There are a lot of those.

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Posted from Houston, Texas, United States.

Given this, I thought I’d do a post about an organization that Houstonians would do well to support. It’s called Houstorian, and it’s the brainchild of my good friend James Glassman.

Glassman is Houston’s biggest fan and one of its greatest assets. I frequently refer to him as Houston’s Future Mayor. Outside of his charity work, he is best known for being everywhere at every place, all the time. If you throw an event and Glassman shows up, you know it has reached critical mass.

One criticism frequently bestowed upon Houston, and more specifically Houstonians, is their inability to handle criticism of their own city. Within this vein, the criticism that Houstonians have a citywide sense of amnesia, that architectural history and preservation are points that tend to be lost on Houston as a whole, tends to fall on deaf ears.

And that’s a shame, because in this day and age, the concepts of cultural preservation and history are more important than they’ve ever been. When there’s a Starbucks on every other block and Wal-Mart can flex its muscles to undermine the voice of an entire community, having a voice to represent your neighborhood’s history is essential.

That’s where Houstorian comes in. In contrast to some of the less-than-diplomatic approaches that are popular around town, Glassman encourages Houston to remember its roots, through daily This Day in Houston History tweets and Facebook posts, as well as sponsoring local screenings of movies like This Is Our Home, It Is Not For Sale. I hear there is an iOS app in the works as well.

I would urge all of you to check out Houstorian.org, and consider supporting the cause. There’s no place like home, and as Houston grows and changes over the next century, it’ll be ever so important to preserve exactly what that word means to you.

You can support Houstorian on Twitter as well as Facebook.

Posted from Houston, Texas, United States.

“You’ll go away, but you’ll come back someday.”
- Sleigh Bells, “Comeback Kid”

Dear New Orleans,

First of all, I wanted to say thanks. I just spent a week touring your city from the perspective of an entrepreneur, with an unbelievable level of access to some of your best and brightest citizens, and had an amazing number of adventures in the process.

You remain, as always, my most favorite city.

While I was there, I was blown away by the amount of progress that has taken place in the past few years. I knew you guys had made leaps and bounds, but what I discovered during this trip was that you had also completely reinvented yourselves. You are a new city. A New New Orleans.

You have a police chief who is top notch. A mayor who is refreshingly positive and forward-thinking. A school system that will serve as a model for the future of education in America. You have an architect that cares deeply for the soul of the city. You have hundreds–maybe thousands–of brilliant, fresh, enthusiastic entrepreneurs looking to improve your city through new ideas and new thinking. Your future looks bright. Consider putting on some shades.

You also have a group of the nicest, kindest, most gifted, talented individuals in the people that were a part of the NOLAbound project. Cameron, Jamie, Zoey, Curry, Kurt, Crista, Nick, Denise, and all of the rest of the people involved deserve recognition for the near-yearlong effort they put into this project. They deserve keys to the city. At the very least they deserve some sweet vacation time.

While I was here I spent a lot of time walking your streets alone. I did this on purpose, because a lot of people say a lot of things that turn out to be very untrue. They say that NOLA’s not safe. That you’re in danger anywhere outside of the French Quarter.

They are wrong.

I walked along your streets through several neighborhoods high and low, day and night, jamming along to some Sleigh Bells with token white iPhone earbuds dangling. At no time did I feel anything but safe, happy, and welcome. I was not approached by anyone with anything but a smile and a wave. I was not robbed. I was not attacked. I was not murdered.

I’m sorry I wasn’t there for the early stages of the recovery. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

I promise to be there for the next stage of the recovery, and for the rest of my life. I’ll be coming home soon. It won’t be soon enough, but it’ll be as soon as possible. And we’ll catch up then, for sure.

In me and my fellow NOLAbounders I promise that you have a set of people who are now inextricably linked with your city’s history and its future. We were once fans, but now we are lifelong ambassadors.

We will not take that duty lightly.

With much love,
Chris Boyd

Posted from New Orleans, Louisiana, United States.

“Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.” – Basil King

Now that we’re all settled in and fully immersed in the NOLAbound project, our group has begun to dive into the reasons why we’re here. There seems to be a different question for every member of the cohort. Some are here out of curiosity, others out of nostalgia, and others with a hard set question to answer. I’m a little of all three, but mostly the latter.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleanians were faced with one of the most daunting and formidable challenges presented to an American community in the 21st century: How to go about rebuilding a city that had been completely reset. I was somewhat surprised today to learn that New York City served as a touchstone during the recovery, but it makes total sense.

