I was unable to decide what to listen to, my forecasting techniques had rendered me incapable of choosing wisely. While listening to "Do You Believe in Rapture" by Sonic Youth I decided to hit the Genius button and a list began… a few tracks later i hit the button again on "Dear Catastrophe Waitress" by Belle and Sebastian. Then several tracks launched another list, then another, and then M. Ward’s "Hi-Fi" unlocked the magic!

The resulting list of 20 tracks for your enjoyment.

1. "Hi-Fi" by M. Ward
2. "Eli, The Barrow Boy" by The Decemberists
3. "Alone Again Or" by Calexico
4. "You Are a Runner and I Am My Father’s Son" by Wolf Parade
5. "Let the Distance Keep Us Together" by Bright Eyes, Britt Daniel & Spoon
6. "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us" by Sufjan Stevens
7. "Perfect Disguise" (BBC Radio Session) by Modest Mouse
8. "Can’t Help Falling In Love" (Alternate Version) by Eels
9. "Dress Up In You" by Belle & Sebastian
10. "Slow Show" by The National
11. "Conventional Wisdom" by Built To Spill
12. "Grass" by Animal Collective
13. "Thinking Of A Dream I Had" The Walkmen
14. "Chinese Translation" by M. Ward
15. "You Can Have It All" by Yo La Tengo
16. "The Enemy Guns" by DeVotchKa
17. "Springfield, or Bobby Got a Shadfly Caught in his Hair" by Sufjan Stevens
18. "Reena" by Sonic Youth
19. "The Delicate Place" by Spoon
20. "Knife" by Grizzly Bear

The Griddle Blog is FINALLY off the default WP template

There’s some roadwork ahead at the website of my favorite San Francisco Rock Band, Griddle. Most noticeably the blog is no longer using the default WP template. Also, the Buy Music page now lists all three of their full length albums with reviews, track listings, large artwork, and more. Last, but not leaset, the Home Page now uses MagpieRSS to gather the two most recent posts on the griddle blog with the category of Home Page to allow the band members to update their index page with their next show etc more easily.

And this is just the beginning! Flash mp3 player, style updates, and, of course, lots of cool jQuery interaction to come…

See Also: Griddle Plays Live on Monday, March 31 @ The Elbo Room (640 Valencia St. - at 17th St. SF, CA) with The Lovers. $7 at the door. 21+

It’s been a while, I know. Here’s the bridge between "when we left our hero" and present day plot… I found out on New Year’s Eve that the stealth start-up company I had been working for ran out of cash. I immediately went on the offensive, and over the next 12 days I sent out 10 resumes a day, rode innumerable trains, buses, and walked to parts unknown in search of a corporate soul mate.

On January 15th, I started at Zivity, a premium social network for mature audiences, as their first front-end developer. Since, I have helped Zivity push two beta releases, turned 30, begun paying back my debts, saw Griddle at Cafe Du Nord, and funked out to Maceo Parker live at the Fillmore.

Working at Zivity

Working at Zivity has been amazing! Everyone here at Zivity is very intelligent, interesting, passionate about their work, and open to new approaches/ideas. I was able to step in right away and make an impact improving the mark-up, converting the Prototype/Scriptaculous javascript over to jQuery, and helped implement a new UI on both the beta and public websites with John and Dustin.

At the same time Matt and Alex were upgrading the application to EdgeRails and simultaneously making a gluttony of new pages and features actually work. It’s been a wild ride!

It’s very exciting to work for a fresh young start-up with the profile of Zivity. My first week we had Forbes shooting in the office for their print coverage of Zivity and the Crunchies where Zivity was nominated for "Start-Up Most Likely to Succeed" (losing to WordPress!) Today, Zivity is in the news again (at Financial Times and TechCrunch) after the announcement that we’ve secured "$7 Million in Series B Funding from BlueRun Ventures, Founders Fund". Soon we will announce world domination!

Critical Mass

Critical Mass Snakes Around Union Square in San Francisco

I attended my first Critical Mass on on the 29th here in downtown San Francisco. Alex Choi and I had just enough time to finish deploying Beta 5, toast our comrades with IPA, and ride up to Market Street before the Mass began. After letting it pass us for a few lights (not wanting to ride in the very front) we dove in! It was an amazing way to see the city! Riding a bicycle as leisurely as you like through red lights in downtown San Francisco is thrilling, is that a surprise?

I’ll quote myself from twitter: "There’s something connective about critical mass. People having fun, looking out for one another, imagining a world w/o cars… rad!" Of course I also said, "One thing I don’t miss about biking around - the sore ass!"

The title of this post is one of my favorite slogans of all time. It belongs to a Mexican restaurant in Phoenix called Dos Gordos (meaning two fat guys). “Skinny cooks can’t be trusted” is such a simple truth, and the same goes for any industry. It’s something I’m a firm believer in…

Web Services I Began Using in ‘07

The removal of Champagne Powder as a distraction has greatly increased the amount of time I’ve spent online (getting fat so-to-speak) this past year. Here are some of the services I began using in 2007:

• Twitter
  Upon moving to San Francisco I felt an urgent need to get my finger on the pulse of the local developer community, but not knowing anyone was making that much more difficult. When I stumbled upon Twitter I quickly realized this was a great chance to do just that. Since, I have become so in enamored with it that I stopped blogging all together for several months!

   

  Favorite Feature: IM and SMS notifications makes it easy to contact all your friends where ever they may be (online/offline whatever).

