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Online recipes + Email + BlackBerry = good food July 27, 2007

Posted by sdpurtill in : Life, Food! , add a comment

It’s 1:05am and I’m starvinggg for some good food. So I went online and found a recipe (trying to get better at cooking these days, I’ll paste recipe at bottom). But then I realized that my computer wasn’t connected to a printer, and we don’t have a network at my house or any of that super hi-tech crap (we’re all just on my open wireless router, if you’re in the neighborhood drop by and use it all you want). So anyways, I thought I would copy the text into a file, put it on a USB flash drive, take it over to “The Mother Ship” (stupid HP computer that everyone uses), and then print it from there — that computer is connected to the family printer. But then I was like, no, that is too inefficient; there MUST be a better way.

And then it hit me. Paste the recipe into an email and then send it to yourself. My BlackBerry will pick it up! SWEET. So I do that, and now I’m cooking with a spatula in my right hand and my BlackBerry in my left.

They don’t call them “CrackBerrys” for nothin’… :D

Ingredients for Chinese Onion Omelet Recipe

Instructions

  1. Put the corn oil in a medium-sized frying pan. Add the corn syrup and onion and cook until the onion is yellowed and tender, stirring often.
  2. Add the salt, pepper, and cornstarch.
  3. Beat the eggs lightly and add the hot onion mixture. Drop by generous tablespoons into a heated pan with corn oil.
  4. Fry first on one side, then the other like pancakes, and serve.

I love technology…

What Facebook could do for The Father’s House July 22, 2007

Posted by sdpurtill in : Church , 3comments

The Father’s House is a church in my city (Vacaville, CA) that I have been going to for a little over three years now. It is one of the best churches I have ever been to – every week they have a great band, a good message from the sermon, and they have grown like crazy these last few years because of it. As of now, I believe there are around 1800-2000 people that attend The Father’s House (TFH henceforth) every weekend. That’s a substantial amount of people, it makes TFH the biggest church in Vacaville, and it is has only been around for 10 years. But with a large amount of growth, there comes problems and changes that need to be made from the top down to sustain the growth, and this is where I think Facebook could step in and solve one of the biggest problems that TFH faces today.

In the Internet business, when a web application begins to see growth, there are a lot of changes that have to be made to the infrastructure of the company (i.e. the servers) to sustain this growth. There is nothing worse than growing like crazy and then not being able to provide your users with the value that they need to stay with your service. The same is true with a church: to keep their members they have to provide enough value so that each person compelled enough to come back next week.

The number one thing that will bring people back to your church every week is the people they know and are connected to. Sorry to break it to you, but no matter how great a worship team is or how inspirational and loud a preacher is, in the long run people aren’t going to stick around if they feel alone in a large community. It would be like going to work every day and not knowing anyone that you work with – it would be impossible to stick with the company for more than a few months. Humans tend to find other humans that have the same interests as they do, and they stick with these groups (or cliques, whatever you want to call them). It is a lot more obvious in Junior High and High School, where you can walk into a lunchroom and find cliques of every kind; the punks, the skaters, the jocks, the geeks, etc. People in large communities like The Father’s House have a very hard time finding these like-minded people; they exist, but there is a problem with a serious lack of information available to these people who are looking to get connected.

This lack-of-information problem is killing The Father’s House right now. People are leaving left and right because they don’t feel connected to anyone in the church. I could go into numerous stories of people that have been in the church for 2-3 years, and have literally never had a single person come up and introduce themselves. I’ll admit that I really haven’t reached out to anyone in the last 2 years; I made my connections the first year I was there, and it helped that I worked in the church office. Since then I haven’t really had much of an inclination to reach out to new people. I think a lot of people feel the same as me, they’ve been in the church for a few years and are very comfortable with the people they know so they don’t have an incentive to go meet new people. I feel like the leaders do an even worse job at reaching out by staying in the front after the services and talking to the same people every weekend – it’s almost predictable who they’re going to be talking to after, and I think a new person trying to get connected and know people have a lot of trouble getting to know the leadership. I have nothing against the leaders, they’re awesome people — but come on, no one’s perfect.

I think I’ve outlined the problem enough, it’s time for the solution. In fact, it is a very simple solution; it’s one word and two syllables: Facebook (you guessed it). To those of you stuck back in the stone ages of computing, with your AOL dial up, Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. Anyone can join and it is completely free of any fees, and even more importantly, isn’t owned by the megalomaniac Rupert Murdoch. I am going to explain the different scenarios where Facebook could step in and become the social directory for The Father’s House.

