jmhobbs

2009 Is Over?!

Wow, I was not prepared for the end of this year. I've got a bunch of drafts that just never happened, mostly involving things that I did this year. Here we go, let's see what I remember...

The Blog
Started in April of 2006 I now have 221 posts (counting this it’s 222) and 26 comments (9 by me, 17 by others). I restructured the whole shebang a little while back and reduced down to 3 categories, and 88 tags.

Consuming
On the music front, I've now played 27,534 tracks into Last.fm since April 2006. This year my top 5 artists were: The Weakerthans, Every Time I Die, The Fall of Troy, Ludo, and Death Cab for Cutie.

I found or was directed to several great new artists this year, my top favorites were: I Fight Dragons, Joel Plaskett Emergency, The Dudes, and Dragonette.

Darcy and I watched a lot of TV shows and movies via Netflix. Notable TV favorites were Battlestar Galactica, and the first four seasons of 30 Rock.

Some of the good movies we saw were; The Darjeeling Limited, Lars and the Real Girl, Slumdog Millionaire, The Machinist, Fanboys, Helvetica, Primer, Super Size Me.

Projects
I feel like I did a lot of projects this year, and I trimmed the fat on old projects as well. I made the transition to git this year, and I got my account at github. Some highlights this year were my heavy usage of Python, trying out Ruby on Rails and a developing love of jQuery.

ThirtyDayList.com - Website
This is my first Ruby on Rails project, and I loved doing it. It's still in progress and no one really uses it yet, but I am determined that the utility is there. This one is closed source, but only because I don't want anyone to see the mess.

OpenPhotoBooth - github, Website
This old project took a dramatic turn this year. I converted it from a Linux oriented C++ application to a combination of Flash, JavaScript and Python. I leveraged the web cam functionality and JavaScript interface in Flash to replace the camera code, and then patched together an RPC system using jQuery and web.py. This switch is what made me fall in love with both jQuery and Python.

TakeMeSomewhere.org - Website
I re-wrote this one, really cleaned it up and added some fun add on features. It still has some cross browser issues, but I got to work on nice clean jQuery and slick CSS techniques.

TagNest - github
TagNest is a semantic searching tool I wrote with Python and Qt4. It's not super-robust or anything, but it tracks, indexes and tags all the files you point it at, then lets you search them. The point of this one is so that eventually I can switch to paperless document storage (i.e. throw away my filing cabinet) and still be able to find things fast.

pyUSB7 - github, Demo Video
I rediscovered my USB7 and patched together a number of scripts using pySerial. Short and sweet, I probably only worked on these for a few hours total.

Work
I worked for REBEL Interactive at the beginning of the year. It's a great design/web shop and I really enjoyed it, learned a lot. However, I got the opportunity to start working on a start up based off of the old Omaha wiki. So I changed jobs to TownCommons.com, Inc. around mid-year and I've been hacking away ever since. It's really fun to work on a blank slate, to build value from scratch essentially.

Outside of TownCommons I have been freelancing a bit, and I'm hoping to do more of that in the next year. I've been trying to put up a organization of freelancer's called Little Filament, but I'm still lacking some skill sets. Maybe this year I can get that the rest of the way together.

Life
A lot happened this year, and I don't have lots of time to flesh it all out, so I'll hit the highlights.

Photos