2009 really was a blur to me, it was over before I really knew it started. But as time seems to move faster as we get older, I still had a great year! Looking back at my post last year, I feel great about getting a few things done that I wanted. I’ll write more about this years plans below.
Some events this year:
- We did a little bit of work to our house, by redoing our hardwood floors in January.
- We had Deborah’s mom take our puppy Toby to live with her. We still get to see him all the time, but we don’t have the room that he needed at our house.
- I started (and stopped working) for Alexandria.com. While I was happy to be back in geodomain projects, it really wasn’t working out the best.
- I launched my own project, gamingtweets.net, which stayed running for a few months but did not take off. It was awesome to learn some PHP and become more comfortable with the Twitter API.
- Celebrated 4 years of marriage with my lovely wife.
- Deb’s had surgery around her birthday on her knee. I had to doctor her for a few weeks for her to get better. Now, about 4 months after surgery, she is better, and doesn’t have any pain anymore.
- We also celebrated 10 years of being together, which is CRAZY. We started dating in high school, and still in love!
I feel this year is going to be awesome. I have a few plans:
- Doing some renovations on our bathroom and kitchen
- To sign up for an iPhone Dev account, and actually make something!
- To read more. I feel like I don’t read enough, and starting to miss it.
- To help more – I want to continue to reach out to others and help where I can.
- Become more involved with my friends/family/others.
- Be more active in my Masonic lodge
- Have a fun time.
2009 was mostly a blur to me. While there was a ton of crappy things that happened, we actually had a decent year, it just went by so fast. I plan on doing a 2009 recap (similar to my 2008 recap) soon.
Christmas was great for us. This year, we tried to get much nicer gifts for friends and family, and it really paid off. Everyone was very happy, and we got to put some serious thought into what we gave everyone. We also got some very nice stuff, including new bedroom furniture and money towards a remodel coming this spring.
For ourselves, we picked up a Mac Mini that is hooked up to our main TV. Its mainly acting as a media center, hosting videos, music, tv shows, and various apps for streaming media (like Hulu, College Humor, etc). We are also using it as a VM Server, and a general use server. I will be writing more about this in the future.
Our new years was amazing too. We got to hang out with a great friend we don’t get to see so much anymore (since she lives out of town). It was great to catch up, talk about old times, and about life in general. We didn’t even watch the ball drop – we just watched everyone cheering and celebrating outside of Penny Lane Pub (where we went to ring in the new year).
We have spent most of this long weekend cleaning and clearing out. I listed a few things on ebay, and hope to list more as this week goes along. I also listed a few things on Craigslist as well. I worked on much more in my office – and will post pictures and info soon about this as well (since its about 90% done).
That’s about it on whats been going on durring this crazy busy holiday season – but expect me to post more soon. Im starting to get a little more interest in posting here again – which always helps!
I continuously neglect this page, but really have no excuses. From those that I knew actively read my site at all, we all talk through Twitter or other means mostly now. And as I mentioned a few months ago, I have been messing with Tumblr a bit as well. But part of me wants to post here more often, just to speak whats on my mind or share some knowledge. But enough with the usual ‘oh my goodness i haven’t bloged in so long’ notes…what have I been doing?
- A few weeks ago, Deborah and I hit a huge milestone: We have been a couple for 10 YEARS now.
- Work is amazing, and I recently hit my one year mark of being there. Its amazing how fast it went by, and I’m still as excited as the first day there.
- The project I started and launched this summer, GamingTweets.net, is going offline. While the ‘learning’ part of the project was a success, the actual usage of the site was a failure. It got little to no traffic, and without a large amount of work (mainly even more publicity), it was never going to sustain itself. Not surprisingly, I think that (in exception of some clients), most twitter-focused sites have less than year lifetimes as well. When going through a bunch of ‘read these some day’ posts in Google Reader, ranging over 2 years, about 80% of those projects no longer existed.
- I have been keeping sharp with ASP.net on a few various other projects, but glad to be able to spend some personal time on other personal projects.
- I bought a Canon Rebel T1I kit, and got rid of my XTi. Costco was having an amazing deal on the camera and kit lens, a 55-250 IS lens, a case, and a bunch of other goodies. I have yet to really work with this camera yet, but will post when I do.
- Picked up Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 on launch day (after work), and just finished it last night. What an amazing game.
- About to make some major changes in our home office, including:
- Picking up a new desk
- Finally becoming completely Mac, since we barely use our PC anymore.
- Extending our iMac to use our 22″ Samsung display as well.
- Ive been working on a Media Center / Home Server idea for a while now. Leaning towards possibly picking up a Mac Mini running Plex, and then some external disks.
- Been mostly home-bodies otherwise, since Deb’s has been recovering from her surgery about two months ago. She’s back to walking normally, and we hope by Christmas she should be able to even go hiking/biking, etc.
- I also started my first Cocoa/Obj-C app, that is letting me learn UI components, but also working with XML parsing and possibly even iPhone development. More on this later….
Well, this week sure started off interesting (but to any that may be concerned, Toby is home safe and sound now).
