freeinnovation

Alright, our first project has begun!Soon we will be launching barcrawlr.com, your social networking, bar finding, google maps using, restaurant reviewing site. I know there are loads of social networking sites popping up out there so we are concentrating more on making it easy (and visually pleasing) to find bars using the Google Maps API. Reviews of the bars will be a priority as well. The networking portion will be kept simple. Find drinking buddies and let your friends know where everyone’s drinking tonight. And finally we hope for barcrawlr to setup bar crawls for you by taking your preferences and planning out a complete night (and getting directions for you ) of boozing with friends.

If you get a chance signup your email, we will be choosing beta testers from signups and sending an email out when it’s ready to go.

http://www.barcrawlr.com

I didn’t realize people were still checking this site, but according to the stats some are.  Sorry for letting it get rusty for I have been busy with work and school.  Very soon I am going to redesign this site and link up some pilot projects I am working.  I am not allowing comments due to heavy spammage, with the new site hopefully that won’t be a problem.  If you would like to contact me please shoot me a message at mwhuss at the mail server gmail dottt com.

I have recently purchased two new domains www.sniftr.com and www.humidr.com.  Keep an eye out on their progress.  Hopefully this blog will be custom soon as well as I have fallen in love with Ruby on Rails.

Jen and Me

Originally uploaded by mwhuss.

I’m currently on a Web2.0 kick and didn’t feel complete without a flickr account. I’m just testing out the post to blog, heres a picture taken on my new Macbook of my girlfriend and me.

Keep an eye out, I’d like to redesign the blog or even roll my own. I’m going to try to start posting a little more often now that it’s summer time. I have plans to do an entry on how we got Airtunes to work with a Linksys router without the 3rd part flash.

At this moment I am taking a course offered by MITRE, the company I work for, titled “Innovation for Systems Engineers”.  I thought it would be more then appropriate to throw up a post.  The main topic at the moment is what’s the difference between Innovation and Imagination?  I am curious to see what you all think.

Time to write my first post on this thing. The whole experience was really awesome–Microsoft made sure to take care of us well. The whole atmosphere was definitely different than both of us expected. We walked down to the hotel lobby ready to depart this morning in mismatched polos and khakis and found everyone in matching school-sponsored shirts with incredible banners and posters. Even so, it was very cool to be able to present our project that we did just for the fun of it. Everyone really seemed to like our idea and were amazed that we knocked out a functional product in only two days. Ok, time to go go-karting.

Alright, it’s 12:45 EST and I’m packed and ready to go. Andrew and I finished up what we think is a pretty spiffy demo early this morning. I really wish this competition was a week later. Trying to balance school and extracurricular projects can be very taxing. I’m looking forward to some 40 hour work weeks to relax a little bit.

It’s 11:52pm and I am currently multitasking between developing our web service and finishing up my Computer Architecture class take home final.  I will be glad once this run of 3 weeks of 14 hour days comes to an end.  We have been working hard for a few hours and have what we think is a solid client for the demonstration on Friday.  I will try to get some screenshots up sometime tomorrow.  I tried to get Andrew to add some of his mind, but he says “I’d rather code =P”.  I guess that’s why I talk to the customers, so the engineers don’t have to.

Been a while since a post but I figured I’d take a few minutes and throw some info up for anyone out there that’s listening. Andrew and I are crazy busy trying to finish school. I never thought that one algorithm paper would be more pages then all the papers I wrote in my college career. We’re chugging along with school trying to find a minute here and there to work on the Imagine Cup demo. I have a feeling we will be coding on the flight there. The people at ETI Travel did a great job setting up our itineraries. Andrew is about 4 hours from where I am so we are both flying out of separate airports and meeting in Charlotte, NC for a connector flight to Seattle. Microsoft has made all the accomodations for us including taxi service to and from the airport, hotel, and even per diem money for the trip. What’s even better is they are letting us stay an extra day after the competition just to explore the area.

Andrew and I both have a few finals tomorrow. More updates to come later this week. The finish up here are the summaries I promised everyone [Round One] [Round Two]

The votes are in and it turns out Team PlastkFlow is heading to Redmond, WA to compete in the US Imagine Cup finals.  Sometime this week I will post some more information including the executive summary we submitted.  My plan will be to keep a running blog during the 3 days we are at the competition.