caseyjenks.com

We got a contest going on at IZEA to decorate our desks, with the top 3 winning a prize.
 Help me win!

If I win, I’ll hold a vote to pick a charity for me to donate $100 to.

Here are some pictures:

To vote, go here: http://community.izea.com/blog/2008/07/izeas-cubico–1.html and vote for Tiki Time

Once again,  if I win, I’ll hold a vote to pick a charity for me to donate $100 to.

Many thanks to shifisurfshots.com, who took these awesome photos.

It was a short trip this time, 11 days including our 2 travel days. We stayed at our usual spot, Playa Hermosa, in Costa Rica. We surfed some of the biggest waves we’ve ever surfed this trip, and it never got smaller than overhead. The biggest day we were there was a solid 3-4 ft. overhead to double overhead, with the giant freak sets being a couple feet bigger than double overhead. Here are a couple photos from some of the “average sized” days.

Next trip: Guanacaste region in CR during the winter, or Pavones(the 2nd longest left point break in the world) trip next summer possibly.

So today marks the launch of SocialSpark, the world’s first Social Marketing Network that connects advertisers and bloggers through an online advertising marketplace. Advertisers are able to target blogs based on conversational topics and make cash sponsorship offers to the bloggers who publish them. Bloggers can make money by either placing display advertisements on their blog or by writing sponsored content. The sponsorships offered through the SocialSpark marketplace allow advertisers to build buzz, generate traffic and maximize social media exposure.

I am very proud to have been part of the team working on this (I was hired in October), and it feels great to finally have it released for bloggers & advertisers to use. There have been a lot of long nights & weekends put into this project for all of us, but it was so very worth it and if it wasn’t tough & challenging then it wouldn’t be worth doing.

One of the types of opportunities in the system is Sparks. Sparks are free, non-paid, non-segmented opps, meant to encourage conversation and this post is actually the result of a spark currently in the system to tell what gear we are using

Work:

• 15″ MacBook Pro. I love this thing! Couldn’t imagine doing Rails development on anything else.
• 30″ apple cinema display. I feel SO much more productive on this than my old 21″ CRT that I used to program with at home

Home (custom built desktop):

• Intel 2.13 Ghz Core 2 Duo (Possibly a 3.0 Ghz version of this in the future)
• 2 GB DDR2 RAM
• 24″ Dell Widescreen Ultrasharp Display (new toy, awesome!)
• Asus 8800 GTS 512 MB Video Card
• Sound Blaster X-Fi
• Thermaltake Armor Jr Case
• Logitech 5.1 speakers(awesome)
• 500 GB USB 2.0 External HD(for storing music and backup of important files)

Other Gadgets:

• iPod Nano 8GB - awesome for the gym
• iPhone - goes without saying that it kicks ass
• 42″ Sharp LCD HDTV - through a SICK deal on Black Friday
• Sirius Satellite Radio
• 6′6″ Lost Surfboard - not really a “gadget” but surfing is my other passion.

1. How and why did you transition from being a developer into a venture capitalist?

2. How does your experience as a developer help you with your current career?

3. If you were to go back to programming, would you want to go back to doing the networking research type stuff you did at IBM, or something new?

4. What emerging technology excites you the most?

Update: Dan has posted his response here , on his blog, http://www.floridaventureblog.com . Sparks are awesome!

BarCampOrlando is a community building event which happens twice a year to brings together people from different backgrounds to share and learn from each other. There will be people who know Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, and other technologies coming together for Dev Day, and there will be people who know film, music, photography, graphic design, podcasting, and even other new Media coming together for Media Day.

There is only one rule with BarCamp:

It is strongly recommended that attendees give a demo, a session, or help with one. This is called sharing and we like it.

Don’t be intimidated by this, just think about what you’re passionate about and come give a talk on it. It could be anything… an operating system you use, a language you program with, a website you like, how to pick colors for a website, how to use photoshop, or how to wash your cat:

Your “big win” yesterday, which can hardly be called a win, got you a net gain of 4 delegates. Out of the 370 votes up for grabs yesterday, you got 4 more than Obama.

For comparison, that’s less than half of the net gain of 9 delegates from the District of Columbia alone. It’s also less than the net gain of 8 from Nebraska, or 12 from Washington State. And it’s considerably less than our net gain of 33 delegates from Georgia.

The task for the Clinton campaign yesterday was clear. In order to have a plausible path to the nomination, they needed to score huge delegate victories and cut into Obama’s lead.

They failed.

It’s clear, though, that Senator Clinton wants to continue an increasingly desperate, increasingly negative — and increasingly expensive — campaign to tear Obama down.

But I guess after you’ve lost 12 in a row, any sort of win qualifies as a “comeback”.

In a move that makes a lot of sense, Yahoo has integrated del.icio.us(a social bookmarking tool Yahoo bought out in 2005) into their search results.
While Google’s PageRank is becoming increasingly worthless, this is useful because it lets you see how many other times a particular link has been helpful to other people.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch

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Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

But do a link’s delicious results improve its rankings in the yahoo search engine? In my opinion, they should. An algorithm based engine can only take you so far. The human aspect of delicious-based search results can give more meaningful results.

Google is playing with the idea of implementing digg-type voting into their results, and it will be interesting to see how these 2 ideas match up.

One of my favorite javascript frameworks has a new release, version 1.2.2. I’ve only had the chance to play around with it briefly and only scratched the surface of everything it offers, but I was very impressed.

“You start with 10 lines of jQuery that would have been 20 lines of tedious DOM JavaScript. By the time you are done it’s down to two or three lines and it couldn’t get any shorter unless it read your mind.” - Dave Methvin

The major changes are:

• 300% Speed Improvements to $(DOMElement)
• .ready() Overhaul: Uses Diego Perini’s non-document.write() technique, now wait for CSS to be ready, can now watch for the document ready event via the traditional .bind()
• .bind(”mouseenter”) / .bind(”mouseleave”)
• Complex :not()
• Accepts Headers
• Event API: jQuery.event.special setup teardown handler

You can download it here

So I just picked up a Sharp 42″ 720P HDTV(kick ass black friday deal), but I don’t want to buy a HD-DVD or BluRay DVD player because of the price and ongoing format war(although it looks like BluRay is about to put the nail in the coffin for HDTV). Apple just announced at MacWorld that you can now rent HD movies through the service at $4.99 a pop, or TV shows at $1.99 a pop. So instead of paying $300-$500 for a BluRay player and then driving to BlockBuster and picking out a movie, I can basically buy the AppleTV for $229, hook it up to my wireless network, pick out almost any movie I want and start watching it instantly. In addition to movies, they also offer podcasts, youtube, and photos. Pretty kick ass. Definitely on the wish list. I’m becoming more of an Apple fanboy/nerd every day.

http://www.apple.com/appletv/features.html#movies

It’s like a vortex of suck.