Now I can ask spam bots simple math questions and turn comments back on. Good times. So i’m back, I think. Doing a lot of moving around with Anna, mostly on the east coast. Working a lot on GroundedPower with my friends, can’t beat that. Oh and looking to buy a used small-ish pickup if you have one kicking around.

I’ve been twittering as a couple of different entities lately and have spent less time here. Right now there’s a lot going on and i’m doing my best to not become another casualty of this economy. Here goes: Recently there were two NPR sightings (err hearings?) connect to me, a pledge week promo I did close to two years ago when I toured NPR in DC and I heard my old coworker Dave on MarketPlace no less, talking about finding a job through social media. Go Dave! I’m still working on Plodt, we’re collaborating with the Eurovision people this coming spring. I hear the Russians always win because they cheat, no surprise there. I’ve also been working on a smart energy project which is super fun. It’s interesting, timely and I get to work with my friends. Not much more I can ask for.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Latitude lately and what it means both for the FireEagle badge (Y! Brickhouse RIP) and location based social media in general. I haven’t tried Latitude because it isn’t on the Jesusphone yet but real time location exposed to the Google network creeps me out. Maybe i’m just becoming an old fogey. We all turn the corner at some point.

We spent Memorial Day in Virginia Beach where my good friend’s brother, Ben, was getting married to Pitya. The vows were all music (keyboard, violin, singing) and the bride made her vows in the form of a song, providing the groom with sheet music that he had to figure out on the spot.

To make it even cooler, the reception was in an aquarium. We had the run of the place and got to hang out near the shark tank and with the stingrays.

On the work front, i’ve been spending a lot of time on ebay trying to get cheap equipment for my startup and learning the virtues of esnipe.

My biggest catch so far has been a dual processor server with 4 gigs of ram and 164 gigs of hd space (configured into raid level 5) that I got for two hundred dollars. The only drawback is that with the four fans and dual power supplies, it sounds like an airplane taking off. I’m also in the market for used Apple 20″/23″ cinema displays if anyone has some. If only I was living in Boston and could make my monthly trip to the MIT flea. Good times.

I also bit the bullet and undertook a massive code rewrite. I’ve been putting off incorporating our evolving design into the new code but I finally decided that the longer I waited, the more annoying it would be. In the end the process was a bit time consuming but I was able to do it fairly systematically in Rails and not worry that I missed anything. I just went through the whole MVC tree object by object and then updated my migrations and libraries. I then wrote data migrations to convert all the existing data to the new schema. Not bad.

The world famous Sheldon Brown has passed on. I first stumbled across his website when I was learning about fixed gear bikes. He never did update his site’s ‘early web’ aesthetic but whenever you would search for any bike related web resources, he’d always be at the top of the fold on Google. Sheldon personally did a fixed gear convertion on my Merlin titanium with vertical dropouts and his wife, Hariet Fell was one of my favorite CS professors when I was an undergraduate at Northeastern.

“He was also well-known for patiently and thoroughly answering his 500 – 1000 daily emails.”

So long Sheldon, rest in peace.

We’ve been moving for the past week with a quick interruption for Thanksgiving in Maine (with stops in Gloucester, New Haven, Swampscott and Jamaica Plain ). Moving, four flights down, four flights up — over and and over again. I’m not exactly sure how we’re going to get out of this apartment whenever we decide to move again. Our stuff is so high up.

I’ve been without proper internet access for a week and a half, very off the grid. My connection has been a tethered N95 over bluetooth which surprisingly allows me to be online and make phone calls at the same time. The throughput reminds me of being thirteen years old and calling boards with upload/download ratios and 9600bps modems. I move much faster than that.

Today I am finally back online after endless arguments with Verizon.

And while I was out of the loop, Google released a new version of mobile maps that gives approximate location using cell towers. All of us with GPS enabled phones have been passively gathering data for them, very nice.

Today I attended the Mobile Bar Camp NYC, a gathering of mobile developers and evangelists, to talk about the future of mobile and catch up. There was a similar event last spring but I missed it as I had just graduated and was rushing to get going on my road trip out to Redmond. I’ve been out of the mobile world, getting a taste of Rails and Flex, but it’s a matter of time before I get back into it so it was cool to come by and see where things are headed.

I’ve also been told that the dormant WayMarkr got a mention on the s60 applications blog.

The BarCamp was sponsored by Nokia in association with RG/A. Outside of all the tiny lettering on the Bar Camp tshirts and the plethora of N95 boxes, you wouldn’t know Nokia was involved. ITPers, especially my class (’07) practically took over the event with our own Andy Maskin helping to put the thing together. So yeah, good to see everyone and interesting to see Sean Owen talk about his work with semacode decoding software for Android.

And get this, I WON an N95 with my group during a half-bakery make up a compelling business plan from these keywords in 15 minutes competition. An N95! With the GPS, accelerometer, the works! I’ve got all my applications running on it and have managed to tether it as a bluetooth modem for my powerbook (it’s saying 3G!). Next i’m going to go outside and see how the GPS behaves. I’ve never had the pleasure of owning a device with integrated GPS, this is going to be awesome. I might have to start writing Python again.

Also, Andy froze a cell phone in a block of ice.

Anna’s agency finally supports deep links! Still flash, but now at least you can get straight to her page.