A Good Question

Watching Attack of the Clones with the boys this morning, in preparation for tonight's Clone Wars movie (they'll be going as part of friend Jake's Birthday party), when Aidan and I had the following conversation:

Me: See, Anakin and Amidala are falling in love.
Aidan: Why?
Me: That's a really good question.

A Few Standards...

A few standards of life in a house with two growing boys:
1) we're always out of something in the fridge or pantry
2) there's always a potty that needs unclogging
3) Jango Fett is always missing one of his guns (and sometimes his head)...

Before you discard...

how considerate of them to remind me...

My boys are Digging you..

A couple of quick little (sorry for the darkness) videos of my boys singing along to their favorite Geoff Smith song, Digg the Code.
Aidan got really shy after he realized I was recording them.. and now he's TERRIFIED that our friend Geoff might actually see this video... but I've assured him that all will be fine if he does. :)

Ones and 0s video

Nashvillegeek colleague, Geoff Smith's got a cool video out for one of the songs on his new album. It premiered tonight on Geekbrief.tv.. take a look.



Ones and 0s by Geoff Smith from Cali Lewis on Vimeo.

Nashville Tech: Jackson's Take

Jackson Miller, local contract software engineer and purveyor fine second-hand hipster gear, does a really nice job offering up his thoughts on Nashville as a Technology Hub

Nashville's Tech Mushroom...

Nice article here from VentureNashville.com (mushroom? really? does that evoke the right image?) about the various tech-oriented groups around town that have been meeting. And another post here at the VentureNashville blog that re-emphasizes the point of the article.. that these informal and institutional groups (i.e. Nashville Geeks vs. the Nashville Tech Council) don't seem to naturally co-mingle.

As someone who's attended events hosted across the spectrum, and also as a technology manager from the institution to beat all institutions, the great State of Tennessee, I have a few thoughts about this:

1) nothing against the NTC, but the few of their events I've attended have largely been about Tradeshow floors. Vendors trying to sell me something. Sponsors trying to get their 'impressions' quota. And lots of business card trading.

2) NTC events seem to largely center on DATABASE SECURITY. Just my impression. Nothing empirical to back it up. Not a lot about application development, user experience, UI design, or new technologies. Again, just an impression. I could very well be wrong.

3) like most professional associations, the conversations at NTC events are mostly alot of "this is what I do; now what do you do..." it's like a series of mini-interviews. Not very comfortable. Not very natural.

4) The Nashville Geeks events are largely about socializing. Informal, yes. Not a lot of collared shirts-- mine is sometimes the only one. And not exclusively a technology audience. There are artists and musicians and writers in the group. And lots of marketing folks. Tech-oriented, certainly. Folks who like to get their geek on with the latest WordPress release or tinkering with the latest social-networking-fad-tool of the day. And lots and lots of digital photography. And cutesy business.. er, calling cards. Lots of those as well.

To be honest, in some ways, I've felt a little out of place at the Geeks events only because I'm the only person (or one of the few) there who works for a large technology shop in a fairly formalized, not-too-cool, not-yet-too-open-source environment. My group's not blazing any trails with PHP or Rails. We're building enterprise software for a large, highly proceduralized government agency. Not a lot of the other folks at the table at Noshville are in that game. And yet, all that being the case, I feel very at home there.

What's ironic is that the social/digital media crowd at the Nashville Geeks events-- the breakfasts, the Barcamp Crew meetups, the bourbon nights-- the talk at those events is a lot about products and marketing and getting messages out to consumers-- this is what social media's largely about after all, isn't it-- but the atmosphere is more collegial than commercial. I'm not being sold something at Barcamp. I'm part of something.

Interesting that Digital Nashville's first mixer the other night appears to have been the first event that crossed this apparent boundary in any kind of significant way.. and everyone, even Dave Delaney, was wearing collared shirts!... and I missed the dang thing. Ah well, I'll be sure to catch the next one.

Exciting times to be in this industry in Nashville.. Looking forward to what's to come.
God, I love this town.

