Dallas-Fort Worth: Landing at the Civic Center

 Communities, Explorations  No Responses »
May 222013
 

I wrote a DFW-specific piece on civic coding in the area a while back and more recently followed up with a more general article on preparing cities for civic coding events.  Now I want to double-back to DFW in particular again and drill down into one aspect of the first article.

First, a lamentation familiar to just about every resident of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex: traffic.  As this area has exploded, practical tranportation options have lagged.  Sure, new highway segments like 161 have popped up here and there, relieving some congestion, but massive construction such as that on 114 and North Loop 820 shows that our ability to get from point A to B is woefully inadequate.

This point was especially driven home today as I received responses to an invitation for a social mixer at the TECH Fort Worth business incubator.  In this regard, Fort Worth is well behind other areas, such as Plano and North Dallas.  One of my goals has been to support increased tech event and meetup opportunities west of Highway 360.  But anyone living in and around Dallas quickly experiences the pain that we Westies have been enduring for years: it can be near impossible to attend cross-town events, especially in the early evening.

The ultimate answer in my opinion is a drastically reduced emphasis on automobile-oriented solutions and more rail.  A LOT more rail.  That can be a hard sell in Texas, but we’re getting better at entertaining the notion.  We just still have a long way to go.

Meanwhile, DART and the TRE do serve major parts of the metroplex fairly well; the closer to Dallas the better that service gets.  And there are plenty of stops in well-planned locations.

When I visit other countries and even some other states in the US, I see city centers have developed around rail hubs.  Government services, shopping, entertainment and other amenities tend to naturally sprout around these stations.  Even without nearby rail, the city center concept has been gaining great popularity in the US in recent years.  It’s easy to see why: the alternative, malls, proved in many cases to be an unsustainable premise.  There are many reasons why and that’s out of the scope of this article.  But one aspect of failure was how indoor malls isolated people from their environment.

In outdoor city centers, you tend to see far fewer cars and much, much more foot and bicycle traffic… especially if they are fed by public transport.  The oppressive atmosphere of cavernous malls is gone.  Along with these features, you see higher degrees of social engagement.

Which gets me back to the social coding premise.  While trying to launch a DFW-wide civic hackathon, I focused centrally in the hope of helping to create that civic center experience where it doesn’t quite yet exist.  But we DO have a strong candidate in DFW: the CentrePort business park.  I was just unable to convince anyone that the time was right to start adding another layer of usefulness to the campus.  And perhaps the time is not right, just yet.  Still, it would be a shame to completely ignore the potential.

CentrePort

CentrePort is the home to many high-contributing companies, such as American Airlines.  It’s also an important logistics hub to others like Whirlpool, Johnson & Johnson, et al.  Combine that with convenient hotels such as Marriott, plenty of eateries, proximity to DFW Airport, a rail/bus stop and accessible highway connections, and you have the starting point for a truly dynamic civic gateway.  And a great future site for events like hackathons.  We just need a few more additions, starting perhaps with a true intermodal center at the CentrePort DART/TRE station.

So my plea to DFW municipal leaders is simple: let’s take a long look at other civic centers, and get to work enhancing CentrePort in similar fashion.  Yes, Dallas has a nice DART gateway near the American Airlines Center, and Fort Worth has two downtown with potential, we still need that central nexus with fairly easy access for anyone and everyone.  A civic center for all of us, regardless of where we live and work.

Let’s get that on the agenda.

Is Dallas-Fort Worth Ready for Civic Coding Events?

 Communities, Explorations, Windows Phone  2 Responses »
May 052013
 

DataLibre_logo-1

As some of you know, I’ve been working the past two months to bring a Hack for Change event to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.  There have been moments of triumph, such as when Pepsi and Frito Lay kindly agreed to donate snacks, and there have been periods of epic frustration.  Following is a letter I reluctantly just sent to those who had been helping me with this:

Greetings Data Liberators,

After struggling to get widespread DFW buy-in for the Data Libre DFW Hackathon 2013, I have had to accept that it isn’t going to happen this year, at least not for the Hack for Change time period of June 1 to 2.  We don’t yet have the awareness and interest in DFW at large for civic coding events.  More on that in a bit.

