I’m very excited, our man Bret Morgan from Bands On a Budget just sent us a pic modeling our new t-shirt:

I know it’s not as design-intense as those South-East-Asian Zetetic threads (I never did figure out how to order from them), but I’m stoked. We just ordered these to have for friends and fam, but if you’ve got to have one, hit us up.

I spend quite a bit of time in front of a screen all day hacking away, so I love to put on WNYC in the mornings, sip my pot of coffee and get to work.

Lately, however, I’ve taken to following more and more podcasts. This morning, on the walk from Greenpoint to Williamsburg Coworking I found myself listening to Stack Overflow, which is getting more and more entertaining as the weeks go by. The guest on the current episode is Damien Katz of Couch DB fame, who we saw give an incredibly inspiring talk at Ruby Fringe last year. The conversation ranges from fascinating computer science to some lively anecdotes about IBM (“full of douchebags”), Erlang, and Lotus, which keeps re-appearing in tech conversations lately. I’m only 40 minutes in, and it’s been fascinating.

Yes, I know I’m a nerd. But if you’re in the business, this is pretty interesting stuff. And we are totally in the business.

Another ‘cast that I look forward to every week is Dan Grigsby’s Mobile Orchard Podcast, focusing on iPhone development and the iTunes App Store. Dan keeps the topics very technology focused, but some of my favorite moments are when the guests (who are always iPhone developers) and Dan (a great developer himself) go into the business aspect of things. Few people have such a magnetic focus on market trends and data, and it also frequently turns up in Dan’s writings. Full disclosure – we were interviewed recently for this one.

And then there’s Savage Love, which is not even a little bit tech-related; it’s Dan Savage’s relationship advice column gone wild. Not safe for children, no, but very, very entertaining. This one can get a bit distracting, I’ll admit, but I absolutely cannot help but listen every week, it’s great.

This post is a tad off-topic, but I know some of us share this sphere of interest. I recently got a great write-up for a show my band played in Brooklyn:

There are no airy disco beats, no acoustic jams, and certainly no taking of prisoners as Ben Franklin is a live act that goes for the jugular with every song. Even the borderline kitschy, “Timmeh,” dedicated to our Treasury Secretary Tim Gieger [sic], is a sludge rock tune that sounds like Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Macis if he ever got the rocks removed from his mouth and asked, better yet demanded, “Where are my taxes?!”

Not bad. I didn’t know that we could be described as “neopunk,” and I never would have thought “sludge rock,” but this is not a review to complain about.

Apparently Michael Bay shows us how. Very funny review of the new Transformers movie, via @warrenellis.

As the Future Ruby conference in Toronto draws near, I’m getting more and more excited about the event. Within the last day or two the full list of speakers
has been posted on their site along with summaries of the talks, and it’s eye-popping. They range from the philosophical to the far-out to the highly technical. Programming with DNA modules? What?

def MajorKusanagi
  mixin homo_sapien, cyborg

  add :xray_vision, :therm_optic_camouflage
  suppress :cancer
end

I’m particularly looking forward to experiencing another Giles Bowkett presentation, learning about the Rhodes, Cucumber and Tokyo Cabinet projects from the people behind the tech, and attending another FAILCamp.

We did a lot of chatting with people at Ruby Fringe last year, it’s a good place to put your finger in the air and see which way the winds are blowing. I’ll be curious to see how many of the folks are moving into iPhone and other mobile platform development.

I think there are still a few tickets left — you should come! You don’t need to be a Ruby programmer to dig on a lot of this.