44 posts
I absolutely adored Spock. Loving Dad was much more complicated. – The Boston Globe A son of Boston, Leonard Nimoy was also my father. What is this doing in a technical link blog? Well I am a big Startrek fan so bear with me this one time! June 17, 2021 at 10:23PM
I was a volunteer for the Democratic Committee in Arlington Mass. They have an impressive operation, just like what you’ve heard. For example, the systems they used to deploy us volunteers.
I walked in the campaign office, untrained and unschooled. Within minutes I was assigned my very own ‘turf’. What is a turf? A turf is a neighborhood of about two to four streets assigned to me and only me.
I was handed a clipboard with a sheaf of sheets describing my turf. The clipboard included:
A map of a nearby neighborhood, with a series of dots on certain, but not all houses A list of addresses in street order, first one side and then the other With each address a list of ...
If you are a theatre fan I strongly recommend a play I just saw last night. It’s called “Luck of the Irish”. From a review on Boston.com:
“… It’s one of numerous instances in Greenidge’s superb, beautifully realized new play — now receiving its premiere in a Huntington Theatre Company production directed by Melia Bensussen — that illustrate the playwright’s sure grasp of the nuances of race and class and her insights into the complexities of human nature.” (from Boston.Com)
Run, don’t walk to see this play at the Huntington Theatre in Boston!
This is from a play we saw last year at the Huntington Theatre. The play is Prelude to a Kiss by Craig Lucas. It production was quite good but this particular speech struck me as the best part of the play. Don’t read it as depressing just as really good writing and really true.
Yesterday was great. The buzz in the place is unbelievable. This place is the Launch Conference. Organized and run beautifully by Jason Calacanis (who has become much more warm and fuzzy than I remember). Here is Rafe Needleman’s summary of day one.
And with all due respect to Boston and Scott Kirsner in particular, I cannot see a gathering like this happening in Boston. There just are not nearly enough interesting startups to pick from. Now, no, I don’t claim to know anything like all of them. I am sure there are lots of great proje...
I Just came back from seeing “Gods Of Carnage” at the Huntington Theatre (in Boston) tonight. Couldn’t wait to post my recommendation.
It’s short (about 80 minutes – no intermission), fast paced, well acted and funny. It’s a story about two couples who are thrown together to discuss a playground altercation between their two sons. That’s the set up.
The story takes up an evening when they get together to discuss it. Huntington has been embracing the web and social media in excellent fashion of late. I just noticed the ingenious new bit, which is doing a “trailer” for a ...
We just got back from the monthly meeting of “Boston Postmortem“.
Huh, what is that? Well as a result of my teaching at Brandeis this summer – Mobile and Game Software Development – I have developed a greater appreciation for the gaming world. When we had Ed Baraf of Blue Fang games speak to our class, among the many things he taught us was that there’s this great meetup in Waltham called the Boston Postmortem.
It was very well attended and the crowd sounded and felt like a community that knew each other and was pretty tight which ma...
This is very close to where I live, and people are amazed to know that you can actually go by boat from Arlington to Boston Harbor. This video is beautiful proof of that. [vimeo 16535358 w=400 h=225]
They may not like me to say this, but as a longtime subscriber, I’ve been very disappointed for the last several seasons at the Huntington Theater in Boston. A very hit or miss program with only a few memorable plays. Well I did stick with the Huntington and it’s time for me to say, like, Randy Jackson of American Idol: “The Huntington Theatre Is Back (man)”
This year we’ve been treated to a series of memorable, interesting, well produced shows. It’s been a pleasure.
Most recently, and still running are ...
I came across VentureFizz. It’s a broad resource for Boston area techies: “VentureFizz can help you see what’s buzzing in Boston’s tech community” Particularly useful is their Event’s calendar, which as far as I can see is one of the better ones. An analogous site is Greenhorn Connect, which is trying to achieve something similar but seems more focused on up and coming entrepreneurs. 
I get asked from time to time to recommend ruby, rails, and other developers in the Boston area, either for full time or part time gigs. I’m developing a list of good local job resources – started so far with the help of pal Brian D:
Dave Beisel‘s WebInno Job Board:http://jobs.webinnovatorsgroup.com
Boston Ruby group’s job board:http://bostonrb.org/jobs
Tom Summit‘s Genotrope: http://www.genotrope.com/genotrope/HitLists.html
Working With Rails national job board:http://workingwithrails.com/browse/jobs/recent
I’ve been a subscriber at the Huntington Theater for years and years now and this new play is the best one by far this season and one of the best in the last few years. “All My Sons” by Arthur Miller, at the Huntington Theater in Boston, MA, USA
I have to say that the productions at the Huntington recently have been uneven at best. I don’t know whether my tastes have changed or whether something’s different but I more often leave with a “meh” than with a “yay!”.
