WombatNation

Someone on my bike team sent out a link to bicyclesafe.com, which has a great article by Michael Bluejay on how not to get hit by a car when you’re biking. I found I do a lot of these things intuitively, especially when bike commuting to and from work, but there were some other good strategies I hadn’t thought of.

I’m kind of a wuss when it comes to riding when it’s dark, cold, and rainy, so I’ve taken that last couple months off from bike commuting. Next month I’ll start back up again. The new Daylight Saving Time schedule is a major boon for my bike commuting schedule. This year it starts March 9th.

It was more work than it should have been, but you can get access to a MySQL database from Python on OS X 10.5 by following the instructions at this blog post.

If you’re using Pydev in Eclipse, be sure /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages is in the System PYTHONPATH. Bring up the Preferences dialog, open Pydev in the tree, click on Interpreter – Python, click New Folder to the right of System PYTHONPATH, and then add the directory, if necessary.

Earlier this week Voxify announced a $15 million funding round that was led by a new investor, Intel Capital. This is pretty exciting news for us, as it allows us to accelerate some internal investments that will broaden the scope of the speech applications we currently deliver.

One area we’ve been focusing on is making it possible for our customers to quickly, easily and safely make changes to the speech applications we host for them. A lot of our competitors provide basic tools for doing this with simple DTMF applications, but we haven’t yet seen anyone providing web-based tools as powerful as what we are now offering for adding announcements, changing prompts, updating recordings, adding menus, tuning grammars and changing application wide settings. There’s also a lot more we are working on in this area.

One of the challenges of providing end customer-facing hosted and managed services is that prospective customers are concerned about giving up too much control of the relationship with their customers. While they understand the incredibly compelling economic advantages of subscribing to our services, they want to stay involved and be able to manage parts of the applications themselves. This can be as simple as updating promo or seasonal messages or temporarily adding emergency messages. From the feedback I have been getting when talking to companies about the capabilities we are now offering, I think our new tools are right on the mark with regards to enabling those capabilities and a whole lot more.

If it wasn’t enough that a great new bar serving Belgian beers opened recently in downtown Oakland near where I work, Linden Street Brewery recently (well, in the last six months or so) started up near Jack London Square. In fact, you can try a Linden Street Common, which is a steam beer like the famous Anchor Steam, at Oakland Tribune article on the brewery, they have Friday happy hours with a potluck outdoor BBQ. William Brand has also written about Linden Street Brewery. I am so there.