Honorable Mention for localpolitics.in

If you haven't checked it out yet have a look at localpolitics.in. I was fortunate to be a part of Hashrocket's entry for the Sunlight Labs Apps for America contest. Localpolitics managed to grab an honorable mention out of 40 apps that were submitted. If you want information on what your representatives for your zip code are up to then this is a great resource. Added bonus it will let you check out Youtube video of them and show you who the top recipients of government funds are for any zip that you enter.

Beyond the awesome app that was turned out it was a great experience being able to be on the inside of a project with members of the Hashrocket team. They truly are a class act that builds quality software. It's not often that you encounter an awesome organisation that is willing and excited about having people come in and be taught the components their secret sauce first hand.

A big thanks to Hashrocket, Dennis from ThoughtNTheory and all the other folks that made this possible. Veez has a good post listing all the contributors.

Technorati Tags: hashrocket, apps for america, sunlight labs, ruby, rails, localpolitics.in

Free Brushes from BlendFu.com

I was working on a couple of new slide deck templates and needed some new brushes for Gimp. I came across BlendFu.com and found some solid ones. What really impressed me was that its actually a cool site. I haven't been impressed with a lot of the sites out there for sharing brushes etc. I think the world has enough Laura Croft Tomb Raider wallpapers already.  BlendFu was done really well and provides a great browser live preview tool where you can try out the brushes before you download them. It looks like every brush has both a Photoshop and a GIMP brush pack.

Technorati Tags:GIMP, Photoshop, Brushes

Time and Task Management with Tomatoist.com

I'm grateful to be spending yet another day co-working with the Hashrocket crew at their offices. I always look forward to spending time with them as I always walk away with new knowledge and better ways of accomplishing the tasks before me. Today is no exception.

This morning I spent some time sitting in with Corey Grusden and Stephen Caudill on their pairing session. I noticed that in the background they had a small web app up that said "Pomodoro in progress" and had a countdown timer. The site is tomatoist.com. Corey and Stephen built the app as a tool to facilitate implementing the Pomodoro Technique of time management. After a little over half a day in the rythm with Pomodoro I'm getting a lot done and it is providing a good balance between work time and decompress time. For me I'm a person that performs well under pressure and this is allowing me to break up my work into manageable tasks with the positive pressure of a deadline without the downside of having to procrastinate until I'm up against a real deadline. Check it out and get on top of your tasks.

Technorati Tags: Hashrocket, Pomodoro Technique, Time Management, Hashrocket