I’ve been playing around (see here) and have set up a simple service that tweets me every morning at 7:30am with a simple weather forecast. Importantly it has the information I want as a cycle commuter.
My Pebble Watch finally arrived this week so I thought I should have a go at pushing information to it. As a cycle commuter I look at the weather every day and am primarily interested in wind direction and rain forecast so I though it would be neat to have this appear on my watch every morning.
I’ve been put forward for this year’s Jail & Bail event in support of Framework and I need your help (money).
Framework is the charity Esendex are primarily working with and supporting. Their goal is to stop homelessness in all of it’s forms. What appealed to us the most about working with them was their approach to helping people get the support and training they need to enable them to change their own lives.
I’m an eternally frustrated user of computer and phone calendars. I find all sorts of aspects of using them clumsy and ill-suited to the way I work.
Am I the only one?
I have some ideas about how they could be improved but I only represent one perspective. If you use calendars and are within striking distance of either Nottingham or London I’d love to come and buy you a coffee.
I’m reading Brad Feld’s book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City at the moment. It shares his ideas and experience from being keenly involved in establishing the start-up community in Boulder, Colorado.
One of his key assertions is that entrepreneurs must lead such a community:
The most critical principle of a startup community is that entrepreneurs must lead it. Lots of different people are involved in the startup community and many nonentrepreneurs play key roles. Unless the entrepreneurs lead, the startup community will not be sustainable over time.
We’re going through a bit of cultural education of my boys at the moment, Back To The Future I, II & III, ET, Fawlty Towers have all been on the bill.
So I put a call out on twitter last Saturday for film recommendations for 80s films that my children need to see. Here’s the list (in no particular order).
Are you a developer? Are you a business owner who employs developers? Have you heard about CodeClub?
Code Club is a nationwide network of volunteer-led after school coding clubs for children aged 9-11. The mission is to give every child in the UK the chance to learn to code. The aim to have a Code Club in 25% of primary schools in the UK by the end of 2014.
What’s not to like about being part of that.
What would you like to be recognised for in 4 years time?
What are the steps required to get there?
Would your life be better if you did the first step?
And the next one?
The Olympics is bloody brilliant because it demonstrates with crystal clarity that success is down to dedication, following a process and constant learning and revising the approach.
If that’s not a lesson for life in general, I don’t know what is.
The announcement of Nottingham’s City Deal last week (http://www.dpm.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files_dpm/resources/Nottingham-City-Deal-final.pdf) is big deal for entrepreneurship in the city. The council now have the funds and powers to provide the infrastructure and support to the new, innovative businesses that will drive GDP growth in the city and provide the skilled jobs going forward.
But, infrastructure is only one part of the jigsaw. I want to share a couple of thoughts on how we, the business community in Nottingham, can do our bit to support our city in this endeavour.
This caused me a bit of heartache and I found little to help via the usual channels.
I’d upgraded a Rails 2 app that used Delayed_Job to Rails 3 and was deploying the Heroku Cedar stack. Jobs were being queued but would fail immediately when trying to deserialise with
uninitialized constant Syck::Syck