Well, I am back from The Ryder Cup. It was a very stressful and work filled seven days in Michigan, and I’m not sure how long it is going to take before I don’t feel worn out. I got a lot of sleep last night, and will do the same tonight. I wrote a lot of code onsite, mainly because we had no other choice given the parameters under which we were working. We also had a major set of server issues, ones which were hard to diagnose, and which we are still trying to pin down today, two days after the event ended. I wish I could say that I saw a lot of golf, and that I really experienced the Ryder Cup, but I didn’t do either. I’ve got a lot of Web reading to catch up on now, and housework and chores. Will be back with you shortly.
I probably won’t be posting too much for the next week or so, I arrived in Detroit today to work onsite for our coverage of the The 35th Ryder Cup Matches. As usual, Todd has done a fantastic job with the design and coding of the site. It is attractive, easy to use, and reflects the identity of the event itself. My part of the team is primarily responsible for the integration of the Todd’s site with our CMS software, and also for the scoring software that will be posting the scores to the site and syndicating them out to our third party partners. As always with the week of an event, we have a lot to do. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t excited to be here for the event, it’s a very unique one.
Well, it is this time of year again. As per my prediction in 2002, the same tree dropped a big limb during the beginning stages of Frances smacking us. Luckily, that limb landed on another limb, pivoted, and the softer, leafy side landed on my roof, causing very little damage that I can see. I have had a hard time finding a tree service that wasn’t overwhelmed by the storm damage, but have to get it off. Hopefully I can get someone out tomorrow.
Tonight, I decided to rock out some bookmarklets that I needed to make for our editorial team. If you ever need to write a couple bookmarklets, I heartily recommend Bookmarklet Builder. It allows you to write your Javascript as you normally would, then formats the stuff all up for you the way it needs to be for your browser and stuff. I had mixed results getting it to work properly in Safari, but it rocked out in Firefox. Now if my power would just come back on.
I flew back on an earlier flight, trying to make sure that Frances didn’t interrupt my travel plans during this critical part of our work season. Now it looks as if Frances is bearing right for Atlanta, the heavy rains have already started, so I’m guessing that the Northern part of the system us here. My thoughts go out to the people in Florida, it looks as if the damage there is severe, and especially troubling considering that another storm, Ivan is moving into the same path.
On the plane, I read The Wisdom Of Forgiveness: Intimate Conversations and Journeys a book about forgiveness authored by Victor Chan and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It’s the second book about forgiveness that I have read this summer, and I definitely enjoyed it as much as the other works I have read that involved the Dalai Lama. Victor Chan added a very personal set of insights into the way Tibetan Buddhism views and deals with forgiveness, and that made this book that much more special to me. This personal touch never felt contrived, this man is a friend of the Lama, and his interaction with His Holiness seems to be a special one. I think that anyone, regardless of religous conviction or beliefs, will take something very moving and changing from this book. Forgiveness is something that I seem to struggle with greatly at times, and the interdependent nature of our relationships with the people and world around us is something that I need to think about more when conducting my daily affairs.
I spent the weekend in Dallas where my good friend Steve Isenburg got married to a beautiful and engaging woman, Amanda Wilson. Steve was one of the first real friends I met when I moved down to Atlanta from New York, and I’ve missed his company since he and Amanda moved down to Fort Worth. We had quite a few small adventures together, including an ill fated attempt by me to do some white water canoeing with him. It was great to see the two of them tie the knot, and to do so in front of two amazing families and numerous friends. One of the real treats of the weekend for me was to get to spend time with Steve’s dad. All I can say is that I wish them the best possible life together, they are two genuinely great people.
