dustyd.net - Dusty Davidson

Lately it seems that all the good blog posting in my life is happening over at the BrightMix blog... This week's exciting news? We've decided that we need a little help, and so we've posted a job posting for an ASP.NET Developer. You can read about it here on the BrightMix blog, or here at Craigslist, or here at Careerlink.

I'm really interested in what kinds of attention our little job posting will get. We're not like other companies around. We don't hire based on number of years of experience, or number of buzzwords, or some other random metric. Nope, we're looking for the 20% developers, as Jeff Atwood would say. And that's exactly why I'm posting here! Chances are, by the mere fact that you're reading this post, *YOU* are in the 20%.

So, I ask you... Want to come work with me?! I like to think we've got a pretty cool place, with some pretty good benefits and perks. Not to mention some really interesting projects lined up for 2008.

Think about it.... and if you're interested, send me an email...

So the story goes like this... Months and months ago, I stumble upon this website... http://www.divvycollective.com -- a group of guys working from a sweet looking office. Yada yada, flash forward a few months, the place comes up for rent, and my company decides to lease the space at 50th & Leavenworth...

What became of the guys that were working there? Well, one of them runs Bisto Design, and got his own place downtown, complete with IKEA furniture. The rest of them got together and rented out a very VERY cool place down by Film Streams at the new Saddle Creek Records development.. They go by the names SecretPenguin and What Cheer.

During and before the move, we got to know the guys, so we stopped by their open house to check out their great new office space, and somehow Marlina & I ended up front and center in a number of pictures!

Congrats to everyone from the (former?) Divvy Collective. We wish them all great success!

My little website has experienced quite a bit of traffic over the past week or so, thanks to my PhotoNotes project being posted on a site called AjaxRain, and subsequently via the StumbleUpon browser toolbar.

Check it out...

Yesterday was officially, without a doubt, the all time traffic record for dustyd.net, with 972 visitors! My normal traffic hovers somewhere around 30-40 visitors / day, which is denoted by the left hand side of that graph.

I saw the post on AjaxRain myself... sort of like... "Hey, that kind of looks familiar... WAIT A MINUTE! *I* wrote that!" It's a small victory for me.

What's funny though, is the amount of traffic that StumbleUpon has sent my direction. I would say that well over 80% of the traffic comes from there. Naturally, I was aware of what SU was, but I had actually never used it. After installing the toolbar, I've still yet to "stumble upon" my site, but I do find it curiously addictive. Clicking through hundreds of random sites is a good way to waste a couple hours.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for checking out my site. If I could keep up the traffic that would be great! If for no other reason than to make my graph look nice :-)

As a small business owner, email is my lifeline. We run our company almost entirely via email, and we make no bones about it. Oh, we have a phone number, but it's virtual, and it's hardly used. We collaborate via email, we talk to clients via email, we send invoices via email... the list goes on.

Until recently, however, I've had serious issues when I've been out talking to clients, or out to lunch (or out golfing!). Problem was, I had no access to my email! Until now..

Verizon, who is almost always behind-the-times when it comes to the latest and greatest phones, has finally released a Blackberry that I'm comfortable with:

The Blackberry Pearl

You see, I don't want to carry a separate phone for business and for personal use. I especially don't want to clip some giant PDA thing to my belt. So, this leaves me with precious few options in terms of available models.

I've had the thing for almost a week now, and already I can tell that my email habits have changed... for the better. I've added both my personal email (hosted with Google Apps), and my BrightMix email (also hosted with Google Apps), and interestingly enough, my Blackberry actually gets email FASTER than my browser. So, I find that I don't need to feel like I'm married to my computer any more.

When I've *REALLY* noticed it, is when I'm out and about. I truly have email with me at all times. AMAZING. It really helps for when a client emails and says "Hey, can you meet up at 2?" . Previously, I've actually CALLED THE OFFICE, and had Kevin check my email to make sure I haven't missed emails like these. No longer do I have to do this.

Finally, as the icing on the cake, the thing completely synchronizes with Outlook, and.. AND, when plugged into my laptop, it can act as a cellular modem. Out-freaking-standing.

I knew it was just a matter of time -- when the price and the phone model was juuust right -- when I would move to mobile email.... and never look back.

A ton has happened on the BrightMix front since I last posted. Most notably, in case you're not following the BrightMix Blog, is the news that we've acquired an honest-to-goodness office space! It's really quite exciting, and for more information, check out the official BrightMix is moving post...

Thanks to Larkware today for a link to a fantastic addin for Visual Studio... ASPX Edit Helper.

This little utility alleviates some of the pain in writing ASPX pages by hand, specifically by auto-completing the tags, and auto-inserting the runat="server" and id="???" for you.

Type this,

hit enter and it auto-completes into this!

Fantastic! And it works with VS2008! Thanks Derek!

It's official folks... I've quit my job as a corporate cog, and have partnered with my good friend Kevin Zink to start a software development company -- BrightMix, LLC

I decided quite some time ago that my passion and my interest lay completely in "web development". I'm completely caught up in the -- for lack of a better term -- Web 2.0 craze, and there was just no way to be a part of it while working for a large company. In Omaha, no less. Nope, pretty much in Omaha it seems the only way for me to do what I want, was to do it myself.

And so, after many months of deliberation via Campfire, Kevin and I decided to take the plunge. Our primary focus is web development. Cutting edge, web development. We want to strive for simplicity, and elegance, and beauty, and all of those wonderful things.

We're really excited to be able to use some fun technologies like Ruby on Rails, for more than "hey look at this!" type projects. In fact, in addition to our consulting work, we have a number of product ideas that we're looking to launch in the near future, which hopefully will be Rails-based.

And so I leave you with that. We're going to try to be as transparent as possible, with most of the inner-workings of our company posted to the BrightMix Blog. There you can follow the progression of the company from tiny startup, to world domination :-) I highly recommend subscribing to the feed.

For the past few days, I've been having EXTREMELY slow internet download speeds. We're talking, 200kbps... it would take several MINUTES to download a 1 meg file!

Here's the speed test...

Pathetic! My upload speed was fine (and faster than my downloads). After many phone calls with COX, they finally sent someone out. He was able to reproduce the problem, which is good, because for a while there I just thought I was crazy.

After much fiddling, he was able to solve the problem -- some switch or network hardware had futzed out upstream from me. The solution? Reset it.

Now, my speed test looks a little more normal...

 

It makes me even happier knowing that I only pay for 8meg :-)

PS. Go check out the BrightMix website. It's Kevin & my new little software development company. "What!?!" you ask? I'll post more shortly...

First, and undoubtedly foremost, if you hadn't noticed the giant pink web2.0 badge at the top, in approximately 10 days I'm getting married! Man how time flies... Afterwards, we will be honeymooning to Hawaii for some much needed beach time.

Second, I've got a number of projects in the works, keeping me fairly busy. Not much to show yet, but I've got a couple of dummy URLs. I've linked to a bunch of things over at http://www.dustydavidson.com. Much more to come on this front...

And lastly? Since this post a while back, I've indeed moved on to Google Reader, and there's no going back. I'll let the graph speak for itself...

From your  348 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 8,655 items, starred 33 items, and shared 0 items.

Yikes!

Stumbled upon a fantastic list of cheat sheets for .NET (and other misc. things). The format string quick reference will be of enormous value. Printing some of them off as I type... (via Larkware)