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One of the perks of working at Conducive is a free parking pass. Parking Management Company (PMC) is kind enough to organize the logistics of this sweet deal. PMC has about 300 locations in Portland, Salem, and Vancouver which I can now use anytime I want.

I found a problem though. After looking and looking, I could not find a map of the locations. If my normal lot is full, I could not find an alternative easily without skimming the list. On the weekends, I want to find a location close to the weekend activity of choice. So, I made a map. I hope somebody out there finds this as helpful as I think it will be for me.

View PMC Parking Map in a larger map

With all the talk about Scrabulous closing down on Facebook this week, it reminds me of the one and only Facebook app that should exist. Last I knew, it did not. Sad times.

There is only one word that can describe this app: freakin-awesome. This game is Worms, and according to Wikipedia is owned by Team17 Software who needs to get their ad-driven-revenue-priorities straight.

In case you are are not familiar with Worms, get familiar. To help, here are a few videos:

Now, it typically does not have the silly music but instead has silly worms that talk. Here is an example of Holy Hand Grenade in the 3D version of the game:

See, freakin-awesome.

Fred Wilson wrote a post earlier on his blog, A VC, called Powerpoint vs Working Code?. In this post he mentions a small study which shows how Venture Capitalist would rather see a demonstration of your software than a silly Powerpoint presentation.

Early in the fund raising process, it might be hard to get large amounts of a web application completed on the budget provided from seed funding. For reasons like this, web frameworks (tools to make creating web applications easier) have started to build into their ‘toolkit’ prototype like functionality.

My favorite is Tapestry 5. With T5 I would be able to create, say, a registration form in less time than it will take to write this post. Now, this form might not be in the final visual state I would like it, but it gives me a chance to quickly get something working.

If you are a developer and are interested in how this works, you can see a screen cast for this form. If you would like to see what a prototype would look like with this method, this screen cast will show this too.

When I first heard somebody was designing a refrigerator with Internet access almost 10 years ago now, I thought ‘clever, some really lazy person never has to leave the kitchen.’ Now it is 2008 and what goes best with coffee other then a yappie dog and a liberal arts degree? Internet on my coffee mug. I would love to meet the VC who funded this project and get funding for my time traveling, stock market predicting, lederhosen wearing perpetual motion machine (with Internet access).

For a few months, ok more than a few, I have been toying with the option of learning German. One problem is that I do not know the best way to do this. I am not going to go to Germany to learn the language; although I would love to, this is a bit out of my desire at this point. I am also incredibly cheap and do not want to pay for a class. I would consider this if it were a better solution though. So what else is there?

There are a few software programs out there. A guy I work with said he would let me borrow his copy of Rosetta Stone if I wanted to. There are also some others I have heard about in the mix lately such as Mango and LiveMocha.

The problem is I have not tried to know a new language since I took Spanish classes in high school, so I do not know the best way to accomplish my goal of being bilingual.

So I ask the readers… What is your favorite or the best way to learn a language?