I came across a blog post a few weeks ago from the co-founder and CTO of Docstoc, Alon Shwartz.

The post draws a correlation between startups and war. Alon says:

...starting a startup is like starting a war. First, you think you're right and you have the right. Many others have done the same thing before successfully and you're smarter than most of them. Yes, you'll need resources and funding but you can start relatively small and grow. It doesn't have to be "shock and awe"...

If you're reading this blog, you no doubt know who Joe Rinehart is. If you're not familiar with Joe, he is the creator of the Model Glue MVC framework, a seriously smart ColdFusion (and Flex, and Java, etc) developer who has been an active and vocal member of our community for many years.

Earlier this year Joe's wife Dale was diagnosed with MS. Joe blogged a bit about the situation.

I've met Joe a handful of times, and he is without a doubt one of the nicest human beings out there. In addition to his endless (and sometimes thankless) contributions to the community there is no doubt that his family is his number one priority. To that end I ask you to help support he and his family in their time of need.

If you can, please visit http://www.helpsupportjoeanddale.com/ and consider donating.

Thanks to the meetup last night, TechCrunch has posted a quick review of SlideSix.

I have to say, the review is pretty accurate and fair (hey, I told you, I'm a developer, not a designer!). It will be quite interesting to see what happens from here with the site. Even if nothing comes of the exposure, it has been a dream project to work on for the last year. Not many developers have the luxury of putting paid work on the back burner for a year while they pursue their dream. I feel lucky, even though it's meant many long nights and weekends writing code while may day job kept food on the table for my very supportive wife and kids. If I didn't love it and believe in the project I would have quit a long time ago (and trust me, there were many moments that I considered it).

Thanks again to John Biggs for the meetup and the writeup.

I had been making some personal backups of my DVDs this evening when I decided to pop one in to make sure everything looked OK. In my office I have a little 26" LCD with an internal DVD player so I stuck one of the copies into the TV when a heard a very unfriendly grinding. It's widely documented that I'm not a hardware expert, but even my untrained ear told me that this was a bad noise to be coming from the player.

Sure enough, the player soon spit the disc right back out at me. I tried a few more times (yeah, like that was gonna work) to no avail when I decided I'd grab a screwdriver and take the thing apart to see if I could get lucky and fix the thing.

As I started to work on the 58 or so screws that held this amazing little player together I began to hear a familiar rattle. The kind of rattle that only the actions of a mischievous toddler can produce. Before I'd even removed the cover I already knew what to expect. Sure enough when I finally got the thing open my suspicions were confirmed:

Thankfully once the offending currency was removed and the device was reassembled it returned to it's previous working state.

So this morning my wife and I are getting ready for work, the usual routine of running around getting the kids ready, making coffee and whatnot and she casually states to me "I think I'm done with Internet Explorer. It's so slow and it crashes all the time." I had to simply stop what I was doing and embrace her in a loving hug. OK, so I didn't really do that, but I have to say I'm extremely proud of her for finally making the decision to use Firefox. She'd be the first to admit she is not terribly computer literate, but even she has finally realized that IE is the 'devil's browser' and is ready to make the switch.

About 6 months ago a friend shared the trailer for Southland Tales with me. The trailer certainly presented a strange but intriguing looking film so I was anxious to see the movie. I kept my eyes open for the movie, but it apparently was only released in a limited capacity in theaters (usually a bad sign) so I had to wait until it came out on DVD which happened yesterday.

In June of this year I will have been working at the same company for 12 years. Working for the same company that long these days is almost unheard of but I consider myself fortunate to be 31 years old and almost half way to being pension eligible (yes those things do still exist). Barring any unforseen circumstances, I'll probably be at this company my entire career. But that's a discussion for another day.

Just finished ordering my new Dell XPS M1530 (I was able to resist my buddy Ray's insistence that I get a Mac everytime I talked to him about laptops). Here are the specs: XPS M1530 Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7250 (2MB cache/2.0GHz/800Mhz FSB)

Operating System Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Edition System Color Midnight Blue

Memory 3GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz (2 Dimms)

LCD, Color and camera High Resolution, glossy widescreen 15.4 inch LCD(1440x900) & 2MP Camera

Video Card 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT

Hard Drives Size: 160GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive

Software - Adobe Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 8.1

Combo or DVD+RW Drive Slot Load DVD+/-RW (DVD/CD read/write) Sound Card High Definition Audio 2.0

Wireless Networking Cards Intel Next-Gen Wireless-N Mini-card

Productivity Microsoft Works 8. DOES NOT INCLUDE MS WORD

Software - Antivirus McAfee SecurityCenter 15-months

Primary Battery 56 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery

Accident and Theft Protection 1Yr LoJack for Laptops Theft Protection (CD Shipped Separately)

Adobe Adobe Photoshop + Premiere Elements Bluetooth Options Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Internal (2.0+Enhanced Data Rate)

I'll mostly be using it for developing, but I really wanted something with some power and durability. Any thoughts on this particular config?

I'm strongly considering purchasing an HDTV PC tuner so I can watch TV whilst I work. Anyone have any recommendations? I almost bought one made by Pinnacle last night at the store, but I've had bad luck with their stuff in the past. I'd like something USB, with decent bundled software and an on board PVR (flash memory). I'm hoping to stay under the $100 price range.

I arrived at my local Toys-R-Us with 2 mugs of coffee and the Sunday paper at just after 5:00AM thinking I'd sip some coffee and read the paper for a few hours until they opened at 8:00AM. Little did I know there would be 19 other crazies already standing in line. Luckily after a near 3 hour wait in the freezing rain I got my Wii! I've just played a little bit but I am very impressed with it so far. The controls definitely take a little getting used to but they seem cool. I'll try to follow up with a post in a week or two after I've really had a chance to get used to them more.