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One of the Atlanta Tech and Startup Week events that I attended was Founder Fables which was an off the record event where co-founders were able to talk freely. While I can't talk about anything else that happened there, I can talk about one co-founder that had some interesting things to say and show: the unofficial other mayor of Atlanta, Mr. Jermaine Dupri. Mr. Dupri spoke about the process behind his new website, Global14.com.

But what he did afterward was just as interesting. He invited all of the attendees to the 20th Anniversary dinner for his label, So So Def Recordings, that was tonight. I couldn't make it due to a family emergency but several were able to make it:

  

In my opinion this is an important event since its one of the few times that two of the major entrepreneurial communities in Atlanta actually interact. And its an interaction that should happen more often. It shouldn't have to wait on someone like Jermaine Dupri making it happen. Each community can benefit from the other. The music business can use and help drive the technology businesses and those businesses could definitely use some exposure to the style and entertainment industry. We have 5 major film studios but all of the technology in those studios comes from outside Atlanta.

The next time we have an Atlanta startup event we should contact Mr. Dupri and invite his team and community. Events like this should be the rule, not the exception.

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So I'm spending the night in a hospital room sitting up with my mother who's here for something that should turn out to be easily fixable. That means I'm sitting (and soon to be sleeping) in some of the most uncomfortable furniture ever designed by humans.

This is the moment that you realize that neither you, nor the person in the hospital bed, are the customer. If you were then this chair would look more like this:

and less like this:

Sleep deprivation wouldn't be an issue, there would be more outlets, and the coffee wouldn't suck as badly. As the saying goes, “If you're not paing for it then you are the product”. In this case the Government or an insurance company are the customers and patients are mearly an accounting issue. Where the patient IS the customer services improve. And when that service directly translates to improving someone else's health it seeems like it should border on malpractice.

And now I'm going to try and sleep in something even the Spanish Inquisition wouldn't expect.

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I pitched Pipefish at Startup Riot today so I'm a bit exhausted. It wasn't my best pitch but I got the message across and met with some good people. I'll be providing more details later but now its time for bed and a good rest.

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I'm practicing for something tomorrow so you guys will just have to put up with puppies howling:

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I spent today at a local Atlanta rally for startup technology companies called Startup Rally. It was a good event with a lot of companies and students from Tech. Here's the view from the end taken by Jared Trotter:

Tomorrow is Founder Fables and Startup Riot. See you there!

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In about two months the media will be dusting off last year's articles about fresh-faced and normally optimistic kids graduating college with no hope of paying off their school loans. Two articles came out this week that every parent of a high school graduate looking at college should read. The first is from Salary.com:

8 College Degrees with the Worst Return on Investment These Careers Might Make You Happy, But Fail the Tuition ROI Test

By Dawn Dugan, Salary.com contributing writer.

What's more expensive than going to college? Until recently, the answer was easy: not going to college. Numerous studies over the years have shown that individuals with college degrees significantly out-earn those with high school degrees by $1 million or more over the course of a lifetime.

The point is that, unless you are either retired, independently wealthy, or already an accomplished artist, these degrees are not something you should ever go into debt for. And if you are an accomplished artist you should be able to get the scholarships to prove it. That said, while you are getting your engineering or science degree there is a great deal of utility in having a humanities minor. They help you think creatively.

But even then, that may not be enough. What comes next does not come from you professors. It comes from you:

What Students Really Need to Learn to Get a Startup Job Dan Woods, Contributor

To get a job, you don’t work on your resume; you work on yourself. Here’s what startups are after:

• People who are on a mission, not just looking for a job
• People who are interested in the work, not validation and approval
• People who can show skills, not just claim them
• People who are aggressive but understand how to listen and admit they are wrong
• People who can learn new skills rapidly
• People who want to learn and to teach
• People who like to work collaboratively in teams, not on their own

While not everyone is cutout for startup life or being a software developer, those personal skills and attributes are the things every employer would kill for. When I was at Masten Space we could see a huge qualitative difference between a welder who was just a welder and one who was an entpreneur who could weld. The first certainly did the job but the second could lay a bead like an artist.

Our economy is moving in a direction where those who don't create are doomed to serve those who do in low-wage, low-skill jobs. There is no room for marginally skilled manual labor anymore. There are a few industries that need them: oil workers in North Dakota is one. But those jobs don't last long enough to build your life around. Build your life around change. Build the skills that let you take advantage of change.

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I've played EVE Online off and on for the past 5 years. CCP is in the process of releasing a new add-on called Dust 514. For those that don't play these kinds of games EVE is a massively multiplayer game in a universe with hundreds of star systems, thousands of planets, and tens of thousands of players. While CCP does release new updates that change gameplay, player actions permanently affect the world. Dust 514 is a first person shooter where missions and campaigns are directed by players in EVE. The two games are connected to each other and exist in the same universe. As far as I know this is the first time two games have been connected to each other.

