Bailout Fail

Bailout Fail

There's been some "focused, wry and timely" media examples recently about the old stock market situation. THE BROKERS WITH HANDS ON THEIR FACES BLOG is one good example. I was thinking about the stock market, the bailout plan and one of my personal favorite wastes of time forms of entertainment: Fail Blog. When...EUREKA!

Bailout Fail...

IKEA Denver (or just Colorado) Finally To Be Announced

According to 9news.com IKEA is finally coming to Colorado!

My Past Discussions of IKEA Colorado

I've written about this in the past and become somewhat of a rumor hound on the subject:

Often the comments on those posts are more interesting than the posts themselves...

I'll post an update comment on Wednesday after the real announcement.

Edit: Ikea Centennial

According to a comment I just received it will be in Centennial, Colorado. Centennial just recently incorporated into a city as expansion has grown south of Denver. I guess this makes sense since that area of colorado (Douglas County, southern Jefferson County) has been the fastest growing area in Colorado and one of the fastest in the nation for the last few years. I imagined they would put it north of Denver because my perception is that IKEA is popular with college students and the CU/CSU combination in Boulder/Fort Collins is the center of our college population.

And more sources are identifying it as coming to centennial.

Health Care Choices for Web Developers

Health Care Choices for Web Developers

I'm taking the a list apart 2008 survey of web folks and got to a question about where do I get my health-care.

For the record, I have a high deductible plan through Anthem and an HSA account through 1st Bank (Colorado bank...) and I love it.

So, apparently you can get health care from a lot of places, but you can't get health care from a health care company. And we wonder why health care is so bad in America...the feedback loop is how big these days? Bad feedback loop! Feedback loop goes to it's room without dinner until it can learn to be smaller!

Herman Miller Chairs in Denver - Expensive Chair, Cheap Tables

So, I'm outfitting my office which has me thinking back to all the great articles I've read over the years about offices. There's Joel on Software's 12 Steps to Better Code which is largely just common sense of developer types explained using traditional business language. And Jason Calacanis about how to save money running a startup which is largely more of the same.

Cheap tables and Expensive Chairs (like... Aeron chairs)

Jason's tip that really resonated with me was this one:

Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs. Tables are a complete rip off. We buy stainless steel restaurant tables that are $100 and $600 Areon[sic] chairs. Total cost per workstation? $700. Compare that to buying a $500-$1,500 cube/designer workstation. The chair is the only thing that matters... invest in it.

DrupalCamp Colorado - 4 Days to Go - My Drupal Camp Phone

We're just a few days away from DrupalCamp Colorado 2008 and things are becoming more and more tangible by the minute. Just now I got a package in the mail at the new offices.

The stickers just happen to be 2"x4" which is exactly the right size to emblazon them on the back of your iPhone. Ever since lijit gave it to me my phone has rocked a lijit sticker:

but now...at least for the next week...it's a DrupalCamp phone:

About quarter of the calls I get are organizing the camp so it seems only fitting.

If you're not convinced by these stickers that this will be a rocking weekend, here are the sessions.

Also, my best to the sticker's designer Don Hajicek and to the other logo designer amytremper.

July Denver/Boulder New Tech Meetup Overview

This was the first "New Tech Meetup" that I've attended. It was quite interesting. Perhaps more interesting was the before the session I was at "The Cup" in Boulder talking to a VC/Consultant/Entrepreneur type and comparing Boulder to Denver he said something like "The thing about Boulder is that there's more VCs up here so the Entrepreneurs from Denver have to come here."

At that exact moment, sitting in the Cup working on their presentation was Dandyid. Point proven?

Without further ado - my notes on the sessions.

Gnip (Guh - nip)

Used OpenOffice.org Impress and Ubuntu.

Basically they want to go from the "polling" model (think of all the rss requests that your rss reader makes in a day) to a push model. But it has to be polling, so they will do the polling in one big poll and then share the resulting data with you either by polling or pushing. Their model seems to be like Facebook, but in a B2B way. I'm not sure that I see the problem that they are solving, but they already have several big name partners which means that those big name partners see a business model which is really all that they need.

I like them more now that I see their website: "We got $h*t to pop". Ok, fair enough. They had a real demo - well done. The demo didn't 100% work. Oh well.

Question from the audience: Who saves money? Who spends money? What's the revenue module?
Answer: Uh, this is the new _tech meetup. I'm not a business guy....Let's say for now we're doing this for public benefit._

mobileXware (nice site!)

Used OpenOffice.org Impress and WindowsXP and they couldn't get the presentation to work. Whoops.

All presentation, no demo (it's hard to demo handheld stuff). Basically it's a fitness guide via cell phone that's for sale now.

Mac Keyboard Shortcuts for Spanish Accents

I've been writing a lot more words in Spanish lately as I gear up for giving lessons in Spanish so I (well really, Greg) recently figured out how to use accents and punctuation elements in Spanish, which has made my life much easier!

Go to System Preferences, click International and then choose US-Extended. Once you're set up with that, the keyboard shortcuts are as follows:

option+e+vowel = accented vowel (lower case)
option+e+shift+vowel = accented vowel (upper case)
option+1 = upside down exclamation ¡
option+shift+? = upside down question ¿
option+n+letter = tilde over letter ñ

You can also experiment by holding down option and pressing random keys.

¡Allí está, suerte!

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