So I just switched the RSS feed for this website over to FeedBurner. If you were subscribed to this site or if you want to subscribe(you know you want to), please either click the subscribe link or click here .

I certainly have no problem with the people at Twitter making money I love the service and if they had some kind of pro account(I don’t know what they could offer in this space), I would more than likely pay for it. So I am really glad to see them slowly rolling out some non-obtrusive monetization on the twitter web interface.

Maybe I am a little behind the times because I don’t tend to use the web interface much, I use ubertwitter on my BlackBerry and Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop on the desktop, but whenever I have some maintenance tasks to do, like cleanup my followers list I head to the web site. I know last month or so twitter launched shirts in conjunction with Threadless which I thought was a great idea and now they are sponsoring the definitions on the twitter timeline page.

I don’t have a problem with this at all, but doesn’t this fly in the face of the comment that was made by @ev(I believe) that they thought that advertising was deemed as an uninteresting way for twitter to monetize? I guess in some cases money talks, if they are going to go this far, I think they should potentially return sponsored results on the search pages, its an easy way to return highly targeted advertisements to the users and ideally provide some value.

As for the interface changes all I have to say is finally! It used to be that looking at followers lists was painful, horribly painful, at least now I can easily(and ajaxy) block followers, or add them, or even message them from the web interface. It is much more responsive now, I don’t know if its actually any faster, I imagine they just queue the tasks up and do them in the background while I am doing other things. That is perfectly fine though, I just need to know things are going to happen, I don’t care about when or how. For example after I block someone , I just want to block them, verify that I actually want to block them and continue modifying other users. The new process allows this, the old one was laborious and it came to the point where I would just leave spammy followers there because it was too annoying to remove them. All in all I will call this a positive change for usability.

One thing I have come to discover is that lately I have a lot of opportunities to do many projects, but I have so little extra time. This is kind of odd to me because time was something I thought I would have in abundance now that I am finished school, this is of the opposite of true.

Seems like things come up like looking for new jobs, going on trips, just general life stuff which make proposed timelines not work. It is also hindering my ability to work with other developers because I cannot devote a consistent amount of time to side projects and it wouldn’t be fair for me to take on projects then have to be away for a considerable amount of time when I would potentially be depended on to get things done.

This has happened to me recently twice with both Josh Gosse with Mobilitea (hopefully I can help him later) and Matt Warren with Twitter Respond (which is currently in development but watch for it soon). So while I am open to the idea of working on side projects(so please feel free to ask me about them) I don’t think I am going to be able to commit to anything until at least the beginning of October.

While I can’t commit to joint projects with anyone currently(I will potentially commit to full-time development jobs in Ottawa if anyone wants to offer me one ) I do have one project that I had the idea for yesterday that I have been working on. I don’t want to announce it yet simply because I haven’t really decided on a name or branding yet, but I should let that be known pretty soon after I acquire a domain for it. What I can say about the project is that it will be written in Django, I intend it to be offered both as free and subscription service and it has to do with web analytics. Besides that, there is not much else I can say except that I hope the initial design work will be done on it soon and I am excited!

Anyone else experience this time crush after making the transition from School to Full-Time Job?

I just saw this site with Internet Explorer for the first time, it actually looks terrible. I am definitely going to have to rethink the theme, expect some changes to come soon.

I have been meaning to blog more lately, I just have been a little delayed from everything that keeps coming up. That being said, Its all has been(and will be) worth it. Last weekend I went with Matthew to Toronto to see NXNE and catch up with Brophy and Chuck(damn them most of these guys for lack of web presence to link to). This weekend I will be heading to Toronto again to see a Blue Jays game and participate in some bachelor party goodness for Matthew then the following Wednesday it is Canada Day, which you have to celebrate, especially when you live in the nations capital and live minutes from Parliament Hill(like me!).

Myself and Nicole have also been trying to find a new place, so that has been keeping us busy, but we have one locked down so we are renting a new place come October, its pretty convenient timing because it allows us to not worry about moving or anything while we are in Hawaii during August.

Needless to say, its been pretty busy, but I do still have one post in the pipe about setting up a BlackBerry Development environment for JDE 4.7. That will be posted tomorrow assuming I have enough time to get it going tonight. I just wanted to drop this update so you don’t think I was forgetting about you 5 people who read this website. If you want to see what I am doing in a little more real time follow me on twitter!

I have been trying out Django a little bit the last few days and I am loving it. I will attribute that in no small part to my love of python, however, getting a test project going with Django was a breeze, using the Models to set up the database and its relations was easy and worked as expected(read intuitive). I would expect this is the type of thing that Ruby on Rails provides, seems like they are very similar in alot of ways, I just think the big thing that compels me to django is that I already have a fairly deep understanding of python and it seems like a logical fit, however, in the future I plan to hammer out some things in rails simply so I can see why everyone is drinking the Ruby Kool-Aid. All in all we can call me a big fan of Django so far. I started a project yesterday and I should have that up and going soon, just something fun that I want to use that people might actually get some use out of.

So I have really been pushing to get some posts going here, but it seems like every time I have the opportunity to get something going something else comes up. I have 2 posts now in the pipe, just need to be edited and then they are good to go. That being said, I messed up my laptop so I had to reinstall windows(again…), and then reinstall everything, set up development environments again, etc. Its been a real pain, which is why everything has been delayed(I still need to fix the threaded commenting in this theme!).

This weekend I am also looking at finishing up a python project I am doing for The Commons at MUN, does anyone have any suggestions for a good editor for python in windows. I could use eclipse, but I’d like to try something a little less bulky. I am leaning towards maybe Gvim or something like that, however, something like Coda for windows would be ideal(I love Coda so much).

If you have any suggestions leave them below in the comments.

So after a long hiatus, mikegrouchy.com is back. I lost all the archives for the old blog through an unfortunate computer incident(formatted my backups! woops!), so comes the unique opportunity for a new beginning, a blank slate if you will.

As of late I have started to learn some ruby on rails as well as develop some blackberry applications while I am not @dayjob . I am told that ruby is kind of similar in ways to both python and Perl, I have a fair amount of programming experience with python and some with Perl so I am hoping its not too difficult to pick up. Either way difficult or not, I have come up with a little project for myself(which I will be keeping under wraps for now) to give me something to work on while learning rails so it should be interesting.

I’m not the most poignant blogger but I am planning on blogging about my adventures on rails(or misadventures), it should be an interesting experience and possibly a way to display to the world how incompetent I can actually be. Needless to say its going to be fun to say the least and I mean how hard could it possibly be?

As for the blackberry application development, I have a little project I am working on with my friend Josh Gosse , its just getting started so I will be keeping that under wraps for now, but as soon as things start too kick off in that respect I would imagine I will be blogging quite a bit about that too(I know, cryptic right? ).

Anyway that’s it for now, but more to come soon, I promise!

Nothing to see here currently, everything is in flux, I am playing around with the logo(what do you think?) and I am trying to get all the layout in order before I start posting full steam. Anyway, if there are any suggestions or anything, leave em! mikegrouchy.com should be back in full swing soon!