Check out the Upcoming Event. Sign up sooner than later, as of this writing there were only about 20 slots left!

I’ll be talking about how I’ve used jQuery in some of my development projects and some tricks and best practices I’ve picked up along the way. I’ll also be talking about degradation, progressive enhancement and (time permitting) discuss how jQuery’s Plugin architecture lets small teams do a lot with little.

Update

The talk was a great success and I had a great time. I’ve posted my slides: jQuery Best Practices. Much thanks goes to the Betahouse for hosting the Refresh Boston event.

As well as the accompanying demos on Progressive Enhancement:

• jQuery Rating
• Toggle-able Forms

My Situation

I live with my girlfriend in a brownstone near Cleveland Circle in Brighton. She recently got into an MBS Program at Tufts Medical School. We are looking to relocate for these reasons:

1. So she can have an easy commute to school.
2. We’re tired of our permanently dirty apartment. (It’s old, small, and shitty)
3. We’ve outgrown living amongst loud college kids.
4. We just need more space.

A Computer Nerds Approach

I didn’t really know exactly where to start looking. It really came down to location, location, location. We had a couple of prerequisites:

1. We didn’t want to live in a small, old place again.
2. We didn’t have a very large rental budget, one of us is after all going to be a full time student.
3. We need a 2 bedroom, no if-ands-or-buts. Both for my home office (I work from home everyday) and so Ashley can have space to do her school work.
4. 2 bathrooms would be ideal. Anyone that’s ever shared a bathroom with a girl knows this!
5. Safety, I don’t want to have to worry about her walking home from the train at night.
6. We need T access.
7. Hoping to avoid a 9/1 move-in at all costs.
8. Hiring movers (it suuuuuuucked to move into the 3rd floor on 9/1 without movers, never again).
9. Parking for my car.
10. Ideally we’d get a modern apartment. (the opposite of old and dirty)

Most of all you have to know what you want. Make sure you’re very specific, have an ideal picture of what you want and a less ideal one that you would settle for as a backup.

Where

Ashley needs T access for school. Namely Orange Line access to the New England Medical Center Station stop.

I used a couple of handy tools to figure out where we could live:

Google Earth

This was a great tool to figure out the where. I needed easy access to the T stop, using Google Earth while overlaying

Layers » Places of Interest » Transportation » Subway,Rail,Tram + Bus

• Service Nearby - MBTA Transport Availability
• Trip Planner - To Calculate Commutes

My focus was on the T and Ashley’s commute. Then, I could find apartments surrounding T stops. I got together a list of likely candidates:

Red Line

• Porter Square
• Harvard Square
• Central Square
• Kendall Square
• Broadway Station
• Andrew Square

Green Line

• Reservoir
• Beaconsfield
• Brookline Hills
• Brookline Village
• Longwood

Orange Line

• Sullivan Square Station
• Wellington Station
• Malden Center Station

Living near any of these T stops would give her about a 1/2 hr commute or less. Luckily most of the train lines converge and intersect close to the NE Medical Center stop (pic).

Use Craigslist and PWN it

Our lease is up 9/1 so we started hunting in May - this turned out to be a bit too early. Hardly anything on Craigslist of quality was available for that move-in date. I also wanted to avoid moving on 9/1 because it’s the absolute worst day to move in Boston. Often renters have to give at least 60 days notice that they will not renew their lease. I didn’t start to see quality apts for 9/1 till after the July 4th weekend.

I looked at alternates like oodle, and kahoots but CraigsList was the best game in town.

The best strategy is to use all the tools available so you won’t miss any opportunities of finding a great place.

