We held our second MobileMonday Miami event last week!
Thanks to those who participated and thanks to Myk Willis, CEO and Founder of Myxer, who gave an awesome presentation of this fast-growing mobile startup. Mobile Monday Miami co-organizer and co-founder Jeffrey Sass (pictured) graciously hosted the event at Myxer’s offices in Deerfield Beach. 
MobileMonday is a global community fostering cooperation and business development through networking events to share ideas, best practices and trends in the mobile industry. We’re excited to create a mobile community in Miami and look forward to its continued growth. If you’re into mobile, you’re invited to attend and participate in our free events.
The next one will be on June 9th, 2008 at Nokia’s offices by the Miami Airport. If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP on the Facebook event page, or just get in touch with me.
The contract unequivocally requires property to be returned and so it is that I’m giving the Mac back at some point today. Mind you, about six months ago I’d never used a Mac before and the almost prohibitive price had always kept me at bay. I was the proverbial die-hard PC guy. So when I was offered the Mac — after I’d burned through one and a half of my own personal PCs at work — I gladly accepted it out of sheer curiosity.
In the six months since I’ve had this Mac, I’ve turned on my PC exactly two times; and both times, it was to try out PC-only software. Suffice it to say the MacBook Pro is sublime. What’s not to like? Once you get past the stuff that works differently, you won’t imagine how you ever worked on anything else. I think this applies to more than the creative professions: the Mac has not really improved my photography workflow. Rather, I feel like my productivity’s been boosted across the board. Maybe it’s the more logical OS and UI (and I prefer Tiger to Leopard). Maybe it’s because it crashes much less frequently. Maybe it’s because you can have close to a gazillion tabs open of Firefox and a bunch of other stuff running at the same time and everything still works. Maybe it’s the 3 hour battery life. And maybe it’s also “Spaces”. The combination of these things and more made it a pleasure to open up the Mac in the morning.
As a quick sidenote, I’ve often heard it said that Mac would convert most PC users if they gave 30-day trials.
Besides the obvious reluctance of going back to a Vista machine (ie, “Once you go Mac, you can’t go back”, etc.), I’m now also faced with the time-consuming hassle involved in setting up a workflow that had been perfected on the Mac. Some of it relates to the time it takes to find and install the right extensions for Firefox. Part of it has to do with giving up software that exists only for Mac, like the excellent Skitch. And the other part has to do with software that I had bought and installed, like OmniFocus, and will be unable to use until I get another Mac.
So when will I get another Mac? As soon as I can … and utimately, a brand new Mac trumps a depreciated one.
“… you’ve left me with nothing but I have worked with less.” -Ani Difranco.
Update: My PC laptop won’t start for some reason, I’ll have to get that fixed now and maybe reinstall Vista. I’ll lose a bunch of nice software I had installed, though.
Update 2: I got a new MacBook, which is performing better than the MacBook Pro I was using. Maybe it’s the clean install. I had considered getting a 20″ iMac — they’re amazing — but I really do need something mobile. The MacBook is even more convenient to carry around than the MacBook Pro.
Note: It’s worth clarifying that I’m not associated with Apple or any distributor. Also, I realize in the relative scheme of things, there are many worse things …
Brian Breslin of infinimedia
Joseph Jaffe of Crayon
Jay Berkowitz of Ten Goden Rules
By the way, Josh Hallett snapped some great photos at WOMMU, some of which appear on WOMMU’s good live blog. Have a look!
On Wednesday, May 2nd, we celebrated the two-year anniversary of RefreshMiami! When a few of us first met at a Starbuck’s in South Beach on May 5th, 2006 (Brian Breslin, Chris and Rebecca Saylor, Robert Murray and I), little did we know how significantly the RefreshMiami community would impact our lives. As Brian writes on the RefreshMiami blog:
"So its been 2 years. Wow. In the last 2 years I have either met or interacted with hundreds of great people in the south florida tech community. Lots of people have gotten jobs, made friends, and had a great time. So with that in mind, I think its time we celebrate."
