(This is the living room, the bedroom has a view of the new World Trade Center building.)


Turkey Day kids. Getting right to it. I'm in NYC on the 52nd floor in TriBeCa. See that picture, it's the view from my living room. I'm staying at my brother in law's Boss's place (follow that?). He is off skiing in the Swiss Alps...I know, right, some guys just get it.

But his killer and, oddly enough, strangely routine vaca is also spectacul-wesome for us. I mean this place is like the stuff you see on TV, honestly, the stuff you hear Jay-Z himself rapping about. Many thanks to Adam S.

Let me get to my point. As all of you three regular readers might be wondering why no nerdy posts. Quickly, new job, new baby lost my way a bit, but I'm actively working on shuffling the schedule and getting my nerd back in full gear. My interest are still primarly iPhone, but ASP.NET MVC is really catching my eye along with wanting to join the hack kinect community and do something fun there. Until then I thought I would do one of those pseudo informative posts about things I'm into right now and hope it may have at minimum a mediocre impact on some aspect of your life.

1. Ray Kurzweil's book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.  I personally feel Ray is more of a true innovator than our famous boy Steve Jobs. See the thing about old SJ everyone forgets is the real innovator in the CO-Ownership of the now famous Apple was Steve Wozniak. Yeah S Dub's did all the inventing and SJ did all the selling. 'Nuff about that. Ray has some radically awesome and contemporary ideas that he backs up strongly about how humans will become so biologically integrated with technology (think fake heart, eyes, lungs and parts of brain),  there will be a point when we can't tell our biological selves from our machine selves and he calls this the singularity. He discusses the implications of this, which of course freak out the religious fundies something fierce because once this happens it all but destroys their beliefs on religion...how is there a heaven (or whatever sect's version of this is) on a human that at the end of it's life may be 100% machine and not biological, this being, is now a man creation and not a "divine" creation. Moving further, he discusses all the social implications the singularity will have and how people who truly understand this now know the profound changes and impacts it will have. Ray is full of very provocative visions, which all signs point to him being correct at this point. He gives an extreme amount of information and I'll try to cover just a smudge when I do my review on the book here on the blog.

2. My trip to NYC: It's funny how a little trip can cause such a vast amount of inspiration. NYC also brings up thoughts of another company I have my eye on ZocDoc.com (based in NYC). It's a site that allows you to book an appointment to a Doctor Online. There is way more to the site than that statement, but, at the core, this is what the site is about. I spoke with my boy Scott Hanselman (not sure if he would agree on me saying this) to do a Hanselminutes on ZocDoc. You can hear it here. Scott is his usual awesome self and Nick Ganju, CIO and Co-founder helps show how ZocDoc is quickly becoming a top notch .Net shop and product.

Well that's it have a great Turkey Day I know I'm having one of my best...did you see that freaking view.

I embarked on the journey of reading Andrew Carnegie’s (AC) autobiography. It was unquestionably one of the better I’ve read (Miles Davis, John Nash, Michael Milken, Jenna Jameson, Jack Welch). The first half of the book has him describing his life starting in Scotland, moving to America and his progression to wealth. You can see from the very beginning he was able to recognize a skill that would be marketable and not only master it, but let the opportunities this skill brought him be the segue into his next venture. The second half is him giving away his money and his interaction with American politics.

AC had no real skeletons in his closet, nothing entertaining from the perspective of drama, drugs or sex scandals. His biggest fault viewed by some may have been his labor practices to his employees. I view this as one sided. He was very generous for his time to his employees; he made more than 20 of them millionaires in the later 1800’s. Just to make this clear, these are people that had no financial risk in the company itself, but he valued their work so much he made them partners and gave them stock options in a time when doing that for employees was simply unheard of. He was one of the first to set up a grocery type store for his employees. He gave them the opportunity to run the store and set the prices ensuring the cheapest cost to the employee shoppers possible and he sold the store supplies at the same discounted prices he received for them when he bought them in bulk for his companies. An example of this was his ability to provide coal at a fraction of the rate the employees where paying outside of the company store. The coal was so cheap they could not only afford proper amounts now the employees were able to have it delivered to their homes. He was also one of the first to set up a type of credit union for his employees, in which he offered more secure backing of the money than the government at the time and he would loan out this money to employees so they could attain houses at interest rates they could afford.

When AC had reached a point he felt he had amassed enough wealth, roughly around 300 billion in today’s dollars he started on his journey of giving away around 95% of it. To put this in perspective, if Bill Gates and Warren Buffet gave away every last dollar they earned it still would not amount to half of what AC gave away.

One of my favorite points about this autobiography was how many iconic people he was casually friends with: Mr. Twain, Mr. Morgan (as in JP), Mr. Roosevelt among many others.