Use Craigslist RSS Feeds + NetNewsWire (or some RSS reader derivative)

1. Download NetNewsWire. It’s Free.
2. Do a search on craigslist. At the bottom you’ll see an RSS link.
3. Load it into NetNewsWire, let your apartments come to you.
4. I decided on a couple of very specific metrics
   • 2 Bedrooms, Minimum 1300 (no dumps), Maximum 1600, Must Have A Picture, Search
   • Sample Link: http://boston.craigslist.org/search/aap/gbs?bedrooms=2&maxAsk=1600&minAsk=1300&query=porter%20square&hasPic=1&format=rss
   • For each “query” I chose all of the previous T stops that I wanted to be located near. query=porter%20square, query=wellington, etc.
   • Edit each query string and load them up in NetNewsWire, be sure to replace spaces, ” “, with the url encoded form, “%20″.
5. The Net Is Cast
6. Live in NetNewsWire until you find apartments worth following up on, mark those posts as flagged.
7. Call realtors in batch once a day from your flagged posts.
8. Schedule ongoing appointments. I used Google Calendar with Text Message Reminders to keep things organized.

Mash it up with cribq, HousingMaps, listpic

Sage Advice

• Only look at places with pictures, if it sounds good but doesn’t have one, request one. Don’t waste your time and the realtors’ otherwise.
• Go with your gut. If your alarms are going off even if it seems like a great deal just back away.
• Make sure you won’t get gouged on heat. Look at how the apartment is heated. Oil is bad, electric or gas is better. H/HW means heat and hot water are included, double bonus. There’s no reason to freeze your butt off during the winter because your heating bill is $400/mo. Avoid this mistake.
• Ask about laundry facilities.
• If a map location on Craigslist isn’t given, ask for the address. If they won’t tell you, ask for the cross street. Searching “Strathmore Rd at Chestnut Hill Ave Brighton, MA” on Google Maps will give you the cross street near my Brighton Apt.

Resources

• Google Maps - check the street view before going to see a place to make sure it’s a quality neighborhood.
• Walkscore - whats around the area?
• Find a good realtor on Yelp. Reviews are your friend.
• Safety - IncidentLog, SpotCrime
• Hack Attack Apartment Hunting 101

Results

I ended up only going to see 3 different places. I got lucky, but I also was very specific in what I was looking for and I saw hundreds of places (online) in the process. The few I followed up with had a very good chance of being the place I wanted because it met all of my prerequisites. We ended up finding a great place right on the Orange Line that met our requirements. Since the apartment has no current tenant we set a move-in date of 8/15, avoiding the 9/1 hassle which also made it much easier to find movers. Hopefully once we’re moved in I will be able to post a followup on Moving Day and The New Place.

I’ve been with Sprint since 2005, before that I had Nextel (which was later bought by Sprint). We got the phones for a now extinct development company I ran with my buddy Dan.

On 7/11/08 during the iPhone craziness I logged onto my Sprint account and saw you could check your end date. I’ve been lusting for an iPhone for quite some time and the 3G release broke the metaphorical camel’s back. Here’s a transcript of my session with Sprint on 7/11 for your entertainment.

If you read that transcript you would think that the issue was resolved and they rolled back my service so I wasn’t required to keep my contract until 12/23/2008 right? You’d be mistaken.

Today I had a followup conversation, just to validate my success getting my plan rolled back. What I learned was this: THEY CANCELED MY ACCOUNT effective 8/1/2008. Hole in one Sprint.

I’m very frustrated I lost the text conversation from today because I tried to view the frame source and Sprint knocked me out. I was speaking to a friendly fellow named "Oliver". Note: a text based online support allows for easy outsourcing. There were some good quotes like:

Oliver:

you line is cancelled. did you pay the $200 cancellation fee?

Me:

I NEVER SAID TO CANCEL MY ACCOUNT

And when I said "hell no" I got this prompt reply:

To ensure that we have a productive chat session, I ask that you please refrain from using profane/vulgar language during our chat. Thank you in advance.

You’d think I said something like "Suck My Ass Sprint" which upon reflection, might not have been such a bad idea.

Needless to say my tenure as a Sprint Customer is coming to a close. Unfortunately Sprint-Really-Sucks.com was already taken. I might’ve been able to capitalize on Sprints cesspool service for profit, maybe I still will!

Maybe I should look into this lawsuit.

I’ll change my strategy and try again, this time following this great advice.

