Say that three times fast.

I had been wanting to check out the new “Coworking” space, Cospace,  here in North Austin (Eryn, Kevin and I have decided that they are in North Austin, which I am sure many of people will agree, vs saying they are in Central Austin, or for those few ‘folks up der in Leander’, who might feel like this area is in Downtown Austin, to which, well they are WRONG.)

Anyway, due to a series of odd events, Eryn, Kevin and I ended up here at Cospace. Coworking is a new concept to most, I was introduced to it by the good folks that run Conjunctured, another Coworking space here in Austin.

Basically, the thing is there are plenty of places for freelancers to work, not many of them are very conducive to working and most lack the feel of working with people, because even the most anti-social of us are still, well social creatures, we just hate being social, but eventually miss people.

So the idea is to get folks out of coffee shops and out of their home offices and into a shared environment, where they will be able to have sort of ‘normal’ work environment and be with people, yet without ‘working for da man’.

I know quite a few freelancers that are always looking for a coffee shop that is conducive to work on projects, unfortunately I would say the majority of them are not remotely conducive. I most definitely recommend a Coworking facility, and given that it is closer to my own home I would say that Cospace is a great place.

I neglected to take any photos of Eryn and Kevin (and I ) working here, ummm, too busy working I guess. But I think the general feel was that the space was good, Kevin recommended that they maybe have some mouse-pads to loan out, or even add them to the vending machine that was joked about when we first arrived.

Speaking of arrival, the reason we ended up here was that our real office (Jaduka/NetworkIP) was experiencing bad smells, not the kind that one would expect after say egg salad sandwiches or burritos for lunch, but more of the kind of bad smell that makes you wonder if you are living in New Jersey, eg chemicals. Apparently some contractors had done some work in the building over the weekend and apparently they didn’t handle their fumes properly.

The fumes were stronger in some parts of the office than other, but regardless I was getting light headed and decided to come on over to Cospace.

I talked with Kirtus Dixon, one of the owners of Cospace on Saturday. Jeremy had mentioned me during one of their conversations last week, as Jeremy (who currently is a freelancer of sorts) has been hanging here at Cospace.

My conversation with Kirtus revolved around what they want to accomplish and what I could possibly contribute to some of their ideas for building a community. I have to say that I am very interested in some of the items we discussed, particularly the hackathon.

Well, I need to wrap up this post as they are putting up the balloons and I hear something about bringing out the food.

I’ll make another post later, with pics from the party.

laterz

bdbenner cospace, eryn, kevin cospace, coworking, freelancing

For those that haven’t heard yet, my beloved ‘Rolla has crossed the 200k mark. I had been thinking that as soon as I passed the 200k mark the tires would fall off. To my surprise, nothing bad happened as I crossed over that 200k milestone.

However, apparently 200,110 miles, my ‘Rolla decided to have a little bit of a breakdown.

Any idea what this is?

If you guessed ‘Driver’s Side Door Handle’ you are RIGHT!

After having dinner with some friends, I had opened the door to the ‘Rolla and we were chatting in the parking lot, a bit of time had gone by, so I decided that I should close the door. After some more chatting, we decided to take off, and I went to open the door and heard a ‘SNAP’ and the door handle FLEW through the air, in my mind I think back and see it flying high through the air in slow motion. However, given that I was able to pick it up off the ground only about two feet from the ‘Rolla, clearly this is just the dramatic moment playing tricks on my mind.

So, ummm yeah. Hey Toyota, any chance there are some outstanding recalls on the 1994 Toyota Corolla? Specifically a recall on the driver side door handle?

I am hoping i can simply order a part from AutoZone, but I suspect I might have to hit up eBay or a local ‘Pick-a-part’. I can see that I am not necessarily looking forward to dismantling whatever parts of the driver’s side door that I need to, in order to replace the broken door handle.

Needless to say, I feel that the ‘Ghetto Sled’ has truly earned it’s name. As I may seriously have to start opening my door by leaning over the passenger seat, I really do not want to do that. So in addition to working on some code, I will be endeavoring to repair the ‘Rolla.

I mean, the car is a 1994, that is 16 years. If the car was only used to go to and from somewhere, once a day, that would mean the door handle was used at a minimum 11,680 times. Figure that it was used for two trips a day, this would mean, 23,360 times.

<pause while I look up some stuff on AutoZone.com>

Looky, Looky… $41.99 and I can have a fixed ‘Rolla, well $41.99 and a few hours for me to figure it out.