1) Current members
Current members would join Facebook under their respective networks (San Francisco, Sacramento, Napa, their college alumni, their current college, etc.). As soon as they register, they search for “The Father’s House” group on Facebook and join it. Inside the TFH group, there are several useful features that the new user can utilize. There is a directory of all the other members on Facebook that are part of The Father’s House group. The user could go through the directory and search for friends, or could simply look for profile pictures of people they recognize and “friend” them. There is a list of upcoming events that the user can RSVP to right away (more on that later). There is a “wall” that the user can post things on, and a discussion board that allows them to start new topics that other members can reply to. There is also a list of links in the description of TFH that link to other groups of ministries that exist within the church – currently there is a group called 1221 for all the members of 1221 to join. The same actions of The Father’s House group are available to all the members of the 1221 group. There is also another feature that allows members to post pictures to the group. For example, if a user took a few pictures from the Small Group Rally weekend, they could post these pictures to the group and all the members of the group would be able to check them out and enjoy them.

2) Visitors
Retaining your new members is almost as important as retaining old ones – you never know who could be joining. It could be the “next Billy Graham”, or more importantly, the “next Bill Gates”, etc. The fact is, retaining these visitors is very hard in a large church. During the “welcome visitors” session of the service, the person could talk about how involved all the members were on Facebook, and how easy it would be for someone to get connected on Facebook. The visitor would go home, join Facebook, and join The Father’s House group. From there they could go find people with similar interests to them, and start talking to them via Facebook. At the next church service, these people would have a reason to come back – they would know somebody with similar interests that they could meet. From there, there are a million positive scenarios that could occur. This new friend could introduce them to a group of people that share the same interests, invite them to a small group that they are in (more on that in a bit), go out to lunch and find out that they need a job, are looking for a roommate, etc. The possibilities are endless, but would have never been enabled without meeting via Facebook.

3) Small groups
There are different types of privacy settings that users can set when they create a group. Small group leaders could create a Facebook group for their small group, and they could let it be a private, invitation only group. This would mean that only the members of the group are allowed to see what is going on – the events, the discussion board, the wall, and the other members. It is like a real life small group – only the members that are within it are the ones that are in the loop, anyone looking from the outside doesn’t get to see what is going on. Small group leaders could also allow their groups to be seen by the public, so other people looking to join a group could check the group out and its members before talking to the leader about seeing if they could join.

4) Events
Entire events can be managed through Facebook. Events can be a part of a group, so small group leaders could create as many as they like. Events could also be created for the entire church (such as Frequency Conference), and attendees can see the other people that are going to be there. They can also invite their friends to to the event, and it is very easy to access all the information about the event. There is a discussion board for people that are attending who have questions, and a wall for others who are excited to be coming to write their thoughts. Need volunteers? Send out a message to all the people that have RSVP’ed as “attending”. There is a rich set of privacy settings for each event – private, invitation only, etc.

5) Rich social connections
Thanks to Facebook, I have been able to connect with old friends and instantly deepen my relationships with new friends and people I have met through friends. Facebook is a new medium by which people communicate, and it is a much more efficient means of communication. In the past, people would have to talk to 150 people to tell them what they are doing for the weekend. Now they can write the information in a note, or put it in their profile, and all 150 of their friends in real life will be able to access that information without having to pick up the phone or see the person face to face. The best thing about Facebook is that their goal is to mirror social reality, all the interactions that happen on Facebook are similar to what would happen in real life, only in a much more efficient way. This means that people at The Father’s House will be able to connect with other people much faster and more efficiently than any other solution that exists today.

A few numbers from some of the most important companies in the world on Facebook: Google has 13,748 employees, 5,418 of which are on Facebook – 39%. Microsoft has 76,000 employees, and there are currently 17,647 of them on Facebook – 23%, with more joining everyday. Note that this was less than a year ago that they opened these work networks, so all these people have joined in the last 12 months.

There is a social revolution going on right now, and it is up to the people and leaders of TFH to embrace it or leave it behind – and watch another church come from out of nowhere to crush all the competition because of the vast amount of social connections each member will have because they embraced this revolution.

And if you don’t believe me, go join, create a profile, and start adding your friends. There is a reason Facebook is worth the rumored $10 billion, as Peter Thiel says, “only the members can truly understand the value in this thing.”