After 9/11, NYC was faced with a similarly daunting task. Not only was there the challenge of recovering from the physical and psychological damage created by the attacks, but also the challenge of restoring peoples’ interest and faith in Lower Manhattan as a center for tourism, business, and community. You don’t think about the amount of effort and work that goes into a city’s recovery from a public, PR-based standpoint, but it’s there, and in both cases the efforts and results have been tremendous.

Today we heard from several leaders in the community from our four areas of interest: Arts-based businesses, Digital Media, Biosciences, and Sustainable Industries. One thing that continually caught my ear was the amount of growth and energy that seems to be happening in each of those areas. Louisiana created some of the most powerful incentives in the country to help bolster businesses in each of the areas here in New Orleans, and seven years later we’re seeing the rewards that have come from those incentives.

From the morning’s moving, candid talks with Michael Hecht from GNO Inc and Robbie Vitrano from Naked Pizza to the afternoon’s informative panel discussion and site visits with specific members from the interest areas, we learned a lot about the recovery and rebirth of New Orleans from the perspective of an entrepreneur. I was most moved by the fact that every single person we spoke with held the improvement of the city and the community on equal level with the success of their business.

In New Orleans, succeeding as a company means succeeding as a community, and vice versa. It’s a welcome change from the infighting and hyper-competitiveness I’ve seen in other areas of the country.

As the sun set, we were treated to a rooftop dinner on the terrace of Second Line Stages and got to meet several more community leaders in our key areas and our gracious host, Susan Brennan. Again, I was impressed by their emphasis on the community’s success as part and parcel of their own.

We rounded out the night with a trip to Oak Wine Bar, where Arabella Proffer and I got to turn the camera around a little on our hosts, and I learned more about the origins of this fantastic and unique project.

The amount of growth and energy that’s here, that has come about from all the changes and efforts made over the past seven years, is nothing short of remarkable. New Orleans and Louisiana were bold enough to take on the challenge of repairing a city decimated by disaster, and mighty forces indeed seem to have come to their aid.

I cannot wait for Day Three.

Posted from New Orleans, Louisiana, United States.

“In America, there is New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” – Mark Twain

You get off the plane in New York or San Francisco, and there’s an immediate vibe. You can sense it amongst your fellow travelers. It’s the friendliness in the eyes of the clerks in your terminal. “Welcome friend,” they say. “This is our city. Don’t mess with it.”

In New Orleans, the vibe is so intense it’s nearly tangible. People talk about it incessantly. It’s some sort of magic that’s inexplicable by words alone. It must be felt.

Today I arrived in New Orleans at Louis Armstrong International Airport to the same familiar vibe that I’ve known since I was a kid. Growing up within an hour’s distance of New Orleans meant frequent trips there during childhood, adolescence, and especially during my college days. It was during those days at LSU when I formed a permanent and unbreakable bond with the city.

I’m here now with nearly ten years’ worth of hindsight in my career and a lifetime of appreciation for New Orleans, tasked with the request of analyzing the city from a standpoint of someone in the Digital Media industry. Not as a fan, not as a native Louisianian, but as a person with a good bit of experience in the tech world.  I’m not here to see the New Orleans I know and love, I’m here to see The New New Orleans.

I’m here to determine where NOLA fits into my industry in terms of economy, job market, and opportunity. I’m excited by the implications of what I’ve seen and heard so far.

Between the introductory interview, head shots, emotional meet-and-greets, second lining with some Mardi Gras Indians through Downtown, and a VIP experience at the Hornets/Lakers game at the New Orleans Arena, I’ve had very little time to write down what I’ve actually experienced in the past twelve hours. But I’ve already had several days worth of noteworthy moments and overwhelming observations. That’s how NOLA rolls in general, and I believe that’s how the NOLAbound trip will roll specifically. Months worth of experience packed into a few days. I couldn’t have asked for a better chore.

And I’ve already met several members of my NOLAbound cohort, all of them as talented as they are brilliant. I look forward to meeting the rest.

I’m excited about what’s to come in the days ahead. I will keep you posted.

Posted from New Orleans, Louisiana, United States.

Life had other plans, and one major natural disaster and several naive decisions later, I ended up spending my twenties in Houston, Texas. That’s not to say it was all bad. Houston has been incredibly good to me, and I have made so many wonderful, life-long friends, especially in the last year, that I will definitely miss when I do move. And the queso. God will I miss the queso.

But my time in Houston is coming to a close, and I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m faced with limitless opportunity. I have next to zero responsibilities, and can afford to take chances on the sort of hopes and dreams I’d wanted to execute in my twenties. Given all of this, I feel compelled to do something new, something different.

