4 posts tagged “des moines”
We've had a TON of rain this Spring. I was gone over the weekend (at NCMR) and when I returned, my rain gauge that I emptied before my trip, was completely full. That's at least 6 inches of rain over the weekend. Most of that was probably from Thursday night. A bunch of my friends had water in their basements. We were lucky. Our sump pump ran and kept the basement dry. That's the first time it EVER ran since we moved in 3 years ago -- even though we've had big rain storms before.
Des Moines city officials have decided to close the downtown bridges today in the expectations that the water will go over the bridges in the next day or so! (more here) The worst flooding hasn't quite reached Saylorville lake yet, but when it does, it's expected to overflow and then flow into Des Moines.
I walked out to the downtown Des Moines bridges at about 1:00 this afternoon and took a few photos. The amphitheater was completely flooded and the arches of the bridges were already almost filled to the top. They closed the Walnut bridge at 2:00 and the other three (Court, Grand, and Locust) will be closing at 6:00 this afternoon. They will be closed to cars and pedestrian traffic.
Live river level alerts here.
I have too many things I want to blog about today (an unusual concern at times and probably a good problem to have), so I'm just going to start with the first thing on my mind.
I attended the first ever Des Moines Tweetup last night. There were about 6 of us there. I had previously met only one: blogging evangelist Mike Sansone (@mikesansone). Also in attendance were: Nathan T. Wright (@nathantwright), the organizer of the Tweetup; Andy Brudtkuhl (@abrudtkuhl) (I'll need to learn how to pronounce that one) who's a fellow developer and tech blogger; Mike Templeton (@miketempleton), a marketing specialist at The Members Group trying to infuse new media into the company; and Scott Phillips (@scottatdrake), who I didn't get to talk to much, but I expect I'll see him around.
Pretty much everyone who attended is a blogger of some form. I learned much more about the Iowa blogger community than I knew previously. Through some of their blogs and other people we discussed last night, I discovered the I-List, a list of Iowa-based bloggers being maintained by Focal Point.
We discussed how we each use Twitter and very few of us actually use text messaging, which is usually the one part about Twitter that people know about. Some use the twitter web page, but have to refresh it every so often because it doesn't auto-refresh (something we complained about). Others have messages routed to IM clients. Some use twitter-specific applications like twitterrific (on the mac) or tweetr on the PC. I'll probably install and start using tweetr pretty soon. I currently miss out on a bunch because I only have a notifications sent to my phone via text for a handful of people I follow. I of course have unlimited text messaging on my mobile plan.
One cool thing that happened (for me) is that several of the attendees had read that post I made yesterday about the tweetup before we got together, having never met me before. There's something to this whole new media, blogging, social networking thing! ;)
Another outcome of the meetup for me is that I'll start using RSS more again. Previously I got so overwhelmed that I stopped using an RSS reader altogether. I'm going to look into Cullect, something I learned about last night that helps separate out the good stuff in your RSS reader from the noise.
Wow! Two posts in two days. I'm pretty sure that's a first for me (but probably not the last). Thanks to everyone last night for the inspiration!
I recently heard about a TweetUp happening in Des Moines tonight. I'll have to go check it out.
A Tweetup is a meeting of people that use the online social networking/microblogging tool, Twitter.
It's happening tonight at Shorty's bar in downtown Des Moines at 5:30 on Feb. 7th, 2008. I heard about it through Nathan T. Wright of LavaRow.com.
The way I heard about the TweetUp is because I track "Des Moines" on Twitter. You can track any phrase you want on Twitter. Then whenever someone sends a tweet, or twitter message, with that phrase in the message, you will get a copy of the message. It's a great technique for finding people (at least Twitter users) who have similar interests as you. You can track a certain phrase, then when you get a message about that topic from some random person you can start following that person, too.
Because I tracked "des moines", I got Nathan's tweet that said: "Don't forget: The first ever Des Moines TweetUp is tomorrow night (Thursday) @ Shorty's at 5:30pm! Who all is coming?". Before that moment, I had never heard about the TweetUp (or any TweetUp for that matter). The tweet said it was sent by nathantwright. I then replied to Twitter with a "follow nathantwright" message and now I'm a follower of him. Incidentally, he is now a follower of me, too.
Since I've never been to a TweetUp, I'm not sure what it will be like, but I hope and expect to meet a bunch of people interested in new media and internet technologies. In a recent blog post, Nathan gave a shout out to Mike Sansone of Converstations, who taught me a bunch about blogging.
Not actually knowing anyone who's going to this thing, hopefully I'll be able to find the right people. I expect to just look for all the people text messaging.
Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, will be in Des Moines for a user's meeting on the evening of Thursday, September 27, 2007. If you like music, and if you're not familiar with Pandora or the Music Genome project, you should definitely check out:
Pandora.
It's a great way to hear new music that you're almost sure to love. You just tell it a song or artist you know you like and it will find other music that's similar. But it's much more complex than just picking other songs from the same genre. The people of the Music Genome project have analyzed thousands of songs to identify tons of features that can be used to compare them to other songs, so they aren't using anything as subjective as "genre". Then as it plays songs for you, you can give the song a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" and your preferences for that "station" will be further tuned. Just go try it out (it's free) and you'll get the idea.
They've had a tough year due to a bunch of stupid legislation regarding royalty fees for internet radio.
You should go meet Tim if you can. I'll post more when I learn where it will be (they're still deciding that).
Tim Fisher and I will also probably discuss this in an upcoming episode of our podcast, What's Up with Tech?.
