I had to get involved. The only catch was finding the right team to partner up with. Many of the teams were filled with people from companies like The Nerdery and TST and orgs like Ruby.Mn and I could have tried to crash the party with them but decided against it as I’d be the other guy…and they were full anyway. (Interestingly enough I was chatting with The Nerdery at the time re: employment and it would have been a great way for us to get to know each other; I ended up accepting another position before we could get intimate.) Instead I settled on a strategy of aligning with the teams that were close enough to meet the threshhold of volunteers and weren’t obviously aligned to a particular company. My other choices where to join groups with few volunteers, those centered around technology platforms I didn’t align well with like a product suite they sell, or to start my own team but finding 9 other volunteers in a few weeks seemed unlikely.

So I joined a team and put a little blurb out there and waited. And waited. And waited. And then started to think if my approach had been misguided. Typically when you’re meeting with someone you want to know better  you put on the sell and in this case my thought was “hey, I’m volunteering and by that fact I’m vetted as only good people would volunteer to work 24 hours with strangers so they have to take me.”

What I didn’t do was detail my years of startup experience, my 10+ years of web development and database work, my years leading teams, managing projects, writing content, cutting up designs back in the day when I led a team of devs in a U.S. top 40 interactive agency. I didn’t describe my 6  years running my own consulting business. Also, what I didn’t do was share my years of volunteering at places like Sharing and Caring Hands, serving Thanksgiving meals with my family in years past, working with Special Olympics for years and how last fall I spent a weekend at the Special Olympics Leadership as a mentor to an athlete.

Anyway…you know where this is going. I was rejected as a volunteer when I read this well crafted Dear John email.

This is the hardest part of an automated email’s job: I’m sorry to inform you that your request to join the “Push & Run” team was not accepted by that team’s captain. On behalf of The Nerdery and a good number of nonprofits with questionable website, thanks for volunteering. You can check out other teams that may be looking for a few good web pros or even start your own team on the website at:

http://tc2011.overnightwebsitechallenge.com/

Thanks,

The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge

Pretty funny to me. At least there were still sites being made for the NPOs.

So on 10/12/10 the WSJ had an article on scrapers which was altogether ho-hum until I saw the flow diagram for the scraping process and it got my geek on. Writing flow diagrams is darn exciting but mine end up looking like an arial view of the Colorado river as they snake back and forth. This flow is simple, effective, clean, and I like it. It also shows that it doesn’t matter what shapes you use if you use them effectively. Take that UML.

‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data on the Web – WSJ.com.

I’m entertaining a period of greater self-reflection that feels a little indulgent since I’m generally fairly self-aware but hey, I’m going deeper. As a part of the exercise I wanted to reflect on some of goals I have put forth in the past while. Now I’m not the best list taker so these are as my tonights recollection. And I’m going to remove the general goals of continual self-improvement like: get more sleep, be a better listener..blah blah blah.

