Things are going pretty good with ORS. Jane is onboard building sites, the 01click project is moving pretty good, and I have two more projects on the back burner waiting for time. I also have two internal projects that I would really like to get going this year.
Jane is doing awesome at launching sites. TheJane, We Race Against Hunger, and a few others. She is also converting all my old sites from HTML to WordPress. I’ll soon be able to turn off that old Slicehost server.
I might have to hire someone to do my back burner Rails projects. I have two that could be pretty good. I don’t have the money to hire anyone though, so that will be hard. Can’t find anyone to work for free. 
If they weren’t automotive related I could probably get my friend Dave to help me, but he is looking for something outside of that realm as a side project.
Anyway, gotta get back to work. I’ll be in SF tomorrow at the Heroku Waza.
Been trying to get the carbs tuned on my chopper. It’s not easy. I have a bunch of jets and I’m trying to figure it out. Lots of manuals out there so it shouldn’t be too hard. I think one more time and I’ll have it running again. Then it will be fine tuning. Hope to get it solved this weekend.
Had a great time with family this year. No snow, so driving was easy. Got everything I wanted.
TextMate 2 Alpha was released to the public recently for evaluation. It’s been a long time coming. It is alpha, so a lot of things will probably change. But, I just hate it for some reason. Maybe when it finally hits beta it will be better. There are things that I feel should have been much further ahead by now with all the time that has past. Some things feel like they have gone backwards in usability.
And I don’t like the new icon.
But, maybe things will change next year.
Got new parts for my bike on monday and haven’t had time until today to get into the garage. New jets for the carb are in and the bike is now running awesome!
I just need to finish up the wiring and fender struts so I can ride it!
For a few months now I’ve been checking out old school choppers, bobbers and such. Thinking about biking. Last month I was given a Honda CL350 all in parts. It got me thinking more about biking. Last weekend I got my motorcycle license and now I’m looking for a bike.
The Honda would have been a pretty cool little bike, but it has no title. Can’t register it and when I went to DMV they just gave me the run-a-round. Looks like it will be a PITA to get a title for it, so I’m going to dump that idea.
So there are these cool sites. http://xs650chopper.com and http://chopcult.com
I’ve been checking out all the photos and stuff and I’ve decided that I want a Yamaha XS650. Fixed up they are really sweet bikes. So I’ve been scouring Craig’s List for one. I really didn’t want to spend over $1000, but I’ve found a few that are mostly built already and just need to be finished up. Most of them are in AZ and TX.
Found one in Vacaville area that looks like a really sweet deal. Getting more info right now on it.
Just spent way too much money on my front Dana 44 axle. New cromo shafts and 300M u-joints. New Ford big bearing outers, and drive flanges.
I better not break any axles after this all gets setup. I sure hope I’m wheeling next weekend too. Takes forever to get this stuff done.
I’ve also put the rig up for sale. !!OH NOES!!
Yep. Just getting tired of sinking money into it I guess. We are talking about moving also. So if we move back to the Bay Area it will be a PITA to go wheeling.
My plans are to buy a Santa Cruz Blur TR Carbon mountain bike and get back into that. I used to have a lot of fun riding. I’m also way, way out of shape from sitting around for the past 10 years. The last 3 being the worst. No exercise at all.
So the rig is up for sale for $14,000. That’s about half of what I have into it. No hits yet, and probably won’t get any for a long time. I’ll just keep wheeling it until it gets sold.
We’ve been talking about putting together a real hack-a-thon in Reno for some time now. Something with sponsors and prizes. Bring your ideas and compete to win the 24 hour hack off.
We now have an event coming soon to create something from Reno local city data. Talks are underway for the event. You can get more news by signing up at: http://hack4reno.com/
This is going to be really good for Reno. We need more Reno developer recognition and getting the Reno developer community together for this event will certainly do it. Lets put Reno on the map and show the world that good developers are not only in San Francisco.
