Yes, I’m a SWirgin

This year, I finally get to see the hype first hand. I will be going to SxSW Interactive starting this Friday. Last year I watched the overflow of Information spill out from the event from my office back here in Northern Virginia and said to one of my contract customers, “I have to go next year!” Too late to put together a panel or a talk (I would have done one on Community Management), I am going this year mostly to network and sink in as many talks and panels as I can. But the point is I AM GOING!

Thanking my lucky stars for much of the pre-planning information this year, as  I am working out much of my trip as I can in advance with the help of some non-SWirgins. I am flying on the Big BWI Blogger Boeing on Friday morning (Flight 2262) with at least 6 other twitter/bloggers. If you are also on this flight, let us know so you can join the group. I am also looking to either carpool or take public transportation to the airport.

To get prepared, I have been doing a lot of reading of my trusted friends and experts who have done this thing before. Aaron Brazell aka @Technosailor has a nice write up about what to expect, some considerations, and even packing tips.

Andrew Mager (@mager) from ZDnet has a guide he put together with his picks for sessions to attend, as well as parties and extras.

And if you are looking for parties and other thing related to the event, you might want to check out the growing list over at http://sxsw.razorfish.com/

I have also signed up for my.sxsw.com. The official social networking site of the entire conference. It was developed by my good friends over at the social collective (follow @bucchere for more details). We used this networking software before for WIREICES last fall and they have improved it a lot since our experience and hopefully with our feedback.

Mostly I will be hanging out with other SWirgins Amy (@sengseng) and Steve (@robotchampion). We’ll be at Amy’s salon on Spying 2.0 (see below) if anyone wants to come say hello.

If there are any other tips or things I should know about please do not hesitate to let me know. I will be trying to twitter and live blog as much as I can during the event, but if my laptop becomes an anchor, there might be more twittering and less blogging until after the event.

I haven’t finished picking out my interested events and some are subject to chance, since some are at the exact same time as others I am interested in, but right now here is a brief list:

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More Thoughts on Work Life Balance

In an earlier post last week, I talked about suffering from the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). A colleague of mine, The Doyen of Intellipedia – the US Intelligence Community’s classified wiki, Don Burke mentioned to me that he had read my blog, but it wasn’t FOMO he was suffering from, it was HOLI: The hatred of losing information.

I have to agree with him that HOLI is a subset of FOMO. While the fear of missing out is more encompassing to to what’s going on at work, on the television, the news, on twitter, out at a social meetup, it is the hatred of losing information is a big part of that. The knowledge gained when we participate on a collaborative site, watch the news, tweet on twitter, or meet in person is astounding.

The Doyen let me know he hates to see information disappear, information lost when there was an opportunity for it to be captured. I agree. That’s the very thing that Intellipedia is doing for the Intelligence community. The knowledge of government, contractors, and other qualified users dispersed around the world being shared on a wiki that anyone can contribute.

It’s very easy to get wrapped up in wiki-markup and esoteric solutions for me. Many a night I enjoy working late as there is time for me to think and play with code. (I am sure many other code-geeks out there know what I am talking about). To me it is fun, fun to see a solution come to life that can effect massive change. Sometimes just 4 lines of code can make a big impact. Those are the time I really smile and get uber-geeky about my work. But then there are times the solution just doesn’t come, so I go to Starbucks or just have to call it a night and come back the next day or next week to it. We can’t expect to know the answer if we get too in the weeds.

Another colleague of mine who I was chatting with today online was commiserating with me about all the projects we juggle and body aches we suffer as we get older. His quote was “Our passions can easily be interpreted as Obsessions“. Even not having a significant other in my life, I know my family and friends can see this about me. My best friend asked me days in advance to go to karaoke last week, because he knew if I didn’t put it on my Google Calendar, then I would just stay in the office and work until I got hungry enough to come home.

Family matters – As you might have read from my tweets and my blog, I have been getting more involved with the church. Which connects me more with family. I feel good when I participate in church functions because my family has been with the church since before I was born and my pastor knows me not only by name, but what I do for a living and what I want to do with my career and life. I was even the first to volunteer for the Chili Cookoff we had this past Saturday and I did come in Second Place. (Dare I share my winning recipe with you all — nooooo like my votes, it will stay a secret).