• Start my MBA – so I’ve been bored and when I’m bored I like to kick start things by signing up for more expensive years of school! This goal has been shelved for sometime in the next 5  years. While I know I’d enjoy the experience I really need to focus on the why’s because just last year I enrolled in a Ph.D program in Computer Science before collecting myself. Besides, I’ve already self-funded one graduate program and afterwards I did not give myself a raise! There will come a time when this is more aligned to the present and that just isn’t now.
• Start my startup – pulling on the bootstraps and going to town on the idea that has been baking in my head for quite a while. I’ve discussed it with folks, sought feedback from would be consumers of the niche endeavor and feel confident but I got caught up in billing time  that by the end of the day I did not want to code. This should see traction soon.
• Production Rails work – I’ve read about Rails, Rails 2, a now there is Rails 3 and while I’ve made the local blog engine and used Ruby for some administrative server work I’m missing a production rollout until…drumroll…I finally do it through some running club focused development I’m throwing on Shawn’s design with our run club. So this goal will have been met in a few weeks.
• Improve Networking and Mentoring – The world is a small place and I’ve been working to stay in touch with those I’ve had the opportunity to work with and trying to get to know those I haven’t yet. One of the benefits I’m looking for is to feel involved in the local developer communities and it has been working and I’ll keep on it. Another aspect is mentoring which has been a nice aside from the day-to-day and I do look forward to teaching at some point.
• Contribute to Open Source (kinda) – so I broke the rules a bit on this one and decided to volunteer my time on something I really enjoyed which is runningahead.com and is not open source but it is free so I figure good enough. Now this goal has been met in theory only as I haven’t given Eric the attention I planned on but he’s being patient so this goal will get checked off.
• Improve my running – this has been going well, my effort and dedication to running has grown as has my appreciation of good health as I’ve had plantar fasciitis for 6 months was close to tying the famed shin splints of 06 as the most painful and is only a year away from matching my record of longest injury with my double hernia of 07. Once the plantar heels up I feel like I’ll drop it to another level. I was keyed in for an easy Boston Qualifier at Fargo this year and drew a bad weather day for this clydesdale and overheated.
• Read more consistently – I read all the time and waste little of my day but I have a plethora of magazines and the daily paper along with my technical (print and web) content that my ‘fun’ reading collection has been largely ignored. I really did enjoy reading The Road on the Kindle this year and I read the Dan Brown book candy finally giving up my boycott to see what the fuss was about. Turned out like I thought, easy reading the doesn’t bring much in the end and yet draws you to it…much like when I watched Rambo as a child (and perhaps still).
• Write you fool write – so there is the writing of this variety which I have not taken too very well. I’m been adament about the separation of Jake and computer but lately am having a different take and plan to write more. I’m not sure what about, my first approach was to treat this as business only but really who are we kidding with the separation of concerns these days. Google will find all sides of us and present it with a nice little bow to whoever looks. If I treat this as business only it is not like the 4500 races I’ve ran won’t come up 2nd, 3rd, 4th in the google results. And trust me, I just can’t be that guy who posts code about the latest IoC framework written entirely in Scala for JSON or business advice detailing my knowledge on the devaluation of Apple because of AntennaGate (I’m keeping my iPhone4…you can’t pry it out of my kung fu grip). I will work on writing more but at the end of the day I prefer building things or dreaming of large nest eggs.

  BUT – My creative writing has been dormant and my poetry as been decimated. Once upon a time I would attend poetry slams and open mikes…now I wouldn’t perform but I’d think about the day I’d perform and if you are still here you should know that you are reading the blog of 2004 Sonoma library – Healdsburg branch – poetry champion! Those days were wonderful inspiration, being in a new place and drinking wine all the time generates a lot. So! I’m going to write some more and I may even put something on here from time to time to keep it fresh.

1. Download, back up and open: wp-settings.php in wordpad/notepad
2. Search for define(’WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘32M’);
3. Change 32M to 64M :   define(’WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘64M’);

Source: http://calcuttaseo.com/wordpress-fix-fatal-error-allowed-memory-size-exhauste/

For years I have treated blogging like learning a foreign language; something I wanted to do but never got around too. Oh sure, once a year I’d start a blog at Blogger or elsewhere. I’d put honest effort and some semblance of thought into my first post; almost as IF I knew it would be the last. And once a year I’ll also find a new Spanish podcast and relearn how to purchase a train ticket in Barcelona. Both would die a short death filling me with resentment at efforts.

I was near tears with the tragic thought that the few search results for Jacob Hackl were going to be my races (hint: scroll way, way down…maybe a little further). Then along came Brent! I found Brent one day while doing some SQL Server performance improving SAN strategy search (or something like that). Anyway, I found a post he had about something and I’ve always been a dev guy with a data bent (or vice versa) so the content and I got along fine and I added Brent to my blogroll. Brent had a series of five posts about starting a blog and it caught me at the right time and I realized I needed to get off the pot and build something. If you are struggling its an awesome place to start and cover the whys, WordPress, Plugins, Themes, and Etiquette.

And with my first attempt at blogging etiquette I would like to kindly thank Brent Ozar for the help; you done good man.