Back in October I was in New Orleans for Voodoofest, and I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Jacobson from PollBob, a promising NOLA startup, to talk about the New Orleans tech scene and what the future looked like. He referred me to the NOLAbound project. I applied, and didn’t expect to hear back.

Suddenly, in mid-January, everything started to take shape. I was selected as one of 27 people chosen by the project to come to New Orleans during Entrepreneur Week and experience the city from a unique perspective: not as the center of passion, celebration, and culture that I know and love so well, but as a flourishing post-Katrina hub for entrepreneurship, new tech, and business opportunity. It was such an honor, to be chosen to “reverse the brain drain”, amongst such brilliant and amazing people.

And if today’s article in NOLA.com is any indication, I am in for one hell of a week.

After Katrina, I was told over and over, by so many people, to give up on New Orleans. Write it off. It’s never coming back. It’ll take a lifetime for it to become the city it once was. There’s nothing for you there. Let it go.

Bullshit.

Fortunately, all of those people were dead, dead wrong. New Orleans is alive and kicking, thriving even, and the NOLAbound project is the perfect opportunity to get a definitive answer to the question I’ve been asking for a long time: Is there enough of a market in New Orleans for an app developer like me to come in, set up a studio, and begin building high-quality mobile apps for local businesses and entrepreneurs?

Next week, I’ll begin asking that question to NOLA’s best and brightest. And I will come to conclusions based on an open, honest, and neutral discussion. Or as close to neutral as I can possibly get.

I’ll see you again soon New Orleans. But this time it will be from a wholly different angle.

Posted from New York, New York, United States.

But nothing quite compares to the thrill one gets when working on a solo project. It’s all brand new, and it’s all yours. So back in February of 2010 when I teamed up with The Anime Network to do their iOS app, I was definitely excited. The iPad had just been announced, and this was the very definition of uncharted territory in the tech world. Was it going to be like a big iPhone? Was it going to be like a laptop without a keyboard?

As we all know so well now, it was neither: it was something totally different. It was a tablet, a device the likes of which none of us had ever really interacted with before, at least not on any legit sort of scale. So as we scrambled to build an app that would work on both the iPhone and the just-announced iPad, there was a lot of guesswork as to how the app should look and feel on this mythical new device.

Well I’m happy to say that with the advantage of two years’ worth of hindsight behind us, I’ve teamed up with The Anime Network once again to produce something that we’re all very proud of: The Anime Network for iOS, Version 2.0.

For over six months we’ve been brainstorming, mocking up, developing, testing, and tweaking. And the product of all that effort is something to behold: a wildly popular app that looks beautiful on both iPad and iPhone. And it blows all the competition out of the water.

From an architecture perspective, the code is very streamlined, efficient, and organized. This is the app I’ve always wanted to write, done the way I’ve always wanted to do an app. The focus is on speed and performance. I wish I could show you the source. It is a thing of beauty.

To accomplish all of this awesomeness, we’re using several neat tricks and acrobatics:

• Cover Flow: To show off all of that beautiful artwork.
• Prepopulated Core Data database: So the user doesn’t have to wait 10 minutes on first run.
• iTunes Connect Manager: My open source Github project that makes working with In-App Purchases a breeze.
• Downloads using NSOperation: For super-smooth async downloads, which I’ve blogged about here before.
• JSON-based API: Which I am a huge advocate for on any project, and with the work of the super talented Aaron Poffenberger we’ve been able to accomplish here. JSON = snappy. XML = crappy.

App Store reviews tend to be like exes: you only hear about the bad, none of the good. So it pleases me to no end that we’ve finally achieved a nice rating for the app. Everyone over at The Anime Network has worked very hard to achieve this rating, and it’s been no small feat. Bringing Larry Kotef’s beautiful mockups to life has been one of the highlights of my career. Stacy Dodson, Samantha Stevens, and Lance Martin, as well as the rest of the team, have all put in some serious effort into this app. Many nights, weekends, and holidays have been spent devoted to this project, so to see that hard work reflected in the feedback is truly rewarding.

For me, this was a labor of love I devoted most of my free time to this past year. Many hours were spent agonizing over the smallest detail, because codewise, this one is my baby. Every X-Y coordinate. Every XIB layout. Every algorithm. Every crash. All mine.

This app is my 2011 opus, and I’m very proud of it. Hope you like it!

Click here to download the app now.

Posted from Houston, Texas, United States.