After discussing this with Karen Siddall of Irving Public Works, I decided to scale down to a brainstorming workshop specific to the City of Irving.  To their credit, Irving is the only city out of several directly contacted that stepped up with solid interest in this sort of activity.  Fort Worth is also interested but not quite ready (they may audit the Irving workshop to get a better understanding of what this entails, for a later event).  Expected total participant limit has been reduced to about 30.

On one hand I am highly disappointed.  Other cities, including Austin and Houston, are fully onboard for the June event.  DFW is just a bit behind the curve on this sort of civic engagement.  I encountered a lack of understanding that cities generally take the lead on these events, and most don’t really need the activities explained at this point.  We have an educational challenge (opportunity) in front of us: get DFW informed and engaged for the 2014 event.  If Dallas and/or Fort Worth get behind it, other municipalities will follow suit.

To that end, I have established a Data Libre Meetup Everywhere group.  The idea is to hold meetups over the next several months geared specifically toward whipping up local enthusiasm for this movement.  I will conduct as many meetups in as many locales as I can, focusing for now on Irving since they are stepping up.  But I will need help; feel free to create a meetup listing for your area and join me in cultivating interest!  And spread the word!

Of course, kudos to Irving for taking the lead here.  I was thrilled that Karen called me back after my query.  It’s just unfortunate that several other cities blew it off.  However, we will make the most of the opportunity we have, and hopefully other cities will realize they missed out on something cool.

I have updated event listings and will refine the scope further soon.  Input welcome.

Note: we are still looking for a venue in Irving.

Thanks all!

While I’m still disappointed with the outcome of my efforts, I remain optimistic that sooner or later the Dallas-Fort Worth coding and enthusiast communities can make a large-scale civic coding event happen here.  It will take a broad coalition of people from all backgrounds, with the common interest of improving city services, public access, and lifestyle opportunities.

Let’s do it.

March Madness 2013

 Communities, Explorations, Make, Qt, Windows Phone  No Responses »
Mar 102013
 

SMU Hackathon

The last time I did a “Where I’m At” post was too long ago, so let’s get this thing going without much preamble.  And no, this isn’t about US college basketball playoffs.  Just feels like it sometimes.

Nokia Stuff

As many if not all of you know, I returned to Nokia on a part-time contract basis in late 2012.  I still have a full-time day job, and commit a large part of my other hours to sharing the Nokia Lumia story with current and hopeful developers in North Texas… with some virtual forays into neighboring states.

Here in DFW there’s been a steadily growing increase in interest, something I’ll blog in more detail about later.  But it’s still a mostly Apple world in these parts, at least from a user perspective, while the local developer community largely feeds on Android.  The Dallas-area Windows Phone developer crowd has reached a respectable size, though, to the point where this part-time gig feels more like full-time.

That last part has been mitigated through cultivation of additional community leaders.  For instance, Bary Nusz in Amarillo, Texas and Patrick Hefner of the Nashville, Tennessee area have been phenomenal in growing the Nokia developer and enthusiast base for their regions.  They’re being rewarded with Lumia phones and something maybe even more useful: Nokia Developer Champion nominations.  The Champions are volunteers recognized for some form of advanced leadership– technical, community-oriented or both.  The perks are very nice.  I have not heard yet if Bary and Patrick will have their nominations approved [update: both were], but they are both deserving in my opinion.  I’ll be spending a great deal of time this year on Champion development.  If you’re interested, contact me!