Last night was a Yay! I recommend going to the Huntington Theater in Boston to see “All My Sons”
I’ve been working quite a bit on the Open Source Digital Voting foundation project over the last 9 months or so. It’s really weird but I’ve turned myself into a mini-expert on how elections are organized and run here in the USA. It’s fascinating and way complicated. OSDV is a non-profit organization dedicated to developing a suite of election (as in Democracy) hardware and software.
The umbrella name for that project is TrustTheVote: an open source project, which will work closely with election officials around the country to learn requirements and then develop software which in turn will be offered free of charge to those who want to de...
Just found out that the WebInno group is back in session after a summer hiatus. This is one of the best open meetings for techies and entrepreneurs to meet and talk and see each other’s stuff. Here’s the official blurb: “The Web Innovators Group (WebInno) is comprised of people engaged in internet and mobile innovation in the Boston area. We aim to support entrepreneurs, visionaries, and creative thinkers in the field by holding events which foster community interaction.
Our regular meetings provide a forum for entrepreneurs from self-funded/early-stage startups to present new services to their peers, as well as an opportunity for...
Pretty cool report via Boston Globe, but see my minor complaint about it at the end: “Hold all that gloom and doom about Massachusetts as a state with little to offer young folks. According to Forbes.com, the second-best place in the country for young college grads is none other than Cambridge, or more specifically the Cambridge-Newton-Framingham area, which ranks behind only San Jose among metro areas with over 1 million people.” (from Boston Globe)
It’s actually quite interesting to see the underlying detail of how the study was conducted, w...
If you live in the Boston area and somehow connected to technology professions you should be interested in this meeting being put on in June: What’s Next In Tech – Where will the next waves of growth will come from?
Date: Thursday, June 25th Time: 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM (ET) Where: Boston University, School of Management, 595 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, 02215 Price: $40
(If you are a student interested in attending this event and would like financial assistance, scholarships are available through www.stayinma.com.)
Take a look at the program, Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe has lined up a...
This weekend I had a chance to attend BarCamp Boston (4). As usual it was fun and interesting and I had a chance to hang out and talk with a bunch of interesting people.
If you don’t know how a Bar Camp works, it is of the genre of “Unconferences” and one of the keys is that it has no program, ahead of time.
Kind of a leap of faith, you know? Anyway, the image to the left (and click on it to see the enlargement) shows how at the end of the meeting the program is fully visible, and actually quite interesting! Click on it to see a big englar...
Check out this post NBC’s Boston affiliate isn’t going to show Leno’s new show: "WHDH, the NBC affiliate in Boston (I’m watching it right now) says that they’re not going to show Leno’s new 10PM show. Starting in September, the station is going to show local news at 10PM instead!" (from: from TV Squad)
This is pretty interesting. I was wondering how the world could give up the 10:00pm time slot, each and every day on NBC. So ‘our’ station is choosing to opt out. Didn’t realize this was even possible!
Hey, how about doing me a favor? It will only take you a minute or less. It won’t cost a penny. Help the famous and wonderful Club Passim win a grant from, who else, Virgin America.
Spread the karma, it will come back to you!
Chris and I, this morning, looking forward to a great day. We’ve waited and worked for this. And now the day has come.
I saw the inauguration communally on a big screen at the Regent Theater in Arlington with hundreds of other cheering folks. It was a fun and exciting event. People even stood up for the actual oath of office.
Quite something!
Hey! If you live in Boston or Cambridge, and you like music, especially Folk music, then you’ve probably been to Club Passim in Cambridge – Harvard Square actually. It’s a lot more than a ‘Coffee House’ – it’s an institution where many of your favorite 70s acts got their start. Passim is a tiny little folk music club in Harvard Square that’s existed years and years and where musicians like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan played at the very beginning of their careers. I am friends with various people at Passim, over the year we have attended lots of shows there.
We have been members for ...
As a favor I am posting this notice about an event that looks like it might be fun: Battle of the Bands
The requirement is that at least one member of the band must work for a New England-area technology or life sciences company or a venture-capital or private-equity firm that invests in technology. All levels of bands are welcome—from club veterans to garage hackers. All musical styles are welcome – entry deadline is Dec 12, 2008.
The event will take place on January 22, 2009 at the Middle East in Cambridge. Last year Jeet “Miki” Singh, co-fou...
