dangerouslyawesome

I'm Alex Hillman, the co-founder of IndyHall and a guy who makes things better in Sunny Philadelphia.

I work on Beanstalk, Postmark, and DynamicWear.

I think technology is cool, but people are infinitely cooler.

the value of education

Drexel University gets a lot of press around here as a “prestigious” school. Do any of you outside of the northeast corridor even know that Drexel exists? Does it mean anything over a degree from any other accreddited university (i’m not talking community college, i’m talking real deal university). Or, is “a degree is a degree is a degree”.

(I’m looking at you, west coasters).

(if you can’t read between the lines, i’m ready to tell Drexel to take their shaft and shove it somewhere else for a change. Just weighing my options, no decisions are being made yet, and no matter what I’m not “dropping out of school”).

hey look, its me

Thanks to William Wingo, a participant at CreativeCamp 2006, there’s now a video of me telling the history of my relationship with Chris and Tara

. Unfortunately, unless he simply didnt post it, the bulk of my presentation on coworking cuts off right as I finish kissing the Citizen Agents’ asses.

Also, since I wasn’t warmed up, my level of “uhs” and “ums” was unusually high. Very uncharacteristic of my speaking.

also, hipcast has the strangest embed code i’ve seen yet. some weirdo iframe.

philly pride: i'm ready to swallow mine, how about you?

ive been thinking about something that was mentioned at this past weekend’s CreativeCamp. One of the attendants was telling me about how he recently returned to Philly and noticed an attitude issue. He said something to the effect of, “I thought New York was stuck up, and really Philly is just bad, maybe even worse. And really, he’s right. Its not so much of the NYC/”We’re better than you” attitude, its the Philadelphia/”We’re Philly and we don’t need or want your help”.

So that, to me, screams pride. Surely, Philadelphians are some of the most proud people in the country. I mean, look at our sports fans. Notoriously some of the most violent, verbal, and aggressive sports fans in the country…and not like they’ve earned it, right? Whens the last time one of this fine city’s sports teams won a sports championship? I digress, and refuse to speak about something that I admittedly know absolutely nothing about (sports).

So this pride that we have, is it what’s hurting us? Philadelphia is the home to many, many incredibley smart and talented people from every industry on the planet. But so few of those people reached their success alone. Most of them, like so many other successful individuals, leaned on the shoulders of peers and mentors. They overcame their pride, and did the hardest thing in the world for a proud person: they asked for help.

This is where I see an opportunity for coworking to break down a huge barrior in our local industry. We shouldnt have to worry about being “not New York”. A venue like coworking not only enables, but encourages collaboration. Working as a team to produce that which couldnt exist as individuals. I don’t know about you, but that’s something that I can’t wait to be a part of.

swallow your pride, philly independents. dare to be great, with us. the founders of this country did it, thats enough inspiration for me.

its all about making a name for yourself

Dan Wilt: i hope one day, my name gets underlined by trillian *
Dan: dan wilt
Dan: that would be nice

well said Dan, well said.

*referring to trillian’s dictionary/encyclopedia lookup feature that underlines words that have entries

data standardization, microformats, not just all hype

this weekend at creative camp we were talking about various professional/social networking tools, and how it’d be handy if there was a single sign-on solution for all of them.

one of the other presenters said, and i quote(paraphrase),

“If you made one place that managed my account login as well as personal info, so i didnt have to retype it every time, for:myspace livejournal facebook monster linkedin bloglines etc etc etc, not only would I use it but you’d probably make a million dollars.”

so yeah. of the bunch he rattled off, the only one with no api support at all to my knowledge is myspace. single sign on/standardizatoin of information IS a good thing. and profitable. cuz happy(and free(and open)) developers are productive developers, right?

Messina has been jabbering on about microformats forever. I recently got around to asking, “what’s the big deal”? Essentially, the content doesnt change but the packaging does. Formats like RSS, while effective, are inefficient because they require an additional packaging process: the generation of the feed. Microformats take the built in id and class properties of HTML elements and use them for their underlying purpose…no, not to style and format. That’s a secondary use. The primary function of id and class is identify an “object” within the DOM. ID’s for single objects, classes for recurring objects. Microformats exploit these identifiers in such a way that a web document itself acts as the publishing feed…a parser can go through looking for a standardized format for information such as calendar and address book info. no secondary republishing. and, every instance of support means that another developer has to do one less thing in making his data scrape work.

data standardization is good.

im weaseling a little bit of hCalendar into the app i’m building at work. my hope is that, when phase 2 rolls around, and it comes time to hook in syndication services, i can say “well, its actually mostly done already”. thats the kind of stuff that makes my bosses happy.