I was disappointed to finish the book. I had become accustom to hearing the nightly stories AC was offering. It felt as if he came back for a short bit to speak with me and upon finishing the book it was his time to leave again. Cheesy I know, but it really is how I felt.

On to my next book, it was going to be the Zappos guy’s book, but a good friend of mine Becky Collins wrote a book of her own, Road Schooled. It’s about her journeys of traveling around on a big fat honk’n Harley Davidson. I can’t wait. She’s got character and personality that is unique and fun, I’m confident she can let it shine through in her words.

A couple weeks ago I did a code binge to nearly finish creating a beer app for the iPhone. I seriously spent 12 hours one Sunday, eating (err drinking) only energy drinks. The bi-product of this was a nearly finished app, and me being burnt out on coding Objective-C...for a short bit :) , the collateral damage is I haven't been posting any code errors fixes I find while coding. These blog posts drive the bulk of my traffic mostly from Google and oddly enough Baidu (Google search engine for China).

Looking at my wife's blog I decided to do a what I like in technology today list just so I can keep posting content for my regular readers...all five of them 4 of which are my family members. :)

1. Google's self driving car. I honestly can't wait until this becomes a reality, don't get me wrong, on the odd Saturday, with perfect weather, I love to take my car out, roll the the windows down, open up the sunroof and just drive with the freedom of life blowing through my hair. Outside of these perfect Saturdays, I'm mostly driving to work with random trips here and there. Nothing excites me more than the ability to hop in my car pull out my laptop or book of the moment and just start reading until I arrive. Nevada has taken the first steps into making this a reality.

2. Grooveshark.com. A very not nerdy girl from my last job showed me this website about 2-3 years ago. When it comes to just listening to your favorite music the way you want it (no last.fm or Pandora business where you can't make your own playlists with the exact songs you want to listen to). It's a wonderful site, clean lay out, and unbeatable music selection. I do question it's legality...ah hell I don't care how it gets through the loopholes as long as I can choose the music I want to listen to when I want to listen to it.

3. Adafruit.com/blog. It's just nerds making fun, semi-practical things utilizing technology. It doesn't get much nerdier, but it certainly tickles the geek brain on potential projects. When I'm done with my beer app, I want to make something that responds to a twitter feed, maybe automatically shut off the lights when I twit lights-out to a specific twitter account. Who knows, the sky's the limit and that is the best part of what this site does for me.

4. Capital One's technology ambition. I've seen more than a few company's technology department, most of them stale with very little drive to step it up. These stale companies are the kind of companies where you sit at your desk over lunch and read about the cool stuff Google and Facebook are building and think, damn, I want to be a part of that. In the banking world of technology, Capital One, is that company. They are working very hard and fast to move to the top in technology offerings and they understand this starts with building a strong foundation. The technology ambition of this company is not just in their projects it's in their people. You can feel it, taste it in the air, and appreciate the passion everyone brings to the table. Expect to see big things from this company in the next 3-6 years. I fully believe they have the potential to be a game changer in the banking industry.

5. Scott Hanselman. This guy is a nerd. Not even a little bit of a nerd, we are talking hardcore drinking the cool aid nerd, BUT the passion, talent, and great presentation skills he has keeps me coming back. He regularly updates his blog with intriguing material (no easy feat coming from a guy who has his own) and is not afraid to express his true opinions even if it may not fall in line with his employers(Microsoft) believes 100% of the time. Which, I believe, in the end, gives him more credibility. He's a .Net guy, but chances are he probably knows more about nearly any other language than you would suspect. If you ever get a chance to see him speak about .Net stuff do it, even if you don't do .Net, you will enjoy yourself regardless.

The last calendar year has been one heck of a ride. Which ended in Richmond with a wonderful marriage, a beautiful daughter and an incredible job at Capital One Bank. Let's talk about Capital One. They started their bank 5 years ago, that's right, 5 years ago and now they are the 8th largest bank in the US. In the banking world this kind of growth is unheard of. A good way to measure this is if you look at the other 9 banks all of them are at least 50 years old.

I believe Capital One's successful growth is, in part, due to the way they approach business and their hiring practices. I'll focus on the hiring practices. It's about a 3-4 month process with a barrage of interviews, equal parts behavioral interviews to case study interviews, along with an aptitude test, which tests your analytical and reading comprehension. The result: very talented employees. A product of this are intense meetings with very smart people. Being on your 'A' game is not an every once in a while kind of thing, it's an every hour of every work day kind of thing. Putting all of this together you get a company that  is very nimble in bringing up it's product offerings for it's respectively new founded bank.

I'm excited to see what the future holds for Capital One in the banking world. I would like to help them get to number 1, after all it's in the name, but I may be getting ahead of myself.