Celebrate we did! Here are some photos. Michael Tangeman compares RefreshMiami to the First Tuesdays and such of the early dot.com days (see also comments on his post):
"It is so refreshingly unlike the dot.com days here in Miami. No suits, no VCs just flown in from the Valley, no investment bankers looking to take somebody public, no lawyers handing out cards and wanting to get in on the deals. The talk is about technology and apps and projects and what people are up to, not about shares and options and exit strategies."
If you’re new to Miami and looking to meet and connect with other web entrepreneurs, developers and designers in South Florida, here’s how to participate:
1) join the 220 member strong RefreshMiami Google Group for discussion on local tech issues, job postings and more;
2) join our group on Facebook;
3) if you’re on LinkedIn, we just started a group there. Here’s the link to join;
4) Subscribe to the RefreshMiami blog;
5) Come to our next meetup! Our next event is on May 28th in Coconut Grove … see you there!
Blogging about not blogging …
So I haven’t blogged in a while … or rather I’ve been on Twitter alot. As it turns out, to rephrase Hugh MacLeod, "Blogging Tweeting is a great way to make things happen indirectlydirectly."
David Berkowitz blogged how Twitter makes blogging better … and in one way worse:
"One prominent blogger, who I won’t call out here, includes a daily summary of his Twitter posts on his blog. Very few of those posts are worth syndicating. They only make sense if you follow him. I find myself reading his blog less now because of it."
I’m not the "prominent" blogger in question ;) but as those of you reading the feed know, I’m equally guilty of reposting daily tweets here. The postings were archived and did not show up on the front page of this blog, but were regularly shipped out on the feed. This served a few purposes, including:
- Using the blog as a journaling and archiving system so that years from now I could look back and find what I was doing on any particular day, through the archived daily tweets here. Twitter has no archiving mechanism and it’s currently very difficult to find your tweets from any single day: you have to scroll back in your twitterstream to do so.
- Posting daily tweets to my blog helped keep this blog going at a time when I’ve been particularly busy and haven’t found the time to blog. The last three months have been very hectic, starting from before organizing BarCampMiami, to leaving Scrapblog, to the various things I’m doing today and which I’ll describe in upcoming posts.
- In addition to keeping the blog alive with content, the daily postings kept Google’s spiders crawling and indexing this site for these past few months.
However, daily postings of tweets are difficult and/or boring to read and as David points out, they only make sense if you’re following them on Twitter as they occur, in which case it’s redundant to see them on Twitter, on the blog and aggregated with my other activity on socialthing! and FriendFeed.
I’ve been active elsewhere
Speaking of which, I’ve been active on many other services as well. I’ve added the social networks and sharing services I use most to my blog’s navigation and sidebar and have thus reclaimed my blog as a central identity hub from which to find me online. These services are listed under my picture on the sidebar, and are reposted below. If you’d like to connect on any of these services, please leave a brief comment describing how we know each other or why you’d like to be connected (see note below*):
Updates on Twitter
Facebook profile
Flickr photos
LinkedIn profile
del.icio.us links
Upcoming events
Tumblr lifestream
Trips on Dopplr
Dugg items
Shared on Google Reader
LastFM radio
Jaiku lifestream
Skitch screenshots
Presentations on Slideshare
MyBlogLog communities
Friendfeed lifestream
Technorati profile
ClaimID identity
Netvibes universe
*Note: I accept most friend requests, although I connect mostly with people I already know or have met on Facebook, Dopplr, Tumblr, Jaiku Google Reader, NetVibes, ClaimID, LastFM, SlideShare, del.icio.us and Upcoming. I’m more open with connections on Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed and Flickr, although I reserve the right to not connect for whatever reason - please don’t take it personally if I don’t reciprocate a connection request.
Having said all that …
… I’m blogging again 