In the past the only good editor was BB-Edit, not that I personally ever thought of it as a “good” editor. Then came along TextMate and that redefined the Mac Text Editor.
Before TextMate I was using VIM. I liked VIM, but I wanted something more Mac like. So when TextMate came out I jumped on it. I loved it for many years, but the author seemed stuck on his next version —TextMate 2 where are you?— while the current version with its many bugs got stale.
Many other people grew tired of the bugs in TM and wanted something better. A lot of people moved to MacVIM. Others started working on new text editors for the Mac.
Here is my list of new Mac Editors (work in progress):
- MacVIM – Its pretty good.
- Kod – Still very early development, but has an interesting platform below it.
- Vico – The newest entry that is like VIM but all new and Mac like.
- Sublime Edit - People are really liking the features of this editor.
Last weekend I was invited to the Hack For Change competition / hackathon. It was a real awesome experience. I’ve been to all night hackathons before, but this was different. The reason why it was different is because this one was in San Francisco. The mecca of startup land.
I left home at 4:30AM on Friday morning. The event didn’t start until Saturday morning, but I had an interview that morning with a really cool company. I got there about an hour early though. They were nice enough to let me work at a desk until my interviewers were ready. The interview went really well, but I didn’t get the job. No problem, I still have a job.
I spent the day in SF walking around checking things out. Had lunch with Jason, visited Engine Yard (nope, they didn’t have a desk for me to work at), and basically wandered around. It was a pretty good day.
The morning of the hackathon came. I found a place to park my car for the weekend and signed in. Met a few people while waiting for the presentation and ate some breakfast. Several companies presented their APIs to use in the competition. SimpleGeo, Twilio, and Sunlight Foundation were a few.
After the presentations we paired up into groups to start hacking. I didn’t really have a project to work on, but I had an idea. A few others had similar ideas so we joined and started hacking. The app turned out to be What’s About My City http://mycity.heroku.com. It turned out pretty good. We finished all the features we set out to have in the 24 hours of the competition. It was fully functioning with nothing missing. We even have an iOS app that works with it. It’s pretty awesome.
I worked with Jay, T, and Emerson on the MyCity project. They are awesome. We all worked very well together and had a good time doing it. Emerson and I stayed up all night hacking on the code.
Well, we didn’t win, but we had a great time. I met a lot of really cool people, and picked up a few possible job openings. I stayed up for 36 hours straight, and proved that I still have it.
It’s been five years that I’ve been using Textmate. Although I really like it, I am just too annoyed by the few bugs and UI issues it has. The features are not unique enough for me to continue to work around the problems.
Before Textmate I used VIM. I have used VIM since the late 90′s. When I was using Linux as my desktop, I used GVIM. It worked really well. But after moving to the Mac platform in 2001 I wanted something more Mac like. I continued to use VIM until Textmate came out.
A few of the problems with switching away from Textmate is the awesome Project Drawer (enhanced to a sidebar with a plugin). It makes working on my projects much easier because I can see the whole directory structure. It is also nice because it does not save project files all over the place. You can launch it from the command line, pointing to a directory, and it will load all the files in that folder into the project drawer. It’s just so perfect and simple.
Fast forward to today. I’ve been back on VIM for the past month. MacVIM actually. It’s more Mac like than the old version that I used, but it still has a ways to go. Specifically NerdTree. It’s a project drawer plugin. I really don’t like it. It works, but I still just don’t like it. I see that others feel the same way. So much so that someone has taken on a project to build a real project drawer for MacVIM. I can’t wait.
There is another project being worked on right now called VICO. It’s a brand new editor using VIM style editing and commands mixed with Textmate plugins. It’s really nice. I will definitely switch to it when it starts to be more stable.
So, today, I say byby to Textmate. It’s been really awesome. I kinda wish you didn’t go stale while your creator builds the next version.
It’s been just over a month since I was last paid. It’s starting to hurt now. I’ve actually started to look for a real job. Not sure I want a real job though.