And if you haven’t checked out our DVLUP incentive program, what are you waiting for?  It’s out of private beta so no registration codes required now.  The challenges have been updated and cool new rewards added.  If you’re an existing Windows Phone developer and haven’t joined, you’re already cheating yourself out of some really cool stuff.  If you’re new to the experience, you’ll find helpful people there and at Nokia’s core developer community as well (our wiki is legendary).  So get engaged!  Some lucky DVLUP participant and Cowtown Code Camp attendee stands to win big– more on that in a following post.

The Maker Space

Being a founder and director of the new and rapidly-expanding Fort Worth Makerspace community keeps me pumping as well.  To minimize conflicts and make it easy on this old body, I’m focusing on areas where Makers can play in the Nokia product ecosystem.  This goes beyond simple app development into some really cool areas, like 3D printing.

As I shared over at post404, I helped kickstart Nokia’s involvement in crowdsourced 3D printing and have been assisting John Kneeland as he promotes this venture into even bigger proportions.  The project started with the sexy Lumia 820 and has recently been expanded to include the newer 520 model.  It remains to be seen if calls for supporting unibody devices like the 920 prove feasible.  I’ve formed a mobile technology special interest group at our local makerspace for those interested in participating.  See Nokia’s developer wiki for more details.

I’m trying to get some sort of contest developed around 3D printing of Lumia back covers, and hope to share something soon.  Meanwhile, Shapeways has announced a 3D printing API and I’m very excited about the possibilities it presents!  Check it out.

Before 3D printing took off in the consumer space, the Internet of Things was largely about mobile and embedded devices.  Sensors everywhere would feed data to the web, turning the Internet itself into a rich field of environmental I/O.  Arduino and Netduino devices are especially designed to participate in this space, and I plan to bring the latter into my Nokia outreach efforts.  Ideas welcomed!

Perceptual Computing

As if all that wasn’t enough, I’ve been asked by Intel’s awesome Bob Duffy to whip up local enthusiasm for their perceptual computing challenge.  How could I resist?

In a nutshell, Intel is promoting the development of novel interactve solutions built around Ultrabooks and Creative’s Interactive gesture camera.  Consider the latter as a laptop-scaled analog to Microsoft’s Kinect camera and you get the picture.

This article at Venture Beat provides an introduction to what Intel is trying to do:

The latest laptops, known as Ultrabooks, will have multiple ways to interact.  Nuance-based voice controls will let you talk to your computer to run Google  searches, start playing music, or share links on Twitter. Perlmutter, who is  from Israel, said the technology will eventually be able to understand even his  accent.

Intel is also working with SoftKinetic to bring 10-finger gesture recognition to the PC. With it, you can wave your fingers in front of the camera of a  computer, and it will recognize your gestures. [Intel executive vice president Dadi Perlmutter] showed how he could use his  fingers to control a catapult game demo and hold a crystal ball, by waving his  hands in front of a computer and not touching it.

I’ll be using my Maker channels to organize activity around this one, although I have also been informing the local Nokia outreach community of the opportunity.  I have developer devices available for loan and session work; I’ll have something more formal to announce soon for the next phase of the challenge, but feel free to hit me up via email if you’re at all interested in learning more.  First, however, get familiar with the program and tools.  Note that my direct support of this activity will be limited to the immediate Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Bob has an analysis of where the challenge is currently, and it’s worthwhile reading.

Getting Qt

Sadly, I have not had much time for Qt lately.  I do want to rectify that, but at the moment I don’t see how.  I’m still interested in the platform, especially where Jolla is concerned, and even in coding for my coveted N9… but overcommitment is a bad habit that I’m working hard to break.  I’ll still share Qt news, mostly on twitter, and continue trying to make time for learning it.  I’m thrilled at its prospects and assured by its recent advances.

!Spam

As noted before I have a lot of work to do with this site.  Most of it has been invisible: theme-searching, plugin-testing, etc.  The necessary grunt work that feels like time wasted.  I definitely need to add some resource pages, and that’s in the works.