This blog is no Wikipedia, but it was very rewarding to do something creative and snarky that also had a positive outcome with regards to a subject I care about. I received several FB comments, emails, and texts to the effect of “Dude…did the FTC really shut down your site!?”

I will take these messages as more of a tribute to my own design skills than to the ease with which people would assume the FTC, or any government agency, has the present-day right to shut down a website. This was the outcome I was looking for, to raise awareness, but in an unexpected manner: I never thought anyone would take it seriously.

So it was a great day. ChrisBoyd.net spent a full 24 hours under blackout, and I unwittingly brought even more attention to this horrible, incredibly short-sighted bill. I also transferred all 12 of my domain names from GoDaddy, a supporter of and contributor to SOPA, to MediaTemple.

You can view the page that I used here. I also posted it as a Gist with the appropriate 503′s (so you don’t lose any points with Google), in case you need to use it for any future half-assed censorship bills our Congress might decide to bake up.

Posted from Houston, Texas, United States.

While this is great, and certainly one of the benefits of living in the supercool future world that we do, it has a downside. On the same network, wireless or otherwise, traffic can be easily intercepted using a number of tools such as Wireshark or Ethereal. This means that anyone on the same open wireless network that you’re on can see the bytes that are being transmitted to and from your machine.

Generally speaking, this isn’t a big deal because A.) Not everyone is a gigantic nerd and B.) Most of your sensitive data is transferred over SSL. Right? But these days, more and more nerds are created every day. And nerds are nosy. And creepy.

The good news is there are ways to prevent that creepy guy sitting near you at Starbucks from reading your email. There’s something called SSH that you can use to create a secure tunnel for your traffic, and there’s a tool for Macintosh called Sidestep that makes turning on a secure tunnel super duper easy.

Once installed, it will detect whenever you’ve signed on to an unsecured wireless network, and turn on SSH tunneling if it determines that you have. It’s easy to turn tunneling on and off through an icon in the menu bar. Hats off to Chetan Surpur for this excellent utility and a really easy, simple approach to SSH tunneling. Best of all, it’s free.

See? The future isn’t that scary after all. Too bad you read this after you sent that nude photo to your significant other, right?

Posted from Houston, Texas, United States.

Make a little money,
Take a lot of shit.
Feel real bad,
Then get over it.
- Harlem Shakes, “Strictly Game”

2011 was certainly an interesting year for me: personally, professionally, politically, emotionally, the whole spectrum. In all areas, it began with peril, and ended with triumph. But I guess that’s the way I like it. There were so many twists and turns, a ton of misadventures, several highs, and several lows. I experienced things I never in my wildest dreams thought I would experience. Some bad, but mostly really good. It was a gigantic booster shot of life experience.

All told, 2011 was the best year of my life.

And as my friends know, I have this weird habit of cataloging my days with songs, much like a journal. In 2011 this became more of an obsession than ever. So now I have this great summary of my year, where I can conjure up how I felt on any given day, and reflect, generally with a smile and a laugh.

This year, I decided to try to pick one song for each month that I felt was the best representation of that time in my life. I came up with this list. Coincidentally, it makes for a damn fine breakup playlist.

• Viva Voce, “The Future Will Destroy You” from The Future Will Destroy You.
  
• Fitz & The Tantrums, “MoneyGrabber” from Pickin’ Up The Pieces.
  
• Harlem Shakes, “Strictly Game” from Technicolor Health.
  
• The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, “Belong” from Belong.
  
• Deerhunter, “Memory Boy” from Halcyon Digest.
  
• The Drums, “What You Were” from Portamento.
  
• School of Seven Bells, “Dust Devil” from Disconnect From Desire.
  
• Health, “Goth Star” from Goth Star.
  
• …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, “Weight Of The Sun (Or The Post-Modern Prometheus)” from Tao Of The Dead.
  
• Waters, “Take Me Out to the Coast” from Out in the Light.
  
• The Vox Jaguars, “Swagger” from The Vox Jaguars.
  
• The Naked and Famous, “Spank” from Passive Me, Aggressive You.
  

* * *

One last bit of advice: Life is going to throw you curveballs. Serious curveballs. Plans will be destroyed. Hopes and dreams quashed. It’s inevitable. What isn’t inevitable is how you react. You can curl up into a ball and let life kick your ass, or you can fight back. I highly, highly recommend the latter. Fight with gusto. Fight like your life depends on it.

Because it does.

I think that’s enough introspection and navelgazing for one year. Bring on the 2012. If the Mayans were right, I want to go out with a bang.

Posted from Houston, Texas, United States.