Looks like we got two feet of snow this week.

Best laptop art ever! Snow White, don't eat the apple. The laptop belongs to @renaebair and was seen at the 2009 Lone Star Ruby Conference.

Last year I had an excellent time at Barcamp NOLA. This year's Barcamp NOLA 2 was twice as large and more than twice as fun. Many thanks to all to the good people of New Orleans for making me feel at home. @cSchultz, @tritico, @NewJess, @LizMoney, @ev3rywh3re, @hartmyst, @CallMeAlva, @plainprogrammer (And many more who's twitter accounts I don't know)

Although they had four rooms open for panels, somehow, every session I was interested in was held in the main room. I attended panels on:

• Unit Testing
• Design patterns you can learn from a professional kitchen
• The history of SMS
  -- The average American sends 347 text messages a month yet only make 243 phone calls a month.
• Design patterns for mobile devices
• Four apps that turn the iPhone camera into a point and shoot replacement
  -- Night Camera, iFlash Ready, Photo Jen, and Autostitch
• Bringing social networking skills to realestate agents
• Application and Network secuity
  -- I need to check out Burp Suite, OWASP, WebGoat, Paros, and, cain oxid.it

I gave a talk on Cloud Computing and how it can be used by startups.  The talk went well.  At the end of the talk, I was pleased Chris asked me to demo PriceChirp for the group as a real world example of a project running in the cloud.

 

Cloud Computing for Barcamp NOLA

View more presentations from sevatt.

 

Amazing Japanese music video shot with a bunch of webcams in a Brady bunch fashion. This must have taken an insane amount of editing to get it to look right. I only wish the song was as good as the video. If so, this could have been fast tracked to viral status.

Fracture: Break your iPhone! You tap the iPhone to “crack” the screen and then you tap again to cause the apps to explode, triggering the rest of the apps to explode in rapid succession. Unfortunately Fracture will not see the light of day as Apple has denied putting it in the App Store "because it uses standard iPhone screen images in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion".

I hope Visuamobile changes Fracture to allow the user to use any image in their photostream. If they do this, and Apple grants them the privilege to sell the app in the App store, I will buy the app and use snapshots of the iPhone and still have fun.

Just finished the audio version of Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Since the book has been out for almost a year, after the jump I am not going to worry about "minor" spoilers. If you have not read the book, the short review is...

It's not as good as Snow Crash or The Diamond Age, however it is very good. The story is extremely compelling and well written. The further into the book I got, the harder it was to put it down. As when I'm actually reading dead pulp, I found myself staying up hours past my normal bed time trying to get to a "good" stopping point that would never come. I have problems with the ending, but they are not enough to prevent my strong recommendation for the book.

Anathem on Amazon.
Track Anathem's price on PriceChirp.(audio)

More follows....

Enjoying the day at Photocamp Houston 2009 at the Houston Technology Center. Learned about TTV (through the viewfinder) photography, copyright laws, lighting and how to make movies. Below is a quick movie I made while at Photocamp.

Adine and I just returned from an excellent 10 day road trip to Las Vegas and back. On the way we visited the San Antonio River Walk, Flag Staff, the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos. Can't wait until our next vacation.

Wordle “word cloud” for evatt.com.

Adine, Hala (@TheHza), Katie (@nadnuk) and myself formed Team Fashionably Late in yesterday's Scavenger Hunt. The scavenger hunt started at Onion Creek and finished at Big Top Lounge. We had 6 hours to take photos of as many items on their list as possible. Most items could be found inside the loop. We wound up in 6th place out of 16 teams. I would definitely love to do it again.

We all had a blast!