Desktop Notes

Its been a long time since I did a Desktop Notes article to kind of give people an idea as to what I have been up to so I figured I would put a quick piece together.

• We held the first Ignite Birmingham Event here in beautiful Birmingham, AL http://www.ignitebirmingham.com/
• Went to the Southeast Linuxfest and Rendezvous Bonsai Conference.
• Finished 2 new web projects and lost a month to large projects at work.

Oh and I almost forgot I picked up an ipad as well. Going to try to get my bonsai app to work on it.

Picked up this ipad stand from amazon this week. I think it was meant for netbooks but they re-branded it for ipads and it works well. And is compact so can travel easy.

The stand from behind in action!

Been doing a good bit of work on Ignite Birmingham 2 this week. I have a few meetings in the next few weeks that will hopefully help us be even better!

Another arrangement of figures on my desk.

Here is my current setup in front of my computer. I change it up every few weeks. Found out the Drossel makes a good business card holder!

I keep most of my business books in my hutch now but I am moving away from hard-copy for most of these and going digital. If they have a lot of useful graphics or charts I may still buy them but right now it is easier to use my kindle or ipad.

This is my wall of dunny’s. I picked up a few Asian art a art fair a few months back and I ended up putting them here on my wall along with my John Lytle Wilson pictures. I will get around to hanging them eventually.

This is my bonsai book shelf were I keep most of my bonsai books be they photo-books or learning books. I have collected a good bit of them over the years and plan on getting a few more photo-books later this year. I really need to focus on my trees in the next few weeks but a lot will depend on the rain.

I’ve decided to start a new series called Desktop Notes in which I will lay out my thoughts at the beginning of the week and kind I’ve decided to start a new series called Desktop Notes in which I will lay out my thoughts at the beginning of the week and kind of act like a log of what I have been thinking over the course of the year. I will also use this series to keep a log of how my desktop environment changes over time as well..

The main thing going on early this year is the start of conference planning. As I have done the past several years I have tried to be involved in multiple local tech conferences in an effort to help the local tech community. So far this year we have BarcampBirmingham 4 and the first Ignite Birmingham in the planning phases. Luckily we have lots of great people in the area that help with these events so it doesn’t consume too much of any one persons time. The Ignite planning is the most pressing due to the fact we have a little over a month to plan unlike the Barcamp where we have several months so that is how my time is really divided at the moment.

The other things on my mind lately have been more on the idea/development side. I have two pet projects I want to start working on soon/again. The first of which is a tech community calendar. While I know we have several of these already in general they are not kept up or they are missing data. So my goal is to make a calendar and an engine to populate said calendar. So far my two competing ideas on the development of the calendar are to write one from scratch in php or use wordpress with a plugin such as gigpress to do the initial work. I will probably set up a demo using gigpress this week just to test it out. If anyone wants to help let me know. I have also contacted some other similar projects about some joint efforts but not much has come out of it yet.

The next project is my bonsai collection management program. I have been playing around with a program called OT2 for a while now and it is a good native app but I think it might be cool to develop a more complex web-based application that may even lend itself to a more social concept. First off I think I am just going to develop an OT2 like program but make it web based for personal use then I hope to develop a mobile client for it for personal use. After that I will try to make it more of consumer driven app and hopefully have a working model by Brussels Rendezvous this year. My one complaint is I am not a good designer so it may look a little rough.of act like a log of what I have been thinking over the course of the year. I will also use this series to keep a log of how my desktop environment changes over time as well.

Had some labor issues while sorting last years business cards!