Barcamp Gesture Notes

Originally uploaded by drunknjew.

I returned yesterday from spending all day Friday in NYC with Chris, Tara, Noel, and a bunch of their crew. The 24 hour stint in the city was the PERFECT blend of business and pleasure. I started working with the CitizenAgency crew on our newest venture together, then after a long day of conversing, researching, and documenting, we hit the town for dinner and then drinks.

Let’s take a quick step back here. That’s right, I’ve been graced with the pleasure of an official opportunity to work along side The Citizens themselves on one of their ventures, as a development and technology consultant. This first bit of work that we began yesterday is part of a “phase 0″ initiative, but ultimately, this opportunity is huge on a number of fronts. First and foremost, relocation. Ryan and I are going to be moving to San Francisco Bay Area in January, to be physically accessible by the partner’s team. Silicon Valley is about to be our new home.

Yikes. In the best way possible, yikes.

So the first day (and first time actually working face to face) with Chris and Tara (and Ben, via internet chat) was awesome. I really came away from the experience feeling like I’ve worked with them for ages…it was such a comfortable fit of personality, work style, work ethic, interests, and really..everything. This is it folks. This is what I’ve been working towards!

So after work (which, while exhausting, was almost too fun to feel like work), the three of us hit a greek place in Greenwich Village, and met up with Glenda and her friend Alec over some lamb and a bottle of wine. Then from one lamb to another Lamb, The Slaughtered Lamb, our beverage consumption site of the evening. Much geekery and drinking ensued, and it was excellent. It’s really something else when you can find yourself surrounded by your working peers in a social setting…the dynamic is so much fun…maybe that’s just our industry? I think Noel put it best, “we’re a bunch of geeks who live our lives on the internet 20 hours a day, and then spend 4 hours offline drinking”.

My final thanks goes out to Noel for his good company, awesome red pants/green shoes combo, and couch-sleeping-arrangement-providing skillz.

Today to my mom’s and then some old family friends’ for X-mas eve feast-ivities. Tomorrow to Ryan’s family for X-mas day feast-ivities. I’m gonna need to really watch myself with all of the feasting, I’ve been so good (lost 20 lbs in the last month…muchos gracias to eating better + high stress levels), I’d hate to blow my new years goal on a couple of days of gorging. But thats what the holidays are for, right?

I’ll probably only get a couple more posts in before the end of the year with all of the travel and running around we’ve got…but that post (presumably from South Beach, Miami) will wrap up one of the most amazing years of my life, and kicking off one more for the books.

December 2006/January 2007 Tour:
NYC [12/22-23], Hellertown/Bethlehem [12-24], Malvern [12-25] , South Beach [12-27:1-3] , San Francisco [ 1-?]

Tags: NYC, citizen agency, san francisco, slaughtered lamb, south beach, holiday feasting, relocation

I just got to Amit’s place to meet up with Chris and Tara. We’ve got a long day of work ahead of us as we head to Coworking Manhattan.

I couldn’t be more excited to be working with and surrounded by such brilliance. Tonight I’m supposed to be hanging out with some “internet rockstars”, so we’ll see who’s on the bill. I’ve got camera in tow, so I’ll be sure to report back.

I’ll be here (in NY) until tomorrow morning, and then heading back to Philly to get my Christmas on.

Tags: chris messina, tara hunt, amit gupta, NYC, coworking

A couple of weekends ago I had the pleasure of meeting Rob Sandie, a Lehigh grad (my hometown) behind the most recent entry into the video upload/sharing market: Viddler, which left it’s private beta and entered it’s first public beta.

I know what you’re thinking, “oh boy, another you-tube knockoff” but Rob and his team have done what all of the youtube knockoffs havent: they’ve taken needs in the video sharing market and found solutions to them. Notably: better streaming of video files and deep tagging.

Allow me to explain. You go to youtube, want to watch the last 15 seconds of a 1 minute video. Or worse, the last 15 seconds of a 10 minute video. You need to wait for the whole video to download before you can give the scrubber a nudge to the end of the timeline. Viddler, on the other hand, uses Flash Media Server so that videos can not only start being played immediately, but if you jump the scrubber to ANY point in the video, the streaming begins from that point.

Deep tagging is what I have said is going to take the next video sharing service to the top. This technique allows any user, be it the one who uploaded the video or the one who is casually viewing, to participate in tagging a moment in the video’s timeline with relevant information: descriptions, tags, etc. This also allows to link TO that specific point in time in a video, so I can send a link to the video to my friend, and it starts playing at the exact spot in George Bush’s latest speech that he says something stupid (not like its hard to spot them), instead of starting at the beginning.

On the whole, the video player interface itself packs a lot of power but also doesn’t become overwhelming. It’s a great demonstration of excellent user experience.

The usual features also still apply: easy upload, insta-transcode, sharing and browsing of your videos, friends videos, searching videos by description, title, or tag. Also you can record in-browser if you have a webcam on your computer.

Check out Viddler today.

P.S. Rob is as nice as he is sharp. We had some great conversations at the barcamp that we met at, and have continued to stay in touch since. In fact, the light blue gradient you see on Viddler? I helped Rob choose between that one and a duller, greyish blue. I think Rob made the right choice :-D

Tags: Viddler, Rob Sandie, innovation, creative camp, video sharing, video tagging, deep tagging, flash media server

..in a totally insane world right now. I:

• am just about wrapping up another 4.0 term at drexel(yawn).
• have quit my job at empathylab to pursue my career as an independent contractor(mom dad and girlfriend are all freaking out a little bit. im as happy as a pig in shit.)
• have formed alliances with some incredible talent on both coasts of this country, and am working on
  some very cool things (which I will disclose soon enough), and am attempting to work on
  some other cool things (also…coming as more information surfaces)
• am going to miami with my girlfriend for new years, to visit my best friend. antics must ensue.
  (oh, and they will)
• have a feeling that 2007 is going to bring a lot of new excitement and opportunity to me and the people around me.

only a couple more weeks until 2007. this has been one crazy year. they tell me it just gets crazier.

Tags: insane, opportunities, drexel, independent contractor, talent, miami, antics, 2006, 2007

I’m speechless. IE 6 is floating on my mac desktop, and there’s a taskbar at the bottom of my screen. I don’t use windows for anything but browser testing, but my mind has officially been blown.

a bunch of performance tweaks, drag and drop copying from OS X -> Windows and back, implimentation of core effects…all around, amazing. Nice work parallels.

Tags: parallels, beta, coherance mode

just a quick launch-announcement:

I launched my first shopify-driven store, for South Jersey based Surfers Supplies.

Full account of the project is available at the new case study that I wrote, as well as the blog post about how Shopify takes advantage of the V in MVC to generate templates and allow rapid, agile development.

Gnarly.

Tags: shopify, surfers supplies, MVC, weknowhtml, launch

so im a little disappointed in myself that it took me almost a solid year to find this, but since my “safari just got a whole lot nicer” post has gotten so much attention, i figured i’d follow up with this one.

I just found, on a 6 month old post on jon hicks’ blog, about a year old feature that’s been hiding in the safari/webkit nightlies.

I wont bore you with details. Just know that the result of the simple directions results in the following tool (more screencaps):

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