I realize I haven't yet explained what Openomy is going to be, but I don't want to be classified as vaporware, so for now I'm keeping mum. It certainly won't be a stealth startup, though.

Still, I thought I'd write a little about why I think Openomy will be successful.

Openomy's success in the broad market will be heavily dependent, I think, on whether or not it's too early to market. It remains to be seen whether the average user is ready for this new technology. I believe that amongst techies (like myself) Openomy is definitely not early and the market is ready for it. Many things have been happening lately within the consumer internet sector, and development practices are definitely changing. You don't have to look any further than places like Robot Co-op, 37Signals, or Flickr to see what I'm talking about. Technologies are changing and peoples wants and expectations are as well.

One thing I've been thinking about lately is how Openomy, as it will (hopefully) be bringing together a lot of these changes, is whether or not it has the potential to create a tipping point. Obviously I think it'd be awesome if it does, but that's a pretty striking claim and seeing how I haven't told more than 2 people about the idea so far all I know is 3 people find it cool. It's definitely not a claim I'm willing to put any money on.

Either way, I'm really excited to launch it, even if it's just to see if it's technically feasible. It's really quite possible that it's before its time, but I guess there's only one way to find out. As I'm getting closer to a working prototype I'll start explaining it in more detail.

I find a lot of techy, geeky, software developer people are really interested in spending a lot of time talking about the code they're writing and really 'fun' binary shifting and operation puzzles.

Turns out I'm definitely not one of those people. I'm much more entertained by discussions of how technology is being used in new and innovative ways to improve lives and society. Not super high-level, stuck in the clouds, but somewhere above the code discussing specific applications and implementations and their effects.

The challenges, either known or unknown previous to the development of sites like the following, are what really interest me: Flickr, Backpack, Google, SidePilot, PubSub, Odeo, Amazon, or even thefacebook. None of them, with the exception of Google and possibly Amazon (because of scale), have any particularly difficult problems. What's cool about them to me is that they all solved some void in the market (in all these cases, the consumer internet market) in new and interesting ways. That's what really interests me.

Now that I've worked (almost) a full week, been white-water rafting, explored a bit, experienced the rain, and have been here for 8 days, here are some more quick notes on Seattle:

1. Yes, it rains. It rained once while I was at work (and the view from PacMed of the rain/lightning was actually awesome over downtown) and once on my way to work the next day. But, really, the weather has been quite good. A lot chillier than what I expect from summer (currently it's 65F here, while it's 93F in Detroit) but according to the locals it warms up in late July or so. But this is still much better from what I expected-- rain and gray and cold. It's more like mostly sunny, cool, and nice with a few showers here and there.
2. It's still really weird to be in a city where tech is so prevalent. I was reading about Gnomedex (Microsoft's quasi-baby conference) and started wondering where it was. I looked it up, and it turns out I can see the conference center from my balcony-- it's directly across the street. Weird.
   
3. Seattle is a lot larger than I expected. I knew it was a city, but didn't think it was quite such a large city. It still feels relatively small and quite manageable (especially in comparison to Chicago), but larger than I expected.
   
4. Belltown, where I live, has no grocery stores. Why is that?

I finally got internet access set up in my apartment in Seattle (it only took four days, but felt like forever). Obviously, I've had internet at my internship at Amazon. I figured since I'm away from essentially everyone and everything I know during this summer, it might be a good idea to hybrid this blog between Openomy things and personal things. That way, if nothing else, I can keep a memory of this summer.

I haven't had much of a chance to keep up with tech news and/or blogs since I've been out here without internet, but hopefully that will change now. Luckily, my girlfriend, Jen, is interning at MSNBC way over on the east coast and keeps me up-to-date with the latest news while I'm at my internship.

So, a quick rundown of my life:

• I've been working on Openomy off-and-on. I've already spotted so many places for improvement, but I'm going to finish how I originally started and then incrementally improve.
• My apartment is nice (maid service is a wonderful thing), my roommate is a really good guy, and the location is amazing.
• Seattle is quite an interesting city - big city with small town feel. Example 1: Cars will stop and line up traffic while they wait for you to cross the street. Example 2: It's quite possible to receive a ticket for jay-walking.
• My internship is really awesome so far. I love my projects and they should prove to be pretty interesting. The company is amazing and the offices are even more so.
  
• My team is great, as well - I have a really great mentor and an extremely smart manager.
• Seattle is missing one key thing-- my girlfriend. Luckily, geeky things like video chat make the experience a little easier (but not nearly enough so).
  

Amazing. Today I was hooked on CNN.com for their coverage of the Michael Jackson trial verdict. I loved the little dots that would change color for each count. Great idea, CNN. Use it better next time, though - it didn't update until they were all said! I had heard the results before you gave them to me.

What really amazed me though was how Technorati (or at least the beta version) started picking up the results from the blogs faster than Google News did. Even News.com noticed the slowness of Google News.

Power to the blogs. I'm surprised Scoble didn't notice/mention that.

Before anything actually begins, I guess it should be known that I'm a pretty big fan of open source. About as big as your average geek.

But, maybe contradictory to that, I'm a huge fan of C#. Putting those together, I'm an enormous fan of mono.

So, to get started with the project (openomy - which you'll hear more about as time progresses), I got all the open source tools I needed to run. I'm using a server I've had for a little over a year now, so a lot of it had been set up already. But, because the MySQL connectors for .NET apparently only run using TCP/IP (rather than also through file sockets) I had to set up MySQL to run with TCP/IP. Which doesn't sound difficult (and isn't), but when you've never done it before, there's a bunch of quirks. Apparently my /etc/hosts file thought it'd be nice to make 127.0.0.1 be localhost.localdomain, while my users on MySQL only recognized localhost. That took a couple hours just to understand what was going on.

Now I officially have mono working with MySQL which will allow me to get working on the project at hand.

Everything is set up, at least for the initial, alpha stage, release that will be coming (hopefully) fairly shortly.

Hey all. This is the first post on my blog, just to get it working. I plan on changing the template shortly, just gimme some time. Then I'll explain Openomy.