Of Twitter, Tweets, and WichiTweeps
by admin on Jan.05, 2009, under Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr
Recently I’ve been hit by a big wave of nostalgia. The source of that nostalgia is Twitter and Tweetups, and in particular the WichiTweeps group. It reminds me a lot of days I thought were gone - the old BBS era.
I got into BBS’s back in the day when online communication wasn’t pervasive yet. Internet access to the home wasn’t even a thought yet - there were only 10,000 hosts on the Internet back in 1987, and not a single one of them hosted a website. Tim Berners Lee hadn’t developed “The World Wide Web” yet. And being connected to another computer via a modem was a novelty at best for most people. And yes - at the tender age of 15 I was starting to get connected to BBS’es via my Amiga. I’ve always been a geek. Now I’m just an old geek with stories like “back in my day, we connected to ONE other computer at 1200 baud! And we liked it! Now you damned kids get off my lawn!”
New And Improved - Now With Podcasting! My Blog returns
by admin on Jan.02, 2009, under Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr
Midnight Ryder’s Blog has been abused and ignored for too long now. One of my New Years resolutions is to start updating this at least every two weeks. Not only am I going to update it, I’ve decided to throw my hat into the podcasting ring - every update will have an associated podcast with it. Or at least that’s the plan at the moment. If I don’t like the podcasting quality, or just plain get bored with it, I might quit doing it. I won’t know until I’ve tried it for a while.
Apple Understands Computers. Apple Doesn’t Understand Developers.
by admin on Oct.02, 2008, under Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr
Apple understands a great many things. Apple understands hardware, Operating Systems, Interfaces, and how to make Hardware / Software sexy. I mean, to the point of nearly being a cult sexy.
I am a huge Apple fan. I’m writing this on my customized MacMini (which I should throw some pics up of someday - it’s a portable with a 20″ screen), and make part of my posts on here on my iPhone (and all my Tweets are done on the iPhone - I never bother loading the webpage anymore.)
Apple even understands developer tools. XCode rocks (in my opinion. Some people’s opinion is different, but ya know this my blog, so my opinion is the one that counts. So there! ;-) What Apple doesn’t understand is developers.
The iPhone shipped as a locked down device - you couldn’t use it on other networks, and you couldn’t add your own software. Developers quickly created the Jailbreak techniques to load your own software on ‘em. Petitions were set up to call for Apple to open up the iPhone for development. Apple finally released the App Store, which allows you to purchase software and load it on the iPhone.
Great! Developers can use XCode to develop for the iPhone. Except… that pesky Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) that says, well… the first rule of iPhone Development is don’t talk about iPhone Development. This resulted in at least one book being canceled on developing iPhone applications (and I’m sure more than one was probably put on hold), since developers couldn’t say anything about the internals.
Then that changed finally…
The Story Of A Failed Business From Beginning To End
by admin on Sep.29, 2008, under Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr
You hear about businesses closing all the time, and usually you get a little recap at the end about what happened from some outside or low level person at the company.
Gamer Zone was one of the businesses I was involved in - starting out as a PR guy and eventually being the captain of the sinking ship. It happened nearly two years ago, but, I felt it was time to sit down and tell the story, in all it’s glory. It’s fun, sad, pathetic, and educational all at the same time. There’s a hell of a lot of business lessons to be learned from someone else’s failures.
New episodes are released once a week (I’ve written episodes well ahead of time, incase I have a time crunch for some reason. There’s four waiting to be published every Monday morning, and since the story flows very easily for me, I’ll probably be 6 to 8 posts ahead each week ;-)