<pause while I searched for the part cheaper somewhere else>

I found it at O’Reilly AutoParts, $46.39 with delivery. The AutoZone one was going to be like $53. I didn’t pop for the 2 day delivery, as their delivery estimate showed that both options would arrive on Weds the 24th. So looks like, I am going to be trying to fix the ‘Rolla next Weds night or Thursday morning.

Well, it is late and need to get to bed. On a side note, I now have a similar setup at home as I do at the office, in terms of having a laptop stand for my mac book.

In other news, I am still doing Camp Gladiator, I will be definitely be doing it three times a week. Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The workouts are intense and having my coworkers there is a good motivation to keep going. I haven’t really started weighing myself regularly, but I did last night for the first time in a few weeks and it looks like I lost about six pounds. Right now, I am more so interested in improving my stamina, as each workout is getting a little bit easier and easier.

Night.

Laterz

bdbenner corolla car repair, corolla, repairs, toyota

Even though my desk is not but 10 feet away, I find that one of the best ways to keep up with Kevin is via RSS.

I caught this yesterday and decided I would try to help him out. Downside is, I haven’t installed any photo editing software on the Mac yet. (partial truth, I installed Gimp, but don’t like it).

The other day, Kevin asked on his Tumblr to have someone update his blog to say 26.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner kevin blogging, kevin, rss, tumblr

For the few folks that read my blog, I would like to announce that a friend of mine, Audrey Montgomery, recently asked me on Facebook to become a fan of her Pampered Chef consulting.

I did that and will do one better, I will link to her Pampered Chef site from my blog here. Yup leveraging the potentially dozens of folks that read this.

Sarcasm aside, I have been blessed with the opportunity to attend some parties where Audrey has performed her magic using the Pampered Chef accessories and her cooking skillz.

While, I tend to get my supplies from the Mission Restaurant Supply company here in town, I took a look through her wares and saw a few items that I may purchase.

Stackable Cooling Rack

Pastry Cutter

Measure-All Cup (like Alton Brown’s)

For those too lazy to click through to her site, here are some quick links.

Contact Audrey

News (recipes too)

New Products

I will go ahead and throw out my professional 2 cents (in terms of web stuff).

I think that it is very cool that The Pampered Chef company enables their agents/consultants with a relatively customizable site that they can personalize and brand a little bit. I would say that anyone doing any sort of reseller/agent type business model needs to be able to offer out that type of functionality.

That would be the good part of the critique, the bad part is that the application that their developers put together is in my opinion not ready for the ‘public web’. The URL structure that they use has query string data (being the stuff after the ‘?’). The first thing that you should learn these days about the query string is that indexing robots typically do not like URLs that have that, so using ModRewrite or what not to create clean URLs will greatly help with that kind of thing.

www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey?page=products-category&categoryId=22

With a little bit of reworking of their code they could use a structure like

www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey/products/category/22

or even a little bit more coding, they could give category 22 a name

www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey/products/category/new

Now for me. I am a HUGE fan of sub-domains. Though, I will admit the general public find these confusing, but there are tricks to get around that (little bit of header redirecting after the .com/, will make it easy for folks to be sent to the proper subdomain). The link could look like.

cookingwithaudrey.pamperedchef.biz/products/category/new

While, I am not sure if The Pampered Chef application knows to detect if it is being executed in an iframe, there are things that consultants, like Audry can do to add their own branding to these types of sites.

Register the domain ‘CookingWithAudrey.com’, setup a GoDaddy hosting account (the cheap one). Setup a simple HTML page that does an <iframe> and is set to pull up http://www.pamperedchef.biz/cookingwithaudrey?page=home

That would would allow you to go to the CookingWithAudrey.com and keep her private URL in the address bar. Would have to test it to see if there are any warnings that come up from the SSL layer when you try to do a checkout. If there are, then rather than doing an <iframe> the CookingWithAudrey.com domain name can do a simple redirect to her Pampered Chef site.

I would probably say that she might want to try and do a splash page, that has some photos of some of the stuff she has cooked and then has a graphic/button/link to take the user to her Pampered Chef site.

So ends my professional 2 cents bit.

Again, congrats to Audrey on the Facebook fan stuff and The Pampered Chef site.

back to the grind.

laterz

bdbenner business, coding, friends Cooking, friend, programming