Today is the third of my four days here in Haiti, so far we have gone to Leogane, and today we are going to Jacmel. We are staying in a house in Port Au Prince. This country is totally devastated even further by the quakes, however knowing that the streets and road condition were already destroyed by rocks, and garbage, it just seemed like the bad just got worst after the quake.

The first day really took me by surprise when exiting the airport in Port Au Prince, children gathered around me as we boarded the car and begged for money, I never thought Id witness that but it seemed to happen a lot thought the days everywhere I went.

I even tried to give an old lady a 32gb USB drive but the Haitians that were with me were like NOOO, I was like why? Its worth a lot of money in the US, they responded, she wont even know what to do with it, it is worthless to her.

I will continue to update as I can, these mosquitoes are eating me alive, check out my uploaded pics on facebook.

As my 2 year contract with Verizon Wireless approached, I had to decide weather I wanted to leave the network or stay. I wanted to stay because Verizon’s service is great, never any dropped calls, however I felt restricted in their network and saw a chance to free myself. Verizon has been notorious for creating custom software for their cellular device that cripples their phones.

I was really considering moving to AT&T and getting the iPhone, I owned a iPod Touch a few months back and loved it, but it too wasn’t as open as I thought, Apple has it’s own limitations on what you can and cannot do. The only other option in my mind was to either go Blackberry or go Android. I liked the Blackberry a lot, it’s old interface threw me away but it seems to function quite well and the phones looked pretty decent, so why change something that works right? On the other hand, I got suckered into the Droid which runs the Google Android OS. Android is truly open source at heart and right now, development is a little behind Apple in terms of the development community and they number of apps but I’m sure as adopters increase, people will pay more attention to it.

I renewed my 2 year contract with Verizon and got a Droid, I like it a lot. I do have a few things to complain about but I’ve found ways around it so I’ll deal but I see Android growing in popularity in months to come. Who knows, maybe it will kill the iPhone one day.

UPDATE: March 25th, I returned to Verizon and did an exchange because of a defective micrphone on the Droid, they were really good about it. It also looked like they replaced it with a more current revision of the Droid.

Rise Again Haiti

Co-founded and designed/developed Rise Again Haiti’s new organization website. Built in 2 days.

Rise Again Haiti’s mission is to restore Haiti after the first waves of relief efforts.

“Rise Again Haiti” is a movement committed to the restoration of Haiti. It is a non-profit organization that is raising funds to sponsor volunteers who will contribute to the efforts of rebuilding the country. Our Vision is to send over 20,000 people there, starting June of this year and our mission is to create task teams that will commit to reaching our goal.

We are in the process of acquiring a Non-Profit 501(c)(3) Organization so that we can move as an entity of force!

I come home today to a power outage! Great! 200+ Residents in Selden without power.

Hi everyone, sorry its been a while since my last post. Been going through several unfortunate events of bad luck with my car, been to a lot of cool places, achieved things I never thought possible, drama with work, etc. I’ve definitely added many causes of stress to my life. I completed my junior year of college, yay for that, what does next year entail? I’ve been appointed President of TSM or STSM and thats the Society for Technological Systems Management at Stony Brook University. I’m looking forward to creating a new vibe to the organization bringing new minds on to the table. Here’s the first banner I created for recruitment purposes!

I got back from DC not to long ago and previous to that, Pittsburg, all in all a lot of cool things to see outside of NYC. Might want to move there sometime this summer just to be there for a month or so. Lets see, umm got a tint ticket yesterday, end of the month quota BS from the cops. Working to really promote my freelance web design work this summer and make some loot. Alright, gotta help some friends move to their new house tomorrow, good night!

Many people ask me where I learned everything I know about computers and how to be successful, not to say I’m successful yet. My definition of successful is not where I am now but where I will be. But we’ll talk about this another time. So here is a story on how I truly grasped the knowledge of tecnology and business.

My main business is web technologies, I can say that I know almost everything there is to know or at least familiar with every internet technology and how to use them to make money. My parents purchase my first computer in 1999, it was a Compaq Presario with AMD k2 355Mhz processor with 64MB of SDRAM and 5 GB’s of disk space. Quite slow compared to todays standards. When I got it, I was the happiest kid on the block, not only did I have a state of the art computer at the time but more importantly, I could visit POKEMON.COM. Like every kid in the late 90’s, I was addicted to Pokemon. I would visit pokemon from the library across the street at a public library but for the first time, I could do it in the comfort of my own home without a line and without a time limit before they kicked me off for going over the 30 minutes.