UPDATE 7/20

I was so livid with Sprint on Friday (7/18) that I got an iPhone that very day, it’s badass. I used this service to check availability. The whole process of buying the phone (16GB Black), transferring my number, and taking calls took a total of 15 minutes. A far cry of the trials and frustrations I heard from people who waited in line and got it on 7/11. This phone kicks ass. I’m still figuring out my way around it, but as of right now I’m very happy I jumped ship.

IN OTHER NEWS

My old phone is up on eBay the sale of which should put a good dent in my cancellation fee from Sprint. Send the link to someone you hate that has Sprint.

UPDATE 7/28

My HTC Mogul sold on eBay Saturday. The final price was $183.90 + $15.95 shipping = $199.85. Total shipping costs were $12.10 to ship via USPS which leaves me with $187.75 total for resale of my HTC Mogul phone.

The Sprint cancellation fee is $200. So it essentially cost me $12.25 to up and leave Sprint. For all the headaches and stress they caused they should be paying me to leave them in my opinion.

Another thing that made it so much easier on the wallet was that my company is paying for my new iPhone. I love my job. All is well that ends well.

picture courtesy of bripblap.com

So I have a confession to make, I love delicious, but I’m lousy at tagging bookmarks. I have a horrible memory so in my travels (and I delicious links a lot) I find myself wanting to tag a bookmark with as many keywords as possible on some off chance I don’t know what to search on to dig up the particular bookmark I’m trying to retrieve. I end up manually toggling every popular tag that is shown on a given post. It’s too time consuming for me.

I’ve been working with jQuery and bookmarklets a lot lately so I had the idea of leveraging the two to create my own LazyTagger bookmarklet for Del.icio.us.

The LazyTagger process is simple

1. You must have the Del.icio.us ‘post’ bookmarklet installed.
2. Drag the LazyTagger bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks toolbar
   
3. Copy and paste this code into the ‘location’ of your newly created bookmark. (has to be done to avoid character limit on browsers)
   javascript:var%20s=document.createElement(’script’);s.setAttribute(’src’,%20′http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js’);document.body.appendChild(s);s.onload=function(){if($(”#poptags”).size()){$(”#poptags%20a.tag”).each(function(){swap($(this).text());});}$(window).keydown(function(event){switch%20(event.keyCode)%20{case%2016:$(”input#private”).click();break;case%200:$(”input#tags”).focus();return%20false;break;}});};void(s);
4. ‘post to delicious’ just like you normally would
5. When you’re at delicious, click the LazyTagger bookmarklet
6. All of the popular tags will be selected automatically. Laziness rocks.
7. After all of the popular tags are toggled the focus will be placed on the tags input so you can begin typing any other tags you deem necessary.
8. You can also press shift to toggle privacy

That’s LazyTagger. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks and I can honestly say I don’t think I could go back. Feedback appreciated.

Which lets me know what tunes I burnt out on last year.

It’s a vicious cycle.

The trend is over with but I couldn’t help to submit this picture this morning when I stumbled across it in iPhoto.

In reality I don’t have a single point of failure at all because I’m leveraging web services by not putting all of my eggs in one basket. However, if my laptop did have a serious problem I’d have to deal with an annoying situation. If for instance my cat spilt a glass of water on the computer (happened to my sister just last week), I’d be out of commission for a few days, but I would still be able to get back on my feet relatively easily. For these reasons I do have a single point of failure, but one I’m comfortable with.

Since June of 2006 I’ve used my MacBook Pro at all of my recent 9-5’s as well as personal use and I have yet to have a hardware failure. In fact truth be told I rarely even turn it off.
knock on wood again

I’d say most savvy netizens have similar setups. Although it can’t hurt to share mine.

