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Rules of CoWorking

We’re putting together some structure and a website for our local coworking group, and were kicking the idea around about how to include people (or not). I’m a big fan of keeping rules as simple and minimal as possible. I figured eight rules were plenty…apologies to Chuck Palahniuk.

  1. The first rule of coworking is that you must talk about coworking
  2. The second rule of coworking is that you MUST TALK ABOUT COWORKING
  3. If someone brings in a box of donuts or pulls up a cool new website, work is over
  4. Any number of people can work at any time
  5. Any number of projects and businesses can be worked on at the same time
  6. No shirt, no shoes? Well, can you at least throw on a t-shirt and some flip flops?
  7. Work will go on as long as it has to
  8. If it’s your first day coworking, you have to work
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One of the Coolest Things I’ve Seen

Not bragging (well maybe a little bit) but I’ve been very lucky to get to do a lot of really cool stuff in my time.  One of the coolest was a couple of years ago when I got to go to a shuttle launch.  That alone would be pretty cool, but my sister-in-law happens to be an engineer at NASA (yeah, I know, right?), so we got to go to the launch as her guest.

NASA employees and contractors enter a lottery of sorts for each launch, and the winners get to take a single carload of people into a viewing area that is really close to the launch pad. “Close” here means a couple of miles, but to give you an idea, the media was positioned directly behind us. If you’re familiar with Cape Canaveral, we were in an area roped off right next to the Vehicle Assembly Building. As you can see from this video, there are no people in front of the area where we were seated. This is as close as any civilian can get, and the non-civilians who can get closer can’t get much closer.

Although this was shot with a simple hand held video camera, I think it at least captures how loud the space shuttle is, and as you can see by the vertical line that is basically burned into the frame, it is insanely bright, even on a sunny Florida day.

The first day we went to see the launch it was scrapped about 20 minutes before liftoff, but we came back a few days later to get the best fireworks show in the country on July 4, 2006. So there you go…beat that for cool things!

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But I Thought It Was About Limits

I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth here, but it seems like the Left (correctly) despises the idea of one man, the President, and more specifically the current President having too much power to regulate. They see this as a dangerous proposition to individual liberty.

I tend to agree.

Why, then, do they seem at the same time to favor giving this same power to a few hundred folks, Congress and the courts? Don’t the same principle and potential abuses apply whether the power is given to one man, one body, or *gulp* one party?

Althouse: Chemerinsky’s idea of “Enhancing Government.”.

So the liberal idea of “Enhancing Government” is about expansive federal regulatory power combined with enthusiasm for regulating business and enforcing federal rights.

HT Instapundit.

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Twitter “Buys” Summize

The official addition of search–real time search–is definitely going to take Twitter to the next level and offer up monetization possibilities, but at what cost?  I don’t expect Twitter to go on commercial free forever, but is summize going to take the spammy stuff we’re already seeing there to the next level too?  And how exactly does a purchase like this work?

The one thing that remains a mystery is the acquisition price. Twitter hasn’t raised a huge amount of money and Summize had almost a million dollars in funds raised itself. What percentage of its coffers did Twitter just spend on all the Summize technology and five employees? It’s probable that Summize investors saw their investments in Summize turn into favorable investments in Twitter, rather than a pile of cash. When one startup buys another one, though, one always has to wonder. It’s usually a sign of desperation on the part of the acquired company – but that’s not likely the case here.

Confirmed: Twitter Has Acquired Summize – ReadWriteWeb.

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Baseball in 2008–meh

I never thought there would come a time when I would care this little about baseball.  The All-Star game is tonight, and I don’t think it’s possible for me to care any less.  Baseball really has no soul left for the most part.  There are a couple of exceptions–a few weeks ago I was in Chicago for Friday’s game between the Cubs and the White Sox.  Cubs tickets are always a hot item, but tickets to this game were going for more than $250.  I had a chance to go, but the price wasn’t worth it, and I opted to go play poker instead.

I did take the train up to Wrigleyville for pregame festivities, and it was so fun being in a city where so many people care so much about baseball.  These were real baseball fans, and the trip up (we took the red line from Sox-35th to Addison) was really fun, just because of the fans and the trash talking.  In contrast, I was in Atlanta for three days before I went to Chi-town, and nobody…NOBODY cares about the Braves.

Apathy–that’s pretty much how I feel about baseball in general.  I just heard that Barry Bonds is irritated that no team wants him, even though he’s willing to play for the league minimum.  While I really don’t care at all, that at least gives me a little joy.  It’s not that I care so much about his juicing, I just don’t like the guy in general, mostly because of his inability to throw out Lonnie Smith–the only man who’s “ass to rest-of-body” ratio is greater than mine–in the 1991 NLCS, costing the Pirates the pennant.

You’ll recall that the Braves went on to perform the first of their many choke jobs that year in the World Series.