A little something different..

Okay, I don't mean to shill but we bought Geoff Smith's new album the other day.. in the hazy hang-over of having just spent the previous evening hanging with friends and neighbors (while the kids were at the grandparents') at Geoff's bar, the Big Bang. Such a good time.. and I was especially happy to get SleepyMama out there.

Back in February when I first visited the Bang, at the PodCamp Nashville after-party, I knew it was a place she'd enjoy.. and although I'd been encouraging her and some of the other Moms in our neighborhood to get over there for months since, this was the first time I'd been successful.. and happily, it was an evening when I was able to come along as well.

So that's that.

Anyway, while we were there, we were talking to Geoff and he was telling us a bit about his new album he'd just released, "Ones and 0s". He called it a 'Dynamic' album, in pre-release through his RingtoneFeeder service. Dynamic meaning the album has basically been released like a podcast. Purchase a subscription, hook up the rss feed in your reader of choice-- looks like it works best with iTunes-- and get the first 12 songs right away, along with a few other goodies (iphone ringtones, the "I'm a Twit" video, and the liner notes). In iTunes, it's pretty easy, then, to move the tracks over into your music library. And then, over the next year, Geoff says he'll be sending down more material to subscribers.. karaoke versions of the songs, live recordings, who knows what..

Well, it should be fun to find out. It's just an interesting experiment to take part in. And Geoff's a local Nashville artist, and a really genuinely nice guy.. so it's not hard to support him.

So, to all the 5 of you reading this.. go out and grab Geoff's album over at Ringtonefeeder.com. You don't have to have an iPhone. You don't have to have iTunes. But you do need to have 15 bucks. Not too bad.

And if you find all this dynamic stuff too scary for now, just sit tight.. the album will be available in more traditional formats (iTunes store, Amazon, even pressed CDs).

I hope you enjoy it. We're walking around the last few days humming "If This Geek Ruled the World" all over the house.

When worlds collide..

Found this video of my old grad school buddy, Mark Marino. We were in the English Dept at Notre Dame together back in the day.
Mark has gone on to become a professor at (the otherwise much hated) University of Southern California.. from what I've seen of his work, he's been doing some interesting research into the nature of narrative and exploring how an internet-enabled world is affecting how we think about stories.



But this presentation kind of turned my head. Perhaps if he's reading this, Mark can comment on his scholarly trajectory here... source code as literature.. interesting, but, speaking as a software development guy and former literary poseur, I have to ask..
can you guys be serious?

PodCamp Nashville interview reel!

I was wondering where this footage wound up.
Glad to see it finally online.
Dave Delaney came around with the camera and happened to capture my first in-person meeting with Geoff Smith.. pretty cool.
Someone should have reminded me to look at the camera, though.

iPhone: the wait may well be over...

The features, the 3G, the integrations with my Mac, the *price*.. and of course the age of my old Hello Moto Pebl.. all this adds up to a big hunk of geezelouiseitstimetobuytheiPhone...
Here's the WWDC Keynote in 60 seconds (courtesy of MahaloDaily):

Evening walks..

We love going for walks with the neighbor kids.. Springtime in Nashville is just a great time of year..

Breakfast: any given Sunday...

Breakfast: any given Sunday...
Originally uploaded by sleepydad

breakfast at our house on any given Sunday..

I'm on the Nothing Show!

This is truly weeks overdue but what can I say, it's been crazy.. and I've been lazy...
but HOLY CRAP! I'm on the Nothing Show!!!

What's the Nothing Show? you really just need to give it a listen to get it.. it's a great little podcast put together by Dave Delaney and Tim Coyne-- improvisational comedy using posts on Twitter as the only source material. Awesome.
Not sure that my tweets of the week preceeding the show really lived up to the quality of previous installments.. but it's an honor just to get nominated... and what a surreal experience to listen to Dave read my silly Tweets.

Dunkin Google Street View..

