When I was growing up the best moments that I remember were had during the summer camping on the St. Lawrence River in the Thousand Islands.   It was always filled with joy as the entire family was around, we would have fishing tournaments, cook s'mores, gather round the campfire until all hours of the night, and hike the nature trails.   I remember days when getting onto a raft at one end of the Wellesley Island campgrounds and floating with the current for a mile took hours, and there was nothing I'd rather be doing.

Inevitably the current would take you to the castle ruins.  The ruins were on top of a 40 foot cliff on the top of an outcropping peninsula.  All the cool kids hung out at the ruins.  The cliffs were the gauntlet that proved you belonged with cool kids.  Don't even think of hanging if you weren't jumping.  

I never was the type to run to the top of the cliff and jump because everyone else was jumping.  I am far more analytical than that.  First take a good measure of the cliff -- 35 to 40 feet.  Next watch the way that everyone else jumps, 1, 2, 3 steps then push off (add flare here) hit the water feet first arms down.  OK, no one is coming up bloody, but that's not enough.   Go to the bottom of the cliff and do depth soundings all around the landing spot.  Looks like as long as you land out 12 feet from the base of the cliff you can't hit bottom.

Some kids just jump because everyone else jumps.  Some kids never jump -- they just don't have the stomach for it.   I analyze, validate, weigh the risks.   I ask questions and think about possible danger scenarios.   I may have missed minor opportunities by taking my time and making sure jumping was the proper course of action, but I've haven't yet jumped where I shouldn't have.  Eventually you have to take some risks,  eventually you hold your nose and JUMP !

I've been seeing an increase in desperation for people looking for PHP talent on the newsgroups I subscribe to.   Yesterday I got two clicks to my blog with the phrase trouble finding php coders.  We are doing OK with our recruitment at Crowd Fusion, but we are always on the lookout for more coders.   When I look at the coders we are working with  it is a Perl guy, a Python guy and a Java guy (all of whom can do PHP).   I've got another Java programmer who I'm going to try to convert to PHP, if that works I'm going to stop looking for PHP talent and create it myself.  There is a stigma about PHP with OO programmers, it was well founded 5 years ago, but PHP is now a quality Object Oriented language.

If you want to work with a quality team on great web projects let us know. If it doesn't work out with us, I can hook you up with some other great people I've worked with, specifically Kevin Lee at Didit, and Jason Calacanis at Mahalo.

Can something that feels so good be wrong ?

Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed DJ
Because the music that they constantly play
IT SAYS NOTHING TO ME ABOUT MY LIFE
Hang the blessed DJ

Panic by The Smiths

Pandora Jam has to be the killer app of 2008 and it will most likely be the killed app of 2008. This product is so addictive it made Brian Alvey switch to a Mac.

Easter was a little early and a little cold to get into the water and go clamming this year, but I did manage to get before the end of April.  I found a remarkably good spot near a 30 ft diameter rock that rises out of the bay a good 8 feet.   I managed to get about 4 - 5 dozen clams in half an hour.  At times I was pulling 4 to 5 clams per rake for 3 and 4 rakes in a row.   The majority were larger clams so I committed to making clam chowder.   It turned out pretty good, but I need to make notes so  I can do better next time.  

1 cup chopped clams + 1 cup clam juice

1 cup diced celery

1 cup diced carrots

1 onion

1/3 lb bacon

5 cubed baking potatoes

1 small can tomato sauce

1 small can diced tomato

1 large can of corn

6 cups of water

I cut the bacon into 1 inch strips and cooked it in the bottom of the bowl.   I added the onion and cooked it to not quite carmalized, next I added the celery and carrots cook them lightly added the tomato, water and potatoes.  I cooked that at near boil added the corn when the potatoes were half cooked.  Added the clams when the potatoes were fully cooked -- let it simmer for another 10 minutes added some parsely a few herbs, pepper and salt.

Things I need to do to make it better.  Cut the bacon up smaller. Don't dice the celery so small.  Don't cook the onions quite as long.  Take the bacon out before the vegetables go in (add it back at the end).  Add some Tabasco Sauce.  Take 1 Cup of the mixture after adding the corn and puree it with a stick blender then add back to the soup.  Half the amount of corn.   Don't cut up the clams quite so small.  All in all a good first attempt at Manhattan Clam Chowder - everyone ate it and no one got poisoned.