It’s hard to believe from those who know me personally but I had trouble connecting to the internet at first. I was using Metconnect, a free 56k ISP here in NYC. In the back of the computer, before the good days of Rj-45 ethernet port, I was faced with 2 RJ-11 telephone jacks. I thought for a long time that the only way to get on the net was to have them both plugged into the wall. My apartment only had one jack which was being used by the home phone. So I was denied of the internet because I did not know that you only needed 1 line connected to the wall jack.

Onto how I actually learned so much about computers, I abused the crap out of Compaq Technical Support, AOL and other computer companies. I called them for everything I could think of, I would ask a question and they would answer it, that was the way I learned everything. I even made up fake problems so they could teach me the ins and outs of a computer through trying to troubleshoot a problem that never existed. Web development came to be at around 2001. It was a hobby and I started by trial and error, I would view the source of each website and study it.

It sounds impossible to do but I did it, an interest in a topic you are trying to learn definitely helps! This is my story.

One day away from Obama’s Inauguration! I’m excited! Watching the coverage on CNN made me think of the people who he couldn’t have done it without. His family, other politicians, campaign volunteers, $$$, me, you, us and web developers? WHAT?

There were so many people involved with Barack Obama’s campaign that it is hard to say who helped him the most with the victory. But one group of people that we all generally give little or no credit to are the web developers and his campaign technology consultants/advisers. I really want to focus on that because as a web developer, we almost never get the credit for making things possible. The credit always goes to the people who plans it out but on our end we think to ourselves, “duh of course you need a website”. Creating a website isn’t a marvel or a great idea by some guy with money, it’s already second nature to us who understand that it is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing to mass communication these days. Technology Specialists the brains behind Obama’s victory, no doubt about it.

From the people who designed Obama’s campaign logo to the web 2.0 social network website barackobama.com that web developers setup. They were all crucial parts to his success. This election more than ever really took advantage of the web and it’s users. I could have easily told Barack myself that this is what you need to be President, many of us could. Next time you need help to get a business off the ground or a way to mobilize people, ask a technology expert. They are your go to guy, not the guy who knows a tech guy, skip the middleman!

Anyway, watch the Inauguration LIVE on CNN at http://www.cnn.com/live. Yet another product of our genius!

I went out and purchased a video game today, I haven’t done that since buying Counter Strike for PC years ago. Game Stop had a deal on Bad Company for Xbox 360 for $19.99 New, funny because the used was $26.00. Whatever, corporations have weird business practices, found the game URL on Game Stop and found the closest location to me with the game. Great so I drove there, went into the store and started browsing around. I found the game on the shelf, there were 2 empty boxes for the game for what I thought was for store demo purposes. I went up to the counter and asked for it, they guy just went to the shelf, picked up a box and inserted the game back into it from behind the counter and attempted to put a plastic seal on it.

Wow, did they just try to sell me a opened boxed game, as new? I didn’t care because it was cheap and I was bored in need of a game to play and it was less than the USED game but this is an outrage! You buy a new game, you expect a new game, not an open boxed game that no one has bought. Besides that display box that I now own has been manhandled by who knows how many people! That’s the last time I’ll buy anything from Game Stop ever again! I also purchased a used Xbox 360 from them, only to find the RROD in less than 2 days playing it, and they wouldn’t take it back!

I got home yesterday evening after coming from a long hard day of work, on my way in, my roommate was walking out the door to go see a presentation at Stony Brook Southampton about Ocean Surges in New York. It sounded like an interesting topic and something I would enjoy so I tagged along.

When I got there, Dr. Brian Colle of Stony Brook’s Marine Science Department talked about “Climatology and Modeling of Storm Surges in New York’s Coastal Waters”. Here is a brief synopsis of his lecture.

A large fraction of the New York metropolitan region and Long Island is vulnerable to coastal flooding during tropical and extra-tropical cyclones. This talk will explore our understanding of cyclone position, track and strength, and how that favors flooding in the New York region.

There have also been advances in high resolution atmospheric and storm-surge modeling of land-falling cyclones in our region. A few historic storms will be discussed, such as hurricane Gloria (1985), which will highlight the modern difficulties in forecasting storm surges and the implications for emergency response.

This was something really cool to see, he presented computer models of storm path predictions and storm surge levels. Most of the time, the models we see on TV are great but I never truly understood the significance of every single mark on the models, Dr. Colle explained all of that and more. What was the most interesting to me was that in a Category 1 hurricane, the southern coast of Long Island would be experiencing flooding of a couple of meters of water. That is CRAZY!