Going to church and my mother coming down on the weekends gives me time to spend with my ailing grandmother and youngest brother. She’s been suffering from extremely low blood pressure among her other symptoms of her condition. She used to be able to outlift me when we would go grocery shopping. She’d grab the 50lb bag of dogfood because I have a bad back. Now its a good day when she can leave the house. Spending time with her I can see is good medicine, it lifts her spirits. Now that I could never do from my office.

My youngest brother and I have an age difference of 14yrs so much of his life growing up, I was not there. This is something I am working with him on as he has Aspergers and I learn his idiosyncracies. He doesn’t like chili or spaghetti, but he loves to cook and grill. He’s 18 and just graduated from High School, so he spent time living with me this fall and now he comes down on weekends. He is a big help around the house and I have been teaching him how to drive. I am proud to say he just did his first round-trip from Pennsylvania and back this weekend. He beat that new game on XBOX “Deadspace” in less than a day.

He’s not with me now in the house because I haven’t been able to spend much time at home as I juggle all my work responsibilities. I sat him down and told him he can come stay with me again in the future, but right now I can’t do much for him to help him get a job or education when I am not at home to help. He is scheduled to get his license soon and that should help out tremendously. Maybe then I could have a driver? I keep saying I need a personal assistant.

Anyways, back on point to this work-life balance, I know we all are trying to find it in our lives and what might work for others, does not work for all. With the openness of the web and new tools for collaboration and communication coming out every day it seems, we can’t know or share all the information. We will miss out and we will lose information. But now, we don’t have to be the only one who knows, goes, and shares. We can work together.

I hope reading my experiences let’s you know, we can’t be expected to do it all at 100%. I mean, even Barack Obama doesn’t do the dishes and Michelle Obama never slept at his DC townhome while he was a Senator. But they have identified and verbalized with each other what their priorities in life will be once they move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Obama is going to work on the Economy & hunt down Al-Qaida and Michelle is going to work on being Mom-in-Chief for the first year. (You can thank 60 Minutes for this knowledge tidbit)

My final thoughts are that time spending with loved ones is time always well spent. I think we should take a moment to remember that as the holidays come around.Be thankful for your health, your loved ones and for the passion that drives you.

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Getting my text messages online ? Say it ain’t so.

I don’t know about everyone in the world, its not my job. But I do know there are people like me who travel frequently and sometimes they can’t bring their phone with them into their workspace or have to have it off during the day. That can be a pain when you are “expecting a call or important text”.

Fortunately technology is starting to catch up with the demands of the likes of us. We can participate in massive social messaging with sites like twitter, pownce, ping.fm, friendfeed and so on. And by using these services we can see our messages online. OK cool. Then there is something called Grand Central.

Grand Central is cool, as its in beta, I can choose my own phone number from anywhere in the country and use this as my “semi-anonymous phone number”. I use this in a few ways. Its the number in my email signature I give out via business email communications and eventually will be on my new business cards (along with my twitter name: immunity). But I can also use it to screen calls and forward calls to multiple lines at the same time. And where I can also check the voicemail online as it comes via email. Very nice huh?

But all that takes a little work to set up and disseminating those numbers and practices to your business contacts and tech savvy friends.

What happens if its your family and close friends, who might not be as techie as you. In fact, they are the ones that call YOU for IT support when their computer is b0rked.

This is where a service like Dashwire might come in handy. I recently stumbled upon the site, from a curious question posted by a fellow smartphone user on my twitter contacts. After reading some reviews on a zdnet blog and checking out the site, I decided to give it a trial run.

Dashwire essentially syncs up my smartphone (T-Mobile Dash) to a personal site for me so I can see all my calls, texts, pictures, and contacts. This is something T-mobile can do normally if I was using a sidekick, except for the text messaging. So this is why I like it. I can see the texts I am missing.

