"There's no can't in I" ~Jason Stein (pre-coffee, this morning)

I love the "Ninja" aspect of this technique:

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Simply brillant. Pulling out the cardboard from underneath the bed already...

realestate.com.au put technology into their business practices to create a comprehensive look at the property prospective buyers were considering. A google maps mash-up, taking advantage of the satellite component straight off as well as being able to add in preferences such as neighborhood, price, and more, they have the incentive for users to return to their site. Add to that RSS feeds based on preference, akin to Netflix's Recommendations RSS feed, and you have regular repeat visit.

When my father worked with Real Estate in New York we discussed ideas like this; the challenge is technically adding on layers of user's desired preference surrounding the property their considering. How many different categories of information make a property that much more appealing? And, then could you go a step further by providing a rating of a property's profile matched to a user's profile derived by survey with a high degree of accuracy. Could you imagine, the city's flower district being a direct hit?

People can't be bosses who don't just listen.

It came out accidentally, but I like it.

Anh and I have been plugging away at JenkyProductions for a while now. We have completed our website, got the mailing list up and running, so it is time to being announcing our presence to the world. The Daily-Tee gave us a nice write-up. Now, we have our eye trained on bigger audiences. Stay tuned for our progress.

So my buddy Hiland and I decided we'd try to learn how use Ruby on Rails. We picked a harmless enough looking tutorial on OnLamp.com by the kind folks at O'Reilly, and away we went. I was happily making my way through things, and then we started needing software. Ah, first it was the text editor because I didn't really know Unix and the world of Vi, etc... Then it was the Rails application servers (at least that what I currently envision them to actually be), like Locomotive. Then there was the need to update everything on my Intel Mac because apparently what it came with wasn't suitable for this task. Then came Ruby, RubyGems, Rails, LightTpd, PCRE (which I've read may be one of the culprits), and again, MySql... Eventually I got the application built from the tutorial, and the last 10 hours have been devoted to learning how to configure a webserver on my Macbook. Low and behold Hiland ditched this one and left it up to me to sufer through this as he's gone to developing some more tutorial driven application efforts on Windows of all things because alas alack it only takes 10 minutes get through the equivalent of 15 (and counting) hours of the equivalent on the Mac. Now, how's this lending itself to adoption of the preferred platform? Don't get me wrong, I'm not going near my Parallels or my Bootcamp login just because it would have been resolved sooner than I could have written this post. I'm in it for the long haul (for now)...

Happy New Year, 2007! Don't know what's going to be swimming through this year; although, last year worked out pretty well. In the last months I got a new job within a week, and I found an apartment in Park Slope with my love within a week. Tough getting a whole lot better than that. Leaving the UWS for Brooklyn. The co-op, the lower building level, and a slightly slower pace on the pavement (tbd) call for me...