For several months, I have been using OmniOutliner to keep track of my multitude of simultaneous projects, and iCal to manage the daily to-do items that I have with due dates. Earlier this week, a few different blogs noted the release of Process, an outliner for Mac OS X designed specifically for project management purposes. I’ve spent the last couple of days getting used to it, and I’m now totally sold on it as a replacement for the Omni/iCal combo. It adds a few features that make a big difference to me for the purposes of project management, aside from the obvious ability to use one application where I currently use two. First, the ability to color label individual items makes my gigantic to-do list much easier to read. Secondly, I was just thinking last week that I would like it very much if OmniOutliner supported a tabbed interface, and the “Projects” that Process handles are a perfect substitute. I can also prioritize each item, and assign it a to-do alarm. These alarms aren’t limited to your run of the mill alert message and sound. They can be an alert, automatically open a fill or application, play a sound, or even execute a unix command. Finally, the application allows you to link specific tasks to files in the filesystem, making it easy to remember where that specification or diagram is currently located. Process fits nicely into the way I work, and the way that my mind breaks up projects. I recommend checking it out if you already use an outliner of some sort for project management.
For years and years, really since it’s inception, I was the number one bump on google. A couple of months ago, some band named bump of chicken took the top spot. I wasn’t upset, I don’t get a lot of traffic, and I doubt that many people are typing the word bump into google. Now, however, some bicycle club with the abbreviation bump as its name has taken the number two spot away. I am not happy, I feel less bumpy.
Last week, while in New York, in a moment of late night, semi-coherent, convenience store shopping, I picked up a pack of Japanese Yogurt Hi Chew Candy. I am now addicted to the stuff. Chewy and delicious, and also available online, sounds good to me.
While in Lake Elkhart, where we stayed while working the PGA Championship, we ended our days at Siebkens. I believe that we actually drank all of the Guiness that they had, to the point where they actually completely ran out of Guiness. Siebkens is actually a fairly famous bar in the motorcycle and open wheeled racing communities, and the walls, bar and ceiling were covered in stickers for everything related to racing. (Buzz added a PGA sticker while we were there, I wonder how long it will last?) If you are ever in that part of Wisconsin, I recommend the place.
One of the bartenders, Patrick told all sorts of fun stories about the various famous people, from Paul Newman to Ashley Judd, who had ended up there during the racing weekends. (Oh, and the other fun bar in Lake Elkhart, Brown Baer, has the best cornbread I have ever tasted. The cheeseburger may have also been the best I have ever had, but I was too distracted with the slab of cornbread to notice.)
Flickr is a very interesting site for sharing photos. Since subscribing to the RSS feed of photos with the tag “Atlanta”, I have become addicted to watching every day as interesting photos of the city I live in flow into my RSS reader. Today they launched Organizr, a Rich interfaced tool for working with your Flickr photo collection. Aside from the obvious hatred of the letter “e” that is exampled in their naming conventions, ludicorp is doing something that I miss in Web companies, building tools that combine the best technologies available to do things people want to do in interesting ways.
Well, I survived my first trip to do onsite coverage of a major golf tournament. We work very very hard in the weeks that proceed a tournament, getting the site in order, the scoring software ready, and all of our sponsorship and syndication ducks in a row. It was phenomenal to actually get to go to an event in person after working them from afar for so long. No rest for the wicked though, as the Ryder Cup is a scant four weeks away now. I find myself, however, energized by the experience, wanting to push myself to new levels of excellence for the site and the team. Wisconsin is a gorgeous state, and the people are super nice, polite, and friendly. I would like to go back some summer and spend more time in that area.
I’m going to start doing this every Friday. This week’s tip is “Drive like you are going somewhere.” This is an especially useful tip for those of you who seem to always be in front of me on my way to the office in the morning.
Calling something a “blog”, or putting a graphic at the top of the page with the word “blog” in it, does not make something a “blog”. I’m not trying to be nit picky. I really don’t care that much. It’s just that things like this annoy me. I have known many blogs, and you sir, are not a blog. This practice is becoming prevelant, mostly among major media companies that don’t seem to get the concept.
I flew back on an earlier flight, trying to make sure that Frances didn’t interrupt my travel plans during this critical part of our work season. Now it looks as if Frances is bearing right for Atlanta, the heavy rains have already started, so I’m guessing that the Northern part of the system us here. My thoughts go out to the people in Florida, it looks as if the damage there is severe, and especially troubling considering that another storm, Ivan is moving into the same path.
For several months, I have been using 