Over the last few weeks there has been quite a bit of new development being done on the CampusLIVE! site and Jared thought it would be a good idea to give developers a break from the every-day coding. He decided that today we would take a 3 hour block of time from 9am – 12pm and see what we could brainstorm with a new technology he found. We plan to do this about every 2 weeks so things will be getting very interesting at CampusLIVE!

Today’s Hack-A-Thon was based on a service offered by a new start-up called PubNub. PubNub is a blazingly fast cloud-hosted data network for building real-time web and mobile applications at scale. We wanted to see what we could do with this by integrating it into our current system but we did not want to have any adverse effects on our user-base so we decided to make it an internal tool for the time being. However I wanted to share this with my readers because it really is a nice service that is being created by PubNub.

We integrated the messaging system into our user registrations, auction bid’s, raffle entries and daily spin functionality. It really puts things into perspective when you see just how fast people are completing actions on the site.

If you look in the header of the image you will notice different icons with counts. These are the counts for those activities over the last minute. As the items are scrolling down the screen you can also click on them to make them dock to the bottom of the list and remain on the screen. The default behavior is for them to flow off the screen as new events come in.

The 3 hour Hack-A-Thon was possible thanks to the following people who participated: Jared Stenquist, Ansel Stein, Mike Miklavic, Jeff Bachand and myself. Next we will be looking at how we can implement this to improve the experience for our users. It’s activities like this that really make me appreciate CampusLIVE as an employer.

A while back I was conducting a job search and put myself out there on the job boards. Since then I have found a position which I am happy with and have marked such on all job boards. After closing down my job search I was contacted by XpertTech about a position which did not fit with my experience. I informed the gentleman that it was not a match and went on with my day. The very next day the EXACT SAME guy called me again about the EXACT SAME position. I told him that I had already spoken with him about the position the day before and that I was not interested. I requested to speak to a supervisor and the gentleman gave me the run around, was being very rude and then eventually hung up on me.

XpertTech is headquartered in Waltham, MA and I tried my hardest to get a hold of a manager at that location and could not. I went to their website and had to call the Chicago office in order to get a hold of anyone who would help. I spoke to a person from the Chicago location and they had a manager call me back. I told them about the gentleman who was rude to me on the phone and that they hung up on me. They expressed they were deeply sorry and would handle the employee per company policies.

Over the last 2 weeks I have been getting HASSLED by the people from this company. I am getting on average about 3 phone calls a day and 2 emails a day all from different people within the company. I actually got an email yesterday from the same gentleman who was really rude to me and hung up on me.

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So over the last few days I have been looking on Craigslist to see what is out there for PHP developer positions. Today I found something that made me laugh… only a little.

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Over the last few years I have been getting more and more into riding motorcycles. They are quite a lot of fun to zip around on in the nice weather. Last year I went out and bought a pair of ScalaRider Pro’s which allow me to attach it to my helmet and have Bluetooth connectivity so that I can make and receive calls all by pressing one button and using my voice to dial. Having a setup like this is amazing, I no longer have to pull off the road and take off my helmet and gloves to find out who is calling me. I can press one button and say hello and carry on with my ride.

I am also an avid Google Voice user. I have been using it for the last few years and love the service they provide. I will not be going into all of the details of what Google Voice has to offer but will touch on the features I found need improvement.

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For a while now I have been debating on getting the Premium Subscription to the COD Elite service. I went out last night and picked up a membership at Gamestop and came home to set it up. This morning the new maps dropped and I immediately installed them to try them out. I played a few rounds on them and then handed the controller over to the kid so he could play. About 5 minutes later he was calling me out to the living room as he could not figure out how to get the new maps to play.

I took the controller and tried to put him into a private match with the new maps but the new maps were not there. When we tried to access them we were told to go buy them from the store. I was getting frustrated so I tried to reach out to Activisions chat support. The first conversation did not go too well because the support representative was not listening or reading what the problem was.

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Over the last week I was in the midst of transferring my domain names from Godaddy to NameCheap.

Why the change you may ask? Rather than explain it all I will simply say I do not agree with SOPA and GoDaddy publicly announced they were for SOPA. Now since then GoDaddy retracted the statement but it’s too late in my eyes. I cannot continue to give money to an IT company which can support such a thing. Now that everyone is transferring domains GoDaddy is getting worried and has they have retracted the support.

Need more info on SOPA and GoDaddy?

I have been using Fuelly.com for a while now to track my gas mileage on my motorcycle. Every-time I fill-up my tank I send an SMS to Fuelly with the odometer reading, the price per gallon and how many gallons I put into the bike.

A sample SMS message that I send looks like this

h 2799 4.099 3.06

I prefix the message with the letter I have assigned to the vehicle in Fuelly so that it knows which vehicle to apply the fuel-up to. This is very handy since Fuelly does all the calculations and shows my history for gas mileage. However I was looking for a way to get the data from Fuelly to display on my site. Currently even with the demand high Fuelly does not have the proper resources to develop and support an API at this time. I sat down over the last week and began working on a library of Fuelly classes (Fuelly-0.2-alpha) that could be used to fetch your data from the site. Currently it requires that you provide a valid Fuelly username and password to fetch data but in the future I plan to remove this dependency. In the future when you use this library to reach out to Fuelly if you do not pass a valid user object it will fetch only the “public” data that it can. If you pass it a valid authenticated user object then it will also grab data which only you can see when you log-in.
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I have been meaning to write about this since last Easter but the product was kicking around my house and forgotten about for a while. The other day I stumbled upon it and thought I would bring it into work and share it with my co-workers. Everyone thought it was funny and an epic failure.

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A few weeks ago I bought myself a Bluetooth headset for my motorcycle helmet. I figured now that I have speakers in my helmet it was time to check out the navigation options for my Android phone. The first application I found was the built in Navigation application and while it works great I wanted to see what other options I had. I did some searching and found a community driven navigation project named Waze. I have been using Waze for the last few weeks to get an idea how the system works and just how well it would work for me.

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You will not find a deal like this too often. It was posted on the NESR forums which is how I found it. For the next 5 days
you can get the MSF Riding Course for $150 by visiting this site.

The course is held at Cycles128 in Beverly, MA.

Generally the course is $295 so if I were you I would jump on this deal like I did. When you pass the course you will get your Motorcycle License which will remove all of the riding restrictions permit riders have. Not only that but you will also get a discount on your insurance.

One thing you might not know.. From the insurance companies perspective your riding experience STARTS to build up when you have your license. You could ride your permit for 10 years the insurance company will not count those 10 years of experience.

GET YOURS NOW!