I could give some long spiel on trials and tribulations, challenges and challenges met, how everything that can happened will happen, but I’m going to give you one short little paragraph followed by a ranked top 5 list. Ranked lists are fun and for some reason I feel human nature views a ranked list as more compelling to read. I’m guessing it’s because you can see your progression and one has a visible start and stop point.

1.  Have An Awesome Wife (or special other/partner)
I don’t care if you pack and label every box, plan the entire trip, and do every conceivable thing for them. This trip will tax them; it will tax them emotionally and physically. You will most likely be uprooting them from everything they know and are comfortable with. They will need, no, have to make accommodations for the move and most importantly for you (see my wife sleeping on an air mattress as we wait for movers to arrive…going on 10 days now). Your patience will be tested; you will feel like you are carrying all the weight, however I found the following reminder helped me quite a bit: your significant other isn’t moving for themselves they are moving for you and that is a major sacrifice. If you don’t have an accommodating significant other, this move won’t happen, it probably will barely happen even if she is awesome.


2. Research your mover
Now that I have gone down the path of getting a mover I found out how important it is to get a reputable and BBB accredited mover. I didn’t do this and because of it I’m typing this post on a lawn chair my father brought when he drove my wife’s car up. On the upside, it’s got a great beer cup holder (see silver lining).

The most important thing I learned is if I ever do a move this far again, I’m going to get a UHaul truck and higher people to load and unload it on either end. This gives me the guarantee that my stuff, namely my mattress, will be here when I’m here. No more waiting on some smuck truck driver to get here with all of my worldly possessions.


3. Label your boxes.
It is no fun, it’s tedious and most of the time you flat out don’t want to do it. --Do it. It will make everything easier on the other end of your trip. By placing kitchen boxes in the kitchen and master bedroom boxes in the master bedroom, you see the pattern, this saves you quite a bit of time and effort, assuming you tell the moving guys where to drop them. Labeling also gives you the flexibility to open boxes as you need the articles in them. The other side is having a huge stack of boxes in your living room and opening each one with it’s own surprise. 


4. Plan Plan Plan and then Plan some more
Think about everything you need to do, then re-evaluate that list….twice. You will still forget something. Just view it as downsizing. Minimalist is in right?


5. Bring healthy snacks for the car ride
This is a no-brainer, but I forgot fruit and nuts for the ride and I was living on road food. Trucker food. Cracker Barrel, Ruby Tuesday’s, McDonald's food. I don’t know about the rest of you but my body can only take about 1 meal a month of this junk. Much past that and my body starts beating me up from the inside and beat me up it did.

I finished it. My review: very boring. Seriously, I know this is a classic but Charles Dickens can spend two pages (as in 4 pages you read and 2 physical pages) describing a room and the sad thing here is, I'm not being sarcastic, he really did that in this book.

There supposedly are two endings to this book, a dark one and the real one (it's happy, kinda). Let me ruin it for you. Pip gets the girl. Now I just saved you 500+ pages of reading.

Don't read this book! Anyone that tells you it's not boring, is wrong. If you like boring by chance, read it.

My next conquest is "The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie and The Gospel of Wealth." Apparently Warren Buffet gives this to all his super rich buddies (Bill Gates) to read on donating their money away. Warren believes dynastic wealth is rarely used wisely and uses this book to show how Andrew Carnegie believed this also. Incidentally Forbes magazine ran some numbers and if Andrew had his money in today's dollars it would be 300 billion dollars. Way WAY more money than any of our richest boys today.

Hopefully this book will not be boring, though I will say I'm very biased on liking biography/autobiographies.

Every once in a blue moon I like to do an unplugged post. Well here is one.

About 2 month ago I created a Facebook profile for my daughter. Many people questioned this idea and I found myself constantly explaining why I created her very own Facebook profile.

For one I'm a very private person, that being said, I don't want all of "my" facebook friends having access to pictures of my daughter. I truly believe there will be an entire generation of kids whose parents made their pictures too readily available on the internet and this will come back to haunt them later in their life, in some form or another.

Another key aspect is I can control exactly who is viewing her profile. It was a real wake up to me with all the security hospitals have in place for babies now. It really hit home how many creepo's there are out there. I believe the amount of creepo's expands exponentially when you have a daughter.

BUT the main reason I created her profile is because it gives me a pseudo journal and an indirect form of communication for my daughter for the times when she can't communicate back with me. I believe when she is old enough she will greatly enjoy looking back on her profile and seeing what her parents "spoke" with her about during those first 2-3 years she can't remember.

