Category Archives: Link/News

Shout-out to Sweet St Music Technology

I want to thank Chuck Brown of Sweet St. Music Technology for sponsoring my Buy Me a Lego campaign. I took a look around his site, interested as I was, because I’m an amateur musician myself (I play piano). I used to play alto sax in middle school, but never became great at it.

Anyway, Sweet St. has a large collection of band instruments, recording gear, studio gear, DJ equipment, guitars, digital pianos, and more–you name it. I liked looking through the band instruments–took me back. And the digital pianos. But if you need anything at all, take a look.

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Some more stores at BrickLink

I received a couple more donations (for http://www.BuyMeALego.com) from stores at BrickLink–thanks guys!

First, eBricksOnline for a wonderful $25.00 donation! thanks! They also gave me a coupon to their store.

And also, Ash’s Extras, for a $2.00 donation. Thank you very much!

So check them out if you need some Lego bricks.

 

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Washington, DC / Baltimore photographer

Thibeaux Lincecum contributed to my Buy Me a Lego campaign and deserves some props. He’s a photographer local to Washington, DC / Baltimore and I enjoyed many of his photos. He’s got a lot of stuff with Burning Man, weddings, parties, and a ton of others. I liked the Montgomery County Fair photos, particularly this one. Very nice. So go check out his stuff.

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Shout out to a store at Bricklink

I buy most of my Legos these days second-hand from a huge online market called BrickLink. People post their inventories for sale, and you can order from all of these people. BrickLink manages all of it.

Well, one store (so far) is a generous donor in the Buy Me a Lego campaign, and I wish to mention them specifically.

Front Range Lego, has chipped in with a great donation of $5.00.

Not an insignificant donations. If you need to get some Lego bricks on the cheap, go check them out.

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Announcing Buy Me a Lego

So I’ve resorted to desperate measures. 🙂

I’ve started a small experiment/campaign to raise the cash for a Lego Millenium Falcon. But I am making it worth people’s while. Whoever donates gets a link from the page to their own site.

The way it works is:

* for 65 cents, I put a link to their blog on the site.

* for $2 I ALSO mention them on this blog.

* for $10 I will put up a banner ad.

Will it work? I think so. Links to sites are worth it. It can help boost traffic. This blog isn’t super-popular, but it’s growing larger and has quite a bit of traffic every day. I think the site I just setup will get dugg or slashdotted one of these days.

So head over to http://www.BuyMeALego.com and contribute! Thanks!

 

Watkins Apothecary

I just wanted to say thank you to Valerie and Don for their contribution to my Buy Me a Lego campaign. Their generous donation deserves a link to the web-site of a very interesting store. As an aspiring gourmet, I particularly enjoy the pantry section of the store. I’ve been meaning to look into some high-quality spice and herb sources on the Internet, since what we can find around here in DC is sadly lacking in quality.

My grandfather would have loved this store. He was an excellent amateur chef and had a nice collection of spices, oils, and other ingredients that came from stores like this.

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Getting Green Off the Grid

Going green is something I am slowly becoming more interested in. I’m not really sure what steps exactly we need to take–I don’t think we have an inordinate impact on the environment, and to be honest, right my pocketbook is far more important. That said, I do drive a Honda Civic that I’ve been able to get more than 42mpg out of. We try to use everything we buy, and dispose, give away, recycle, sell, etc. everything we don’t need. We try to walk places where we can.

Thank you to Eric for his contribution to BuyMeALego. He has a genuinely interesting site. Getting Green Off the Grid is a blog about both more sustainable living and living independently.

About the site:

This is a journal of my research into becoming more independent, away from the power grid. My goal one day is to live out in the middle of nowhere, dependent upon none but myself and my family. That dream is a long way away, but every little step counts.

I think that is a very enviable position to be in–completely independent. Independent power utility in particular fascinates me. Or better, being able to sell your power back to the power company.

I don’t think it’s possible to turn off our dirty technologies or habits all at once, but having people like this who do the research, who advocate, who publicize the next big clean technology is absolutely vital. We need to start down the path and have smart people working on it hard. We’ll get there, eventually.

Anyway, I think I will subscribe to his blog for a while and check it out–the posts I’ve read are interesting and he links to some good stuff.

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The users are in control

I really enjoyed and appreciated this essay from Raganwald about the user experience at work versus that of their home PC environments (among other topics).

I particularly liked the point:

And meanwhile, the very same users could walk across the street and buy themselves a much better PC for less money than we pay and take it home the same day.

Ain’t that the truth. I put together my Core 2 Duo system for the same price as my crappy Pentium 4 hyperthreaded number at work. The time frames were not that far apart. The Core 2 runs circles around this sick puppy.

A company’s philosophy should be to get users (especially developers like me!) whatever hardware/software they need immediately. Within minutes or hours, not days or weeks. Of course, then you have to trust your employees to make good requests. But if you don’t trust them to know what they need, why trust them to do their job at all?

The essay goes on to talk about writing applications that take advantage of modern PC horsepower. I think I’m doing an ok job of this at work now. For example, we have a database of assets that is continually growing. It used to be we could view all of the assets on a single page that took about 30 seconds to load off-site.

Now that list will take several minutes to bring up. Yeah, we’re growing. So we need tools to help manage all of that information. One thing I’m building right now (as soon as I’m done writing this, as a matter of fact) is a quick filtering functionality on a desktop app that talks to the database. The list of assets is filtered as you type, taking advantage of the fast PCs we have these days.

That’s just one example. I can think of others that are immediately useful in business apps:

  • better visualization – it takes time and thought to develop good data visualization, but the results are usually worth it
  • drag & drop support – make sense to drag assets from a customer to another? I don’t know, maybe.
  • dynamic views – use all that processing power to show something more interesting than fields on a scrolling form. Graphics views that change in response to context
  • track history, undo/redo – might make sense in some contexts
  • attach more meaningful information – pictures, videos, documents, whatever. – with stuff like WPF, it’s easier than ever to display varied content

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