Pick a side. Any side. But pick a side.

A friend, who's clearly a McCain supporter sent me an email tonight that I just couldn't help but respond to...and I guess it fired me up enough that I feel the need to share it all with you now as well.

First the meat of the email forwarded by my friend (well I hope he's still my friend):

Should I use Django on Jython?

Someone posted a quick question on the NextNY list today more or less asking if using Django on Jython made sense...for whatever reason, I dumped a fairly long rambling response...and I liked my points well enough that I'm cheesing out tonight and using that as my post of the day as well! Read on to see what my thoughts on the subject were...
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Where my party people at?

I just cranked through a handful of annoying bugs for Bowker tonight...all the while listening to the new Nelly CD (Brass Knuckles) and a ZZ Top CD (Greatest Hits). These are the two newest additions to my CD collection - which you can probably guess just by the difference of these two, is quite varied.

Anyway - I'm actually a VERY big Nelly fan and I find most of his music to provide me with a nice amount of adrenaline (however you spell that)...I especially like to listen to it when I'm on the treadmill (which lately has not been often enough)...but it's also a nice pick-me-up when I'm cranking through or struggling with some boring code (like tonight).

That's all I got for tonight...I'm now off to try and crank through a little bit more Hero Brawl code! Wahoo!

I really don't care about money.

As everyone knows the economy is tanking and so this appears to be all that people want to talk about right now. How to get your business to survive, how to protect your 401k, how to keep your house...and a million other 'how to' articles are all I'm finding around the 'blogosphere' right now.

But I'm going to share a personal little secret with you...if you were in business just to make money...you were in the wrong business...and it's probably a good thing you are tanking right now.

Don't get me wrong, we all need to make money since that is how society has decided over the years we are all going to interact and function...but my point is that, people put too much energy, faith, and time into the idea of money. What every happened to doing something just because of the challenge, or god-forbid, just because it was fun and interesting?

If all I cared about was money, I would simply spend all my time consulting...something that I can easily make a nice chunk of change on...but as it is I feel like I do too much consulting already. Every dollar I earn consulting, is a dollar earned for time I am not doing something for myself...something I'm more interested in, or something that I think is going to be more beneficial to the world than helping company X build an e-commerce site.

Even with my own projects, I'll admit I am influenced by the drive to revenues...but it's been my experience, the projects that I start (or continue) with a primary objective outside of pulling in a buck, have a lot more stickiness and generally just 'feel' more authentic.

I suspect that it's the same for others - though they may not really pay attention to it as much as I do.

I guess growing up poor, I was taught at an early age (by society in general) to pay attention to money...to notice who has it and who doesn't...and you would think not having it most of my life, I would have this burning desire to get it, and keep it. But really I don't. I have the same desire as anyone else to get and do the things that money allows for, but the money itself, I'm just not that much of a fan of.

Perhaps it's BECAUSE I grew up poor...maybe it's just comfortable...or, I like think, it's just because I've been down that path, I know what it's like to be poor...and, for the most part, if you are the right kind of person...it's not that bad.

Of course I'm not talking - no house, no food, no clothes poor...I'm pretty sure that really would suck...but I like to think that my work ethic (and my wife's) along with our financial decisions pretty much assures us we'll never really be that poor (I guess I like to think and HOPE that).

Anyway - I've rambled on about this enough for one night...and I fret that I'm not making much sense as usual...besides it's all very easy for the current me (the one that actually has a bit of cash and more work than I can shake a stick at) to say I don't like money...we'll see if I am signing the same song in the future...because you never know what it will bring

little distractions...

I was working with a friend on Friday trying to bring him up to speed on some basic web development stuff...and so I ended up being a little too distracted to post.

Throughout the weekend, we had a pretty full social calendar -- going out for an 'no kids' night with some friends back on Long Island Sat. and hitting a kids birthday party on Sunday. So I was too busy to post.

Monday I spent a lot of time debugging production code for some critical features for the day job. When I got "home" (usually I work at home for the day job, so I just mean when I switched hats), I was all set in my mind to do a post on 'growing up poor'...but then I got involved in some updates for hero brawl and the next thing I knew it was about 1am and I was too tired to post.

So, in the past few days I've been too distracted, too busy, and too tired to post. That sounds all good, but the reality is, I've just been too lazy to post. I could have squeezed in a few minutes each day to post some rambling thoughts (like this one), but I just didn't.

I bring this up, because my laziness is something I struggle with each and every day. Sure I do a ton of stuff, and I'm always moving something forward a least a little bit...but I'm still never as productive or as active as I could be. Or as I should be. It's something I know about myself, and just something I have to keep working on.

Anyway, on to some other tidbits:

1. I did finally convert the comments section of this blog from my own custom commenting system to that of Disqus...I struggled with the decision for awhile because it's so simple to build a commenting system...but in the end, the network effects you get from a system like disqus that already has large adoption is what really makes it valuable in my mind. It's also nice to dump off some of the more annoying chores/tasks of a comment system (like dealing with spam) so that I can focus on the other things I find more interesting.

2. We've been pushing hard with hero brawl to get what we are considering a first version out by Nov. 1st. On one hand it's funny because the game has been available since Feb. when I was the only one working on it (and playing it for that matter)...but the basic idea was that we wanted to set a date to work towards for certain goals. The hope was it would keep us focused and active, and as far as that goes, I think it's worked well for that. I think the biggest problem we are still having with the project as a whole is the lack of an overall plan...we are just sort of making stuff up as we go, and since we are a VERY small team (me and two friends), we can get away with it. But since we have no 'REAL' plan, it's a bit of a mess figuring out what to do when and it's easy to lose sight of what we are trying to do (esp. since what we are trying to do can so easily change from day to day).

3. I'm planning on going to an event tonight labeled "Going to the Mattresses"...it's basically going to be advice for startups on how to survive through tough economic times...ie. how to live poor. In a lot of ways I find this funny, because what startup do you know that doesn't already survive poor? I also find this especially funny because who really needs advice on how to be poor? (I've had a lot of first hand exp. on being poor -- so I'm pretty sure I don't need any advice on doing it!). Still, I think it's going to be very interesting to see what people's views on the future of the market and how it relates to startups goes...so I'm really looking forward to it. Oh and it should give me a chance to catch up with some of my favorite people involved in startups in NYC too...so that's always a bonus.