At the top of the hill, one can stand on a rock and see skyline of Philadelphia which is about 10 miles away. We all, the dogs included, had a lovely time taking in the brisk autumnal air.

That reminds me, I must get the recipe for the coq au vin in the crock pot. It was sensational!

Here are some pictures of our hike up Blueberry Hill. The full set is here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sean808080/sets/72157609189719112/

Do you have a spot like Blueberry Hill close to home? Do tell…

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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It’s basically a real world meetup of folks that have been corresponding on twitter. It’s a great way to connect and meet people as well as learn real names as opposed to twitter nicknames. I’d been hearing about meetups for months and months and wondering when I’d ever get the chance to attend one in my part of NJ.

Taking matters into my own hands, i decided to start one up on my own. I setup a nifty little ning page at http://cnjtweetup.ning.com and posted a few messages on twitter about it. Folks started signing up and then then after waiting for what seemed like weeks, the little tweetup I organized at my local Panera Bread was upon us.

I got there early and was wondering to myself if anyone would show. How sad it would be if I threw a party and no one came. For that reason, I brought my trusty little macbook to keep me company.

First to show was @banannie. She’d been on seesmic and twitter from the early days and impressed me with her local knowledge of my neighborhood as she had grown up in the area. She knew the name of a local little lake and let me know I could paddle there when I did not know. Impressive what you can learn!

Next to show were @thediva and @hopeclary they worked together and were big Second Life users as well as twitter users as well. Then came @taiwanbrown who is wise beyond his years. I connected with taiwan by doing a local search for twitter users and local he is as he lives in my same city.

The last two to arrive were @jenali and @biltonpw who had a rough time finding the spot. Apparently the sign outside wasn’t lit on this rainy night! Doh! I’d been online buddies with jenali for over a year thanks to the iPhone social site: http://irovr.com since then we’ve moved our correspondence to twitter and facebook more.

Bilton arrived last, got himself a smoothie and the conversation continued until I looked up and saw all the tables had been folded up for closing!

You may be asking yourself, what do people talk about at a tweetup? We talked about technology like AppleTV, http://boxee.tv , http://itweet.net , iPhones, G1 phones and some obscure sites that offer some intriguing websites that one only hears about when talking shop with people in the know.

We also touched on the job situation that is affecting us all in one way or another as well as our families, previous meetups, and of course we talked about the thing that brought us all together this evening: twitter. The time flew and it was time to say goodbye. Fortunately, @jenali had a camera and got a group picture before we hit the road home.

I’m looking forward to our next tweetup. If you’re in the central NJ area or willing to drive a bit sign up at the ning page! http://cnjtweetup.ning.com

If you’re not, then consider starting your own by doing something similar in your part of the world. It’s quite simple! Here are the steps:

1. Setup a ning page for your tweetup.
2. Decide on a search term to make it easy for folks to find the conversation about the tweetup. Our search term [also known as a hashtag] was #njtweetup Any twitter messages should have that term somewhere in the message because then you can find them easily by going to http://search.twitter.comFor example, here is our hashtag in action: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23njtweetup
3. Find a venue like a Panera Bread or a friendly bar. The important things are that it should be central, offer free wi-fi, and be good for the majority.
4. Pick a date and setup an event on the ning page.
5. Send twitter messages and invite folks you think might be interested to signup on the ning page

That’s it. It was nice meeting folks that I’ve known online for so long as well as some new faces.

I’m already looking forward to the next one. Here’s the pic of the crew before we said our good byes:

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Have you heard of boxee? It’s a free application that’s currently in alpha testing by invite only. The software runs on linux, mac, and AppleTV.

I tried boxee about 6 weeks ago on my mac and it froze and made my mac act like a sluggish PC. I immediately deleted it and all traces of it from my machine.

Fast forward a number of weeks and after reading the gizmodo article on maxing out your AppleTV this week, I figured I’d try it on my AppleTV. It worked much better than I remembered [progress!] and the best part was though it was alpha and crashed at times, the features that did work were the features that the AppleTV didn’t have.

Some great features that boxee brings to the table are things like:
-lastfm integration
-a visualizer that made the hdtv screen sing
-playing video files that were not converted to play in appletv’s specific format.

The article that got me re-motivated in boxee is here: http://gizmodo.com/5082130/how-to-max-out-apple-tvs-potential-with-boxee

Another huge advantage of using boxee? Being able to subscribe to your hulu queue so that the shows you like to watch on hulu are waiting for you right on boxee’s video list. Being able to watch hulu shows on the appleTV is a huge hit around here!

Here’s a sample from my Hulu queue with shows and movies that I’ve subscribed to:

With the relatively good experience I had on the appletv version, I figured I’d give the boxee another go on my macbook. The current version is much more stable and doesn’t make me think i’m running a PC any more. It is much more responsive and although it does crash from time to time [it's alpha!] I can actually use this and keep it on my machine!

I really look forward to the continued progress on this app. great stuff! While it’s not really ready for mass consumption yet, when it is ready it will be _very useful_!

Cheers to the boxee crew and everyone else who are working like mad to make boxee FANTASTIC!!

http://boxee.tv

http://hulu.com

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Here he makes an impassioned plea for the rights of gays to marry.  He speaks eloquently and from the heart on this topic.  The folks who voted down gay marriage in Ca. should be ashamed.  Proposition hate indeed.

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Here are the snapshots.

Enjoy…

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