terrygold.com

Another Intense Debate test

I'm still testing Intense Debate comments. This is a photo I took this weekend up near Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Testing Intense Debate with Prairie Dogs

I'm testing Intense Debate comments.  Here's a photo of a couple of Prairie Dogs that I took yesterday evening while out with my Nephew Jim and his wife Angela.  They've never seen Prairie Dogs before and have really enjoyed watching them.

New Boulder Blogs

Jerry Lewis, the editor of the Boulder County Business Report, has started a blog.  I'm sorry to say I didn't know about it until he whacked me over the head with a post about my FJ Cruiser Car Computer Project.  If you are dong business in Boulder, you should be subscribing to the Boulder County Business Report, and now you should subscribe to Jerry's blog.  It's his personal blog, but you can bet he'll have interesting things to say about our community and doing business here.  I've always enjoyed his editorials and now I'm looking forward to his blog.

Jesse Sarles over at the CBS 4 sent me a link to another Boulder Blog called the Boulder Report.  It's a "Review site covering Boulder" and has some great restaurant reviews as well as reviews on other businesses in Boulder.  If you live in Boulder, enjoy visiting Boulder, or you'd like to live in Boulder some day, check it out at www.boulderreport.com.

I'm OK

I just received an "Are you OK, I haven't seen a blog post in awhile" message from my friend Marshall at GotSpeech.Net.  It's nice to be missed, and yes everything is fine.  I should explain that my entrepreneurship postings have been going up at the Kauffman Foundation's eVenturing site.  The Kauffman Foundation is a wonderful organization that makes the world a better place by improving education and supporting entrepreneurs.  I was asked to be their entrepreneur blogger last year, so this blog has leaned more towards tech, with a lot more pictures according to one local media person.

I do have some stories to tell, and I will get them posted this weekend.  Here's a quick one though.  I'm a big believer in organizations like YPO and YEO (Now just called The Entrepreneurs Organization or EO), but I'm no longer a member, so late last year I convinced a small group of local entrepreneurs to get together at a local pub.  We had a great time, despite the fact that there seemed to be some sort of play-off kind of game on all the TVs and people around us would just start screaming for no apparent reason.  We left when the screaming became non-stop.

So now it is time for another get-together, and one of the folks sent this email:

The purpose: to discuss how great it is to run a business (sometimes) and how exhausting it is to run a business (sometimes), sort of like raising a kid but just a little bigger though it throws up on you about as often (but who would have their life any other way). And of course to drink a beer or two, eat some pizza and talk with people of similar interests and life journeys.

That pretty much sums it up.  Have a great weekend!

Testing

Just testing.  Thanks Jason!

Helping the community, one blog at a time

Yesterday I was part of a panel talking to a great group of local non-profit organizations.  Jesse Sarles from Channel Four, Seth Levine from Mobius Venture Capital and I were asked to talk about The Wave of the Future – Non-Traditional Media - Utilizing the Internet, blogs and other non-traditional media to get the word out. 

It was exciting to meet so many people who are dedicating their time and energy to helping other people in the community.  It also re-enforced my belief that this technology stuff is still way too hard.  More than one person said that they have websites that someone developed for them and now they aren't able to update it for themselves.  Most though had their websites and email working and were just curious about how blogging might help them get their word out to more people.

I think that starting a blog can still be pretty easy, but I'd like to offer these good people a hand.  If you can spend a tiny amount of your time helping one of these non-profits get started, drop me an email at [email protected] and I'll help you get connected.  If you are a non-profit looking for help, email me too and I'll see if I can find someone who can help you get started.  It really isn't that hard to do.

Spelling errors, RSS and staying connected

I just realized that I had a misspelling in the title of one of my previous posts, and while I know I'm not a good speller, I hate it when I allow a spelling error to creep into my writing.  I have an excuse, but not a good one.  It's what I think of as an edito - not a typo, but an edito.  The error happened because I made an edit to a word and I didn't notice that I'd deleted one-too-many letters.

My next mistake was to rely on spell check.  I use typepad to maintain my blog and I always try to remember to run spell check, which I did.  Unfortunately, typepad doesn't seem to check the title of the post.  I think I'm going to give the new Microsoft Livewriter blog posting tool a try.

I've already made the correction, which is one of the great things about delivering content via RSS.  I know many people reading this are going directly to http://www.terrygold.com and checking to see if I've posted anything new.  Unless your web browser is caching the old version, you'll see the new error-free version.  It's fine if you want to do that - you get to see my reading list and other information that might be helpful, but there is an easier way to keep up with new posts to my blog, and most other blogs.

