Discoveries of the Week

This week I made some social networking advancements and started to build a few other new skills.

The first is Tweet Feed which is likely responsible for you seeing this short article. I am not going to have to hand-tweet the AgileInAFlash or AgileOtter articles because they're auto-tweeted for me.

The second is that blogger's admin screens let me turn on the social button bar after each article, so readers may more easily promote anything they find interesting or outrageous. It's a small thing, but already I've seen a new tweet from the page. It's a very small thing, but sometimes small things matter.

I'm on ohloh now. My friend Sam Hart has prodded me a bit, and I finally realized he's right (it takes me a while sometimes) and I should take some credit for the work I've done in the public space, like the PDK. I never realized that I was the check-in leader there. Sam wants me to pick it up and make it a living project again, and I'm thinking he may be right. Mind you, I am a little more interested in the DITS concept, but I have opportunities.

A big social breakthrough is that I realized that taking the train downtown isn't as bad as I made it out to be. Now that I'm moved a bit south and am near a station on a different line, it's just $12.00 for the round trip and it's a bit over an hour each way. This is important because all my peers in the agile community are downtown and I could benefit much from being connected with the local community. It will help with the Talent Agency idea as well as Agile In A Flash, and we all know how iron sharpens iron.

I have entered the world of video production. I really am NOT great at it, but I made some progress in the video realm. I am now a fan of dead-simple transcoding front ends. Arista has been handy for me. While Open Shot is still my editor, I don't always get new content into the right format and size for media sites. I used Arista and encoded for iPod, and it turns out to be totally viewable by mac and windows users (the poor saps) in addition to more enlightened Ubuntu users (1/2 grin).

I ended up putting opening and closing title images on the "Deal" video, and put a drum track at the beginning and end. I still don't know anything about making interesting videos or screencasts, but I suppose that's the future. It's a way to connect, and connecting is good.

I also started with Django all over again. I've read a bit more of the book (on the train) and re-did the "Django for the impatient" and am getting to a point where I can more easily dig into the unit testing problems. I just needed some backgrounding. I've been invited to play in a nice open source project in Django, so I have a wealth of options.

I also am looking at a few good opportunities for my next gig. There is so much to learn, and so many good people to work for, it is an embarrassing wealth of options. Will I be Agile Otter or Django Otter next month?