One of my goals is to push content to your preferred channels so you don’t have to subscribe to MY preference(s).  So besides this site, here’s a list of outlets where you can expect updates:

Twitter

Texrat (general)
NokiaDevNorthTX (Nokia outreach specific)

Facebook

Texrat (general)
Nokia Developer Outreach North Texas page
Nokia Developer Outreach North Texas group
Mobile Monday Dallas

Google Plus

Nokia Developer Outreach North Texas community

Meetup.com

Windows Phone App Developer Group – DFW North Texas

LinkedIn

Develop with Nokia
Windows Phone Community
MobileMonday
IdeasProject
Windows App Developers
Developer Evangelists

Nokia Developer

Windows Phone App Developer Group – DFW Dallas Texas
3D Printing and Nokia Developer Outreach North Texas

Website(s)

Fort Worth Makerspace

Up Next

I’ll be attending a Board of Directors meeting for the Tarrant County Maker Community Foundation this week.  If you have anything you want me to raise there, let me know!

Here are some upcoming events:

Cowtown Code Camp 2013
Mobile Monday Usability/Accessibility Brainstorm DFW

Much more to come!

Theming…

 Communities, Explorations  No Responses »
Feb 192013
 

I’ve been focusing on building various channels for pushing community content, since I don’t want to force people into one that doesn’t suit them.  I’ll post more on that later.  But what’s kept me from developing this site as I want is a frustrating inability to find a theme that fits my goals.

This needs to be a community-oriented site, supporting the three areas in which I’m involved (Make, Windows Phone, and Qt in no particular order).  But I’m unable to find a ready-made WordPress theme, free or premium, that works.  I’ve tried several dozen with varying degrees of dissatisfaction.

I don’t have time or skill to develop anything, nor can I afford to pay for custom development, so that limits the possibilities.

Essentially I’ll need management of events, developer resources, contests and communications.  I’ve found plugins I believe will support those but I still need a site framework that does.

So… suggestions?

Adios 2012, Hello 2013

 Communities, Explorations, Windows Phone  No Responses »
Jan 022013
 

Late last year as many of you know I rejoined Nokia in a part-time capacity, supporting developer outreach.  I neglected this blog a bit because I was focusing most of my attention on our local Windows Phone meetup site, but that’s about to change.

Going forward, I wil transition the bulk of my community support activity to this blog, as well as two twitter accounts: @NokiaDevNorthTX (was @DFW_WPDEV) and my old generic account, @texrat.  The latter is blessed with the most followers, but they’re so diverse (and include many people disinterested in Windows Phone) that I will use @NokiaDevNorthTX for highly-focused Windows Phone activity.  Still, expect at least few retweets on the @texrat side!

Last year I sponsored and otherwise supported some fun meetups and events, and 2013 will be no different.  January starts off with the North Texas Smartphone App Competition 2013, followed closely by a local instance of the 2013 Global Game Challenge.  Both events will also have preliminary meetups.  We’ll also be holding regular group meetups at Nokia’s Irving site starting in January.  The first meeting will cover many topics, and my hope afterwards is to have one major topic for each meetup.  We’ll have a really exciting one for April oriented around usability and accessibility, and I’m also putting one together (probably for March) with the theme of creating compelling apps.  I’ll be bringing in guest speakers from various companies and organizations, and looking for volunteers!

Speaking of meetups, the DFW meetup group grew fairly well in 2012, finishing the year at 107 members.  Out of that number, there were about 20 or so really active participants, some of whom have flirted with the Nokia DVLUP Leaderboard (must be registered to view; ask me about that if you aren’t) and quite a few winning prizes and awards for their work.

One thing to note: for reasons unclear to me, I have lost co-organizer status at the DFW meetup group.  This means I can no longer organize meetups or events on that site, or even update resource pages I created.  I will therefore be exploring other options… possibly Eventbrite.

I was also a little discouraged at low participation in certain community challenges, so I’m looking for feedback on how to do better this year.  Let me know any ideas you have for incentives and contests.