If you are not visiting my website, you are probably reading this via an RSS reader.  I think a lot of people are missing out because the idea of RSS or "news aggregator" is not widespread outside of the [jarbarish alert] blogsphere.  Personally I use Newsgator because the Newgator guys introduced me to the concept, I can use a reader on my phone and via the web and they magically keep what I've read in sync, and they have a free version, so it is easy to recommend to friends who are new to the idea.  (And since I just looked up how to spell "aggregator" I realized where the name "NewsGator" came from.)

With Newsgator, I can subscribe to blogs or other sources of news and information, and have it all come to me without actually visiting the individual web pages.  It's easy - I go to http://www.newsgator.com and I login.  It then pulls up a list of all the [jargon alert] RSS Feeds (blogs) that I subscribe to and it only shows me the ones that have new content.  I can quickly scan each feed for anything interesting.  As a result I can go through industry news, world news and whatever else that I find personally interesting very quickly without actually going to each and every website to see if anything has changed.  I'm using a mobile version on my Treo, which isn't publicly available yet but will be soon, and so I can get news in the odd moments between meetings or while standing in line at the grocery store.

So, back to my spelling error.  If I was using email to distribute my writing, I'd either just have to hope no one noticed or I'd have to send a second email correcting the error which would really just serve to draw attention to the error.  I expect that one day all press releases and much of the news will be delivered via RSS - Really Simple Syndication in case you are wondering - so go ahead and give it a try. 

By the way, spell check caught two errors for me.  My fourth grade teacher said I'd never be a success if I didn't learn to spell and I'm still working at it.  I also have a new Volunteer Editor-At-Large who has agreed to point out any mistakes, and through the magic of RSS, hopefully I'll be able to correct them before you see them. 

Website fixed?

My web hosting company, PowWeb has up til now done a great job of hosting my website, but last week they migrated me to a new server but didn't save, or migrate, my CNAME settings.  I think I have it fixed now, but I don't do this stuff often enough to be sure.  Apparently after messing it up, PowWeb had no way to go back and retrieve the old settings.  Oops.

They did survey me after the fact to see how things went.  We'll see if they respond.

Minor website problem

My web hosting company is moving my site and it looks like I have a bit of a problem.  It's better now, but there still are some broken image links to fix.  I'm aware of it and I'm working to fix it.

Thanks!  -- Terry

TelePodcasting Part 2

In my previous post I said "I think I've invented something - comments please!"  I went on to describe an idea I had for making it easy to create PodCasts using nothing but an ordinary telephone.  Maybe the term TelePodcasting is new, but others have clearly thought about this already.

Daniel Gerges left a comment saying that his company had developed a capability to post MP3 files to their website.  I found a few other references to this, so wrapping them up in RSS is just a slight improvement that makes it possible to automatically turn the recordings into PodCasts.  I like to check out the websites of people who comment and got a real treat at Daniel's blog.

Daniel has written Should you open source your ideas? and he used my TelePodcast post as kind of a case study.  Open Source Ideas - check out Daniel's post.  I felt like a rock star when I realized he had also picked up on my post about vacations.

Derek Scruggs of Fanprints (check it out!) pointed me to Instant Audio and suggested I send a link to Adam Curry, who is a Big Name in broadcasting and an active PodCaster.

Jim Curry of Whole Wheat Radio pointed me to OpenPodCast.org who has had a call-in capability, though it doesn't seem to be in service right now.  I spent a couple of hours this morning listening to Whole Wheat Radio.  It's great, and it is another example of how the Internet is changing the world.  Jim's inspired me to figure out how to stream music throughout my house because I kept listing to "just  one more song" and didn't want to leave my computer this morning.

So what have I learned?  When I was a developer I learned to not be too quick to blame another's code, because as sure as I did, I found the bug in MY code and looked stupid for pointing the finger at someone else.  I *may* have come up with a new term, and a slight twist on other good ideas.  I don't think I've invented anything.  The idea may still be worth pursuing and my first experiment with Open Source Ideas has been great.

At Gold Systems we focus mostly on applications, though we do have one product that is more of an infrastructure product.  I think the power of TelePodcasting will be in the applications that can be built with the concept to solve real problems.  That's what I'm going to be spending my time thinking about.