UPDATE: For people that go to The Father’s House reading this, why not join The Father’s House group on Facebook now instead of 6 months from now when “everyone else is doing it”.

One of the many reasons why I still hate Java July 22, 2007

Posted by sdpurtill in : Python , 2comments

Ok here is the Python that I wrote:

word_list = words.split(', ')
word_list.sort(lambda x, y: len(y)-len(x))
for word in word_list: print word

And here is the Java:


import java.util.Comparator;
import java.util.Arrays;
class LengthComparer implements Comparator {
public int compare(Object a, Object b) {
return ((String)b).length() - ((String)a).length();
}
}
public class JavaTest {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String words = "java, python";
String[] word_list = words.split(", ");
Arrays.sort((Object[])word_list, new LengthComparer());
for(int i = 0; i < word_list.length; i++)
System.out.println(word_list[i]);
}
}

Indentations will probably be lost in the HTML, oh well. Anyways.

Oh someone just told me a way to make the Python even shorter:

print "\n".join(sorted(words.split(", "), lambda x, y: len(y) - len(x)))

And I couldn’t resist putting this picture up from ICANHASCHEEZBURGER, my favorite place on the internet… This made me think of Java (it also made me laugh hysterically)

NO PAIN NO GAIN

I has a fevr… Django update July 13, 2007

Posted by sdpurtill in : Django , add a comment

Been feeling terrible these last few days, down with the sickness of a fevr (Web 2.0 way of spelling it).

Django has become to me like a beautiful girl who is also a hacker. One in 6.2 billion. Today, I was working on making the database for ClassOwl a lot cleaner and more efficient (for scaling, of course) and I knew I had to use two columns in the database — one to state the name of the model, and the other for the row ID in that model (table) where I would be pulling the data from. This makes it so I can have one master table that stores all the data, and allows me to create new types of things to be put in people’s planners extremely easily.

For example, the three I am using right now are 1) homework 2) tests 3) events. But maybe some day after reader thousands of emails from users we would like to add something like class work as part of it. This would be simple, all I would have to do is create a new model (ClassWork) with all of the fields that are unique to a ClassWork object (time handed out, time due, maybe a discussion board). Doing it the way I have things set up right now, I would have to create a new model called ClassWork which has a lot of duplicate columns that homework/tests/events have, and then I would have to go in and add a bunch of code to my views to make it work. A big pain in the arse :).

Django makes this even simpler with it’s Generic Relations. You specify the two columns (they give you a helper called ContentType which is amazing) and then add another line:

content_object = generic.GenericForeignKey()

And vualah! Now you can create a foreign key to any model you want, specify the primary key, and then access it with item.content_object when getting the data out of that row you are fetching. Man it seems like the only way they could make it better is if they started adding tons of “magic” features like they have in Rails… Actually, scratch that, I’m more of a control freak with my code, Django is perfect the way it is.

I LOVE YOU DJANGO.

Great Leaders July 5, 2007

Posted by sdpurtill in : Rants , add a comment

I’m in bed trying to get some sleep before my flight to LA tomorrow, but I’ve been meaning to write a post regarding my thoughts on leadership for a while. It will be hard to make an essay out of this post as my thumbs are already tired of typing on my BB.

I am tired of the term “leader” being thrown around these last few years. I heard the term a lot at school, and even more at church (TFH). People have lots of different ideas as to what they think makes a great leader. And of course, I have my own opinion on this matter. There are four different people that I find to be the greatest “leaders” of today, and you’ve probably only heard of one or two of them. They are:

1) Mark Zuckerberg
2) Mark Cuban
3) David Heinemeyer-Hansson
4) Sean Parker

Yes, I know that they are all geeks and very tech-centric. I regard Zuckerberg as the number one leader because he has bigger cajones than everyone else on the list combined (for not selling to Yahoo last year).

There are a few things that characterize these great leaders.

1) They have the balls to take criticism — lots of it
2) They are unpopular with a lot of people
3) They all give the finger to “the man”, and in doing so, become THE MAN
4) They are not afraid of telling people which end is up — explicatives are often used by Cuban and DHH to drive a point home to idiots
5) They are all atheist/agnostic/humanist, which means not very “religious”
6) They are more important to the the world than the media will ever admit, simply because the media doesn’t like them

Obviously, being liked has nothing to do with changing the world. Looks like the only people that need to like you are your employees, and the rest of the world can devolve on its own without guys like this. Well, having a great product also helps a helluva lot.

As Ali-G would sign off, “Respect yo.”