After participating in Field Day over the weekend with Colby, I decided to renew my membership to the ARRL. I used to enjoy Amatuer Radio about 10 years ago, but with moving to North Carolina and then back to Florida, my interest in getting back into the hobby was reduced.
I’m going to start going through my gear and take inventory of what works and what doesn’t. I know my TR-751A is in need of more surgury to fix the now scratchy volume pot. I had a new squelch pot wired in when I lived in Naples, FL. There are no parts available for this radio when it comes to these particular ones, so extreme improvising is needed.
Anyways, depending on antenna and radio conditions Colby and I may participate in the CQ WW VHF contest on the 18th-19th this month.
I’ve been on Twitter for some time now and have continued to watch the traffic grow. The value for me was to stay informed a bit better on developers in the Django and Ruby on Rails communities. Using IRC on freenode worked for a while, but it seemed to be too cluttered with people learning the environments rather than people interested in adding to the environments. Don’t get me wrong, IRC is an invaluable source for troubleshooting your applications and that type of traffic doesn’t belong in Twitter.
Recently I’ve seen more and more marketing people getting involved in twitter as if this is something where they can spam, and I do mean spam in a derogatory sense, non-sense in the hopes of getting reach through following everyone and trying to get everyone to follow them. Is the real value in watching or publishing only to your follower’s list?
I believe the power of twitter is not watching your followers list getting spammed with “@noonespecial I really like to chat with you, DM me sometime for hugs and kisses.” Maybe I’m a bit too cynical with this, but come on. You’re there to find people interested in your services or providing a service to others. In this economy, I realize that spam and reach may be your only way to feel like you have some sort of false value. I do sympathize, but is it worth the cost of turning Twitter into a spam haven?
Now onto what I find to be the most powerful usage of Twitter, or at least one of the tools that makes Twitter an invaluable tool. Search API. For those of you that have a Twitter client on your desktop like TweetDeck, I would highly recommend adding a window for search. The most recent version allows you to combine search terms with OR and AND for those that want to aggregate multiple topics. You can use this to find useful information and people that are possibly interested in your services or company. I use it now to track programming and local area stuff. I’ve almost gone to ignoring what’s in my follower’s list since it’s been a bit too chatty.
In summary, I think if you’re on Twitter to make money or bring value to your business then consider every tweet before you hit the send button. Does this tweet add value to my brand? Should this be a Direct Message? Do I sound like a 13 year-old? Am I only tweeting because I watched some savvy presentation at a(n) (un)conference of (un)employed marketing people? Twitter can be a useful tool if your not a tool while using it.
I have installed all the packages that were in the repository that support my needs. I have update Python to 2.5.2, which is completely necessary. I’m now installing all the Perl modules that support my existing repository of scripts. I have also installed FreeTDS for communicating with SQL Server 2005. Basically the server needs to be able to execute a stored procedure on the database, it doesn’t really need any other functionality.
Screenshot of my VM as modules from CPAN are being compiled.
I’m getting my VM for OpenSolaris all setup so that I can test to make sure I can migrate my Ubuntu servers at the office with little to no problems. They are planning to replace them anyways with some Windows servers and a lesser product, but in the meantime creativity is still allowed.
I merged all the posts from my byteflow installation and my blogger site. Moving the byteflow by RSS proved to be quite a project. All the tags we called categories in byteflow, and they had bad formatting around the names. All the posts were missing the published date as well. So, I dug into the xml and added the missing date information and did some search and replaces on the bad formatting. I opted to remove all the tags at least for now. Just want to try and get a clean start with preserving at least the post history.
In the sidebar you’ll find my Twitter feed as well as my Google Reader shared items. I’ll add relevant information and links as I have time. I hope to also add a project portal page to my personal projects.
