Over thanksgiving, my brother loaned me a Nikon D100. This is my first foray into digital photography beyond using my shoephone's camera to take blurry snapshots of strange supermarket items.

Sending photos to Flickr, I'm finding I'm going to exceed the limits of their free-ride accounts. My first thought was "oh, I should go FlickrPro". Then I decided to check out some other services before I go about spending money.

Currently I'm checking out SmugMug.

So far, I like the slideshow feature. I think I like the themeability, but then again, I reckon I just want a Flickr theme. I like the fact I can have multiple galleries. The downside to multiple galleries, though, is I no longer have just "my flickr," but rather "my foo gallery on my smugmug." Flickr's concepts of sets as pulling from a global gallery as an organizational tool may make more sense in the long run. It's not about what gallery a photo lives in, but which collection(s) the photographer has chosen to display it in.

Of course, as my wife said, "but everyone else is on Flickr".

Brian Topping had the foresight to bring his digital SLR and document the Oof Uncamp gathering last Tuesday evening. Attendees included some current and ex-ThoughtWorkers (Paul Hammant, Kurt Schrader), some guy from Ning (Brian McCallister), a cow-orker (Pete Royal) and a VP of something-or-another at Yahoo! (Sam Pullara). Plus our intrepid photo-historian, Brian Topping. Random partners and friends-of-friends were inbibing with us. Click the photo for even more photos.

Conversation ranged from why everything Yahoo! touches is so ugly to ranting about how freaking cold it was that night. By the time it was all over, Sam was talking about some ideas that involve fleeing the country, never to return. My reputation as Mr Perma-Beta was re-affirmed, and apparently is to blame for Radar's perma-stealth mode.

Yes, it's all my fault. I also cause cancer.

We befriended and inducted Cephus and Mongo as honorary hausmates. We doubt either of them own a computer, but they were nice guys, and the Codehaus Foundation needs some muscle on staff, in case we have some enforcing that needs doing.

Remember kids, any gathering of 3-or-more hausmates is an event. Or an un-event. 2.0.

Wow.

I'm finally home after a trip to San Francisco to meet my co-workers. It truly was surreal, in that I've been working for The Job for about a year, and had never met a co-worker, aside from Pete. When I joined, the team was 3 other people, and we were all in different states. New York. North Carolina. Michigan, California.

Now we are 18.

This is the first funded startup I've been a part of, and it's been fun to watch the growth of a company. I think we've assembled an excellent team of talented individuals. It certainly is a rather eclectic group (no, the children are not employees).

It is somewhat strange being the odd-man-out, clear across the country. This trip through, to finally meet everyone, helped solidify the realness of it all. When everyone is in different states, you've got a hip distributed team. When there's just one guy in the hills near the moonshine shack, he's just a remote worker . Ultimately, I wouldn't trade my grits and banjos for the world, and am grateful that an organization such as Radar is jiggy enough to keep a hillbilly round. But while proximity doesn't matter to Subversion or Jabber, we are all humans, and faces do matter.

I'd like to travel out there more often, and I aim to finally locate and hook up the iSight.

The point to this post? Technology allows you to never actually meet humans, but I wouldn't recommend it.

It has been decided that tonight, 12 September, the Codehaus Oof Uncamp will happen at Zeitgeist, in San Francisco. It's cash-only, so bring some Benjamins. I'll buy the first round or two.

Update: 7pm is the time to collide.

My luxurious jet-set lifestyle is taking me to the San Francisco area in a week. September 10th through the 14th, I'll be in the general area of all things 2.0. I'm truly excited to finally get to meet my coworkers. Yes, I've worked for Radar Networks for just about a year now. No, I've never met a single coworker while employed with Radar Networks. I have met Peter Royal before, but that was before either of us worked for the company.

I am tentatively thinking of a Tuesday (12 September) evening Codehaus Oof Uncamp Conference 2.0, where hausmates, sympathizers, collaborators and detractors can gather to do no camping but rather consume some Beers 2.0 . Though, who knows. Maybe we'll do it Wednesday, or Sunday. We're agile.

Locals will need to suggest some good location and pick my ass up near Chinatown.

My Day-Job has been secreted behind a wall of secret secrecy. It still is. But we have a new website tonight. There's a tad more information than previously disclosed, but only a little. You can learn a little bit about our investors and our management team. Meanwhile, we're still heads-down cranking out the best massively-scalable ferumnibiting osteobithorpolexer you'll ever have seen. I've already said too much. If I disclose anything else, I'll be sure to be receiving The Memo. And we wouldn't want that.

Today I had the good fortune to shoot the breeze with Mike Loukides at O'Reilly. He's working on a new model at O'Reilly, doing less expensive, smaller, and more up-to-date PDF publishing. I think this is an excellent idea. The 37signals guys have certainly done well with their PDF publishing, and you simply can't argue about the cost reduction. Similar to how with web 2.0 someone can quickly and cheaply produce a new thing, reducing the risk of the effort, a publishing 2.0 model likewise can harness the, um, long tail (man, I feel dirty just saying it).

So, if you've got the price of a pair of lattes, and the need for some information you probably won't find in a dead-tree book, surf on over to O'Reilly's new PDF library and take a gander.

Of course, I still print stuff out so I can read it while lounging where-ever I care to lounge.

Through the kick-ass efforts of Ben Walding (pictured left with his, um, jaffles iron...) and major assists by Contegix, sanity has started to return to the haus. All repositories are capable of being open for business, pending the project despots decision. So, if CVS/Subversion is missing, go bug the project lead.

We've got all project mail flowing again, with a new web-based management piece for subscribing and unsubscribing. While the downtime sucked more than most things can suck, we're coming back with better tooling and infrastructure. This is mostly the result of not being willing to reconfigure all of our projects by hand. So we've scripted the heck out of things.

We're still working on personal and project webspace. Previous sites should be up, except those using plain HTML. Any Confluence-backed site is good to go. All projects are currently restricted from producing new distributions on dist.codehaus.org, but we're quickly working towards a solution for that. Pretty soon the front codehaus.org page will return to its normally scheduled programming.

Plus, we've got a new logo. Everything goes better with a new logo.

Today, a friend of mine asked me write an endorsement for him on LinkedIn. I hadn't been to LinkedIn in a while, so surfed around for a tad, and noticed a new feature. LinkedIn lets you know the localities of your network. As you can see here, I've got links to the Pillippines, Korea, and, um, Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Yes, that's Arkansas. Turns out that Wal-Mart is has the same influence (or more?) as some small countries.

Today, being a lazy Sunday, I surfed over to 37Signals and picked up a copy of Getting Real. I know I'm a few weeks late on this meme, but I truly enjoyed the book.

On the surface, after reading 177 pages, you could easily think that there was nothing concretely useful in the book. You could, but that'd be silly. The whole book enforces a different attitude. It's about agility, not only in development or management, but in the vision of the product you're producing. The best quote, I think is

Stick to what’s truly essential. Good ideas can be tabled. Take whatever you think your product should be and cut it in half. Pare features down until you’re left with only the most essential ones. Then do it again.

Ultimately, stop thinking about producing, and simply go produce. As my dad says, "the enemy of 'good' is 'better.'" The essence of your product is probably good (or you can hope). Alas, the desire to make it better can work against you, creating feature overload, delayed schedules, and a lack of focus in the vision. Get on with it already.