Online Applications I Use

• Gmail in favor of Mail
• Google Calendar in favor of iCal
• Google Docs in addition to Numbers and Pages
• Subversion Repositories for Code Projects
• Serial #’s Labeled:Serial in Gmail (or any other important info worth labeling)
• Del.ici.ous for Bookmarks
• Flickr for Pictures

and many more

• MP3 Library on a LaCie external drive + DVD Backups
• iPhoto Library on external drive + DVD Backups

I also use SuperDuper! for nightly bootable backups. Time Machine was putting a strain on my system and if it ain’t broke - don’t fix it.
One thing I would like to move completely online are my finances. I do the usual online banking, but I use Quicken on my Mac for personal finances. Quicken sucks, especially on the mac. Hopefully one of these days there will be a decent web app to replace it. I’ve played around with Mint and Wesabe but they’re just not there and I don’t feel entirely safe with that type of personal information in-the-cloud yet.

Right now we’re at a half-way point between pre-internet-personal-hardware-entrapment and post-personal-hardware-cloud-processing-greatness. How long do you think it will be? I say 10 years before I’m on an Apple Thin client as a primary computer. That will be sweet.

SQL Server 2000 by MICRO$OFT is the best SQL application I have ever used.

Select query text -> run (ctrl+enter) -> results. nothing out there does this simple behavior.

For everything I love about OSX I do miss a couple of apps since I jumped ship in June of ‘06. A decent SQL application is right up there at the top.

The Candidates

Navicat

 I use Navicat on a daily basis but it drives me IN SANE. All I want is a simple application for running queries that’s easy to navigate and has plenty of hotkeys baked in so I can bounce around with ease and speed. Navicat fails miserably at this. I end up with 5 windows open just to do simple stuff, there’s not enough distinction between the behavior of browsing tables or writing queries. It’s a painful, verbose, hassle. Today I was so pumped I found a couple hotkeys that would save me a lot of time only to find out they were useless because they didn’t put focus on a textarea that would be painfully obvious to anyone actually using the program. Multiple queries require multiple windows and it all ends up being a CF in the end. I’m looking to replace Navicat pronto.

Query Browser

Query Browser could be awesome, but it comes up short. Again a lack of hot keys and cursor focus make using it a pain. Frequent crashes don’t help (it crashed on me twice while writing this). My biggest peeve by far is how Query Browser deals with errors. You end up getting this tiny sliver of an area dedicated to errors. If you get a couple in a row they all stack and become unreadable and you can’t even resize the errors window space OR clear them out. I do like how Query Browser makes use of tabs for multiple queries instead of creating a new window each time (take note Navicat).

phpMyAdmin

I know other mac users who just use phpMyAdmin for all their SQL needs. I hate the lag of a web interface for something that is screaming for an application interface. Again, phpMyAdmin is sans hotkeys. That’s a deal breaker.

Dismay

If anyone can enlightened me please speak up. I’ve looked near and far and this is the only list of apps I have found and I assume it’s pretty comprehensive. I tried a couple of these applications out and found that I was already using the best available out there.

I’m very close to just retreating back to the basics.

I wish I blogged more often but it’s hard to find the time to do it. The bottleneck for me was creating and editing posts via WordPress’ backend. Loading, refreshing, uploading pictures, and double-checking the blog post to make sure everything was lined up correctly, etc. The time I would spend writing a post was compounded by the back and forth between the front and backend until I found MarsEdit.

MarsEdit to the Rescue

Simply put MarsEdit is an OSX application that interfaces with the Wordpress backend of the blog via XML-RPC. MarsEdit allows me to edit/post/upload images with ease. If I wrote for multiple blogs (I don’t yet), then I could do it all from within MarsEdit and life would be that much easier. Now I can post/edit/upload much faster. The next step to making things REALLY fly is my use of Markdown.

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). daringfireball

Essentially Markdown is shorthand HTML that makes it faster bang out blog posts.

If you’re blogging or thinking about blogging I highly recommend adding these tools to your repertoire.

You’ll notice since I implemented these tools back in the beginning of March there has been a serious uptick in the frequency of posting here at somedirection. A large part of that is leveraging MarsEdit+Markdown in this blog. There’s also another factor and I’ll be writing about it shortly.

Resources

• MarsEdit
• I use the WordPress Markdown Plugin to format the pseudo markup.
• Markdown CheatSheet PDF

This post was written in Markdown, you can view the syntax here.