 

• Yelp!
  Where can I get a good cup of coffee and free wifi? Where’s a nice place to get a burger or go shopping? When you lived in one city most of your life this is the type of knowledge you take for granted. This year Yelp has been a huge help in making life a little easier.

   

  Favorite Feature: Google Maps usage makes it easy to see what results are where.

 

• LinkedIn
  I’ll be frank, I haven’t been the best at professional networking over the years. After my roommate invited me to LinkedIn I quickly saw it as a chance to make up for that error. It is a great service allowing you to connect to new people more easily, shop available jobs, and display recommendations from previous employers, etc. So, thanks Ursula!

   

  Favorite Feature: Recommendations make it easy to display your credibility to potential employers.

 

• Google Reader and Documents
  Say what you will about Google, they produce some handy tools. I’m subscribed to so many feeds in search of useful articles that it can become daunting. The Starred feature, that I became used to in gmail has become a lifesaver in my use of their RSS reader. Meanwhile Google Docs gives me a free alternative to MS Office that I can use to collaborate with others online. Great, great, great.

   

  Favorite Feature: Having my Mail, Documents, Speadsheets, Presentations, and Feeds all available in one place online.

It’s no secret to those who know me that I haven’t been the most career oriented web-hacker in the past. I’ve lived a “permanent vacation” style of life over the years spending large amounts of time snowboarding and wakeboarding by day and coding by night. So, just before New Year’s Day 2007 I moved into my cousin’s San Francisco guest room determined to finally get serious about my craft and career. It was a tough year in which I had many struggles, unexpected set-backs, tight pockets, and much to learn in order to compete in the local market.

Web Technologies I Learned to Use in ‘07

If you’re not going forward you’re moving backwards in this industry. After taking some steps forward in late 2005, ’06 brought huge growth in my snowboarding skills and little progress in my development prowess. Looking back on the year that was 2007, however, I’ve grown exponentially as a developer. Here are some of the new technologies I’ve become proficient using over the year:

• Flash Video and FFmpeg
  2006 was truly the year that made Flash Video hotter than hot. In early 2007, while consulting for The Learning Annex, I was asked to develop a video learning site. I have had the chance to work with Flash Video Controller design and FFmpeg transcoding several times since.

 

• Subversion (SVN) and Concurrent Versions System (CVS)
  As I began development of my open source content management system (coming soon) it became immediately apparent that I needed to employ version control on my server. Since then, being able to roll back changes, replace accidentally deleted files, and checkout working copies to my local machine has been invaluable. Later this fall I had the chance to put what I learned using SVN to use at a stealth-mode start-up which uses CVS.

 

• Apache mod_rewrite
  Another addition brought about this year by my custom CMS development. Using mod_rewrite turns ugly URLs, like domain.com/index.php?article=99&ugly=yes, into readable ones, like domain.com/99/yes/.

 

• jQuery JavaScript Framework
  The latest and perhaps most significant addition to my skill-set was jQuery. After using it in minor problem-solving roles as a consultant with The NY Daily News and on my own site I had the opportunity to use jQuery full-time for the last couple months of the year. Today, I hand-code jQuery DOM interaction on a weekly basis and have even begun writing jQuery tutorials.

 

• Others…
  Some of the other technologies I began using in 2007 include: MVC, Template Toolkit, Microformats, Prototype.js, WiTango, API interaction, and more.

January 30th, 2008 should be circled on your calendar if you will be in San Francisco for the evening as Griddle plays Cafe Du Nord on my birthday!

Just The Facts:

1. January 30th is, of course, my 30th birthday!
2. Griddle (my favorite San Francisco pop-rock-gasim) has finally returned to rock us once again with their majestically-threaded goofiness at Cafe Du Nord!
   • Griddle is an unmissable progressive rock band from right here in the Bay area.
   • The band has two lead vocalists, Xifer Fortier (guitar, vocals) and Kevin Seal (keyboards, vocals), who you might have seen in the Pandora Podcast.
   • They also feature Satan’s most treasured rhythm section: Kimo Ball (bass guitar, keyboards, more) and Chris McGrew (the reason they call me Cousin Wil, drums).
   • You might remember their last show in town with Persephone’s Bees, …you dont? Oh man!
   • Griddle most recently rocked the entire city on Manhattan so completely out of their own minds that somehow everyone loves Guiliani again.
   • Their music is available on iTunes (check out the iMixes for a quick browse), MySpace, their website, or at the show.
3. When you go to the show, be prepared to want a black-on-black tee shirt and a copy of “Klimty Favela,” their third full-length album (released this year with a full-length comic book)… I’m just saying.

120 Days of Powder Web Mock, originally uploaded by yetanother.

Just got the basic web mock of 120 Days of Powder live. This uses jQuery + PHP/MySQL to load video onto the stage on demand. The Snow Report works, but I’m updating it to cache the result so that Steamboat’s server doesn’t become overloaded serving up XML. Later this week I’ll be posting some tutorials based on this site for jQuery + PHP/MySQL, Flash, FLV, ff-mpeg, etc. Be on the lookout.

Oh, and it validates and looks crispy on IE 7 too thanks to their finally adding PNG-24 partial-transparency support!

Here’s my new 120 Days of Powder style mock-up. Anyone know of a jQuery snow plugin? ;)

The sketching last night was so much fun I haven’t stopped! Here’s a mock-up for the long over-due baseballtopia.com redesign.

Just a little freehand photoshop sketch of my roommate’s cat, Houston. I haven’t sketched anything in a really long time, it was a lot of fun!