now I wonder what Amazon will do with the Kindle pricing.  I do want to buy a ebook reader but with the new iPad, I am not sure what I want to buy.  The Kindle is still priced at $259.  If I needed to buy a ebook reader today, I would probably have to buy the iPad seeing is that it is only $250 more than the iPad and does so much more.  I have to think that Amazon is going to have to drop the price of the Kindle, but I will believe it when I see it.

One other feature that I felt was missing out of the product was wireless syncing with iTunes.  I still can’t believe Apple has not released a technology that I wan walk into my house and when the device connects to my wireless network pictures, books, and videos would be synced with my Mac.  I think this may be a feature be announced in March with Apple has their yearly iPhone announcement.

I am still up in the air on if I am going to buy one or not.  I think this device could be better, but hey it is Apple so they know what I want!