PhatBoyG.com

The guys at Los Techies have invited me to join their ranks and start posting on their blog. I’ve accepted the invitation and am looking forward to being part of their great community. I met several of the guys in Austin (one of which managed to snag a shot of Dru Sellers and me looking very sleepy) and they’ve got a good thing going over there.

I’ll continue to post in both locations as I figure out how to best integrate the content between the sites. I switched to FeedBurner for my feed so hopefully I can aggregate the content somehow. That, and getting MarsEdit to format the content nicely for Community Server (it seems that most Mac users don’t post on Community Server blog hosts so demand hasn’t been too high there). I think I’ve got the kinks worked out but I’m still massaging the process a bit.

So check me out here or at my blog on Los Techies, one way or another you should be able to find me!

I’ve been lazy the last few days so a quick update this morning.

• AppleTV
  We’ve been using this more (thanks to Handbrake, no help from Apple sadly) around the house for kids shows and movies. It’s a shame Apple doesn’t make it easier to leverage this product, it’s so compact and subtle, but searching for anything video related is a complete pain in the butt. And forget music without a set of defined playlists. An upgrade from Apple to support uPnP would be nice instead of only iTunes, but that’s probably not likely.
• Guitar Hero 3
  I need to get some time to play this more. I certainly enjoyed the first couple of sets and the game itself is showing so much polish compared to previous versions. I really dig it.
• iPhone
  I still love my iPhone — it’s a great device. Rumors are version 1.1.2 (minor upgrade to annoy the hackers) is due any day, along with an updated version of iTunes (7.5).
• OSX Leopard
  This refresh of OSX is great and I continue to find more and more new things I like about it. There are a few minor annoyances, but I’ve figured out one of them at least. My intermittent network connection is due to the fact that my RJ45 plug isn’t locking into my MacBook Pro and keeps slipping in and out, in and out, in and… Anyway, fixed.
• Subaru WRX STI
  With the updates to the ECU, I love driving this car. And the cooler weather has really brought on some new grunt that just feels so good. That, and not having to run the air conditioner!
• Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control with Castle Windsor
  I gave my talk at work last week and I think it went well. I’ve gotten some good constructive feedback and will publish a blog post of the content in the near future. I hope to tune the presentation and add it my roster of talks for upcoming user group meetings.

I spent some time with the kids carving pumpkins for Halloween tonight. Check it out!

Since I’m a Mac user now, it only makes sense that I change my blog template to look like a Mac.

So I’ve started to try and use the Mac for everything possible. Of course, web surfing is an easy one, along with that comes Google mail, particularly since all of my domains e-mail is handled by Google Apps for Domains. Good stuff. Now I’m checking out how TextMate has the ability to edit blog posts offline and upload them to the blog. Seems cool enough to me, let’s see how it goes!

Continue reading »

Wow, today is going to be a long one. Last night, I went to see EOTO play. EOTO is a spin-off of the now defunct String Cheese Incident. It was a solid 2-hour techno show, but not the hard house or trance that I’ve heard so much about. It was more trip-hop or something like that, very cool stuff. The drummer played for two hours straight without a break — pretty wild.

The MacBook Pro continues to evolve. Post Fusion install I’ve gotten all my development tools installed, including Resharper, TestDriven.NET, TortoiseSVN, and NAnt. So far everything seems to be working great. I’ve yet to install PowerShell (so I can have my NIX command-line goodness for the Windows box). I pulled down the trunk of Castle and got it to build as well. I had to create the Test & Test2 databases on my local instance of SQL Server 2005 in order for all the tests to complete.

It looks like I’ll be giving a presentation on MonoRail at the TulsaTechFest 2007. It will be an introduction to building a web site using MonoRail and Brail. MonoRail is part of the Castle Project and provides a MVC (model-view-controller) framework within ASP.NET. MVC is a solid pattern for building web applications that is a significant improvement over the page-based WebForms model. MonoRail embraces web standards allows applications to be built based on controller logic and helps facilitate the separation of concerns. It’s good stuff, I can’t wait ot talk about it.

Did I mention that I’m old and staying out until 2 AM at a live show is painful the next day? Where is the Tylenol again? Strange that I can stay up until 3 AM playing with a new computer and not feel fried the next day but this was… different.

Oh yeah, Peggle Extreme is part of the pre-order package for TeamFortress2 on Steam. I highly recommend it as a fun diversion! Speaking of TF2, I’m all set for the beta that starts on Monday. I can’t wait to play the game, I hope for some cool in-game video recording (with FRAPS or otherwise) next week. I wonder if voice-chat is built into the game? Things I don’t know — they are plentiful today it seems.

I got my iPhone store credit, $100, fast and easy from Apple. I guess this means a trip to the Apple store is coming soon.

Oh, and today’s post is an experiment in link diarrhea to see how long it takes this post to go up!

It seems like every time I turn around, another social networking site pops up. First, it was MySpace (which basically sucks ass) and then it was a ton of clones (none of which I’ve ever joined). Then the nostalgic Classmates.com (which I joined, and never visit) to try and snag your personal information. Then another set of clones arose. Then the professional focused LinkedIn, which makes you think that you can have a personal connection (albeit it akin to a 3rd cousin) to the VP of Microsoft.

My conclusion? They all suck. But I join them anyway. Why? Maybe so nobody does it for me.

So what makes a good social networking site? Simplicity. For example:

del.icio.us is a great example. It hooks nicely into FireFox, I can use it to ensure all my bookmarks are in sync between work/home machines, and I can find related links just by browsing keywords from my links. Good stuff, plain and simple. Plus, I put a feed on my home page so I can always see my latest links regardless of location.

Flickr is cool because it offers a great service with great features for a great price. I even signed up for the Pro account to use it to archive my photos. Plus, you don’t have to make everything public, meaning you can put those pictures of your kids you only want the grandparents to see.

Topic-centric forums are probably my favorite of all “social” web sites. They typically have a good search engine, most questions have already been asked and answered, and good ones have better hands-on content than the creators/manufacturers/publishers original web sites. I like forums, you get solid answers, tons of worthwhile opinions, and if you recognize the noise factor you can easily weed out the whiners and post-count spammers.

The latest edition is ever popular blog. I think my favorite quote about blogs reads (paraphrased):

“I blog therefore I am”
- 0 comments

Sure they offer a great way to keep in touch with the masses, an outlet for wandering thoughts, or solid technical information based on experience. Sometimes they are just fun to keep track of friends and family. I use this one to point out things I find interesting to the half dozen or so readers I likely have (the rest of the hits are probably search engine robots). The more popular blogs are social in the commenters they have on the site, some more vocal than others. I follow some technical blogs and find the comments sometimes more interesting than the original post, based on the experience of another reader.

I’m not yet what I think about sites such as Twitter or Pownce, but the general aspect seems to be akin to broadcast text messages without the $0.15 per message charge. A friends list makes it easy to broadcast the mundane details of your day without a lot of overhead, and support for mobile devices makes it easy to fill up the time spent waiting in the drive thru for a quick french fry fix. So far, they seem to be fairly limited and of questionable value to the market.

Well, I’m done rambling, and if you are actually reading this, feel free to leave a comment. Or better yet, share a link on del.icio.us, post a mini-blog entry on Twitter or upload some pictures of dogs doing it to Flickr so we can all gain something more than yet another blog entry.

I took some time to migrate my blog to a new server so I could upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress. Version 2.1 and later requires MySQL 4.x or later and my old server was still stuck on MySQL 3.x. Anyway, it’s all good now.

So check it out, new blog, new style, fresh look, still pimpin’.