Kaitlyn and I are going to be doing the Turkey Plunge again this year to benefit the East Hampton Food Bank. Last year we had unseasonably warm weather and got to look and act a lot tougher than we really are. This year is not shaping up that way. It may be difficult to tell which one of us is the 13 year old girl.

We’re looking for Sponsors once again for this year’s Plunge and appreciate anything people can give.

Click here to donate now

Here’s an overview of product/service I’ve been working on since April…..and am getting ready to roll out in beta very soon. It’s called Triplefy and it allows Small Businesses to offer Deals and sell eGift Cards directly from their own web sites and social media pages.

Triplefy Web Site

Just watched this TED video by Eli Pariser about what he coins the Filter Bubble….definitely thought provoking and worth a watch. The basic premise is that the news and information we’re exposed to is being curated by the Googles, FaceBooks and Yahoos of the world based on our prior searches/choices/likes/dislikes. On the surface this seems to make sense….show me what I’m interested in.

The danger in this of course is that this slants the curation of what’s in our new feed in a way that filters out those items that might provide a contrarian view to our current political, religious, scientific etc thinking. The end result is that because we’re not exposed to these alternate news sources (and POVs), our thinking hardens along our current biases because they’re constantly reinforced within the bubble

I need some one to write a program to remove the snow from my roof. I was up there for 5 hours yesterday and and seems like a very good task for automation. It’s fairly easy to break down the steps and they’re easily repeatable.

You can write the program in the language and platform of your choice. If you’re of a functional bent, Clojure or Haskell is fine…..if you prefer dynamic, Ruby or Python will do. More corporate…. I’ve got no problems with .NET and Java. I don’t care where you keep state…..MySQL, MongoDB or a sticky note.

You get no extra points for doing TDD, BDD or [FlavorOfTheDay]DD. It just needs to work. Ok, so here it is:

Constraints:

No cloud computing allowed…..clouds are what got me into this damn mess in the first place. It needs to run locally for obvious reasons.

Spec:

Last week was a busy week. RecDesk (RD) is going to be undergoing some major improvements and enhancements over the next 12 -15 months. Chief amongst these is full support for facility reservation along with a slew of other functional plus UI improvements. Before starting this work though I felt it was important to migrate the code base from .NET (and ASP.NET 2.0) to .NET 4.0. The performance and LINQ capabilities alone make it worth it….but add to that better tooling, and it’s a no brainer.

As I thought about how I would do this, I was certain of two things: 1) I would use Amazon EC2 for hosting and 2) use GitHub for remote source control. That’s not how things turned out….. here’s how they did.

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