Julio’s Musings Around Columbia County, New York

The Twitter Phenomenon. Keep track of what your’s truly is doing all day long.
From jumping on the subway to a staff meeting after staff meeting.
You think your life is boring? Fear not!

Tags: Twitter, Julio Hernandez-Miyares

Will have to add a photo when I have it but need to get this post in before my memory recedes. This week visited Club 21 on West 52nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues in New York City. As our business office is adjacent to this well known establishment and we are moving downtown this week, a friend and business colleague decided what a better way for a send off then to splurge for lunch at one of the true power centers in New York City. Our quest for the Club 21 Hamburger fueled our anticipation. So after dressing up (you need at least a jacket for lunch) we made the 50 foot trek into the rarified space of a New York institution. Immediately we (or at least) I felt elevated well beyond my relatively paltry position in the world of New York business. Though the football helmets and toy trucks hanging from the ceiling provide the sense of a “boys’” club, the treatment from the staff is classy to say the least. We were swarmed over by sommelier and other wait staff who’s role I didn’t even know. We quickly got to the point and told them we were here for the burger. Now mind you, its a $30 burger. That is not a typo.
Throw in the “creamery cheesecake” we had for dessert and you have over $100 for lunch for 2.
Notwithstanding the high price, it was well worth it and I suggest all you business , high-roller types make the pilgrimage at least once to see how the other 1/10 of 1/10th of 1% lives.

Tags: Julio Hernandez-Miyares, New York City

Though I now find myself in Dublin, Ireland on my next leg of a two week trip to London and Ireland, I wanted to write a few more words around the Future of Web Application Conference (FOWA).
One of the most enjoyable though not educational aspects of the conference was the live filming of an installment of “Diggnation”. In the main auditorium in front of a standing room only audience, Kevin Rose and his sidekick Alex Albrecht (or maybe its the other way around) kept the crowd pumped,yelling and screaming with their adolescent politically incorrect banter while drinking whatever free beer was provided by the sponsors or fans.

Though I did not take an actual count, I suspect the audience as was the conference itself was about 95% male. The largest number between 20 and 29 years of age but there were 30 and 40 somethings as well to keep me from feeling anachronistic.

All and all, it was very interesting to be part of a group who truly believe they are re-making society and have that fleeting dream of becoming rich at the same time. It reminds me of the adolescent years and rock bands and thoughts of becoming the next Led Zeppelin or something similar. Now of course, behind all that facade it was just about finding and attracting girls. Sadly, the crowd at the Future of Web Applications hasn’t been as successful based on my visual survey of the scene.

Tags: FOWA, Future of Web Applications, Diggnation, Julio Hernandez-Miyares

I find myself in London, England at the moment attending Future of Web Applications FOWA for short. Excellent “dork” fest of folks in the Web development space getting together to hear each other speak about the Web and what’s happening and where its going.

Great way to make a living if you can. Pundits on the Web. I have tremendous respect for the folks presenting especially those that have taken action and established their own companies irrespective of the attendant risks. I don’t believe risk-taking of that caliber is for only the young but on the Web, or at least at this type of conference, its interesting to see those with Cult-status are barely out of college age.

I guess its humbling for me being over 29 years old listening and taking pointers from these 20 somethings but .. what the hell, I will take the pearls of wisdom from whomever.

Trying to finish this blog entry quickly so I can get to the live filming of Diggnation live from the ExCel Center.

Tags: FOWA, Julio Hernandez-Miyares

Haven’t written a post in about a week. I have been locked away in Northern Virginia (Reston to Sterling and back) for the past week. Hard to get inspired in a place like that, at least for me So, I became inspired to write about how uninspired I was. Mind you, things are not bad, not complaining or whining. Its been a week chock full of work and useful work at that but I would rather be somewhere else, 250 or 350 miles North of here.

There isn’t much to this post, seems rather pointless. On a good note, I will be flying back to New York on Wednesday morning on a business trip. I can already feel the excitement building..

I met up with Dossy Shiobara in New York City this week (shown here posing in front of Radio City Music Hall in standard tee-shirt garb). I hadn’t seen him in months since he left his position as Super-developer at AOL. With trepidation , not knowing if had started going bald or maintained his ripped physique or what I would see after 6 month hiatus, I setup a lunch appointment in the City to catch up.
Well here he is looking better then ever and in excellent spirits. Obviously doesn’t have the combined weight of approximately 5 layers of managers telling what to do on his shoulders.

He was happy to pose and fine with me blogging around something as trivial as a lunch date. You see, Dossy is good SEO regardless of the content. Dossy is the CONTENT!

Anyway, you can go to his blog and see all his delicious links or sprinkled between them read up on what he has been up to in the past half a year.

Tags: Dossy Shiobara, Julio Hernandez-Miyares

Far away from Columbia County, New York this week in Bangalore India. 8,600 miles to be exact and 10.5 hours difference in terms of time zone. Watching the Indianapolis/New England Championship game live at 8am to give you an idea of the time difference

This picture attempts to juxtopose the old with the new in India. A recent built office building overshadowing what I characterize as a shanty-town. Not quite a shanty-town , I only see one family living in the vacant lot . A lot of anarchronisms such as this exist in India which is modernizing at a furious pace.

Wearing a goofy Cleveland cap and a grin from ear to ear, Nate Folkman of ADP fame turns over his AOL employee Pass on his last day as an AOL employee at his office in the Radio City Music building high above Midtown-Manhattan.

Sadly, Nate is just the latest of a continuing but diminishing stream of AOL’ers that have recently left who brought the Internet and Web as we know it in the year 2007 to AOL. As a key member in the rarefied group of developers responsible for the ADP platform, he worked for years with like minded individuals at DCI, Local Tech and Web Services and Publishing to build the platform that currently drives the majority of Web experiences at AOL.

Luckily for those that know and respect Nate and have the good fortune to live or spend a lot of time in New York City, he will be moving barely 500 feet into his new offices at 75 Rock!

Tags: Nate Folkman, AOL, AOL Server

Been a few weeks since I have been able to post a blog entry. Busy with work and kids and the host of administrative grunt activities that consume life. I have noticed in the few weeks since I have posted a blog entry that Google’s ranking of my blog when doing a vanity search has gone down. My dad also known as Julio Hernandez-Miyares, that i had totally eclipsed and relegated to the 2 or 3 page of results is making a strong comeback. Well, that is a call to action to me to stop that positive movement for him and negative for me. You see, this is a zero sum game. No room for more then one winner. 

In the never ending quest to get as much cross-linking as possible, I am adding a link to Naymz. This site appears to be designed to allow a person to aggregate the various sites where they have some manner of a profile ie LinkedIn, Yelp , Flick, etc. What the exact purpose I would use it for other then a place to consolidate the links to various sites I maintain a profile and hopefully by extension increase the rank of me when querying “Julio Miyares” , I don’t know.

Tags: Julio Hernandez-Miyares, SEO

I have been experimenting with Yelp’s User Rating and Review product over the course of the past few weeks.

Here is an url to my reviews. Julio Miyares Yelp Reviews.

Strangely familiar to what AOL Digital Cities had many years ago in a product known as Local Experts. I am talking the 2000-2002 timeframe which in the Web world is a long time ago.

In a familiar refrain, we had no followup and allowed the product feature to die on the vine. Social networking in the local space?? User contributed content?? What is that?

Tags: Julio Miyares, Yelp, Ratings and Reviews