As for DVLUP… it’s still a Canada/USA program only for now and I know that frustrates those of you outside those countries.  Nokia of course recognizes the need to expand this opportunity so I hope you’ll be ready to jump in when it’s available to you.  It’s become quite popular and the development team has been hard at work fixing bugs and implementing new features.  Participant feedback is key!

Of course, while Windows Phone consumes the bulk of my community work these days, I’m still involved in other initiatives.  I’m on the board of directors for a local Make organization, still interested in 3D printing, and helping Digia as I can with local Qt meetups.  But I did drop some other activities due to time constraints.  I can only be stretched so thin, unfortunately.

Anyway, there’s going to be a lot going on this year and I have my work cut out for me.  Soon I hope to beef this site up a bit and make it a truly useful resource for you.

Thanks everyone for your support!

What IS Tribal Method?

 Explorations  1 Response »
Mar 022012
 

Ok, so I last wrote about a little venture I am starting called Tribal Method, and already the questions are rolling in (just not here for some reason).  So I’ll explain a bit more.

First, I need a gathering place for my own ideas and projects.  Just to manage them if nothing else.  So I’m going to incorporate as Tribal Method first to start organizing my own efforts.  The initial website will host them and provide links to services that support what I’m about to describe.

As I mentally explored ideas on project organization, I realized the if I could solve MY needs I could solve ANYone’s.   Just… unconventionally.

See, I deal with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).  I refuse to say “suffer from” because although the syndrome can be a major pain in the butt, it’s also ironically responsible for my success in many areas.  ADD is a common cause of unboxed creative thinking and I would not trade this curse for any gift.  But– constantly generating countless revolutionary ideas is rather useless if there’s no mechanism for moving them forward.  In my career I have often had to depend on others for that.  I’d rather not.

Project management tools have not helped, because they don’t work the way I do.  Too often they demand too much labor in setup and maintenance, and lack natural connectivity to my other systems and data stores.  This makes project management extremely inefficient.

Everyone with ADD or ADHD right now is nodding in sympathetic horror.  We HATE inefficiencies– even our own.

My idea count has just been mounting with no end or solution in sight.  Pulling together teams has been frustrating because the people I know well enough to trust have their own things going.  Part of the solution has been getting out more and getting involved on the business side, but even that has made me realize there’s still a need out there for herding ideas through the development process and into actual products and services.

So I’m going to bite the bullet and focus foremost on crafting a solution.  I need something immersive.  Where my often-erratic workflow automatically incorporates the actual management part.  Something that Just Works.  Seamlessly.  Invisibly.

As I said last time, technology should be an enabler.  It should support solutions that work the way users want to work rather than forcing us into awkward, counterproductive corners.  And while not everyone has to deal with ADD or ADHD, other constraints impose on them the same problems I experience.

It’s time to create something to address that.

Going Tribal

 Explorations  1 Response »
Mar 012012
 

Just recently I sat down to share with whoever is interested what I’m up to lately and where I hope to be going.  Instead, the article turned into a screed on introvert exploration.  Which is okay, because it was a topic I wanted to talk about anyway, and with it now out of the way I can try the other bit again.

I’ve rambled quite a bit about my past in other places, mostly at Tabula Crypticum, so no need to dig into that deeply.  But a synopsis is worthwhile still before revealing the new stuff.

At age fifteen I started in the plumbing business, a family obligation.  After ten years of that torture I stumbled into a product design career, my goal at the time, starting with 7 highly educational years at Texas Instruments.  When that ended I bounced around a bit in various technical ventures as US manufacturing outsourcing reduced opportunities for a maker like me.  And after losing a too-short dream opportunity at Nokia I ended up in IT application support.

And that’s really not where I want to be.

I have some ideas, guys.  Some small and easily rendered by myself into something real, and some so big and potentially game-changing in some way that I would need to wrap a sizeable company around them.  They’ve been popping up for decades, and each job change has just opened up more possibilities to explore.

