About me
Edina, Minn. is home. New York, N.Y. is where I live.
Prior to New York, I lived in Spain from 2009 through 2012. While there, I became a fluent Spanish speaker, traveled a lot and became a web programmer.
Although nothing tops a long meal with good friends, I enjoy rock concerts and traveling.
Improving my tennis game is a priority.
Kirby Puckett's performance in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series is my standard of excellence.
Creating a list of people to meet
I know of a gentleman who maintains a list of 50 people whom he would like to meet. When he crosses someone off that list, he adds another. The list is always 50-strong — motivating him to meet really influential people.
This is a cool concept.
There are key influencers all around: a thought leader, a “famous” guy within the community, a successful businesswoman, etc. Current location isn’t terribly important.
I don’t maintain a list of 50 people I’d like to meet.
The question that first arrives — “What will I talk about when I meet [person x]?” — might be a bit premature. Perhaps I should be more worried about how I will meet [person x]!
In Four Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss explains getting incredible access to incredible people simply by asking. He states something to the affect of, “The more well-known a person is, the more likely it is that people aren’t simply reaching out to them for advice.”
Creating a list and contacting the people might be all it takes. That’s pretty exciting.
What would you do to prepare for a quick chat with someone you’ve identified as one of your Top-50 People to Meet?
Would you tell them that they are on your list?
Streams
It’s pretty easy to experience the power of Node’s streams by piping a file back to the end user, consider:
https://gist.github.com/tbuchok/5517780
The request receives a response very quickly — the Stream gets piped back to the response object as it receives data. There’s very little waiting.
Consider a common alternative in Rails:
https://gist.github.com/tbuchok/5517692
The example above will download the entire file to the server prior to sending the response. (What else could be done to improve the Ruby/Rails code above?)
Think in more practical terms, imagine that the Stream wasn’t an example .mp3 file, but rather a CSV built from the server! The users of the application will get instant feedback that their download is working and being sent to them — rather than buffering the whole thing server-side and waiting on sending the response once complete.
EC2 Linux AMI and Node
Each time I spin up a brand-new EC2 instance and install Node, I ended up with a trillion open tabs looking up obscure details to get through the installation.
If nothing else, the below will be helpful for the next time:
- Spin up a brand new EC2
- Select “Security Groups” in the EC2 console and ensure that Inbound > HTTP (Port 80) on Source: 0.0.0.0/0 will open up the instance for HTTP requests
- Set up the SSH keys with the .pem file
ssh -i /path/to/file.pem ec2-user@http://ec2-xxx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com/
- SSH into the server and install some things:
yum install gcc-c++
yum install git
yum install nginx _# if you want nginx_
- Install Node
git clone git://github.com/joyent/node.git
cd node/
git branch -al # find latest release branch
git checkout
./configure
make
This will take 15 to 30 minutes.
sudo make install
Create an image of your instance — compiling Node will take while. Visit the EC2 console, select the instance and follow the steps from Actions > Create Image
Have fun!
Think Your Home’s Small? Look At Hong Kong’s Illegal Microapartments
COMPLAINTS ABOUT NEEDING MORE SHOE STORAGE OR HAVING NO SPACE FOR YOUR THIRD BIKE? PLEASE. IN HONG KONG, THE PRICE PER SQUARE FOOT AVERAGES $1,300.
It can be tough to grasp the reality of living in what amounts to a very functional closet through facts and figures, though. These images, which show us a bird’s eye view of several Hong Kong microapartments, do a much better job. They were produced by a Chinese human rights group called the Society for Community Organization, whose mission is to promote equality amongst citizens. “Grassroots people are struggling day in and day out to keep their head above water,” SoCO explains. “Standing in the line of dejection are caged lodgers, tenants living in appalling conditions, aged singletons, street-sleepers, mothers with no one-way permit to live in Hong Kong, families made up of new immigrants and boat dwellers.”
They estimate that over 100,000 people are living in unauthorized apartments in the city, a number that may well be low.
This is amazing.
Ideas that I’m excited about
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea if it’s the only you have.
I’ve recently contributed to two crowd-funded projects that I am excited about. I love that these ideas are decidedly not my idea, and that they are providing solutions to problems outside of my day-to-day, maybe even my year-to-year.
When I arrive at an idea by myself, it is almost always related to digital media and technology. I don’t feel that they are necessarily bad ideas, just it feels like same idea each time.
From this frustration comes my inspiration to contribute to the following two projects.
They are both based out of Barcelona, using technology in a thoughtful way, and are run by some friends or contacts I made while living in Spain.
Uniqbrow
Uniqbrow hopes to solve a common sunglasses problem: your stylish shades diminish in coolness because it’s your only pair!
The product allows you to purchase a single set of lenses and swap out many different Uniqbrow frames — not dissimilar from Modify Watches.
I wear prescription sunglasses and I like them a lot. But my biggest issue is I cannot drop a few hundred bucks each time I want a new style of sunglasses.
As Uniqbrow grows, perhaps we can all be a bit cooler and have some more scratch for other stuff we enjoy, like fish sandwiches.
(Uniqbrow has some line abut fish sandwiches on their site. I’m pretty sure it’s a poor translation — fish sandwich sounds kind of gnarly in English, no?)
StormFly
I was convinced by the video for StormFly — anything posing as an alternative to cloud computing makes me a bit skeptical.
Despite the fact that I try to store virtually nothing on my machine — between Git, Spotify, Gmail, etc. there’s really nothing to store — I’m not necessarily the normal consumer in the computing world.
StormFly offers a bootable USB 3.0 Linux OS that allows for professionals or children — or anyone else — to basically wear their computer on their wrist. All that’s required is, essentially, a “host” computer.
Take a look at their Kickstarter page to get an idea of the market they’re after.
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Those are that latest ideas that aren’t mine that I’m excited about. It’s nice to be thinking a bit about stuff that’s not “World Wide Web online ads that are interactive and have brains!” — or whatever the latest thing I’ve conjured up is.
Watched the first two episodes of House of Cards last night. As it relates to me as a person and as a professional — we’re all hoping Netflix wins big here.
(via hitrecordjoe)
