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SHDH: I R GOIN. R U?

For those of you living in the Bay Area, SuperHappyDevHouse is going on today. I'll likely make a late arrival after I pick up my broken server in San Jose.

WTF is SHDH, you ask? "DevHouse is not a marketing event. It's a non-exclusive event intended for passionate and creative technical people that want to have some fun, learn new things, and meet new people. In this way, we're trying to resurrect the spirit of the Homebrew Computer Club. We also draw inspiration from the demoscene as one of the only intentional getting-things-done computer events in the world."

Last time I was there, I met the Chairman of the EFF and the guy who put the dot in dotcom, Brad Templeton.

Sweet

I also met a couple other people whom I now hang out on a semi-regular basis to drink (matt) and make pizza (ross). I Y the Bay Area.

My Awesome New Ride: A Kent Super Scooter

Recently, I contemplated getting a Vespa again but decided, instead, to stick with my pretty but slow bicycle. My commute is about 2 miles but using San Francisco's public transportation, generally takes 26 minutes from door to door. Too long! I can get there on my bike in 16 minutes but I have to drive in traffic, wear a helmet, find parking and lock my bike up. The parking/locking takes about 10 minutes or more, pushing me right back to 26+ minutes.

So I was on CalTrain, going down to the colocation center AGAIN because my server has bad memory and crashed on a daily basis, and I noticed a commuter with a Xootr. Ouuu! A Razor for adults. It had bigger wheels, a sleeker look, was light and folded into a tiny pile. I wanted to know where I could find in in San Francisco so I used my awesome Sprint Mobile Broadband (Thanks Luce!) to get online and I checked out the prices. $260. Wow, 1/10th the price of a Vespa and with no DMV fees, Insurance costs and Class M license requirement. I'm sold! So I put my laptop to sleep and began to fall asleep myself.

As I was about to start dreaming, I remembered my FAVORITE CHILDHOOD BIKE-THING, the Kent Super Scooter. Mannnn, did I drive that all around the rural streets of Louisiana. That scooter was awesome..it had brakes and some small bicycle wheels. Yet was so light (18 lbs which feels like nothing on wheels) and fun. They were all the rage. If you grew up in America and are around 30, I bet you had one too.

Mine was blue and white JUST LIKE THAT! Could I still fit on this thing? Will it fit my size W9.5 foot? Wow, only $60 on Amazon?! I'm buying TWO! One for me, one for my friend's kid who calls me Nanna Crumble. She's just about the age I was when I got my Kent Super Awesome Scooter and her birthday is coming up.

So I temporarily signed up for Amazon prime and got $30 in free shipping. While Prime came with free 2nd-day, the magically scooter got here overnight (just like my Litter Robot )And guess what? My foot totally fits! I have a size 8 in men's and would guess that this could do a good 9.5 or so.

San Franciscans should consider buying this scooter. It's so light and the hand brakes are especially useful here. It's really easy to hop on and off while navigating through busy sidewalks. I even took it on Muni (the J) with me. You can park it in your office and safely ride on the sidewalk. And.. people love it. On the way home, I got stopped by adults and kids like 4 times wanting to know more about the scooter.

Now I just gotta find cool stickers to put all over it. I'll start at unamerican.com. I'm also looking into modifying the handlebars to come up a little higher. I saw the perfect set (tall yet thin) at the Bike Hut at Pier 40 but it wasn't for sale Riding the scooter requires that I bend my knees anyway but I'd still like to see what it would be like with taller handlebars.

So if you are a commuter in a metropolitan area or a parent looking to give an awesome gift, consider getting a Super Scooter. No, this isn't a paid advertisement I just think it's great that it's possible to still love riding this thing 18 years later.

I Thought It Was a Little Quiet…

Sorry if you wrote via e-mail or left a comment in the past month or so and I didn't respond. I made a DNS change, broke stuff and consequently wasn't notified of any new comments or e-mails. I promise to respond when I get a chance. The DNS change also broke Akismet so I've gotta sift through about 2500 spams too.. nasty.

Whispers from the Valley

Haha worst post title ever.. so very Wal-Mart romance novel-esque. I love it.

So I wanted to share the word on the streets here in San Francisco. In attending conferences or hacker parties, here's the stuff that keeps cropping up, filtered to my tastes.

The dotcom is coming back
I often ask cab drivers about the original dotcom boom in SF. They often respond with stories about rude cell phone users or how impossible it was to get dinner reservation/place to rent. Recently, though, a 50 year old cab driver said "They're back. Just head down to South of Market. You'll see them everywhere." I noticed it but I was surprised that it was so obvious that he'd notice. Perhaps its the optimist in me but I don't think this will be a bubble/bust. Investors are smarter this time around.

Jeff Atwood (codinghorror.com) asked "What will you do differently this time?" I plan to spend an entire post on that. I'm eight years older this time around and now I live in the middle of all the action. There's a lot I'll do differently this time.