I have so many ideas that I can’t manage them all.  So I’ve tried assembling teams, virtual and local, to get things going.  With very little, if any, success so far.

So most of these ideas are stagnating, which is really eating at me.  But one thought keeps me optimistic.  It’s that I don’t need to be their ultimate owner; I just want to be their launcher.

You see, I’m not as big on monetary gain as I am on accomplishment.  And I’m also a huge believer in the team approach… including team recognition over my own.  Because I was insecure enough as a kid; having outgrown that long ago, I have motivators other than the need for attention.  My biggest satisfaction comes from helping someone else succeed.  And if it’s with the germ of an idea I had, even better!  But I want the attention on the solution and the team that made it happen.

As my ideas accumulated and lingered, I realized I was seeing the same sort of thing I had seen in the Maemo and MeeGo communities: plenty of needs, plenty of people wanting to work on needs, and yet a big gap in execution.  Organization was required, but these were contributors who resisted organization.  After all, that leads to bureaucracies.  Which lead to dead projects.

But then, so does inaction.

I’ve been thinking for some time that a solution to this dilemma would be big.  And every now and then I toyed with creating one.  I know many of the issues: different opinions on best practices, resource fragmentation, etc.  I also know that the answers lie in solving functional disconnects, automation gaps, and similar.  If people can work the way they want, without being burdened by technical obstacles and personality clashes, it’s a lot easier to get them on board a project.  After all, technology is supposed to be an invisible enabler!

With those thoughts in mind, I believe I’m finally pulling a solution together.  Participating in local entrepreneurial, social media and application development groups has really helped.

So yesterday I took out the domain tribalmethod.com.  Because I have this idea that will help me solve the team assembly problem holding back other ideas, and very likely help you, too.  It will work for open source, closed source and gradients in between.  There will be opportunities for recognition, money and whatever else motivates you.  I just could use help developing it.

There’s nothing at the Tribal Method domain… yet.  I’m going to need to assemble a team for that.  A chicken-and-egg dilemma, but hopefully I’ve piqued the interest of the right people.

Hop on board.  Ask anything.  This is going to be fun.  ;)

An Introvert’s Guide to the Spotlight

 Explorations  7 Responses »
Jan 212012
 

I tried to explain a while back my feelings about three years of battling to break back into Nokia, but it just came across as a long pathetic whine.  Which suggests I really need an editor.  Or should take time to reflect with a post in draft before publishing.  Or have a draft in hand while writing.

Here’s the problem: Nokia screwed me.  And no I don’t mean by letting me go (well, at first, but that eventually wore off).  I mean by yanking me out of my introverted comfort zone.

I was perfectly fine for years as a closet entrepreneur.  I just threw my wild ideas at every employer and took backstage delight at the few that stuck.  I could never be the guy working the exhibit halls at events, megaphoning my resumé and convincing strangers they should care about my opinion.  I was just too shy.

Fun fact about introverts: get us talking about our passions, and act like you’re interested, and we won’t shut up.  You’ll even swear we are extroverts.  Especially on twitter.

But I’m not.  And when I started working for Nokia I thought that would still be okay, like it had been for every other employer.  Plug in, turn on, crank out.  Collect paycheck.

I knew I was potentially in trouble, though, when my senior manager (read: ABSOLUTE BEST BOSS EVER) told me I needed to get a passport.

Why?

Because, she replied, I would be getting opportunities to travel.  Probably to Finland.

What???  I had never been out of the US!  Now I have to visit reindeer herders?!

This thought of overseas travel frightened me.  Introverts can be confused for agoraphobics.  We often prefer to avoid the over-stimulation that can come with getting Out There.  Couple that with foreign languages, new cultures and invasive airport security and you get the picture.

As it turns out in my Nokia factory employment I dodged the bullet.  I received offers to visit Oulu, Finland for product training but declined.  In hindsight, this was stupid.  I did make one trip to the big Nokia factory in Reynosa, Mexico, but that’s like visiting south Texas.