Debs and I went out to dinner with a few friends on Saturday, and while out, her mom called and left a voicemail, with a slightly sad attitude. Once home we called her back, and got the bad news…
Toby had run away a few hours ago.
We were shocked. We knew something like this was bound to happen, and discussed what we could do, how it could have happened, and how it’s actually better that he ran away at his new house than when he lived with us (we live on a busy road, and it would have been a lot more dangerous). From what it sounds like, he managed to jump up on some chairs on the deck, and then jump off the deck down into the yard (though, we are not sure if he jumped to the steps first – if he didn’t he would have fallen ~12 feet).
That night going to bed was sad. We both had dreams that he was barking on our front porch (after walking about 15 miles). But nothing all day. Since Monday was a holiday for the kids, some of the nieces and nephews spent hours looking for him, but no luck. I created a flyer that night, as well as made a posting on Craigslist and mentioned it on twitter as well as Facebook (which was seriously retweeted about 3o times, which is awesome). Her mom had also been in touch with vets, the pound, animal control, and everyone she could to alert about Toby.
Mid afternoon Tuesday, I got two calls from Debs about 15 minutes apart. I was in a meeting, so called her back when done, and immediately found out that he had been found! This was about 48 hours after him being gone!
He was found by a lady wandering around two subdivisions over. She drove by, then turned around when she noticed him just looking lost. From what we heard, she opened her car door, and he jumped right in and laid down. She took him to the pound, who then contacted her mom. The cool part is that earlier that morning, we had sent the pound a link to my flickr photos so they could have some references of what Toby looked like.
We didn’t get a chance to see him that night, but did visit on Wednesday. Her mom wanted us to try to cheer him up, since he was very quiet and odd. We figured most of this was due to exhaustion, not eating, and just being scared out of his mind. We examined him and got him to start reacting to more people.
Her mom took him to the vet the next day, where we got a full report. He was still covered in ticks (one of her brothers had already removed 10-15). He also had a bunch of grass seed in his eyes, which was hurting him quite a bit. His nose was also rubbed down from just trying to sniff against the ground so much. I took a few pictures and posted them to Tumblr. The vet gave him some antibiotics as well, and expects him to be almost fully back to normal next week.
Funny enough, we found out that when he went out for a walk the day after being back, he managed to get loose of his leash. But this time, he ran right back through the yard and sat on the steps 
.
As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, im thinking about doing something different here. It’s just too much ‘work’ to sit down and do a blog post – especially on a personal blog. While WordPress is great, sometimes its just overkill to make a quick post, which usually means I don’t post as much.
So I started a blog on Tumblr to see how I like it.I suggest for now you follow both (if interested), and in the future I will probably be moving to just Tumblr (and my jmlumpkin.com domain tie into a lot of other services).
If you are also on Tumblr, add me!
One of the biggest reasons I have been rather quiet is being so busy with a personal project! I really wanted to push myself to finally ‘develop’ one of my ideas (which I recently talked about not being able to do), from start to finish.
While driving back to Richmond from a day trip, I had an idea about having a site that would index video game information going across Twitter. But I also wanted this project to:
- Let me learn another language, or at least be more comfortable with it (I am mostly a .net developer, and wanted to really learn more PHP for web work)
- Start learning a popular API, and the community around that
- Create a site that could be a testbed for various things (new HTML standards, learning new techniques, SEO, etc), but also provide a use to a community.
While it took a bit to long to get rolling, I spent a few weekends and nights putting everything together and came up with GamingTweets.net. Its ‘live’ now, and already seeing a little bit of Search Engine traffic. I still have plenty more searches to add, and I already have two new features I have been thinking about as well. I even had my first bug fix due to the Twitter DDoS attack on 8/6/09 (although I didn’t get to fix it until that night, after things were running again).
Now that this project is ‘out of the way’, I have a few other things I am already starting to work on. I have a few client projects to complete in the very short term, but after that, I’m going to be diving back into Cocoa again, and start writing some Mac and iPhone applications.
Not sure if I am missing something here, but what’s the actual ‘Live Developing Story’? Life?!?
I haven’t been posting much, mainly due to lack of time (and even sometimes interest). While I love having this blog, sometimes I really feel that writing a post isn’t as good as just generally describing whats going on. I’m starting to think, especially with the insane growth of social media, personal blogs aren’t that interesting any more. Not that I’m saying I plan on stopping, but I really have been thinking more and more of turning this site into a general ‘life stream’ of what I’m doing, be it posting a message to twitter, taking a picture, blogging here or on my tech blog, or anything really.
Since I last really updated about whats been going on:
- Have had the worse sinus problems ever I think during the summer.
- Finally got outdoors and went mountain biking on local trails with friends. Other than hitting some logs wrong and eating dirt, it was a blast, and ready to get back out.
- Did all the core work needed on GamingTweets.net.
- Been working with a few friends to make some really cool things on the web. Still have plenty of work.
- Worked on some really cool things at work!
- Spent a short weekend in DC, and had a blast!
- Working much harder on what I eat, and already starting to notice differences. Now just to loose 60+ pounds.