It’s able to make this work by sending text messages to the dashwire service, as a forward, so an unlimited text messaging plan is essential if you want to try this out. Additionally, be forewarned, this is a resource and battery drain, especially while synching. So while it maybe cool, consider this downside, especially if you are not able to charge your phone (charging in your car maybe a necessity).

Also to note, they didn’t have an exact match of the HTC phone for my dash, so I picked the closest model and it still works.

I started using this about 2 weeks ago and think I will give it at least one month more before I make my final call, but for this trial run (self-imposed trial, the service is free), its been very helpful.

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Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008 Day 2

Yesterday was an amazingly different and wondrous day. It started off with the hotel finding us the biggest chocolate croissants evar! Then Steve Mandzik and I walked down to E*Trade. After which, we started walking back to the Moscone West when we were stopped by News Channel 5 in SF to talk about the presidential campaign so far. I am hoping my soundbyte made it on air. (If someone can find me this clip I will love you forever and pimp your site, blog, twitter, whatever for you.)

Update: My friend Mike B. found the clip, I am standing next to Steve and his soundbyte made it, but mine did not. Next time eh?

After that, I sat in on Joseph Smarr from Plaxo’s presentation “Data Portability, Privacy, and the Emergence of the Social Web“. I saw Joseph earlier this year at the Future of Web Apps in MIami. This time he had more time to speak and talk about the direction in which the social web is going and the ever growing need for our connections to travel with us, instead of re-friending your friends. I also saw Kevin Marks again from Google and I met Identity Woman, Kaliya Hamlin.

I spent a lot of time back and forth in blogtropol.us and on the expo floor. I was really impressed with the Tell Me app that works with voice on your blackberry to keep your hands free when looking for information. I also got a demo of saleforce.com powered by google apps and the possibilities I can take with me back to Navstar. I still have 4/5ths of the floor to explore. A little each day.

Most of the time spent here is actually networking and talking to developers making cool hacks, scripts and apps. But the afternoon we got to listen to the Keynotes of Day 2 (Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky surely were the standouts).

So far the new apps I have been working with since I got here Fireball, powered by Fireeagle. Alertthingy, a desktop app for friendfeed.com. And ribbit, another way to make your phone do so much more for you.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMW52Z_a5xM]

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Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008 Day 1

Yesterday and throughout the week, myself and robotchampion (who is also live blogging) are in San Francisco attending the web2.0 expo.

The conference is being pulled all together by the social networking site crowdvine. This is my second time using crowdvine as my guide through a conference and this time it is dramatically better. I was able to guestimate my schedule of panels and sessions for the week as well as fill out a little information about me and link all my rss feeds that I will be generating about the conference, to include twitter.

I am tagging everything in twitter with the hashtag #web20expo and following @w2e on twitter. I have uploaded and started a group on Flickr (Web2.0Expo08 San Francisco) for this event for all my pictures and hopefully others will contribute to as well.

We will also be posting video podcasts and vignettes throughout the week, so stay tuned to this blog for more information and links. I already posted a video last night of The Unicorn at the Digg Party last night on youtube, check it out. Thanks to Kevin Rose and the people at Digg for an awesome get together.

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Navstar Inc. Blog

Last week I started the launch of our blog presence at Navstar Inc. The website and blog are still undergoing cosmetic reconstruction and therefore the link to the blogs is not linked on the company website, yet. But I am putting the link out there so those who meet me at conventions and conferences can start seeing my social web technology specific blogs appear over there.

I will still blog over here on my personal blog, but my professional voice and opinion can now be found over, there. So check it out.

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DC Wikipedia Meetup

I am going to go, yes I know I am a geek, but I know some of my readers might be interested in going… what say you?

DC Meetup

2007-07-21 17:00 EDT

Who should come? You should. Really.
If you are interested in Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects, regardless of your level of experience or involvement, or if you are otherwise involved in with free content you are invited and welcome.

What, Where, When, and How?

• What? : DC Wiki(p|m)edian meetup

• Where? : Uno Chicago Grill, Union Station, Washington DC
• When? : Saturday, July 21. 5 PM — until it ends
• How? : See the directions.

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