Posts with mood good (6)

Last Friday I went to the webOSRoundup Dallas meetup/developer event. (you can see me in a few pictures there - I sat in the second row)

I had a pleasant drive up that morning and arrived in plenty of time to eat lunch and read on my TouchPad before showing up to the conference center.

The developer event was first, from 1-5 PM. Most of the material was fairly basic stuff, which I had expected, so I worked on my own webOS apps, adding a feature to Simple Alarms (yikes, I need to update that page!) and finishing the port of State Lines to Enyo and the TouchPad. (hopefully coming soon!) I did say hi to the people next to me and chatted and helped them out a bit. And Ben Combee (@unwiredben) showed off a Vectrex emulator that he had ported to the TouchPad and added iCade support. (code available here)

During the breaks I chatted a bit with HP and webOSRoundup folk, which was nice, although I didn't have a lot to say.

After that, I checked into my nearby hotel, then went over to the meetup event. It was at the Blackfinn, which seemed like a nice place (and had good beer!) but it was really, really loud. I had a few short conversations, but the noise combined with my natural introversion kept me from talking to too many people, and I left kinda early. I stopped by Best Buy to get a Touchstone (since I didn't win one :-) ) and returned to the hotel for a night of light coding and relaxing.

The next morning I just drove back, stopping for lunch at a Mexican place in Waco.

The trip was fun, but wasn't as successful as I had hoped. The next time I do something like this, I need to:
- have more specific projects to work on or features to add in my apps. I kinda felt like coding Friday night but didn't have much that I was inspired to work on.
- make more of an effort to network and talk to people. I've done better on previous trips, but maybe the lack of a plane trip/overnight stay hurt here? I kinda felt like the event snuck up on me, and maybe preparing for it more would have helped.

- There's a index of happy cities and states in the US (unsurprisingly Hawaii is the happiest state, although Utah and Montana tied for second). New Orleans is the 9th least happy metro area, and Rochester, NY is the 12th least happy. (although at least they beat Buffalo!) Austin did pretty well, too.

The Atlantic (best magazine ever, I remind you) did a a bunch of correlations on various demographic data to see what makes a city happy, and the most significant relationship was to education (or more precisely, what percentage of people had a bachelor's degree or higher) with a correlation of 0.68. Math!

- The White House unveiled their health care plan yesterday - here's a summary of how it compares to the House and Senate versions. There's going to be a "health care summit" later this week and then...who knows? Apparently they're open to passing it through reconciliation, which means they would just need a majority vote in the Senate instead of 60.

- Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation

- The stimulus bill probably has already added 1.6 to 1.8 million jobs.

running out of semi-clever politics titles
Mood: good
Posted on 2008-10-02 09:55:00
Tags: politics
Words: 115

The long-awaited clip where Palin can't name any other Supreme Court decision (other than Roe v. Wade) that she disagrees with:

I'm hesitant that tonight's debate will provide any more such moments (since there will be not a lot of time devoted to each answer), but I guess we'll see!

The Senate passed a bailout plan last night with a bunch of extra crap in it. I guess I think it should pass...we've got to do something? (credit markets are freezing up, as I understand it) Still pretty unsure on the economics of it all. A look at how the credit crunch got started a few weeks ago.

Also, I really like this Michigan shirt :-)

I think we're finally done mortgage-hunting. Which is good because it's starting to drive me bananas. I went to Bank of America today to cash in some savings bonds and (after the guy miscounted them which would have shorted me some hundreds of dollars) the guy asked me what I was doing with the money. I let it slip we're planning on closing on a house soon(ish) and his eyes literally lit up ¹ and he got very excited and started talking quickly and pulled up a web page with mortgage numbers. At one point he actually jogged across the room to ask someone something.

Then on the way back from that, another mortgage person possibility called me to make sure I had gotten the estimate he emailed back this morning.

I think if I wore a shirt saying "About to buy a house" I would be crushed by the mob of humanity coming to offer me a mortgage, is all I'm saying.

1 - I hate it when people say "literally" when they don't mean "literally", so here's my justification: his eyes opened wider, therefore exposing more of the white of his eyes to me, which is brighter than the rest of his eyes/his skin. (back)

So I have this $20 Best Buy gift card that's burning a hole in my pocket. Given the insane amount of music I need to keep me sane at work, I was thinking of getting some more Radiohead. Summize is this neat review aggregator that shows a nice 5 color bar summary of reviews (from super-awesome to wow-this-sucks), so I thought I'd see what it had to say about Radiohead albums. (although for some reason The Bends has very few reviews) Based on y'all's suggestions, I was thinking about picking up The Bends, Hail to the Thief, and maybe Kid A as well.

Wilco's good, too, right? I heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was good, but it's kinda countryish which I'm not thrilled about. (saw it described as a "Hillbilly OK Computer", which sounds...interesting) I need to listen to some samples when I get home...

So over the weekend I finished congressvotes - check it out! (I also prettied up my homepage a little bit...maybe I'll actually make it look nice some day)

We did see Hot Fuzz this weekend, and it was awesome. Like Shaun of the Dead it's a good mix between a comedy and a serious movie (cop drama/mystery in this case). Highly recommended!