It'd be nice to avoid Las Vegas

                February 28, 2014

            It'd be nice to avoid Las Vegas

             I noticed there a few subscribers out there, so I should start writing.

# "This whole discussion of of application development in the cloud and creating applications"

I try to travel less now-a-days with a 5 month and 4 year old, not to mention a wife who enjoys my company. Nonetheless, I was off to IBM Pulse earlier this week in Las Vegas. It's their Tivoli conference, and plenty fun, professionally, now that they're cloud crazy. IBM is looking to make a big bet on developers. Their proposition is this: our customers will need to start developing software more and more, and we'll be there to sell the infrastructure, middleware (in the form of PaaS), and services needed for that. It more or less hold water, but it relies on non-technology companies actually doing it. The only "great" example of this I have is the rumor/estimate that Starbucks has pulled in $1B through it's mobile payment app, over 2013. I use it when I'm on the road, it's wonderful.
Anyhow, there'll be more analysis to follow over at 451.

# DevOps Cafe

Podcasts and I have a strange relationship now-a-days. While I did plenty of them, I grew to hate the post production tediousness. Now, I try to team up with other people who handle all that (on the awesomely unfolding Connected Culture and Oblique Strategies) and guest on other podcasts. As such, one of the guys on my team, Jay Lyman, and I were on the DevOps Cafe podcast yesterday - just a video up now. It's good stuff: http://coteindustries.com/post/78110481106/jay-lyman-and-myself-were-on-the-devops-cafe

# Sports Jacket

In my line of work, you end up feeling the pressure to wear a sports jacket (or "coat") if you please. I feel weird about that. Thanks to Kim's encouragement, I finally wear Western shirts all the time underneath, but I still wear a sports jacket. It's a nice, "Billy London" affair I got for $80 at clothing discounter Marshalls and it does the job. Coupled with a MacBoom Air, the sports jacket is actually good for conferences because you can put the power supply and an iPhone charger in the pockets, along with some business cards. There's utility to the sports jacket.

To that end, I was thinking I should really focus on the utility aspect and get a Scott-E-Vest one, so I checked it out (http://www.scottevest.com/v3_store/SeV-Sportcoat.shtml). It looks great, I'll see if I can pitch it as a $200 father's day gift.

I obsess over those "what's in my bag," "the stuff I read," and "my setup" type lists, so you can imagine how much (too much!) I spent thinking about things like "utility sports coats."

# Flickr

I've often said that flickr is a Web 2.0, nerd ghetto. I realize that's, as they say, "a bit ping pong," but it really does sadden me that flickr didn't win over Instagram, yfrog, and all that. A good case of dropping the fucking ball, clearly. Nonetheless, I keep using it and love it, like a parent who can't give up on their fuck-up child. It fits exactly, and defines what I think photo sharing should be. I have decades of photos in there (from scanning photos in, you careful reader), and I hope it never goes away. I often wonder (hope!) if anyone notices the obsessive curation and patterns of usage I deploy in there.

With that, allow me to say: I hate the fact that the search by default searches everyone's photos. To the point of the above, flickr for me isn't about other people's photos, it's about my photos.

I'll see y'all next time. Thanks for reading ;)