February 2006

Scott Johnson introduced me to another Scott recently who is working on what seems to be a very interesting web startup. They are looking for a wiki developer. The company is based in San Diego but you can be located anywhere. It seems to be a contract job at least initially.

Startup looking for an experienced wiki developer. We’re looking to find someone with experience shipping products that sustain significant load and that can scale almost infinitely. There is no preference at to whether it’s built on PHP, Perl, Python, Rails, etc. That is up to the developer(s).

For more information, email Scott: klezmer41 @ yahoo dot com.

Lego and other modular toy fun at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival! Ryan Gantz and I conspired with Hugh Forrest at SXSW to set up this room. It should be fun.
Here’s what Ryan wrote on the playpen website:

For a couple of years I had this idea in the back of my head that it would be fun to put a bunch of web geeks in a room full of geek toys. At some point during the Bruce Sterling party that concluded SXSW Interactive ‘05, a group of us discovered a basket of Zoobs on a table upstairs, and we entertained ourselves for a while. We had fun discovering the limitations of the toys, inventing problems and solving them, and collaborating on creations.

It’s in this vein that we announce the Interactive Playpen. We’re quarantining off a small area on the first floor of the Austin Convention center and filling it with Legos and other kinds of modular toys. When panels are too crowded or you’re just looking to get creative and make new friends, swing by the Playpen. Build something no one else would think of.

The latest installment of Exploit Boston Game Night is tonight (Tuesday, February 21st) at the Common Ground in Allston. It starts at 7pm and usually runs for three or four hours. We have lots and lots (and lots and lots) of board and card games. It’s 21+ and free admission. There’s more information about game night on the event site. See you there?

The Boston Foundation held an event on Wednesday, February 15, 2006, where they released the “Boston Unplugged” report about city wi-fi in Boston. There are a few notes about the meeting on the BostonWAG weblog. And here’s a pdf of the report, too. I had work comittments so I wasn’t able to attend so I don’t have any anecdotes about the event to share.

This seems like a fun thing that Odeo has set up. You can send me a voice message by clicking on the button below. It’s also at the top of the sidebar over there on the right. I think that everyone who gets super cranky towards people they barely know online should be required to record those rants via an audio message. ;)

Whenever I see Odeo’s name, I want to sing that (slightly modified for the purpose of this joke) tidbit from The Wizard of Oz … oooooooooodeeeeeoooooo ooooooooooooodeo!

Michael is slowly (yet surely) making his way through the AFI’s Top 100 List from a few (OK, many) years ago. His latest review is up about Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall.” And much like his sports writing, Michael can even make a Woody Allen movie sound interesting. Or at least interesting enough to read a review about the movie. (Maybe I’m in the minority, but I have never liked most of Woody Allen’s movies.)

Woody Allen. He is what he is, and you either love him or hate him. I’ve enjoyed most of what I’ve seen by him, particularly Radio Days and Manhattan. But there’s a dark story associated with a Woody Allen movie that I have to share - the day in 1992 I chose to go see Shadows and Fog - an utterly, completely, totally forgettable movie (literally, all I remember is that it’s black and white) - and decided not to stay home and watch what turned out to be the greatest basketball game of all time (Duke/Kentucky: The Laettner Shot).

That has nothing to do with Annie Hall, of course, but you didn’t wait five months to hear me say “I heard it was really good.”

Read the rest of the review and then comment on his blog post about the review!

Late last year Pete Caputa invited a few of his cohorts to compose 2006 predictions. I missed the deadline and I’m sure I’ve passed the grace period for these sorts of predictions. But well, better late than never.

The more I hear about the latest event websites popping up, the more I am convinced of it. 2006 is the year of the human and connecting with each other at events — not just typing to each other online.

Case in point: Boston. It seems like every other person I talk to lately has an event website. OK, maybe that’s an exageration. But here are a few newish event-related websites in my town: HeyLetsGo, LikeLife and EntertainBoston. And of course there’s my Exploit Boston website that has been around for a while.

I think we will see more niche community/websites doing their own events, too. Craftster? Dogster? Mighty Foods?

Related: My valentine to the web is included in today’s issue of A List Apart. Thanks to Jeffrey for the invite to share my tidbits. :)

MuniWireless.com reports (via Adina Levin at the Community Broadband Coalition):

This coming Tuesday [February 14, 2006], the Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing on municipal broadband. It is critical for the committee to hear from you — the people who are making community broadband work, and who are bringing the benefits to your community.

Please call, fax, or email your Senator and ask them to support the Community Broadband Act. The bill, cosponsored by Senators Frank Lautenberg (D, NJ) and John McCain (R, AZ) protects the rights of local government to support broadband access in the manner that is best for local needs.

Contact information to fax and email members of the Senate Commerce Committee and a sample form letter are avaialble at MuniWireless.com. Read the Community Broadband Act of 2005 at the Library of Congress website.

A while ago I noticed that Rosie O’Donnell had a flickr account so I added her as a “contact.” She mostly takes a lot of photos with her camera phone. This morning it looks like she took a few photos while on Martha Stewart’s show. Here’s one she took of Ms. Stewart.

Tom McGonagle, co-founder of the Watch City Wireless Project in Waltham lead a discussion last night about Linux and wi-fi routers at the Boston Wi-Fi Meetup. There were about 25 people there which was a great turnout for the Wi-Fi Meetup. I am looking for interesting topics for future events so if you have a suggestion (just a topic or an interest to lead the discussion), please let me know.

Here are the notes from last night’s meeting. Also worth checking out is Scott Johnson’s quest for information about OpenWRT versus SveaSoft.