Eventually our beloved local factory closed, I lucked into a seat at Nokia House Irving days before my employment ended, and everything changed.

Suddenly I was flying to Finland after all.  I was fortunate to wind up with a great travel mentor in colleague (and eventual great boss) Chris Loney, and that helped.  By my third trip I was a practical Finn.  From moi to kiitos to anteeksi, I am a stupid monolingual American, I could navigate my way through essential conversation and Helsinki City Centre.  You learn to later grin at your own ignorance when you find the great Czech restaurant you had been calling Ravintola is really named Vltava, and that ravintola means restaurant (which, trust me, will confuse the hell out of your Finnish friends when you explain how good the food was and they try to pin you down on details).  Oh, and Virgin Oil Company rocks.  Stockmann, not so much (too expensive).

The real problem was that in this new, global role I was required to talk In Front Of People.  Strange and different people.  Important people.

And I realized, with an amazement that made me wonder if I really knew me, that it was actually thrilling.

Don’t get me wrong.  The fear was still there.  Every time I had to cross Charles de Gaulle airport in an hour or less (usually failing) despite one line for all of Customs.  Every time I had to offer my assessment on a worldwide delivery network I didn’t yet fully understand.  Every time I had to eat with my team at a nice restaurant (sorry, ravintola)… knowing alcohol would be served, I would drink it to overcome my introversion, and then carry on like a glib idiot to the embarrassment of my more reserved Finnish hosts.

Americans!

Talking in front of people in Tampere

Anyway, as my time in that last Nokia role grew, I had to meet and get in front of even more people.  I had to communicate with Vice Presidents.  I had to train unknown colleagues.  And I came to actually love it.

After Nokia employment ended, I decided to expand involvement with the maemo.org community.  I started grass roots marketing projects and got elected to the community council (three times altogether).  This meant getting in front of even MORE people.  Like several hundred in Amsterdam, where I learned the hard way that 1) paring a twenty minute talk down to 5 minutes at the last minute (without carving off critical content) is like building the Eiffel Tower with razor blades and 2) when you’re asked to perform such a miracle, request to speak last just in case.  You really don’t want to get the stage hook halfway through.  TRUST me.

Even with occasional embarrassments, at some point I simply HAD to pursue opportunities to travel.  Why?  Because I had made so many good friends around the planet.  Hanging out virtually is fun but just not the same as being there.  So every time Nokia or some other organization called, and paid, I went.  To Tampere, Finland for KDE.  To Dublin and San Francisco for MeeGo.  To Bellevue, Washington for Intel.  Every time was an absolute blast.

With each trip, each stage appearance, I expand that comfort zone further.  I still get nervous, and still know fear, but I’m learning to manage it.  And slowly finding that maybe a career behind the scenes might not be what I really want now.  I’ve discovered as a Nokia Developer Champion that I really like mixing it up with people.  Even ones I don’t know.  Even outside of comfort zones.

Can an old introvert change his spot?

Early December stuff

 Explorations  No Responses »
Dec 042011
 

As noted at Tabula Crypticum, I’m taking the time to really dig into QML.  At the same time, I’m going to explore Windows Phone.  Yeah, I recognize the dichotomy.  But I’m too stoked about technology for its own sake to worry about it.

I really need a new laptop, though.  My old Thinkpad T43 just isn’t keeping up with everything I throw at it.  Or maybe I’ll get a bigger drive for my Ideapad (thanks again Intel) and set it up for dual Windows/Linux boot.  I hear Qt Creator runs better on Linux than Windows anyway.

As for TC… I may not kill it after all.  Maybe I’ll use this site for personal ramblings that everyone can freely ignore and stick with meaty stuff there.  Or maybe find a WordPress template that makes dividing up that sort of activity clear and easy.  Caveat: whatever template I use has to be highly configurable, and play nice on mobile things.  Suggestions welcome.