So Nashville Twitterati are all abuzz with the warm glow of Google Street View showing off all the sights in our fair town... if you know where I live, you can take a happy little Sunday Drive through my neighborhood and see my wife wait patiently for you to pass at an intersection on our street before she pulls out. It's always calm on Google Street view, you never have to worry about using your blinker.. and it's always late summer/early fall there. It's beautiful.

So tonight it occured to me to check out my old home town-- Leominster Massachusetts. And while almost none of Leominster appears to have been covered by the Street View crew, there were a couple of major thoroughfares near my old house highlighted in StreetView-blue, so I decided to take a little tour around town. It's been almost 8 years since I've been back there afterall.

And I have to say, this is a weird experience. I can imagine what it would be like driving through town-- that feeling of familiarity mixed with the alien sense of things not quite the same.
That alien feeling is all the more intense when you're 'driving' around town through a series of sometimes-not-all-so-contiguous freeze frames of streets and traffice.

But it's still pretty freakin' cool!

And then, just as I was about to wrap up, I decided to take a run down Central Street.. it caught my eye because on the Map, it appears that there's a big gap in the Street-View highlighting.. as if they skipped a quarter-mile of the road when they were filming. Did they lose the hard drive that day? bad sector?

So I pressed the Google accelerator and pressed onward toward the breach.. and a funny thing happened.
We turned into a parking lot.
Passed a row of cars.. passed the Leominster House of Pizza, where I used to get the biggest and best pepperoni pizzas any kid just finished with a little league or street hockey game has ever had.
and we pulled in for a quick stop at the Dunkin' Donuts.

Hey wow, they added a Dunkin Donuts in our little Johnny Appleseed Plaza. Cool! Hey wait a minute...


View Larger Map

Yep.. seems dude at Google didn't turn the camera off when he stopped in for a piss and a cup of Joe, I guess.

"Friends you know.. or pretend to know.."

...only you me and Michael Arrington will understand this..
Yes, we have beer cozies.

Top 5 Quarterbacks All Time

With the retirement of Brett Favre this week, there's been a lot of talk-- okay, almost all of it on ESPN Radio's Mike and Mike morning radio show..

So, for what it's worth, here's my Top 5 All-Time NFL Quarterbacks

1. Joe Montana
2. Johnny Unitas
3. John Elway
4. Terry Bradshaw
5. Dan Marino

Who are your influences?

Bands have always talked about their early influences-- giving a little window onto those elements that factored into their early development and made them who they are today. Did you listen to the Beatles or Elvis? Zepplin or The Who? Ratt or Motley Crue?

Nick Hornby's novel, High Fidelity, which was of course later adapted (pretty well) as a film, gets into this quite a bit as Rob, the main character, is constantly sorting and resorting his record collection.. reorganizing and reprioritizing those little sentimental pieces of himself contained in those records-- the times and places and people they represent to him.

I think about this from time to time-- in terms of music, literature, television, even philosophy... all things that put a little structure in your brain, that affects how you think about things from that point on.. These are the things you find yourself going back to over and over again, referencing in conversation, using to define some abstraction in your head.. or maybe these are just the experiences of things you reminisce about when you have a little time to think about the old days.

So who would I list as my influences?
Pink Floyd
Rush
Led Zepplin
Star Wars
The Tom Baker Doctor Who
J.D. Salinger
Plato, Republic
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Bill Buckley
Michael Ondaatje
The ClueTrain Manifesto
Hornby, High Fidelity (I can't leave it out after I mention it in explaining my point, can I?)

So who are your influences?

Brett Hangs 'Em Up...

This is one of those sublime moments when you see the real heart of a competitor surrendering finally to age, fatigue.. finding himself in a place where he's forced to say "It's over."

Twitter in Plain English

Once again, the good people at CommonCraft-- Lee and Sachi LeFever-- bring order to the chaos and give us the words and images we need to explain something so simple and yet so incomprehensible to our friends and relatives..
On second thought.. I'm not sure I want my relatives a) reading my Tweets; or b) Tweeting themselves.

All the same-- this is awesome.