I’m going to run a special this month as Orange Room Software where I will work on any project for $150 per day.
So, anyway, not wanting to get a real job has me thinking. I came up with a great idea while searching for work on the internet. I can probably do this in less than 90 days. So I just need to get $15,000 to start it. That’s really all I need is three months of my bills paid.
I’m pretty sure that I can do this. I’m pretty sure that it will make some money too. At least keep me paid for awhile. So the question is funding.
I have been looking at Kickstarter.com and thinking about posting up my idea there to get funding for it. But here is where I start to sound like all the people I used to work for; what if someone takes my idea… Worse, what if I don’t get the funding and then someone takes my idea.
I know that just sounds stupid, but now that it’s my idea it doesn’t sound so stupid to me anymore. I used to cringe when I heard that from partners on the many projects I worked on. I would say, “nobody wants your idea.” But this time, I think, someone out there would want my idea. Of course my idea is probably not unique and there maybe a site out there already doing it. I’ve been searching but I can’t find one, but still…
I think what I’m going to do is start working on my idea right away and get a prototype working. Then I’ll think about funding. I think I could do a prototype in about a week. (A week in Phill time is more like three weeks.)
Here goes nothing…
I’ve been working on some cool stuff for the last six months. One thing about being the boss is that I get to call the shots on the technology that we use. I chose Rails 3, MongoDB, and PusherApp for our service.
Rails 3 is awesome. A really big step forward I think. I’m also running on Ruby 1.9.2. This combo has really made development fast and easy. I find myself writing hashes the Javascript way, {symbol:value}. I like it.
MongoDB using Mongoid has been really nice to work with. I originally wanted to use CouchDB but the Rails support just isn’t that great. I gave it a second try in another project but still it’s not as complete as Mongoid. Also not having to do migrations is awesome. It just works. It took some time to figure out a few things, and Mongoid kept changing along the way, but the latest 2.0 version is pretty solid.
PusherApp saved my life. If I had to write the socket stuff for this auction, it would have taken another three months. Pusher is a direct drop in and go solution. Even when Heroku went down, Pusher was still up and running. I’m using Pusher to push updates to the clients during the auction. It is also used for our chat system. I love it.
I started with everything running on Heroku, but when they went down I moved the whole thing to Linode. It took me like three hours to do and I was back up and running. I was able to get a lot more speed out of the system on Linode. Local MongoDB running and now Resque is really fast. So fast that I’m sticking with Linode for now. I tried to use the new CloudFoundry but my app would not run on their platform. Not sure why. I think in the future I’m going to install CloudFoundry.org on my own Linodes and have my own cloud servers.
So now that the Auction app is done I’ve been working on another car app for a guy in the Bay Area. I’m using Rails3, MongoDB, Resque, and Linode. To me it seems to be a winning stack. I have about 80 hours development into it so far and I’m just over halfway done. I’m going to try to finish it this weekend
So, what’s next? I don’t know. I don’t have anything scheduled. But next week I’ll be looking again. If anyone needs a Rails 3.1 app… I’d be happy to go for it!
You might have noticed that I had a whole lot of duplicate posts from Twitter. A plugin that I was using, FeedWordPress, has a bug since a few days ago. Not sure if it was caused by a WordPress update or the changes Twitter is doing. But it broke. So I turned it off for now.
Jane and I have been thinking about moving back to the bay area.
While we were in Santa Cruz last week I went to an interview at a company in Burlingame. Spent all day interviewing and I think it went really well. I’m waiting to hear back.
I have to say that living way out here is starting to wear on me. Not having good Internet and nowhere to grab a bite to eat is getting old fast these days.
It was really nice to walk to the store or a restaurant in the city. Not to mention the weather was much better.
It will suck for wheeling. I’ll have to drive 4-5 hours to do that from SF. Probably will have to put my buggy in storage.
Yep. I think it’s time for a change.