Amazon S3
All the startups, including smugmug are using Amazon's Simple Storage Service. We at RealCajunRecipes.com will be using it too, as a very affordable Content Delivery Network. Some people say it's not a CDN; I say whatever, it's cool that our visitors on the East Coast and the South will get their RCR images delivered from a much closer location. For just $0.10/Gig up and $0.18/Gig down (starting in June), it's likely that I'll also start using S3 and JungleDisk as a backup server as well. Even though there are cheaper solutions, I don't need to backup off-site but once a month so it works well for me.

Twitter.com
"Twitter is to blogging what chat is to e-mail." I overheard that at SHDH but can't find the source. I use Twitter sporadically; I can't really find a value for me yet.

BarCamp
BarCamp (or "BahCamp" in Boston) is "an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. The name BarCamp was inspired as a complement to FooCamp." One of them in San Francisco is being held at Microsoft's offices. Drool (One day, my pretty).

Windows Powershell
Windows admins and enthusiasts are raising the roof about Powershell. It was one of the most talked about technologies at the recent Longhorn Roadshow that I attended. FYI, my friend Lee Holmes, a member of the PowerShell Team in Redmond, asked readers of his blog if any PowerShell newbies are interested in being technical reviewers for his O'reilly book "PowerShell: The Definitive Guide." I know I am! I've been anxiously awaiting my copy since May of last year.

Virtualization
This is one of my favorites, I'm totally in awe of virtualization technology, especially the stuff I see VMware put out. Longhorn has virtualization built in (a native SSL VPN too omg!) but many believe it will be about 2010 before they are a real competitor to VMware.

I could probably go on a bit more but I have finals to study for (again). Wish me luck.. I'll need it this class. Stuped [sic] hardware.

How I Learned to Deal with My Sweet, Elderly & Newly Epileptic Cat

My beloved 17 year old cat named KITTY II has been with me since I was in middle school and I'm now approaching 30. That's actually more than half of my life. As old as she is, she still looks young, a trait that runs in my family . Here's Kitty starring in a poorly Photoshopped (her right eye was too bright) picture:

Kitty is still energetic and vocal -- super vocal. I now keep a pair of ear plugs by the bed because she likes waking up at odd hours to yowl like she's dying. If I yell her name, she suddenly goes from Death Meow to innocent kitten meow; it's really unnerving. Kitty lives with me now but she didn't last year when I had a high school friend, Mel, take care of her for a while. Kitty enjoyed the stylings of a large family home in Oceanside, complete with a backyard and koi pond while I worked things out with my apartment.

One day when Mel was taking care of Kitty, I received a call from her saying that she thought Kitty was dying. Apparently, Kitty did this weird thing where she fell on her side, "ran in place, feet in the air" and peed everywhere for about 30 seconds. When she stopped doing that, she woke up dazed, cried out when went eat tuna like nothing happened. My heart sank, I really thought Kitty was gonna go soon and did what I could to visit more even though I lived in San Francisco. I learned at some point that Kitty was having a classic seizures and that elderly cats could live for years with them.

A few months later, I was able to take Kitty back and I immediately took her to the vet to see what could be done. They ran a good $1100 worth of tests and found nothing that could be causing the seizures. That likely meant it was adult-onset epilepsy or a brain tumor. If it was a brain tumor, I wasn't going to try to artificially extend her life so I figured it didn't matter what was causing it, as long as it wasn't something that was preventable.

The first time I saw Kitty have a seizure, it had such a bad impact on me that I called in sick to work; I was a mess. It was about the most awful thing ever. She was sleeping on my pillow and the alarm went off, apparently, loud repetitive noises trigger her seizures, and she started going crazy on the bed. I could see every muscle tense and pee was flying everywhere. I tried to cover my eyes so not see it but I could still feel her shaking the bed. My poor friend, I felt so bad.

Hello All 89 of My Friends: I'm Now on FeedBurner

I apologize for the duplicate posts that appeared in "all y'all's" RSS readers; I signed up with Feedburner a few days ago and it slightly changed the content of the feeds.

I'm surprised I signed up with FeedBurner, honestly. As someone who's hosted my own mail/dns/web/database/everything since 1998, I've always been a proponent of "do it yourself" when it came to technical feats. Now, however, I find myself starting to outsource services more and more. I think this is because not only do I have less time, but because the services are more useful and reasonably priced (or free).

A couple years ago, I saw people flock to FeedBurner but thought I'd be happier just keeping the stats myself and dishing out a few SQL queries when I wanted to find out more about my visitors. That takes time, though, and I never actually took the time to look. Up until today, I had no idea how many readers actually subscribe to this blog's feed. I was pleased to see I had 90! Well, 90 minus one since I subscribe to my own feed to ensure the formatting looks proper. It's a modest number but it's my number.. and I appreciate your interest in my blog.

So, other outsourced services I now use are: Google Analytics, Gmail as an anti-spam ASP (I'll blog about that next), flickr pro and soon enough, mozy pro. I also use WordPress instead of building my own blog engine. Oh, oh and recently, I decided to hire a real graphics designer to redesign RealCajunRecipes.com ("RCR"). It won't be cheap but thankfully, Google Adsense and our cookbook sales are going to pay for most of it. Out with tables and images and in with CSS! Out with that 2002 design too. That will give Brandon (my best friend and co-creator of RCR) and I time to focus on backend development instead of stressing over something we're mediocre at like graphics design.

