Ack! In the process of writing that quick post on my Rubyconf presentation, I noticed that I’ve completely neglected talking about the Rails Rumble. As it turns out, I kind of won the solo division… again.

I love the Rumble; it’s one of the most inspiring competitions I’ve ever been a part of (including the create-your-own-He-Man-character one that I did when I was ten or so, which ’til the Rumble came along had been the high point for me :). There’s just something about sitting down to an empty project on Friday night, hacking away for 2 straight days, and deploying something useful (or cool or whatever) at the end. This year in particular I’m gratified that people liked my entry, Forever Home, because it represents a cause close to my heart (dogs needing adoption). I’m also amazed that I pulled out the win over the course of the last day, since the other solo entries were extraordinary.

Oh, and there’s a rumor in the air that there could be more frequent Rumbles in the future—that’d be an exciting thing. Why limit the fun to just once a year?

I think the presentation went pretty well, all told—not my best presentation, but far from my worst. Importantly, I got some good feedback, and am excited to continue working on this topic. If you’re interested in seeing what this is all about, the code lives (or will eventually live) at GitHub, and my slides are here:

For a while, I used a bookmarklet to avoid that—but with the release of Mozilla’s Ubiquity, I now have an even better tool. If you’ve got Ubiquity installed, check this out. Once you’ve subscribed to the command, you can activate Ubiquity and type

flickr-cc [term]

to quickly and easily find the CC-licensed photos you want.

This command is a lightly-modified version of the Flickr command built in to Ubiquity, and is obviously further modifiable (adding an optional argument to specify the license, for instance). As it stands, though, it’s a pretty easy way to enliven your deck—give it a try!

I’ll have slides up on SlideShare as soon as I can, but I’m still having issues sending largeish files over the internet here (either wireless or wired)—keep an eye on this post for the eventual update.

And here they are:

At this point, I’m kind of sad to retire this talk… I think people get a lot out of it, and every time I give it I learn something new.

Here are the slides, though they probably won’t be all that helpful.

Also, as a result of the work we did in the tutorial, I spent a few hours today working up an initial version of a resourceful forum plugin. There’ll be a more official announcement sometime next week on Viget Extend, but if you’re interested in a preview take a look at this.

So as it turns out, Milorad Cavic has a blog. (If the name’s not ringing a bell, you probably haven’t been watching one of the most remarkable sporting accomplishments in history—he was the swimmer out-touched by 0.01 seconds in the 100m Olympic butterfly.) For me, this brings two surprises: first, that a world-class athlete is blogging on his own, as opposed to the sort of marketing-driven blog most likely written by interns you might find on a star basketball player’s site; and second, that Cavic has an amazing attitude about the whole thing. Heck, the relevant entry is titled “Success!!!,” and begins:

I did it!!! I won an Olympic medal everybody! I’m sorry to brag, but I’m sure you all will forgive me just this one time!

When so many people might focus on how they would feel cheated by the outcome, it’s refreshing to see that Cavic himself has a much more positive view. I’d love to see more of this—the elite in every field communicating without a filter, showing the personalities that help (or hurt) them in their success. It’s blogging in its finest form, and I applaud Cavic for doing it.

Since the iPhone 2.0 software came out, I’ve been really enjoying a number of third-party applications. Recently, however, that’s been taken to a whole new level. From NetShare (which I was fortunate enough to grab after it was first pulled from the store), to yesterday’s release of DataCase, there are some apps that have fundamentally changed the way I work.

Evernote

In this post, however, I want to talk even more about one app in particular: Evernote. I tried Evernote on the desktop (and web, of course) back when it first hit beta, and I wasn’t particularly impressed. I’ve never been a big fan of the note apps (including Yojimbo, for instance)—they just never seemed to fit my workflow.

Once the free version of Evernote on the iPhone hit, though, that all changed. The ability to create notes via text entry, the phone’s camera, and by recording audio is fantastic; I find myself recording notes in the car, and snapping pics of things all the time. The photo notes are particularly interesting given Evernote’s ability to index text in images—take a photo of a book you want, and you’ll be able to find it by searching for the title or author later. Add in the desktop-web-phone sync, and you’ve got something that (for me) is a killer app.

In Action

Here’s one way I’ve recently started using Evernote via the iPhone. We recently moved offices, and I discovered a cache of business cards that I’ve collected over the past year. Instead of trying to find a place to put them all, I took pictures of each card within Evernote (using the iPhone camera for some, and the note-from-iSight feature of the desktop app for others). Each went into my Business Cards notebook, so I’ve created a virtual, searchable rolodex. If I could only sync it with Addressbook, I’d be set*.

* Evernote apparently plans to release an API, so cross-application syncing might become possible in the future.

Now, to get started on the tutorial for Berlin…