We finished it. We finished the auction system. We have had two relatively successful auctions. I say relatively successful because the auction system worked great, but we didn’t have many bidders online.
In the last auction we had 129 registered members. We generated about 50 leads. The system had no glitches or crashes for the whole event. I think it went great!
The problem we have now, after two auctions, is that we are out of money. We have one more auction coming up in two weeks and that’s all we have scheduled. You see, we lost a partner last month, Jeff, who was our sales guy. He was the pivotal partner to making this whole thing work after the software was finished. Since then we have lost money and had to let go of our sales team.
What we really need now is funding. We need a few hundred thousand to get a top notch sales team together and start moving this business forward. In three months we could be generating enough to keep the business running. Three more months is all we need.
Well, for now I’m going to go back to consulting. I have one gig lined up, but that’s only going to get me a quarter of what I need to keep my bills paid. If only I could sell my house I could pay off all my debt and start new. But for now at least I still have my house and that’s good enough for me.
Image credit: RichardTheRough (http://richardtherough.deviantart.com/)
I’m constantly getting jobs that need to be done very quickly. They also don’t want to spend very much money building the applications. It’s very hard to explain that good software does not come cheap. They don’t really want good, they just want done. So, I take the jobs and deliver a cheap fast project.
This is where things go bad with the fast and cheap method. They never come fast.
After shipping the project, there is always something wrong with it that requires going back in and fixing it. The customer usually balks at the extra charges to fix the problems. They tell me how it’s my fault that there is bugs or design issues and that I have to fix them for free. Usually I just fix a few things to get the customer out of my hair and out of my life.
But the majority of the work out there is Fast Cheap. Everyone wants it NOW and they don’t want to pay anything for it. But, then get upset that it’s poor quality.
I’m taking a stand right now. Fast Cheap is off my menu. It’s going to be Good plus fast or Good plus Cheap.
If you want a app built for cheap and you want it in 3 months, it’s going to take a year. Deal with it.
I’ve been looking for something better than TextMate for a long time. MacVim is OK, but it’s not Mac enough yet. Kod is looking good, but it’s still not ready yet.
Sublime Text 2 Alpha steps in today…
I just checked out the new Sublime Text 2 Alpha text editor. It has some pretty nice features started. Here’s my good/bad list:
Good:
- Loads really fast
- Long lines don’t lockup the system
- Auto-remove trailing whitespace
- Line numbers don’t scroll off the screen when scrolling sideways
Bad:
- Preferences don’t work (maybe I’m doing it wrong)
- UI Color scheme is really bad
Conclusion: It’s not ready for me to use yet. I’ll stick with TextMate.
I decided that I need to put myself on a tight schedule to fit in everything that I want to do. I don’t read enough because I’m always working. I’m working too hard because I don’t have the knowledge to work faster. I have to spend a lot of time either with trial and error or researching the problem to find a fix. This just sucks away time from my day. I also think that I would have better health if I took time to relax more. And of course I would make more money if I can get my work done faster.
7AM: Wakey wakey, hand off snaky. This give me time to get ready for work. I could even read the morning news while eating breakfast.
8AM: Start my first work block. I have found that four hour work blocks are ideal for what I do. That is enough time to really get into my work and resolve problems.
12PM: My first break. Lunch, news, twitter, exercise, whatever.
2PM: Back to work for another four hour block.
6PM: Quitting time. I can sneak in some TV or whatever.
8PM: Reading time. I really need to stick to this one. I just don’t read enough. I have a lot of books that I need to get through. Technical manuals and also some fiction to round it off.
10PM: Back to sleep.
Had a blast this weekend at Reno Collective doing the March Madness Hack-a-thon. The Think Kindness project was pretty successful. We didn’t quite finish all the features, but we have a real good start and made it all the way to beta.
Things that I learned:
- It takes lots and lots of time to setup development environments
- Select the platform before starting the clock, and stick with it
- Don’t sweat the details until beta time
I can’t wait until the next one!
