shdh

Mini dev house

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I missed last weekend's Super Happy Dev House for my first migraine of the year. I was planning on finishing up the code for the launch of rereuse.com, a site that would help people (read: me) give away crap instead of throwing it away (and having the items end up in the already too full, already too large, already a burden landfills). Essentially, streamline the freecycle process so that more people would be interested in giving away crap instead of throwing away crap (hey, if you're throwing it away anyway, why not give it away?).

Instead, I spent the day in bed, and the weekend fighting a headache that wouldn't go away.

Midweek this past week, I complained to Kris about the lost opportunity to crank on the site and launched. More like whining than complaining, actually, and more like lamenting than whining, as I wanted to use the site to get rid of a bunch of my crap in order to reclaim the garage and office. (Goodness, quite the run-on sentence there. I'll take full artistic liberties and leave it in, instead of making it a proper sentence, or four.)

"Are we doing anything this weekend?" Kris asked me.

"Not that I know of."

"Are we both here this weekend?"

"Yeah."

"Let's have our own code-jam weekend, then. I'll work on FBA, you work on mycrap*."

"Whoo! Okay!"

So, here we are, Saturday morning. Kris is at his desk. I'm at my desk. The dogs are in their beds behind us ("... have to stay with the pack!"). Intarweb connection working. Freezer stocked full of easy-to-heat, easy-to-eat goodies. Fridge stocked with beer and colas (and Odwalla Citrus C Monster for me!).

Best part - the JW Gold from Ben waiting for the end of the weekend for us to celebrate.

* "mycrap" is the original website name Kris and I came up with a couple years ago for this project, which is a combination web-lend program and freecycle-enabler program. We could get only the mycrap.org, and not the .com name, which is why I switched it to rereuse for this part of the project. I'll probably roll the two of them back together for the mycrap.org domain, if I launch the second part later.

Yahoo! Hack Day

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Tomorrow is Yahoo!'s first open Hack Day. They've previously had company wide hack days, where employees spend a day hacking away on projects they want to work on, typically using APIs or other internal libraries to create a project outside the typical work tasks.

Kinda like a corporate BarCamp, or Super Happy Dev House. Speaking of, the next SHDH is November 4th, which is the day before Kris and I head off to Australia.

I'm looking forward to the event very much. Even if I do have the feeling it may become a subtle Yahoo! recruiting effort. I mean, what better way to find talent than by inviting hackers over and watching them work?

Intarweb serendipity

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Today is a day spent at Super Happy Dev House 12. I'm working on Project Decloakment™, which involves building a high profile website and ATTACH MY NAME TO IT. Details of PD™ later, as it's important to what's going on in my life right now, but not until I've laid the groundwork.

Now, about that high profile website.

Basically, I'm building out myCrap, so that I can use it to get rid of my crap. It'll work as both a TAKE my crap freecycle-done-right site and a BORROW my crap (so that I can track who has my Saving Private Ryan DVD or my Firefly DVDs) weblend site.

When the web server I'm working didn't update correctly on a Drupal update, I went to check the error log on the server. Near the bottom of the access log, which I looked at before I looked at the error log, was a blog feed read from rojo. In the feed, they reference my blog's RSS feed on their systems (I'm not really sure how I feel about my content displayed on other sites, but I did put a CC license on the site, so as long as the copy is Non-Commercial and attributed to me... hey, wait a second...), so I wandered over to the link to see what they had for me.

I found my blog's RSS there. It didn't display to me who is the single (ONE!) reader I have out there using rojo, but I hope I'm not too annoying to you, whoever you are!

As I'm wont to do, I started poking around with the site's URL. What did they use for their URL scheme? What if I subtract one number from the identifier for my blog's feed? Will I get another feed, or is the last number a checksum value of the other numbers? Eh, subtract one and look.

I ended up at Jamie Nuwer's LiveJournal blog. Jamie Nuwer? That name sounded familiar... How do I know that name? Reading further into her blog, I realized I know her name because she plays ultimate: women's ultimate in the Bay Area, on Skyline.

What are the chances that feeds for two Bay Area ultimate players are one apart? Now I'm really interested in who added me to their rojo list. Most likely an ultimate player, methinks.

BTW, I update more often than Jamie does. Yay, me!

Update: More poking around and the discover of Liz Gannes' Furl feed leads me to believe my reader from rojo is Mike N, Raphael or Liz herself. Cool! Hi, Liz, Mike or Raph!