First is Charlotte Startup Weekend 3, where I am a co-organizer. You can read our kickoff blog for CSW3 on our site. We also have testimonials from technologists and business people. This is a great event for working on a project for the fun of it, and making friends and connections in the Charlotte startup community at the same time.

It’s November 4-6, so it’s in a few weeks. We have a lot of sponsors, judges, advisors and volunteers to introduce, but we need attendees! If you cannot afford the registration fees, please contact me, as there may be some scholarship possibilities.

If you’re not sure whether Startup Weekend is right for you, there’s an event from Collaborate CLT and CLT Launch hosted by Packard Place to help you evaluate that on Tuesday, October 25.

Finally, if you are interested in the Charlotte startup community, I publish a newsletter that attempts to circulate great information about what’s happening and who is involved here in the city. You can view the archives or sign up!

Thanks for your time and attention.

Jim Van Fleet

It’s a great site, and I am very happy with my change in brokerage, regardless of my employment status. If you are a stockholder, consider transferring your assets to TradeKing. You can’t beat the price, and the customer support is top-notch. You also get to play around and shoot me nasty messages if you find any bugs in the community site. What could be better than that?

Adhearsion looks like it might make VOIP accessible to me, which is a pretty ridiculous notion. If you’re thinking VOIP and Ruby, think Adhearsion. I know the speaker is probably frustrated that his demo didn’t come off at the end, but that was going to be incredible if he pulled it off.

I’ve heard Bruce Tate speak a number of times, but it’s clear to me that getting out of the Java sphere has actually been good for his psyche. He speaks with a lot more passion now and asks interesting questions. He’s not the only one asking them, but I think it’s pretty likely that some of my fellow attendees could really get something out of reflecting on his talk.

Our social schedule led to missing the games development talk. Ooops!

The lightning round was relatively informative, and I preferred it to what I saw during the security talk at RailsConf.

The birds of a feather session that I attended about using Rails for social good included discussion of a mailing list that I hope ends up happening.

The presenters on the second day after that all did a great job. Ken Ault gave a great talk about the Rails ecosystem and how the interrelations were important for Smalltalk and what Ruby can learn. Smalltalk got a lot of “face-time” this weekend.

Jared Richardson gave a really illuminating talk on the interrelationship between C and Ruby.

Both talks I’m going to watch again at some point, and I think that’s one of the highest compliments I can pay.

Marcel Molina wrapped up with a talk on beauty which really wasn’t to my tastes, although clearly many people in the crowd responded well to it.

Overall, I think the organizers and the presenters did an incredible job of getting a lineup of interesting speakers and topics together in a place, delivering a great value, and bringing it off almost without a hitch. Awesome job, and I give my compliments to everyone involved.

What I Run

Web Browsing (and del.icio.us) posting

Camino and dashLicious are my preferred combo here, although I do run Firefox right now for GMail. I may try out BonEcho, but my computer hasn’t shied under the load so far, so running two browsers is OK by me. Camino delivers a Firefox level of browsing quality almost always, and pairs perfectly with dashLicious, which is kind enough to be browser agnostic.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is the majordomo for OS X. “Albert, open my newsreader!”, “Albert, send this file over IM to my friend Jeremy!” Quicksilver has most of its functionality tied to Apple software, but plugins are available.

Flickr Uploadr

I use Flickr for my photosharing needs, and you can view the bigfleet photostream to check it out yourself. The tools are so much better than uploading directly using the web interface, it’s kind of a joke that I ever used the web in the first place.

If you use Flickr, this tool is a must download.

Google Notifier and GMail Macros

The whole reason that I run two browsers is that the combination of GreaseMonkey and GMail Macros is so powerful. The real inspiration for this post is that I have finally reached an empty inbox on GMail after clearing out nearly 2600 unread messages. You can fly through tagging, archiving, and deleting messages with barely any time at all. It really facilitates the sort of session that is advocated in Getting Things Done.

Google Notifier does the job of letting me know when I have new mail. It also lets me know if I have just read a piece of mail (by displaying a “new” entry in the ten newest unread messages list) which is annoying but still worth it.

Handbrake, iSquint and Lostify

Just read this if you have an iPod.

NeoOffice

Even if NeoOffice is slow to start up, you can’t beat free. Maybe the new iWork releases are awesome, though, and they’ll be worth paying for.

SSHKeychain

If you use SSH a lot, you can use SSHKeychain to stop typing your passwords. If you’re like me, that actually makes a big difference.

Adium

Although I really wish that either Adium would work with Quicksilver or Yahoo would work with iChat, since neither of those seems to be imminent, it’s Adium for me. Although I did get laid off, so I’m not really required to use Yahoo! IM anymore, so the iChat door is open again.

CocoaMySQL

MySQL is my favored database, and CocoaMySQL is my favorite interface to it on OS X.

Transmission

For BitTorrent on the Mac, my favorite application is Transmission although BitRocket shows a lot of promise.

Colloquy

IRC is taken care of by Colloquy. It’s the best IRC client that I’ve ever used.

Have fun with this!

“list eight habits or facts about yourself, then tag eight more people.”

1. I am not going to finish up writing RailsConf 2007 like I said that I would. I blame my readers for their utter lack of caring. It’s just too far in the rear-view mirror now. Next year, I’ll move more quickly.
2. I left on a trip for Europe on July 16 and returned on July 30. It was an incredible trip, undoubtedly one I will remember for a long time. The trip was with 10 high-school children from King William county where Megan taught this year. I’m certainly going to try to blog about this.
3. The time between RailsConf and Europe was spent primarily on XSLT project with a Flash front-end. That was different.
4. Two days after I came back to work, I was laid off by my employer. It was four days before my ten-year high school reunion, and just over two weeks before The Big Day. I’m interviewing with several places around the country, and having an enjoyable time considering the possibilities. I am looking outside the Richmond area, and if you know of a senior level Ruby/Rails position with some managerial responsibilities, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
5. I attended my ten year high school reunion, and I would describe it as surreal and anticlimactic. I expected to know more of the people who came.
6. I get married in less than ten days.
7. I use Twitter habitually, even though there’s really no point to doing so.
8. I tend to be a very calm person typically, but if I am hungry, that is a dangerous time to irk me.

I’m not going to tag anyone, you can do this if you want.

(Via mattwalters.net: lost ramblings.)