Speaking of development, I have a couple questions for you, my #1 reader.

1.	Are any of you ASP.NET developers and if so, do you use the user controls that come with ASP.NET? If so, are you happy with them? If not, why not? We currently have a user database that can be easily imported into ASP.NET's built in user database but I don't know if that's the best way to geaux.
2.	We're going to use ASP.NET 2.0 (Longhorn & Orcas) to redevelop RCR and are considering setting up parts of the site to be written in both English and Cajun French. I'm familiar with localization but I believe that looks at the encoding info that the browser provides. I'd prefer that visitors just click a link that says English or Cajun French. Do you know how to best do this in ASP.NET?

Also, a bit off topic but I'd like to write about more personal things (dealing with a 17 year old seizuric cat, general stuff about living in San Francisco) sometimes, but I often don't. The posts about D-Pie and my cold, blue legs were exceptions and I ended up removing one (and pondering the other). There's something about netnerds.net that often prevents me from talking about non-tech stuff. I noticed that a lot of people have personal blogs and technical blogs. Do you think I should create a new blog or should I just talk about non-tech here?

And finally, I have a poll on the blog that I'd like you to answer if you haven't already. I'd put it in the post itself but I don't think that the AJAX will work in the RSS readers. The question is What's Your Job Title? So far, the top 3 answers (of 151 total) are: Sys/Net Admin (23%), App/Web/DB Dev (15%) and Douchebag (12%). Just as I suspected!

Google Developer Day 2007 Now Accepting RSVPs (Again)

The Google Dev Team writes: "Due to the huge amount of interest, we've added spots at the event and opened registration back up." Seats are super limited so sign up while you still can.

(Living in the Bay Area rocks)

Jon Brumi & Laughing Squid are Freakin Awesome (BYOBW07)

Yesterday, while eating and drinking in North Beach SF, I stumbled upon an event put on byJon Brumit called "Bring Your Own Big Wheel." What a trip Imagine adults, dressed up as super heros and other oddities, racing big wheels down a very steep, very windey road. There were a ton of wipe-outs and scrapes but everyone laughed it off and was proud to show their bruises. This event was non-stop fun.

   
Photos by "Scott Beale / Laughing Squid"

I'd post the video I made but my laughter is out of control so instead, here's someone else's:

My collection of photos can be found on flickr.

Edit: Originally I thought the event was put on by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid but as it turns out, the organizer is Jon Brumit. Oops .. but the title stays, Laughing Squid is still awesome

A Very Geeky April Fools

Back on April 1st, 2004, I was dating a woman who was a fan of Showtime's new lesbo show, The L-Word. She subscribed to Showtime specifically for the show but missed it one night. Not having experienced the pleasures of TiVO, she asked me to download a copy from the Internet. She was usually a little too paranoid to participate in P2P but was pretty desperate to see the missed episode. I hopped on her computer, installed the popular P2P client of the month and quickly downloaded the episode. She was happy but also a little concerned. I reassured her saying that there are millions of downloaders and only thousands of law suits, stats are in her favor.

I'm a bad person, I'll admit. Seeing her worry about the download got me thinking. Today is April 1st, what a perfect day for an awesome prank. As she hopped into the shower, I hopped onto her monster Dell laptop and began flipping through all of her IE Favorites. I gathered up all of the hostnames (imdb.com, news.google.com, nytimes.com and so on), opened up her HOSTS file and went to town giving about 50 of those hostnames the IP for my webserver.

I then setup my webserver to accept wildcard hosts and then copied all of the HTML from http://www.mpaa.org/anti-piracy/index.htm and inserted a fake message. The message, which had her full name (only after a successful IP check), stated that she was to be served with papers on Friday, April 2nd. I didn't want to make it too obvious that it was me so I actually setup a scheduled task to switch out the good HOSTS file with the modified one (as well as an ipconfig /flushdns) at the time I was in the shower. Oh, I also set the 404 as the index file in the event that she didn't go to the root URL. I tried to make the text as cheesy and unprofessional as possible and came up with the following:

The plan worked perfectly, when I was in the shower, my lady companion loaded up imdb.com, saw the message and shit her pants. She started sweating and ran into the bathroom. "CHRISSSSSSSY! I'm going to throw my laptop out of the window!! Oh my god oh my god!" I said "What's going on? You have a virus or something? Let me look. I'll be out in a second." "Noooo! My family is going to kill me! I'm getting sued!"

The bad person in me let her freak out for about a minute more as I fake comforted her, saying that it had to be something else. "The MPAA can't take over people's laptops -- it's illegal and virtually impossible." "WELL! LOOK!" she yelled. I strolled over to her laptop, poked around and said "Sweetie. The only problem with your laptop is that you've got a crazy girlfriend that replaced the HOSTS file and played a prank on you. APRIL FOOLS!" I then proceeded to run out of the room yelling bloody murder as she ran after me yelling profanities. Talk about a hoot!