On the first day of SXSW Ryan and I registered early and avoided the lines.  We then found a pair of comfy chairs right under the wireless router.  It turned out to be a high traffic area for the press and we got interviewed by the Houston Chronicle and I got two quotes in an Intel Video -- the one I knew they'd like is at 1:00 in where I say that I sleep with my laptop under my pillow. I did a ton of name dropping include Crowd Fusion a couple of times - Jason I am learning.

It isn't spring until I can start working in the Garden.  I've finally started getting that precious 45 Minutes in the early evening outside with the kids.  Yesterday I trimmed the bunnies toe nails, today I cleaned up the asparagus bed.  The spring bulbs are up, the Crocus are blooming.  The daffodils will be soon behind.  The Hellebores become more beautiful every year.  My favorite time of year is upon us, it is so easy to be too busy to go outside and enjoy these days, I can't let that happen.  

Taxes are always the highlight of my year, a couple months of dreading having to get them done - followed by a couple weeks that are dedicated to sorting credit card receipts and phone bills.  Stacks of papers covering every flat surface available.   This year our accountant thought it was an April Fools joke when I delivered the folder to his door yesterday.   When we lived in Ithaca getting the taxes done early meant getting to the post office before 10 PM on April 15th.

So this year went pretty smoothly until Excel decided that AtariAce-Books-2007.xls was "unable to open".  I went through all the normal fear and rage.  Shutdown my computer cleared my cache and tried three different ways of opening the file.  I took the file to Carrie's computer and crashed her Open Office with the file (which crashed the file she hadn't saved after an hour's work).  Sorry again ;(  After doing a little research online I found out that there is an entire industry that has written programs to recover crashed Microsoft Files.

I understand data recovery services, hardware fails and people don't do backups enough, but known file corruption recovery is just wrong.  We are so captive to Microsoft that they don't have to give us products that actually work.  If there are 10 competing products that can repair a file that Microsoft Excel failed to save correctly than the problem is well known and Microsoft should give this service away for free.  I'm not a Google worshipper, there are serious privacy concerns with their software, but at least we are starting to have some options.  

I've never been one to celebrate a birthday, but Carrie has been having fun with this one and calling it the last birthday I'll ever celebrate, as if I'd want to stay 39 for the rest of my days.  

I have to admit I was a little down on my 30th Birthday, I think it had to do with not have any children yet, maybe Audrey and Owen filled that void, I don't have goals to be a Billionaire by 40 or retired by 45 or travel the world before I'm 50, so I think I'll keep celebrating every year in as quiet a manor as yesterday.

Carrie asked me do you want a cake? Ice Cream?  I said I want Cha Shu from Sun Say Kai.  We had a great time in China Town, after lunch we went to the Playground, had some Ice Cream and visited the new Pearl River Mart for the first time since the fire.

If you haven't been following the Comcast v. BitTorrent debate that is being mediated by the FCC, get out from under that rock.  The future of the internet is being decided now and if you don't step up and tell the powers that be how you feel - you are destined to have internet programming regulated by the same clowns that bring you 20 hours of Reality TV every evening. 

I signed up for Verizon EVDO on February 28th.  I noticed in the contract that if they decided I was a 'heavy user' they would restrict my bandwidth.   I wasn't thrilled at the idea, but I only needed it for travel so I didn't expect that I'd be a candidate for throttling.   I liked the service enough that I recommend it to a friend to use instead of his Cable Internet, when he got to the store on March 5th they had changed their terms of service to a 5 Gig download cap with each additional Meg costing $0.50.  We did some math and if you streamed Music at 128Kb for the month your bill would be $148,000.  

Heavy users of the internet are about to get the shaft.  Everything else in our society has the minor user subsidizing the heavy user; Insurance, Taxes, Utilities, Public Transit.  The government has to step up and make permanent a Net Neutrality bill that makes the ISPs accountable if they start throttling services of their competitors.  There needs to be real discussion of what tiered service means, if you signup for 1.5MB does that really mean 200Kb during peak usage?

To see some important articles on the Comcast throttling incident check out our new Crowd Fusion Search which brings up articles that I'm writing and things I've flagged to keep from my news feeds..

Refactor I is in the books and released to the production environment of Crowd Fusion.  Ryan nearly single handedly rebuilt our prototype code into a far more logical OOP framework that will allow for more hands to be working simultaneously.  The refactor took less than 5 weeks, 6 was budgeted, and retains the main principles of MVC with strong leaning on Elements as our fundamental class structure.

