My friend, Charles Calvert, has just formed a new Computer Consultants meetup to replace the now-defunct Independent Computer Consultants Association (ICCA), which went bankrupt at the end of 2009. If you’re interested in consulting, you should think about trying out one of this group’s meetings.
Joining Toastmasters
I joined Toastmasters last Wednesday to ramp up my public speaking skills, particularly since I’ve been regularly speaking at user groups and technical conferences. My long-term goal is to be as effective in front of an audience as speakers that I admire, such as nationally known speakers like Dave Thomas and Chad Fowler, or top local speakers like Jeff Casimir.
Two External Drives and Final Cut Express
I just spent $641.16 on equipment to accommodate the video editing needs of RubyNation 2010. Specifically, I ordered two 2TB Western Digital external drives with FireWire800 support to handle our video storage needs. The FireWire800 support also ensures that the drives can be used as scratch drives during video editing. Additionally, I ordered Final Cut Express for myself (my other editors both have Final Cut Pro, so we’re covered).
RubyNation Retrospective 2010
We just had the Retrospective for RubyNation 2010, where all of the organizers get together for a celebratory dinner and discuss 1) what worked well with the conference, and 2) what needs to be improved for next year. I believe this strategy is one of the key reasons that RubyNation has steadily improved as a conference over the past three years.
KeenerTech Crosses Milestone
KeenerTech.com just recently crossed an important milestone. I implemented Google’s AdSense program in December 2009. The site is getting enough traffic now, and has Google ads sufficiently integrated into the site, that KeenerTech.com is now self-sustaining. That is, the site earns at least enough through advertising to pay for its hosting costs. As a by-product, it also covers the hosting costs of the other sites that I host for various people.
Running Amuck at Quantico
Those pesky marketing folks at MetroStar Systems have done it again. Our company is sponsoring the Marine Corps series of races, and the marketing folks pounced on me (in a weak moment) and convinced me to sign up for the Marine Corps Run Amuck race on August 14th. This four-mile race engages runners in obstacles, mud pits, a water challenge and more beginning at 8:00 AM!
Anatomy of an April Fools Joke
We moved RubyNation to April this year to avoid conflicting with RailsConf 2010, which was scheduled to be held in nearby Baltimore in June. Once we landed in April, we realized that we were going to have a nice opportunity to pull an April Fool’s joke on the Ruby community.
We struggled long and hard to find a suitable joke to pull. It clearly couldn’t be mean-spirited, tasteless, offensive or just plain stupid. It had to be kind of cool. Many emails were exchanged as we all wracked our brains to come up with a good joke, and there’s more than 10 dedicated organizers for an event like RubyNation.
Finally, Arild Shirazi, from Code Sherpas, came up with the winning idea.
So, here’s the text of the April Fool’s joke that was published on the RubyNation site just 8 days before the conference:
Matz Presents Ruby2 - Finally Ready for the Enterprise in 2010!
Yukihiro Matsumoto (newly minted Chief Ruby Architect at Oracle), will join RubyNation live via satellite from Japan to discuss how Oracle's acquisition of Ruby finally makes our favorite language ready for the enterprise. With the impending release of the Ruby Language Specification 2 version 1.0 and Sun's Ruby Virtual Machine™, Matz will describe how developers and architects can leverage best practices for these upcoming, exciting changes:
Ruby Community Process® Program - controlled
changes to Ruby via Ruby Specification Request®
(RSR) committees
Oracle Application Server Enterprise Edition™ -
the reference Rails Application Container®
Introduction of type-safety to the language with
Ruby Generics™
Extensive XML-based configuration and mapping
n-tiered Ruby, hyper-threaded Ruby, Rails
Enterprise Beans®, rant build tool and much,
much more!
Get excited about Ruby2v1.0 - Ready for the Enterprise!
One of the things we weren’t expecting was the active participation of Matz himself, the creator of the Ruby programming language, in our little joke. It seems that various people asked him if he had really joined Oracle. When he found out why people were asking him this, he got such a kick out of it that he re-tweeted it.
This caused a major traffic spike on the RubyNation site, as you can clearly see in the Google Analytics chart below. The chart covers a week and shows the number of visits for each day.
We were all surprised and pleased at how well the April Fool’s joke went over. We’re hoping to do something like this next year, but we’ll have to come up with the right idea. So, see you next April!
On Media Convergence
Here’s an interesting video perspective on media convergence. Quite nicely done,by the way.
MetroStar Ad
Here’s a preview of MetroStar Systems’ full-page advertisement in the RubyNation 2010 Conference Program. I was surprised (and pleased) when the Marketing team incorporated pictures of myself and Dave McVicar into the ad.
MetroStar Launches Video Contest Platform
My company, MetroStar Systems, just a launched a new product called Votridea. It’s a contest platform, generalized from our ExchangesConnect online video contest, that can foster brand awareness, build social communities and promote innovation.