20071128_0636, originally uploaded by david parmet.
You can read Allen Stern’s write up here and Michael Galpert’s here. The rest of my photos are here. Kudos to Charlie, Eran, etc., etc. for a great event.
Tonight is MatchUp Camp:
an open-space networking event where everyone you meet is a potential match for your talent or idea.
If you are in New York and thinking about working at a start-up, or have a start-up and are looking for talent, this is the place to be.
Details.
Since this seems to be turning into a meme… Here are the tools I use to get me through the day:
- Apple MacBook Pro - What can I say? Without it I’d be lost amidst the stormy seas of the Interwebs. Not to mention I can get online anywhere and I’m working. Or playing.
- Nikon D80 – This is the digital camera that convinced me that digital could be as good and as satisfying as traditional dark room work. A big huge thank you to Tom and the rest of the team at MWW who put this puppy in my hands and helped me out when things went wonky. The “Picture This” outreach was a blogger program done right. Now about the D300….
- Adobe Photoshop / Bridge CS3 – Like Josh, I’ve made the jump to working purely in RAW format. Bridge and Photoshop make the workflow issues easy. I’m still trying to figure out how Aperture works into all of this – frankly I like it’s controls better than Lightroom. But we’ll see how it all goes.
- WordPress – The only blogging platform that matters.
- Vonage – Still the easiest to set up and operate. I still don’t understand why Verizon charges my wife so much to call her friend in France. Maybe they haven’t heard…
- FlipCam – I have to admit, it really belongs to the Boy Genius but I love this little guy.
- Sangean Super 909 / Radio Shack DS 398 – As modified by the good folks at Radio Labs. There’s still a lot to listen to on the ShortWave bands and this radio will pull it all in. Add the SONY AN-LP1 portable antenna (only available in Japan) and you are good for listening to the World.
- Timbuk2 Blogger Bag - Yes. I know what I said long ago. But this bag just rocks. It fits pretty much everything I need to get my working on and with room to spare. And it fits under the seat on airplanes.
OK. Enough gadget lust for today. What’s in your bag?
I’ve been thinking a great deal about local issues and information. How they intersect and how local governments share and distribute information.
In our Town, most of the records and forms you would need to do just about anything are held tightly in paper form at the Town House. Not because of any fear of getting anything out but because that’s how things are done and to change involves not only cost but time. Imagine taking 100+ years of property records and digitizing them. Even in a town of less than 5,000 the cost is unimaginable.
The problem for many small communities like Pound Ridge is that as more and more people move here from New York City and the lower suburbs, they demand more and more of the services they’ve grown used to in their previous home towns. They want activities for their pre-school aged children, a place for their teenagers to go after school, a conveniently scheduled yoga class at the library and they want it all without having to increase taxes.
And apart from all the physical and programatic needs, they want information from the Town government. If they want to expand their house they need to get the original site survey and plans from the Town House and fill out an application for a building permit. The permit application is online but the site surveys and plans are held in files, some so old they risk falling apart to the touch.
Another story: last year I had to get duplicate copies of our children’s birth certificates. I went to the Town Hall of the Town they were born in, walked up two flights of stairs to a dusty old room with “Official Records” stamped on the door. There, inside of two metal cabinets, were all the records of every birth and death in history of the Town of Sleepy Hollow, New York. All handwritten in giant ledger books.
Imagine the consequences of a fire. Imagine the possibilities of identity theft. Imagine the cost to safeguard and then digitize all those records so they can be examined, crossed referenced and stored for perpetuity.
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