The new Simcity also comes out next month. Unlike previous versions, this new version is inherently multiplayer. Each city can buy from and sell into a global marketplace that all other cities have access to. You can also setup cities in regions with other players and cooperate/compete (no fighting, though). The gameplay demos are beautiful and the interaction with other players is subtle and interesting.

Game makers seem to finally understand that always on, universal network access means more to gameplay and story telling than most first person shooters simply running around the same maps over and over again. First person shooters seem to have been moving back to limiting the story telling to the rigid story line and a limited number of maps. If Dust 514 and Simcity succeed could they start to move back to letting players create their own maps? Could the next version of Halo let characters take and hold territory?

Many online businesses are trying to 'gamify' their products. Is there something for them to learn from these new massively multiplayer games?

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I spent today at a regular meeting of of a semi-formal group of state-level space organizations. The group is working to help raise Georgia's profile as a space-capable state. The main topic was the proposed space port in Camden County:

View Larger Map

The most recent upate was that the Environmental Impact Study was in process but since the site was already an existing industrial facility it shouldn't take very long to complete. The other is that public statements by SpaceX mean that vertical launch seems to be more compelling than horizontal in the short term.

The other item was the soft launch of the new The Georgia Center of Innovation for Aerospace:

The center acts as a catalyst, creating opportunities for aerospace companies and their suppliers by connecting them to new technologies, university research, potential business collaborators and current industry information. The Center advances recognition of Georgia’s strength in the global aerospace industry, and contributes to the entrepreneurial and educational ecosystems required for its continued growth.

One of the VERY useful resources the Center is providing is a single Google Calendar of state wide aerospace related events:

If you have something to add contact the Center at aerospace@georgiainnovation.org. I'll be providing additional details at the Space Georgia meeeting on February 23rd.

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The first official Space Georgia meeting will be Febraury 23rd at 4:00 pm at the Hypepotamus co-working space in Midtown Atlanta. Hypepotamus is in the basement of the Biltmore which is at West Peachtree and 5th Street. The only Biltmore doors that will be unlocked are the ones on the basement level so please enter on either the 6th Street or West Peachtree Street doors.

Here's the agenda so far:

1) An introduction to the NSS and an invitation to join

2) Nominate and elect a President, Treasurer and Secretary

3) An update on space related happenings around the state

4) How the chapter might help with those events

5) Plans for the next meeting and review of action items

6) Adjourn to the Gordon Biersch on Peachtree for a drink

While registration isn't required and the meeting is open to the public, registering with our Meetup.com page will help us guage attendance: http://www.meetup.com/Georgia-Space-Society/events/103988852/

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One of the Pipefish apps I'm building uses themoviedb.org API as a source of information on movies. I'm using them because they return usable IDs in search results and don't have the severe usage limitations that IMDB does. Regardless of who it is, it creates a dependency within my service on a third party that I have no control over. So I need to mitigate that dependency as much as possible by caching.

Since we are using Backbone.js in the client and ActiveRecord in the backend we have a very transparent flow between the columns that exist in the database and the attributes that are available to the Javascript in the page. As soon as I run the migration to add a new column to the model it shows up in the page. But that doesn't mean there's actual data in the database.

Right now the logic is that if the object exists in the database load it and move on. If it doesn't then retrieve it from the web service, set the attributes and then save it to the database. To handle new data I needed a way to declare the model in the database as dirty so it would be updated. I didn't want to do it all at once due to the load.

After much googling I discovered the poorly documented “after_find” callback. I created a new column called 'dirty' and modified the model to look like this:

class Movie < ActiveRecord::Base

  after_find :clean_if_dirty

  public

  def clean_if_dirty
    if self.dirty == 1
      begin
        newattributes = Tmdb::Movie.find_by_id(self.tmdb_id)
        self.newthing = newattributes["newthing"]
        self.dirty = 0
        self.save
      rescue => e
        puts "Help! Something broke and it needs fixing!"
        self.dirty=1
        self.save
      end
    end
  end   
end

Then I created a rake task that uses update_all to invalidate the current models:

namespace :data do
  desc "Sets the dirty flag for all movies to true"
  task :invalidatetmdb => :environment do
    Movie.update_all :dirty => 1
  end
end

So I can deploy and immediately invalidate the data without downtime to rebuild a database. This deploys and works but something tells me that I'm not doing this the Rails way since I'm repeating much of what ActiveRecord does for detecting if a model is dirty or not. So while I think this is a valid use of the “after_find” callback, I'm not sure if the overall patern is the right way. Thoughts?

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