I took the kids Trick or Treating over the weekend. Below are some observations (well, rules really) I came up with afterwards…

• If you are old enough to drive, maybe you shouldn’t be trick or treating.
• If you have to tell the person you are talking to on your Motorola RAZR to “Hold on” so you can say “Trick or Treat”, maybe you shouldn’t be trick or treating.
• If you need to pull a wagon with 2 six packs of beer in it, maybe you shouldn’t take your kid trick or treating.
• If you are not wearing anything that is recognizable as a costume, maybe you shouldn’t be trick or treating.
• If you are going to complain about the candy you get 2 seconds after you get it, you don’t deserve any candy.
• If you are a female below the age of 21, you should have your parents approve your costume.

Besides all that, we had a blast. Most people have some common sense which helps them navigate Trick or Treating, so I really can’t complain too much.

I love the people who get so into it, they recruit every member of their family to be part of the show on the front lawn, either working the elaborate set, or dressing up like a maniac, or pretending to be a live pumpkin head… Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. There’s no baggage involved, it’s pretty much just about fun.

Anyone interested in attending the Chicago Perl Hackathon happening Nov. 10th/11th, 2006?

I’d be willing to drive from Milwaukee. I’m not sure I’d spend the night, but I’ve got Saturday totally open and would at least spend the day there…

Below is the illustration for my “Web 2.0″ Halloween costume idea…

Besides the rounded corners, tags, and Ajax, the whole damn thing is social, since you’re expected to interface with other people while wearing it, and you can crowdsource things like acquiring candy/drinks/food to the people around you.

Les liked my idea from 2 years ago, so I thought I’d toss this one out for the web nerds…

As usual, I’ve released this under the “Give me some candy!” license…

I finally got around to testing out Songbird…

First impressions? It’s cool. It’s usable. It’s still in development, but I love the concept. It even says “Now with video hack!” which you can see the results of in the image above, where I visited my videoblog at tinkernet.org.

Songbird (the application, and the idea behind it) is cool. I see potential for this thing. As Apple & iTunes seem to take away our rights with each new release, I see Songbird opening things up more and more with each release. When it comes to consuming media, that’s what I’m all about.

Emma was playing an online game, and she was telling me how much it would cost to furnish her house, and how much it cost for a couch, a rug, etc. and finally she say “Hey, I earned $1000 but I didn’t get the money!” to which I had to reply “What are you, a freelancer?”

Har har har…

My brother is funny…

I’ve seen at least a few IM status messages that say something like “Sorry, I ran out for a bit!” which I’m guessing is a default for some client out there, but I noticed my brother’s status message today:

Nice one… (And yes, he is a computer nerd…)

I’ve been using iChat lately, but I’m still not convinced I like it…

I was a long time user of Fire, until I switched to Adium, which I still really like, so why mess with iChat? Video…

Yup, I’ve been toying with video chat, and since Adium can’t do that, iChat is what I’ve been using, and it works great for video, but as an IM client, it is a bit lacking…

iChat doesn’t do Yahoo! or MSN Messenger (I don’t use MSN, but some people do) but it does do Jabber/XMPP and handles Bonjour connections, which is nice.

You can enhance iChat a bit with Chax, and I’ve also added growliChat as well. They help a bit, but for a Mac OS X client, I still like Adium, but the chances of Adium doing video any time soon are pretty damn slim.

We’ve been discussing whether or not the Milwaukee Web Design Meetup should continue to use Meetup.com or venture off onto our own…

I’m convinced we could replace the web tools that Meetup provides, the main issue in my mind is if people will be able to find us, since we won’t really be a “Meetup” group any more. I think with the power of the web (and blogs!) we can do it.

We’ll be meeting in November at Z2 Marketing + Design and I’m hoping at that point we can make a decision about it. If you’ve got comments about this, discuss it at Meetup.com or feel free to leave a comment here…

OpenLaszlo… Finally, a legitimate use for Tomcat…

I was just yesterday I talked about my Flash issues, and later that night at the October Milwaukee Web Design Meetup our pal Justin did a demo of OpenLaszlo.

I had heard of OpenLaszlo before, but didn’t quite get what it was. Luckily a quick demo and a few questions was all it took to see that it could be a useful tool.

By the way, the October Meetup was at C2, but the November Meetup will be at Z2. (How’s that for confusing?)

One of the coolest things that happened at BarCampMilwaukee was that, during the introductions, Dustin Dupree said he wasn’t leading any sessions, but if anyone wanted to know about Flash, they should ask him. Someone yelled out “Lead a session!” and sure enough, a session on Flash happened later, led by Dustin. I’m glad that Dustin felt like embracing the idea of “you are an expert at your own experience” and sharing what he knows about Flash. To me, this is the spirit of BarCamp, and I was glad to see it happen.

I was sorry I missed that session (Scott seemed to enjoy it) because people keep telling me that there are open-source tools for Flash, but every time I dig through osflash.org I just get confused and can’t seem to find any sort of Mac OS X development tools that look appealing to me.

Remember Blogger? It was a side project of Pyra Labs, whose real project was Pyra.

From what I understand, twitter is a side project of the folks behind Odeo…

So is twitter the next Blogger?

I know Ruby on Rails is all the rage, but…

Hurm…

Cory Zimmerman of Z2 Marketing + Design presented a session at BarCampMilwaukee titled “How to not think and succeed - Starting and running a firm.”

I thought the basic idea was somewhat similar to the 37Signals idea of "Getting Real", where you can’t let planning and over-thinking get in the way of actually doing something. I’ve been involved in businesses before where grand schemes were discussed over and over and never acted upon. It’s the whole “ideas are useless, execution matters” thing.

From what I’ve seen, Cory and his partner Deb have made Z2 successful by doing the right amount of planning, just enough to keep from flying by the seat of their pants, and then executing on their ideas. Yes, they’ve dealt with failure, but Cory didn’t think it was due to a lack of thinking or planning.

I’ve tried to adopt similar ideas for 2XL Networks, focusing more on doing and less on thinking, or over-thinking, as it were. Maybe a good deal of this is based on previous experience, but if that is the case, then people starting out might do well to focus on doing as well, to actually gain that experience…

Hey, I’ve got a joke for you!

Q: What do you call a future Ruby programmer?

A: A Java programmer!

(Check back in a year and see how this joke has aged…)

I lead the Share Your Gadgets session at BarCampMilwaukee, where geeks gathered to gab about gadgets…

It went very well, but like many sessions, it seemed too short. We spent about an hour, but it could have easily gone twice as long. I talked a bit about my PIX Sports device, which is cool, but not quite cool enough. I described how it sort of required morse code to program it to display something, and while the geek factor on that is high, the usability is a bit low. The group was surprised you couldn’t just plug it into a USB port to program it. That would definitely be a nice addition (as long as it didn’t require some lame Windows-only software.) I also mentioned how it had no on/off switch and to turn if off you have to remove the batteries. Someone thought that making it use USB for charging would be a good idea, and it would. So this is a gadget that is cool, but the 2.0 version could be so much cooler.

We also saw and discussed a number of phones and software apps run on them, a Psion organizer circa 1992, and an AlphaSmart Dana Wireless system. This is definitely one session that I wish could have run twice as long. (In fact, I could have went for hours discussing gadget UI’s, usability, and connectivity.) Ah, well, there’s always next BarCamp…