True project management has begun and a build out of all the weapons in our arsenal is in full swing.  We are now adding developers to the core coding team.  One of the biggest changes moving from the old code to the current version was the rewriting of the stub, our old initialization routines were disjointed and complex to navigate.  The new system is truely a single instance for web, cms, crons, daemons, and utils.   This requires a small time investment in permissions systems to allow crons and daemons restricted access and additional IP checking, but the gains of not having duplicative launch systems is proving very beneficial.

We are still looking for developers, designers, and web standards gurus.  Send me an email if you are the top 2% of your field or just want more information craig at crowdfusion dot com.

FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that is up for renewal.  Everyone agrees that it should be renewed and it makes provisions for when you can and can't monitor domestic conversations.  The White House and the Senate have added an amendment to the bill that gives immunity to all telecoms that ever broke the law and let the government spy without warrants.

Last year a whistle blower came forward and showed that AT&T shunts all communications to a Government run room inside of AT&T's offices in San Fransisco.  It is assumed that other telecoms have similar rooms and The White House has promised these telecoms that they will not be prosecuted.

The House had vetoed the bill, but claims they are close to allowing it to go through do to White House pressure.  President Bush has appeared on T.V. and radio twice condemning the House and admitting he made promises to the Telecoms that they were not breaking the law.

I don't mean to make this political, but this matters for the future of the internet.  We want an open internet where innovation is fostered.  If the gatekeepers of the large routers and switches can start monitoring all of our traffic with immunity, than it gives them an unfair advantage against start-ups.  Also if the government is encouraging and financing it this brings up privacy issues.  WIthout sounding like a conspiracy, the next step will be filtering objectionable content like Comcast is currently doing to P2P users (but that is another political football for another day).

Call you House Rep and let them know where you stand.  RIGHT NOW !

The NYTech Mailing list clued me into a snarky Engadget Article about Nokia's Morph Project. Engadget readership has gone way down hill if you look at the comments,  I think Digg now has the moral high ground on comment content. Reading the responses it is obvious that the majority of people don't expect to see this type of device in their lifetime. I think Jeff Bezos is counting on it being in the next 5 generations of his Kindle. Maybe I'm a dreamer but I do expect to have foldable digital paper in the next 20-30 years.

I have to get everything I wanted to get accomplished done by September 7th 2008.   That includes finishing the Crowd Fusion Platform, writing blog posts for the next 2 years, adding a second bathroom, and getting the kids into College.  Why ? you ask..  What could be so monumental ?  How about the official release date for Spore.

We have started a Refatoring of the code base for Crowd Fusion.  This version of the Code is barely 6 months old but was prototypical from its birth.  Ryan is taking the lead and being sensitive to the core principles, our Element Controllers are restrictive, but allow future extensibility without conflict, and need to remain intact.   While working through some of the framework design flow were discussing a great post about 'professional PHP developers' and I thought about a missing component to this.   A professional PHP developer has undergone numerous refactors, and they'll be able to talk about the pitfalls.

Great programmers are never happy with what they wrote yesterday.  So I'm trying to come up with a formula about when you should refactor and if you can tell the quality of a coder based on their desire to start over.   Using myself as the measuring stick (great coders are also very egotistical) we are 6 months into design and the code base needs an overhaul that will take 2 1/2 weeks.  So there it is.. if the your dev team is itching to rebuild your code base and the time it will take is more than 1/10 the age of the code, you've either got really crappy code or you need a new team. 

There are tons of great resources to help you know when to refactor and the pitfalls to avoid scattered across the web.  The question should never be if you should take a fresh look at your systems, the question is when.  If you aren't spending atleast 10% of your teams hours cleaning up your Objects, reducing redundant code and cleaning up design flow life you will come to a point that new development is nearly impossible without adversly affecting the rest of the system.  Every hour of new dev will come at the cost of 10 hours of debugging.  Spend 10% of your time now to avoid it being 90% or your time later.  If you are getting pressure from the suits, have them call me .. I've made this mistake before I'll explain to them the consequences.

In this post 9/11 world it is an extraordinary day that a ruling comes out in favor of an individuals privacy.  I'm not advocating anonymous Trolling of forums or wikis.  Quality forums are based on strong communities who should be given the technology and tools to police themselves.  If we find that website owners are responsible to give away the id (or IP) of any user whose posts anyone finds questionable the burden will be too great for forum owners.