- Got to visit a great friend in Hampton, and spend a few hours at the beach.
- Have grilled so many times already this summer I have lost count.
- Every week has gone from rather empty to PACKED in a day. Looking back at my calendar for the last 2 months, something has had to happen nearly every night.
Its crazy that its already August. Deborah’s birthday is just a month away. I’ve almost been at my new job for a year in a few months. But its amazing, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Nowadays, everyone can be a media outlet. Traditional media (newspaper and TV), new media (whatever the hell you consider it, including bloggers), even down to anyone with a twitter account or random blog. Obviously information is power – and having a lot of information on something can usually be a good thing. That is, until you have ‘to many cooks in the kitchen’, and leave everyone having to dig through all the noise to find something meaningful. And those who ‘break’ the story get the fame, until the next story comes along, and then no one cares.
I’ve been trying to write this blog post a few times, with possible titles as ‘Social Media Freakout’ or ‘Hyperlocal Hyperactivity’ (and I may use them in the future). But some events today led to a perfect post, that almost writes itself. Case in point, the ‘OMG UKROPS IS GOING TO BE SOLD!!!!!!’ flurry of tweets today. First of all – this rumor is nothing new. This rumor has been flying around for a very long time now. And heck, I even had my own say in it recently (before all of today’s events broke out). I’m not saying its not true – im just saying some need to stop contributing to the noise!
For those that don’t know, there’s two things that happened today. First an entry is posted on Food World that Ukrops has been out looking for buyers. Then there happens to be a forum post yesterday mentioning that there have been 29 liquor licensees applied for at ABC. While I understand the Food World article (I used to read it at slow times when I worked there), how can anyone trust a random forum post? There are even emails flying around (my wife got one) that even mention the sale value ($850 million).
Over these two events is then the hype machine that surrounds it all. To the point that RVANews leads an article mentioning the sale. Then you have the hype machine that is twitter cast its wrath all over the information. Local news affiliates (both NBC and CBS, as well the RTD) make mention of it, but at least dont contribute much to the hype. All this is good – twitter is almost like todays ’small talk’, just only much more public, visible, and online. But with all this noise – you really have so much ‘he said/she said’ arguments, all targeting back to two random posts on the internet (and yes kids, not everything you read online is true). Twitter has got to be the fastest way ever in humanity to spread ‘misinformation’ (misinformation in quotes, because no one knows for sure whats true, whats not. Somethings going on – just not many know what yet).
It’s hard to say in words how I feel about all this. I am complaining, but not really. I want my news as fast as everyone. But I am finding it increasingly difficult to filter all the noise. To the point that I would rather jump back a few years, and have more ’solid’ news than fast news.
Sometimes this can be a good thing. A great example would be the plane crash in the Hudson. That was mentioned on twitter first, then brought to mainstream media. And all in all – handled in a very good way.
But let’s also look at the recent Michael Jackson tragedy. For hours the only trending topics on Twitter dealt with him. But you had people all over the world just plain out making stuff up! This got to the point where CNN (where we happened to be watching coverage) was jumping back and forth about what was going on. Obviously VERY few people in the world at that time knew what was going on – but social media freaked out the big guys enough to change their decisions based on whatever was more ‘hip’ at the time. And this all leads down into a downward spiral.
I wish I had recorded an AWESOME interview on CNN the next day. I don’t even remember the guys name – but he talked specifically on this topic. With all this going on – its hard for ‘true’ media outlets to also filter the noise, and therefore actually slowing the news down! Yes everyone may know something is going on – they may not know the truth.
I saw a great post yesterday from CodeBetter that had a great quote…
in general, the .NET crowd overthinks and over-engineers just about everything
No matter how bad that sounds – you have to admit it’s probably true (though, im sure its not just a .net thing – it’s a developer thing). Over thinking and overdoing isn’t always wrong – that extra step may be ‘the next big thing’ or pushing the boundaries of what’s already been done. But in most day to day work, sometimes we could just be wasting our time.
His post actually references a post made before it – about jumping the 20% fence. While I didn’t feel that this was pushed in the article, I feel that a good chunk of the ‘bugs’ every developer faces can be from over thinking the actual problem. The more complex your project (as a programer, or any other profession really), the more complex the bugs can be, and the more difficult it can be to get to the root of the problem.
That’s not saying you have complex problems to solve. When solving thee problems, its amazing to look back and say ‘wow, I really did that, and it works!’. But one thing that has always helped me is to break everything down and look at it piece by piece. Develop each piece, and link everything together. Then This not only helps simplify the problem, but helps you to refractor your code as well. Once you know each of these pieces, refactoring is much easier, and helps you see the problem solved as a whole in the end. Finally, if even a ‘little piece’ is to complicated, theres a chance that it can be broken down even more.
I have found that focusing on each of these pieces, getting them done, and moving on – it really adds up. Taking a break isnt bad either – plenty of times I have felt ’stuck’ on a problem, got up to get something to drink, and came back to easily solve something I thought was near impossible just moments before.
Personally though, I think this may be one of my favorite quotes:
Simplicity is beautiful.