Scott Kirsner of the Innovation Economy blog, as well of the Boston Globe says that: “To me, the biggest way to make Boston more competitive and innovative right now is to do a better job connecting students with our innovation economy. Which is why it pains me that our trade associations and networking groups make it so hard for students to get involved.” (from Innovation Economy)
He goes on to grade a variety of formal and informal groups who put on meetings regularly in the greater Boston area. It’s a ...
If you live in the Boston area and are in the tech business you should check out the more or less monthly Web Innovators gathering sometimes referred to in shorthand as WebInno. Here is the WebInnot blog and here is the WebInno registration page and announcement of the next WebInno event. For all of y’all who suffer from the boston-isnt-as-cool-as-silicon-valley syndrome, I strongly recommend you check out the next WebInno. Here again are the coordinates:
“It’s just over two weeks away until our July 15th Web Innovators Group meeting and we’ve lined up another great set of demonstrators for the event.
As usual, the doors officially open at 6:30pm at the Grand Ballroom in the Cambridge Royal Sonesta, with the “main dish” presentations to the entire crowd starting at 7pm.” (from WebInno)
Recently three friends of mine got nice press coverage, so I thought I’d share them:
Reed Sturtevant is doing some great things at Microsoft in Boston
Paul Engiish and Kayak are showing the true prices of air travel
Ted Morgan of Skyhook are performing magic with photos and no-GPS
So in fact, there IS cool tech stuff going on in Boston 🙂
Well it’s not really ‘coming’ – it was here all along, just dormant. Here’s the down-lo: BarCamp Boston 3 May 17-18, 2008 http://barcampboston.org/
BarCamp is an unConference, organized on the fly by attendees, for attendees. There is no registration fee, but you don’t just attend a BarCamp — you can participate in discussions, demo your projects, or join into another cooperative event.
Topics may include, but are not limited to: open source software, startups, UI design, entrepreneurship, AJAX, hardware hacking, robotics, mobile computing, bioinformatics, RSS, Social Software, programming languages, and the future of technology.
More information and free registration at: http://barcampboston.org/
I’m coming. Are you?
Last week I went to the monthly “WebInno” – web innovators group –meeting at the Sonesta in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA). I am quite impressed with the attendance and the quality of the people presenting. The gathering was quite crowded and the buzz was very loud, lots of dynamic discussions going on all over the place, people trading war stories and comparing products. It was stimulating and fun, and I plan to go next month again.
In the meanwhile, Don Dodge of Microsoft writes a post “...
I just came back from the theatre, the Huntington Theatre, Boston’s, production of a brand new play called “The Cry of the Reed”by Sinan Ünel. This play and production is truly amazing, great, dramatic, thought provoking, and overall excellent. We were discussing this play the whole drive home. Talking about war, religion, morality, ethics, human nature, theatre and drama.
I like seeing these productions before the pundits and professional reviewers decide if it’s any good. I went there tonight not even knowing what this play was about and happy not to have been influenced by some stupid reviewer. This world premiere better get a five star rating IMHO.
Em. Yeah. I liked it.
I just came across this announcement for the ‘Battle of the Tech Bands’ on January 22 in Central Square (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.) “Musicians from Boston’s tech and tech-investment companies play their geeky hearts out—you pick the winners!”
Sounds like fun! Check out the Battle of the Tech Bands here!
Two nights ago, Friday, I got to go to the TechCrunch Boston party at The Estate in Boston (which oddly enough doesn’t seem to have a web site.) Those of you who know me will be ‘surprised’ that I had to miss the ‘drinking-focused after party, held at an Irish pub, from 11:00pm on. Lately it seems like every week there’s another tech networking event in our area, which is great. This one was huge though, seemed like 500 or more people, elbow to elbow. Great fun!
Here’s ...
On September 11, 2007, the [tag]Boston PHP User Group[/tag] is meeting about “Building the PHP-stack for the [tag]enterprise[/tag]”: “PHP has become ubiquitous when it comes to personal blogs, content management systems, ecommerce sites and more. Take any list of Web 2.0 sites and you’ll find that more than 50% have PHP as back-end technology. What is less known is that PHP is also making significant inroads in the enterprise. Join BostonPHP, IBM and Zend as we discuss where “Enterprise” PHP (and OSS) is going and how it’s going to get there. : (from Boston PHP)
If you are into [tag]PHP[/tag] you should check it out!
Check out this post from Bostonist:
Attorney General Martha Coakley announced today that the Boston area cut a deal with Turner Broadcasting and Interference, Inc., the brains behind the marketing campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theatres that made life in Boston a little nutty last week.
