Scott Thorpe

Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Watch your words; they become actions.

Watch your actions; they become habits.

Watch your habits; they become character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

– Frank Outlaw 

I have been having a hard time finding events that are of any value to me. I find that the events I’m interested in are generally the type of things I hear about on the news or from my friends and family. So I have created a new simple site based around this idea. http://getplanz.com

My hope is that other people have this same problem. If so, please let me know if the site is useful, helpful or could help you find interesting events.

Setting up the system was not ideal. But I won’t go into that right now. This post is about how to setup SMS to send a text message from the server and receive a text message.

First here (http://clickatell.rubyforge.org/) is great documentation on how to send a SMS message, plus instructions on how to install the clickatell gem.

So when you want to have users send a message to your server you need to think about how you want to handle it. Clickatell offers several different options and protocols. I’m only going to talk about the one I used, HTTP POST.

  def receive
    @new_text = RawText.new(
                  :api_id => params[:api_id], 
                  :from => params[:from],
                  :to => params[:to],
                  :timestamp => params[:timestamp],
                  :text => params[:text],
                  :charset => params[:charset],
                  :udh => params[:udh],
                  :momsgid => params[:momsgid],
                  :user_id => User.find_by_phone('+'+params[:from]).id
                           )
    if @new_text.save!
      print "Text message Saved at #{Time.now}"
    else
      print "ERROR::FAILED TEXT MESSAGE - Text not saved"
    end
 
  end

With a HTTP POST you have to supply a target address. In the code I have above, I am using the address /sms/receive. Clickatell does a post to that address and I am able to receive the values and save them to my model raw_text.

Pretty simple. Hopefully this is useful.

Please take some time to read this letter from Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt

Net Neutrality

Please get the word out. Blog, email, share.

And please call your representative (202-224-3121) and let your voice be heard.

Don’t know what Net Neutrality is? Click here.

“Social structure becomes actually visible in an anthill; the movements and contacts one sees are not random but patterned. We should also be able to see structure in the life of an American community if we had a sufficiently remote vantage point, a point from which persons would appear to be small moving dots. . . . We should see that these dots do not randomly approach one another, that some are usually together, some meet often, some never. . . . If one could get far enough away from it human life would become pure pattern.” -Roger Brown

I’ve been thinking about a different way to see humans lately. Here is what I got.

Humans are an organism living the day to day routine of eat, sleep and reproduce. Everything humans try and accomplish is dependent on what the human body is capable of. Everything the human body is capable of is from millions of years of evolution. The fight to survive causes all human beings to last longer in their environment.

When I get inspired I think of how I might be the one person who comes up with an idea to create something so brilliant that the entire universe shakes. But, if I’m capable of doing that, then it means my environment gave me the mutation to do it. Which means the universe would already have been expecting it and wouldn’t shake or collapse into itself. Example: The LHC Large Hadron Collider being built at CERN. Some goofy people are worried we will open up a black hole that will gobbles us all up for good. YIKES!

I try and observe myself from a eagles eye these days. Trying to see my routines and break them when I find myself doing things that doesn’t help me. You know how easy it can be to get focused or distracted by something that just comes up. Goals help but its more than that, its a type of algorithm you carry with you at all times that can morph and change to help keep you on your path to what you want. Other wise, when you look at yourself from a eagles point of view you might look like a dot that is doing repeated circles with small unnoticeable changes you used to think were accomplishments.

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After reading Danah Boyds blog post: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/08/01/knol_content_wo.html

I wanted to see how many people see these ideals in their polar corners still. The interest has been sparked with the controversy over Google Knols vs Wikipedia.

I had a great conversation with my fiance, Sarah the other day. It all started because I wanted to find the “passion” in being a doctor. Specifically a neuroscience doctor. She said for her it is really amazing how the neuron will grow more dendrites when you improve memory.

This really sparked my interest so I started to probe for answers and asked questions like, “I wonder how we could grow more dendrites.” We both laughed about the different “drugs” you can buy at the store and the special t.v. programs about improving memory with their five step method. But after taking a big sip of coffee and thinking for a bit, I said, “We are in the same business.” Sarah looked at me puzzled and I started to tell her that the only reason we have memory is to interact with each other.

Then we started to talk about evolution and why memory would be so important. So, clearly if I know basic things like finding food and shelter then I can live longer than those who don’t. But why would it be important to learn a language better than any others? Well, then I guess you could tell stories and learn from other people’s stories. Plus, you could learn from your parents mistakes just by speaking with them.

We also recalled that the most successful people in tribes were the most social. Seems to be true today where you can see these “Hollywood” stars that are rich and alway in the public eye.

So what is happening here, what causes us to be more successful and live longer by learning and communicating more? My guess is that we are actually learning how other people handle situations based on how we normally handle the same situations. To take it another step, when we converse with one another we are actually learning other people’s “point of views”, or their general algorithm for deciding what is right or wrong. Then we are able to compare their general algorithm with ours and find bits and pieces to keep or maybe keep their entire algorithm and learn when the best time to use it is.

To bring this all together and summarize, we learn by communicating with each other because each one of us is different but not so different we can’t learn from one another. When we communicate we store a little bit of that person in ourselves which we call memory. The smartest people on our planet are the ones who can see every persons point of view and knows how to apply it.

App Store

I am working on building my app and get it launched by the end of the month if not sooner. The hope is to get a couple of things figured out before I continue down the deep end.

I just started building the app back in June. Really didn’t have any prior experience to ObjC and no idea about creating an app in XCode.

So now that the App Store is open I feel this desperate need to get my app done and published. I feel a bit of excitement and sadness for not making the launch. But I guess the biggest advantage now is learning from other iphone application mistakes.

After reading Duane Johnson’s Post about his green wireless network. I Immediately IM’d him and started chatting about how amazing it would be to have internet and a computer while the power is out.

So i’m going to build a Green server just like Duane’s and then start the first steps in connecting our two servers together by a community driven green network! CuWireless has already started the free wireless movement. Should just be a matter of money and volunteers.

Imagine a network you could connect to that wasn’t driven by large corporations, or just one entity. What would happen if power blips like back in 2001 hit California again? If (*Knock on wood) an earth quake hits the bay area hard. Imagine getting wireless access on your already charged smart phone and give a twitter update with your location and IM all your family to see if they are ok.

Plus, its a step in the right direction for making our environment safer. This should be some fun.