Some fantastic walks in New York are coming up for the week of October 18-24, including “Sustainable Skyscrapers: Times Square Goes Green”… learn about the reactive interiors and intelligent materials that make up the Bank of America Tower and six more of the city’s greenest buildings. | Some Lectures of interest are taking place soon at SVA, including Jason Fried (37Signals), Callie Neylan (NPR) and Matt Mullenweg (WordPress), amongst others.

Over 1,860 issues, covering the years from 1936 to 1972 of Life Magazine are now available on Google Books. Get started by selecting a thumbnail from the thumbnails of every Life Magazine available. Dig into an individual magazine via scans of each page. More details on the Google Books blog. Google Books, Making printed material collections less relevant by the minute. Well, more relevant.

What I’d like to do before we commit, is compose a tweet summoning local buyer’s agents to contact me. Similar to brands that are alerted of mentions of themselves in the Twitosphere, I’m assuming a real estate professional using Twitter would follow specific keywords, perhaps even zip codes. They can then follow up with the twitterer, offering their services.

When I went to compose this tweet, I realized I don’t know the twit vernacular that will maximize my exposure. I’m thinking keywords would be a start. I’ve also seen tweets precede keywords with the pound symbol. For example, “#skate”. I assume that is to get themselves bunched in with some kind of keywording group?

This is what I’ve come up with. Any advice on maximizing my tweet?

In search of a buyer’s agent. North NJ, NY Metropolitan area. Real estate 07086. DM if that’s you.

Our baby girl was born 11:20pm Thanksgiving Day, Nov 27, 2008. 9 lbs 1oz, 21 inches.

Susan & I weren’t able to attend, but my sister and her fiancee were able to catch Mark looking like Ryan Seacrest and behaving like Joan Rivers. There’s a couple more snapshots on Flickr.

I snagged the pics from my soon-to-be brother in law, Brian, who blogged all about it on: Live from Rodney Drive.

• Semantic HTML
• W3C Valid HTML
• W3C Valid CSS
• Anti-wysiwyg, hand coding
• Cross browser, cross platform intricacies
• SEO optimized naming conventions & coding techniques
• Google friendly, user friendly URL structures
• Web Standards
• Usability
• Yada Yada

This is what I’ve come up:

• Brogramming the front ends
• Front end programmer
• Separator of content and design
• Design and content separator extraordinaire

I’ve gone out on a limb and used the word extraordinaire, please, humor me. I’ll start practicing the things I preach, just as soon as it’s on my business card, I swear.

Which ones do you like? What do you think a potential employer would appreciate the most? I’m just getting started here, what are your suggestions?

Lucky for Susan and I as well, is that we just got the keys to our new apartment yesterday morning. We were able to make a couple of runs with the essentials (cat, computers, and the TV of course) and not spend the night in the smoky center where it rains ash.

Full map of the fires

Update:
Some great photos of the wildfires on Flickr.

The savings quickly adds up:


$93 a month allows me to squirrel away a healthy $654 before I skip town. I’ve elected to keep my own internet connection and not leech off neighbors merely for the reliability my own connection provides. I’m willing to pay for that much.

My next step was to simplify the process of getting that must see TV via the internet, where this Cnet article I read a couple months back came in handy: TV Torrents: When ‘piracy’ is easier than legal purchase.

Within 10 minutes of setting up Miro and browsing tvRSS.net, my favorite shows were all queued up.

One of the definite drawbacks is all that money spent on an HDTV that will no longer receive HD programming. Seems like a waste. Perhaps a portion of the savings can go to upgrading that upconverting DVD player to a legit HD one. You know, just to round things out a bit.

The internet as a true content delivery network, what a time we’re living in!

Our web department has had tons of freedom in guiding all the brands online, deciding what was best, and executing the way we knew best. It was tons of fun applying technologies that usually only exist in nerd communities to practical use in a non nerd setting.

With that said, there’s some major projects that needed to be started and completed quickly. Namely, ecommerce. Despite our team being more than willing and able to get the job done and presenting how to do so, upper management creates pie charts on how to approach the project. That leaves us to hack together something somewhat useful, posing as not so good, ecommerce. A year later, the pie chart has some new slices on it, but no action has been taken. I understand that Sole is not an internet company, they’re a traditional business with a traditional business model, but that’s no excuse for being excrutiatingly slow to action.

Part of the problem is that the people involved in that pie chart aren’t educated when it comes to the web. Therefore, they’re easily taken advantage of by industry hacks dropping old buzz words such as eStrategy, database marketing and mobile technology. The fact that these bottom feeders are able to get face time with decision makers makes matters worse and slows things to a crawl.

Sole Technology needs to turn to their web department first, they’re the experts.

We have some great, talented people. I hope they continue to get things done and do a better job of influencing decision makers than I ever could. For gods sake though, start your work day at 10am, at least! It’s been a lot of fun, and I’ll miss it lots, but it’s time for something else.