Boston will receive $2 million dollars for its trouble. In return, Turner Broadcasting and I...
A quick reminder of the upcoming BostonPHP meeting: BostonPHP will host a panel discussion on Venture Capital and Open Source Software with Michael Skok of North Bridge Venture, Larry Bohn of General Catalyst Venture and David Beisel of Masthead Venture. Sounds interesting. Follow the link for more details!
Just a quick reminder that we are having another super-informal-geeky-but-not-exclusively-geeks Geek Dinner, and we have a lovely new location, sponsored by our friends at Permabit. The location is on First Street, in Cambridge, MA, USA, in the so-called Davenport Building, on the second floor.
See you there!
Here are the coordinates:
When: July 19, Wednesday, 6:30pm to 9:30pm
Where: Permabit, 25 First Street, 2nd Floor. Across from the Galleria Mall.
Topics of discussion: AJAXPHPOPMLRSSJAVAETC
We are having another super-informal-geeky-but-not-exclusively-geeks Geek Dinner, and we have a lovely new location, sponsored by our friends at Permabit (Thanks Tom and Katie!)
Who is we, again? Bela Labovitch, Adam Green and me. We’ve organized two of these this year, and they were lots-o-fun. People met, talked: no cures for cancer were discovered but in general people felt it was good enough to try again.
What happens at these things? Just a lot of chatter about products, technologies, politics and in general, “wats goin on” in the Boston area, Geek-wise. Oh and of course...
As you may have heard, we’ve had torrential (and I mean torrential) downpours here in Massachusetts. I happen to live on a little isthmus (look it up) between the upper and lower Mystic Lakes in Arlington Massachusetts.
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I met Mark Mark Withington at the last Geek Dinner. He runs the Boston PHP Group. They meet every month. This month’s meeting is about the ZEND Framework. Looks interesting. If you’re PHP dude, check it out!
When: Thursday, May 04, 2006 At 06:30 PM Where: Optaros, 60 Canal Street 4th Floor, Boston, MA 02114 What: BostonPHP meeting. Topic: Zend Framework More info: Here
Technorati Tags: PHP
There is a lot of stuff going on with OPML these days. OPML stands for Outline Processing Markup Language, invented and evangelized by Dave Winer some number of years ago. Since then though, at least from my observation, it’s had its greatest traction as an import / export format for RSS Aggregators.
But now, there are lots of cool new ideas floating around, prototypes and products being built, that rely on and leverage OPML...
Just a quick reminderof a Geek Dinner organized by three of us: Adam Green, who writes Darwinian Web, Mark Doerschlag, and yours truly who writes this Blog and also runs the BlogBridge project.
What is this “geek dinner” thing again? Well we’re inviting all their geek friends to hang out and geek out for a few hours. Each of us have almost non-overlapping networks so this is a chance for us to make new connections around town, and for you to do the same.
Location: 66 Church Street, Cambridge. (Near Fire and Ice)...
Inspired by Geek Dinners popping up all over, we thought it might be fun to try it here. Who is “we”? Adam Green, who writes Darwinian Web, and yours truly who writes this Blog and also runs the BlogBridge project. Adam also has a Ruby Blog (he’s been swallowed whole by Ruby) as well as a Mashup Blog. The third “we”
is Mark Doerschlag..
What is this “geek dinner” thing? Well 3 guys inviting all their geek friends to hang out and geek out for a few hours. Each of us have almost non-overlapping ...
I Just came back from seeing ‘Falsettos‘, an unusual (and unusually good) musical, at the Huntington Theatre, in Boston. The themes cover the gamut from family, children, love, judaism, homosexuality, life and death. The music is unusual and complex and very nice. I recommend it highly. So much that I also just got the music from iTunes!
Technorati Tags: music, recommended
Michael Feldman of Dowbrigade has a really interesting report on something that I didn’t even know was going on in Boston. Apparently they/we are thinking about providing wi-fi access across the city:
“However, there are a number of important issues to be resolved before one of these plans becomes operational: opposition from current ISP’s and wireless phone providers, differing business models for paying for and possibly charging for the service, which of several competing technologies to support, and the proper role of municipal and state government in regulating access and content.”
M...
Welcome back Chris Lydon! Those of you who have lived in the Boston area for a while (and who are NPR listeners) will recognize the name. Chris has been on local and national TV and radio, and a couple of years ago did some really early, innovative podcasting work (yes, before Adam Curry 🙂
Anyway, he is launching a new radio show, called “Open Source”, and he is debugging it in public, which is pretty cool! Check out the show’s blog for background and also links to the first three beta test shows. ...