Now I'm sure you are thinking what if facebook shuts down you loose all that information, to this fellow nerds I say finding a way to preserve this data is very simple, but this time I won't bridge that gap for you it's all up to you. To the non nerds I say "Ctrl-c" and "Ctrl-v" make them your best friends. :)

Personally I can't wait to share some of what I was thinking with my girl when she was older and see how my view points will probably change....you know the whole better in theory than in practice thing. :)

To wrap it all up...I love you Emma.



Update: My Wife quickly let me know it was her idea. What a great idea she had. Those darn dentist people are smarter than we give them credit for.

Update 2: I was informed of an application called Social Safe. It seems to back up your Facebook pretty easily to your local desktop, but if you want to back up that local desktop it gets a bit tricky. Here is what they sent me:

Mac OSX:

1) Select Finder
2) Select Username (Appears in the left column)
3) Select Library
4) Select Preferences
5) Select com.1minus1.socialsafe....

If you are running a Windows OS:

Windows XP:

1) Click Start
2) Select Control Panel
3) Select Folder Options
4) Click View Tab
5) Click Show Hidden Files & Folders
6) Click Apply
7) Click Exit
8) Select Start
9) Select My Computer
10) Select Local Disk C
11) Select Documents & Settings
12) Select Users Name (Or Machine Name)
13) Select Application Data
14) Select com.1minus1.socialsafe....

Windows Vista:

1) Click Start
2) Control Panel
3) Select Classic View
4) Folder Options
5) View Tab
6) Show Hidden Files & Folders
7) Click Apply
8) Exit Screen
9) Click Start
10) Select Users Name Located Under Us Picture (Top Right Of Start Menu)
11) Select App Data Folder
12) Select Roaming Folder
13) Select com.1minus1.socialsafe....

Windows 7:

1) Click the start option on the bottom left of the desktop screen
2) Click Control Panel
3) Change the "View By" format to Large Folders
4) Click Folder Options
5) Click the View tab
6) Click Show Hidden Files, Folders and Drives
7) Click OK
8) Exit the Control Panel
9) Click the start option on the bottom left of the desktop screen
10) Open your personal folder at the top right of the start menu
11) Select AppData
12) Select Roaming
13) Select com.1minus1.socialsafe....

Nerd Chic is what I like to call the new age of nerds coming up. Somewhere in my lifetime nerds went from guys with glasses to guys like Gregg Luskin. Gregg was a Comp Sci major at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but decided to take his techie skills and start making music. He titled his second album "Circle of Fifths." Circle of fifths is a mathematical way to create harmony. As soon as I saw this as his album title I knew I would love this guy, his music is great for the gym too.

Above is his new song. I dig. One more nerd redefining social boundaries. After all the future of any industry is in technology and pretty much nothing else.

What a wild month! London, Paris (loved Paris), and Barcelona, followed up with a gig in Philly working for the second biggest software developer in the world on their up front website, SAP.com. Before I dive into the limited aspects I can speak about SAP.com's technology I would like to point out the facet of SAP that has had, and will have, a lasting effect on me, the cafeteria. These people (SAP) treat their people good! Made to order sushi, made to order Thai, a Philly cheese steak that will challenge South Philly's finest and a Starbucks that feels like it was made just for me, all this within a short walk from my desk. Really, next to the BMW the Germans know how to do it.

Lets dive into my first day. I was sitting at my desk, after enjoying my oh-so-delicious lunch of Alaskan Cod; I hear this loud noise getting louder. Turns out it was a helicopter flying in with the American Co-CEO. As he gets out, much like a scene you might expect to see from Iron Man, he has a dream effect on me. He waves at the people there to greet him and follows up with a mock gun shot (I can only hope he made the clicking sound that goes with the mock gun shot) at one of the security guards as he steps into the Escalade, in my mind I say YES, awesome! I know right then and there I'm going to love it for my limited time here.

I digress lets talk about a website that needs to address more nations than a senator trying to get votes in NYC. In short, because this is all I will say and feel comfortable, they follow a Model View Presenter (MVP) development process in making their site. SAP's site addresses content based on what nation/region you are coming from all while maintaining a similar look and feel for every end user. Think localization is easy with .Net...not on this scale boys and girls! Now add a level complexity comprising of several teams in more countries than you can count on one hand, developing for this one site. To create a level of consistency across so many sites a template format was built and an engine on top of the .Net engine to address what should be displayed....this is all I will give up, but I can say it's fun and challenging.

I just came back from touring 3 countries. UK - London, France - Paris, Spain - Barcelona.

The picture above was me on Tooly street in London. The significance of this street is it's where Chris Martin is walking at the beginning of the Fix You video. This song is so moving how could I not take the chance to stop here, plus the bus tour I was taking drives right by it. I think you might actually be able to see a bus at the beginning of the video.

This isn't a very tech post, but like I say in my description, sometimes you just have to turn the internet off. I'll have a few more photos in my "photos" section.