“Hotel Yorba” just finished blowing out my eardrums and I’m awfully psyched and thought I’d pop my head up out of the laptop and review my last couple days.  I’m sitting at Victrola, coding a bit against Twilio’s uber-awesome API, doing a small amount of people-watching and a fair bit of reflecting on the weekend just about to pass.  It was (typical for me lately) a study in contrasts; black-and-white paint spattered on the canvas, but patterns are starting to emerge, themes and riffs and reoccurring choruses and moments of sunshine and the reappearance of cloudbanks that I know I’ve seen before.  My analytic brain tries too hard to pattern-match, to put things into boxes with labels and yet my creative brain, the one I’ve begun to understand and love in ways I never knew before – even though I’ve always considered myself to be the creative sort — likes to sort of hang out and observe and watch things unfold and draw loose associations and connections that arise abruptly and surprisingly from my subconscious.

This morning I ran twelve miles.

That sort of deserves its own paragraph because I seriously don’t think I’ve ran that far since college.  Earlier this month I signed up for this crazy relay in July called the Ragnar relay and I met a couple of my relay teammates for the first time this morning at Greenlake and we ran.  Twelve miles.  I’m proud and tired and happy and realize that what I thought are my limitations are not my real limitations.  That’s powerful.  Chris and Leslie, the two people I ran with this morning, were supportive and encouraging and I had a really great time.  Did I mention it was twelve miles?

A couple great meetups this weekend, reaffirming my sense that I feed off of, and am made happy by, time spent conversing with smart, engaging and passionate people.

The weather in Seattle this weekend was A-fucking-MAZING.  That was the macro story; the thing on everyone’s lips.  It’s February but feels like we’re deep into springtime.  I didn’t get out as much as I would have liked, but what time I was able to get out and enjoy the weather was spectacular and memorable.

I hope you had a great weekend as well.

I’m sitting at Zoka early on a Saturday morning, doing some coding, drinking some coffee, and enjoying the moment.  It’s been a very odd week, lots of disruptions to my usual rhythms, and it’s nice to get back to a treasured marker, this early morning Zoka time, and reflect.

This week Winnie, my 8-year-old Bouvier, went in for an emergency splenectomy.  The veterinarian removed an 8.8-pound tumor.  Amazing.  She has a long, ugly, 40cm scar on her stomach.  She also has to wear a cone (the “cone of shame”) so she won’t pull out her stitches.  I won’t find out until early next week when the lab results get back whether or not the tumor was malignant or benign, and thus, whether or not my time left with her is measured in weeks or years.  I won’t tell you what the surgery cost to save you from choking.  It was a lot, however.

I’ve been super busy in other areas.  I’ve got a couple projects I’m working on, and truthfully, right now, it helps to be busy.  A new project involving Twilio’s state-of-the-art telephony API may be right around the corner.  And of course I’m always trying to figure out how to find time to push Crowdify forward.  I’ve had a lot of interest recently in Crowdify – a little odd, to maintain the theme of the post – but it’s nice.  My goals is to find and keep a little momentum going.

Terrible news from the Olympics, where the death of the Georgian luge athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili saddened the world even before the games begin.  At least he probably didn’t feel a thing.  The big news from last night’s opening ceremony was probably the pants worn by the small Azerbaijani contingent – spectacular and colorful.  Oh, and there was some sort of snafu with the cauldron.  No big deal IMHO.

This week I attended some of the 2010 Agile Open Northwest conference and forgot to mention one thing: Alan Shalloway, the CEO of Net Objectives, was super helpful and knowledgeable.  In a couple sessions, particularly one on Kanban, he chimed in and really helped me and the rest of the group understand some of the thorny, subtle details.  Thank you Alan.

Also odd is that I haven’t exercised since Monday.  Ye gods!  I’ve been feeling a lot more stressed than usual and, well, that negative streak ends today.  I’m going to the gym come hell or high water or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Hope you’re having a good day and hope you have a great weekend!

Good news for fans of Twilio, the Seattle-turned-San Francisco based startup that has some awesome telephony technology that makes it dead simple to integrate voice functions into your applications:

Twilio Raises $3.7 Million For Powerful Telephony API

Startup Twilio has raised $3.7 million in Series A funding from Union Square Ventures. The startup previously raised $600,000 in seed funding from The Founders Fund, David Cohen, Mitch Kapor, Manu Kumar Chris Sacca, and other angel investors. Twilio creates a powerful API for phone services that allows developers to quickly integrate telephony functionality into their apps. The company plans to use the new funding for growth in sales and marketing and to further the development of new products. Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger and Founders Fund’s Dave McClure will be joining the startup’s board.

Great job, Team Twilio!  Obligatory cheese shot of the team, courtesy of Marketing Director Danielle Morrill:

What I’ve been most impressed with about Twilio is the consistent way they’ve rolled out high-quality updates and extensions to their service.  Check them out – you’ll be amazed at the power behind their API.

“Create a conference call in three lines of code.”

Sounds too good to be true, but Twilio has just announced the ability to set up conference calls via the Twilio API and TwiML markup language.  From their press release:

Sick of those crappy conference lines? The ones that that require you to enter your conference id, participant pin, access code, weight in kilograms and pi to fourteen digits before you can get to chatting? Now you can build your own with just a few lines of code. Ready?

Twilio conferencing adds new REST and TwiML elements to allow bridging two or more in-progress call sessions. Just <Dial> a <Conference>, and specify the name of the "Room"… any callers who dial the same room will be conferenced together… it’s that easy!

I’ve been working on and off with Twilio this year and am super impressed with the team, the technology, and the consistent stream of updates they’re making.  Telephony-enabled applications are a breeze using Twilio, and if you’re considering adding a phone icon to your Visio architectural diagram, you should seriously check out Twilio.

Tomorrow night (June 10th), Jeff Lawson of Twilio will be giving a talk on Cloud Computing at the monthly Seattle Tech Startups meeting. Apparently Jeff gave a similar talk at the June 4th Amazon AWS Start-Up Tour which was very well received, according to comments I read on the STS mailing list.

The STS Wiki has details on when and where, if you’re interested in going. Should be a great talk, following up on last month’s great discussion!