The results of the election and the aftermath feels like America waking up from a 5 year-long drunken bender and finally regaining some sense… After the 2004 elections, I got pretty burnt out on it all, so I think that I’m emotion I’m feeling most more than any other is that of relief — I’m relieved that people have realized how much of a failure Bush/Neocons/Republican agenda, are seeing through the newspeak/spin, and got fed up with it all.

Although I’m finding it hard to supress a goofy smile seeing the newspeak unravel so dramatically:

One down…

It’s a while since I’ve done Java programming, but I’m slowly getting up to speed for programming on my Blackberry Pearl.

• Have gotten my signed+registered keys to sign my code (the signature files were originally placed in the wrong folder by the application)
• Can successfully request files over HTTP
• Discovering that the Blackberry API docs often have completely non-working code samples
• Can open the SDCard filesystem and write files/folders
• Got the JDE to finally rebuild w/o having to restart the simulator
• Have loaded an app OTA
• Discovered that the camera MMAPI interface doesn’t exist… but there’s a workaround that’d probably work OK for what I need

Reflecting back (and from the inside), I don’t think that Yahoo! Open Hack Day could have gone any better. It blew past my personal best-case expectations. The biggest problem is where to take it from here. But that’s one of those good problems. 🙂

There are a lot of good and bad things about big organizations, and in the day-to-day, a lot of people can get hung up about the latter, but the organizational hacking is to figure out how to leverage and finesse all those positives with the right vision and approach. (hooray Chad and Bradley!)

• Yahoo Hack Day is on! – Gordon had an introspective writeup
• All Women Team Takes Yahoo Hack Day Top Prize – Mike, who MC’d has a writeup of the results. Blogging in Motion, the winning hack, was definitely the right pick (sewn hardware hacked in a day!)
• Flickr: hackday06 – almost 3200 photos tagged hackday06. And more than a third of that, over 1000 photos tagged to the Upcoming event. (wow, that’s a huge surprise to me)
• Too many blog posts to mention. I’ve been tracking over the weekend with technorati, icerocket, and blogpulse

Some more awesome writeups from Yahoos:

• Yahoo Open Hack Day: Hell Yes! – Bradley has a great writeup about the whole thing
• “We can’t control the puppets but we thank you for your understanding” – Yahoo Hack Day ’06 – Ian Kennedy also puts some more of “what it was about” into words
• Beck Plays Surprise Show at Yahoo! Hack Day – Schiller, DHTML Ninja and apparently mega-Beck fan (sorry we had to keep you in the dark, but it all worked out in the end 🙂 has an awesome review and more links
• HackDay: Thoughts on how Yahoo got there and what it all means – Susan is “speculating” but gets a lot of it right on. My personal favorite naming option for “Open Hack Day” was Hacking Man. Maybe next time try to use the Volleyball court to make a gigantic burning yahoo-guy bonfire

The new version of Google Reader is light years better than the previous (read: actually usable). The scrolling/loading is still a bit clunky, but that’s just implementation niggles that I’m sure can get filed down. It also starts to include a full stream view (although the filtering seems to have taken a step back – there’s just no grouped/labeled feeds?) It also doesn’t seem to have any sort of real aggregation (collecting things into piles).

The absolutely worst thing though is expressed in Chris’ video message though. I can understand the pitch of Reader as an “Inbox for the Web,” but I already have an Inbox, it has big numbers and things to unbold, and it doesn’t do that by itself – the last thing I need/want is more to be deluged and responsible for. The Inbox metaphor may work for those who have a few sites they read, but how does it let me sample/prioritize for hundreds or thousands of feeds? (Simple answer: it doesn’t!)