Higher Efficiency's Take on Tech
Microsoft Roadshow Returns to Tech Valley
3/5/2010 2:40:51 PM -07:00 • Andrew Badera • Comments
Microsoft Northeast Roadshow

The Microsoft Northeast Roadshow is back in town, this time Friday, March 12th at the Troy Hilton Garden inn. Developer Evangelist Jim O'Neil has a blog post with further details.
Coffee: I prefer to buy 'local,' but ...
3/5/2010 7:33:17 AM -07:00 • Andrew Badera • Comments
I prefer to buy local/do business locally when possible, but almost invariably I order my coffee online from remote (to varying degrees) vendors.

Case in point: I would love to buy my coffee from Uncommon Grounds, an Albany/Saratoga coffee house, roaster, bagel shop venture with two locations. I believe they're about 18 years old. They've recently become fairly social media savvy; I don't know specifically how long they've been online in general, but they seem to have a decent enough online coffee & t-shirt store.

Uncommon Grounds seems to have a strong following in the local community. Having been to the Saratoga location in the distant past, and perhaps once to the Albany location in more recent times, I personally don't have any particular attachment to their physical locations. I don't eat out (or get out, for that matter) often, and when I most urgently need to restock my bean inventory, (during code crunch time) I need it to be as quick and painless as possible, while interrupting my workflow as little as possible as well. This typically leads to online ordering.

When I order coffee, first and foremost I want fresh-as-possible, quality beans of varying roasts that arrive as quickly as possible. Close behind that, I prefer organic, fairtrade, preferably shadetree grown beans. After that it's all about price and customer service.

I just placed my second order with Porto Rico Importing Co. out of NYC, (three hours away) tipped to me by Ed Costello. (thanks again Ed!) I placed an order in February on a Sunday, and it arrived Tuesday morning. The beans were, while maybe not the absolute best I've ever had, pretty darn good. They've been in business some 103 years, their website isn't anything flashy, and as far as I can tell, they're not particularly active when it comes to social media. Their store has much more diverse offerings than coffee and t-shirts however, including filters, syrups and machines.

While I prefer to do business locally, I, currently an independent consultant with irregular income, have a hard time justifying a 44% premium on coffee, a staple that I generally consume 2lbs. of each month. I have to wonder, is it a simple matter of profit margin? Or is it a differential driven by sales volume, or diversity of inventory? 44% is a steep premium for buying local.
All coming together ...
3/1/2010 4:48:22 AM -07:00 • Andrew Badera • Comments
As I approach the start date for a new fulltime role and work to wrap up outstanding consulting obligations, it's been a crazy busy few weeks with not enough sleep, food or fresh air! However, it all seems to be coming together.

A quick snapshot of my morning, the culmination of days of grinding it out:

It's all coming together
  • We got StorageByMail's revamped, Rackspace Cloud-converted site launched.

  • We've been prototyping a creative multi-product stealth-mode SaaS offering for a NYC-area startup. I've been acting in both consulting CTO and lead dev roles, and have had the first chance in a while to work with Java and Tomcat applications commercially.

  • My work continues on a near-beta Twitter business services app; that app is now growing to include LinkedIn and Facebook as well.

  • I continue work on a still-stealth multi-social platform biz app I'm partnered with a great team out of NYC on. (Public beta by mid-March!)

As part of these efforts, in the last three weeks I have:
  • Started using ADO.NET Entities and LINQ to Entities instead of LINQ-to-SQL. Entities seem gosh darn piggish when it comes to RAM consumption -- even when managing repository lifetime in what I understand to be best-practice fashion. I don't recall that issue with LINQ-to-SQL. Generating the model/updating the model from the database is painful when it comes to some relationships that seem to require manual removal every regeneration. I hope Microsoft gets it right in 4.0.

  • Got over my fear of lambda expressions, at least fairly simple ones. I still need to fully grok compiled functions. Baby steps.

  • Realized yet again how much MS ASP.NET AJAX stinks. Obscure and painful to work with.

  • Written a .NET consumer for the Twitter Streaming API. I haven't come across any other full implementations in .NET, though my basic incremental HTTP consumer is modeled after others' examples. I will probably publish this to Google Code soon.

  • Started working with Google Buzz.

  • Written a .NET PubSubHubbub subscriber client and callback handler. This has been published to Google Code.

  • Worked with the new Buzzzy API on top of Google Buzz. Useful API for my needs, but the 250 requests/hour limit is kneecapping.

  • Created my own Google Buzz firehose by crawling 4.2M Google Profile IDs (crawl in-progress now, finally got a nice multi-threaded crawler purring) and subscribing to push notification for all of their Buzz feeds through pubsubhubbub.appspot.com. Unfortunately 4.2M is still not the complete set of profiles, but it's a great start.

Haven't yet had time to catch my breath or catch up on sleep ... but there's light at the end of the tunnel! More launches/betas to come! And more aggravation, learning and ... "opportunities" along the way I'm sure :)