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WordPress 2.6 Nice

WordPress 2.6 has been released, and there are some really nice features in this version.  The biggest new feature to me is the revision history, which allows you to compare every revision of a post and also gives you the option to revert back to previous versions.   Other really cool features are a live word count, ability to reorder images in a gallery you’ve uploaded, captions for images, and a “Press This” button for your browser that let’s you post right out of an article you’re reading.  Does that mean I have no excuse for the light blogging I’ve been doing lately?  Now I have to pop in a post from EVERYTHING I find interesting?  We shall see.

On the admin side, plugin management has been changed to make things much easier (multiple activation is now enabled) and theme preview is now available without installing a plugin.  I’m sure I’ll write a post later complaining about all of the things that are broken, but I’m pretty happy with this update so far.  These features make WordPress even better for use as a full fledged CMS.

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Chemical Spill Shows Us the Sequatchie Valley

We didn’t pay much any attention to the news while visiting the midstate over the weekend, and were really surprised to find I-40 east closed from Cookville to Knoxville because of a chemical spill.  There are a couple of ways to react to something like this.  One is to kick yourself in the ass for not paying attention before you left.  We did that for about 30 seconds, but it’s not very productive.  The suggestion from safety workers was to travel down highway 111 to Chattanooga, then head back north on I-75 to Knoxville.  Coming down 111 into Dunlap I remembered that my buddy used to live there, so I gave him a call and ask the fastest way to Knoxville from there.

Sequatchie ValleyEven though it took us a lot longer than we’d planned for our trip, we really enjoyed the scenery of the Sequatchie Valley by taking Hwy 27 to Hwy 30 and over to I-75 at Athens.  It’s really beautiful and quiet down there, and if I didn’t know that everyone in the world reads this blog I’d recommend the drive, but I don’t want to cause a major traffic jam, so I’ll stop short of doing that.

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How Much Schooling is Enough?

I was listening to Dave Ramsey this afternoon and he fielded a call I’ve heard him take several times in the past–“Should I quite my job (or sell my house, or cash in my savings, or sell my kid, etc.) to go back to school and get a master’s degree?”  I think this is a pretty tough question to deal with.  On one hand, there’s a ton of knowledge to be gained by going back to school, and the fact that you’re paying to learn in an intense environment means that at least some of it will soak in.  On the other hand, is there any information they are giving you in school that you can’t get in a book or online?

I’ve considered an MBA several times.  It’s easy to talk myself out of it since my brother-in-law is storing his entire Duke MBA experience in our garage right now–all I have to do is open up boxes and start reading books.  But the advantage I see of going back to school, especially for business, is the connections you can make; the people you meet.  Those connections are a little tougher to make out in the real world, but it can be done.

I guess I tend to believe that the value is in the information you have and the people you know, not in the piece of paper you earned.  A degree doesn’t always imply an education, and an education doesn’t always imply a degree.  There’s no denying the fact that the degree can open some doors that the knowledge itself can’t.  Then again, the people you know can probably open more doors than both.  However, in the long term, it seems like knowledge and talent are ultimately going to trump everything.  As Dave Ramsey says, “Your raise will be effective when you are.”

And if your abilities are going to be discounted based solely on the fact that you don’t have the right degree, you probably aren’t keeping the right company to begin with.

At this point, more school almost seems like a luxury purchase to me.

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New Round of Purchases

It seems like I buy stuff in bunches, especially computer stuff. And I’m always looking for bargains, especially when I’m upgrading my old stuff. I may be a nerd, but I’m frugal–i.e. you won’t see me talking on an iPhone anytime soon. Here’s a quick rundown of the things I’ve purchased most recently…

Network Accessible Storage–I got this 1 terabyte (1,000 Gigabyte) network storage solution at Amazon last week for $311.50 with free delivery. It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll give it a full review when I get it all set up. Up until now I’ve been using external USB drives to store everything, and it was time to upgrade. The problem with the USB storage is that I could only connect it to one computer at a time and I had to have one drive back up to the other every night. This device connects to your network, just like any other node. That means any computer in your house (on your network) can access it. Also, there are actually two 500 Gb drives in the enclosure, so you can set it up as RAID 1, which means you actually only have 500 Gb of storage, but it is automatically backed up to the other 500 Gb drive.

22″ Monitor–I watched the prices on these things fall until I couldn’t resist getting in. Buy.com has a ton of big monitors at cheap prices. I paid ~$200 for a Soyo 22″ monitor. On things like this, I don’t worry so much about brand name. No matter the brand, chances are most of the parts are made at the same factory, and at $200 I can afford to buy a 24″ later if this one blinks out. In fact, I may actually prefer to do that.

Logitech Webcam–Under $50 (also at buy.com), great for talking with video over Skype (free), and does pretty well for capturing video as well.

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KTown’s New Slogan

Head over to KtownLowdown to cast your vote in SVD’s contest.  He’s listed the top 5 reader submitted entries for KTown’s new slogan. The winner of the contest gets a cool t-shirt and bumper sticker.  If you can’t afford gas, you probably can’t afford the luxury of a bumper sticker, so don’t pass up on an opportunity to get one for free!