Chris Hutchins

For the last month, I’ve been planning an event called LaidOffCamp. It’s gone through a ton of iterations, but it’s finally at a point where I’m ready to announce it to the world. Please check out the site for details!

“LaidOffCamp is an ad-hoc gathering of unemployed & self-employed people (including entrepreneurs and startups) who want to share and interact with each other. LaidOffCamp SF is the first LaidOffCamp ever! You do NOT have to be unemployed to attend!”

LaidOffCamp SF will occur March 3rd, 2009 somewhere in San Francisco. Please feel free to contact me if you want to help or have questions!

If you’re a Mac user, then you probably get frustrated by the way the tab key functions (or should I say DOESN’T function). When navigating forms, instead of tabbing to drop down boxes or buttons like it would on a PC, the tab key will skip to the next text box or list (see example to the right). Fortunately, there is a simple solution built into OS X.

Step 1: Open up your system preferences and click “Keyboard and Mouse”

Step 2: Click the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab and in the “Full Keyboard Access” section at the bottom, select “All Controls”

That’s it. Finally you can fill out forms without constantly switching between your keyboard and your mouse / trackpad. If for some reason you don’t want this setting active all the time you can enable/disable it by pressing Ctrl+F7.

On December 3rd, at 8:45pm, I received an email requesting that I come to an “urgent, important meeting” the following afternoon with a partner I’d never met before. Given that almost every day I read about another company laying off some of its workforce, I immediately began “preparing for the worst”.

The next morning I heard that someone in our New York office (where it was already afternoon) had been laid off… I was almost certain of what was to come. Despite that I had enjoyed my time working as a consultant for the Monitor Group, I always had an internal itch to go out and do something more entrepreneurial with my life. Sure enough, the afternoon went just as expected and my preparation made the situation far less awkward.

While many people are quite torn up after losing their job, I chose not to dwell on everything negative associated with the situation and immediately began to brainstorm ways that I could sustain my lifestyle doing what I love. For now, I’m spending my time consulting to a former employer (Fusion Telecommunications), rock climbing and getting to know San Francisco and all it has to offer with Amy Lynn Fox.

If you know any interesting projects that I can get involved in, please let me know!

Final parting advice to anyone losing there job in this economy: take your transition period to figure out what you’re passionate about and find a way to make your next job/career/project reflect that passion.

Just like most of the people reading this post, I use Twitter quite a bit (@hutchins). In the last few weeks I’ve noticed that the number of followers I have on Twitter has starting to pick up quite a bit (see why here). Anyways, it has left me in the middle of a major Twitter decision: does one follow everyone that follows them (auto-follow) or not.

As I often do with most decisions I looked at the pro’s and con’s:

Pro’s:

• It’s polite (I kinda feel like a bad person when I don’t return a strangers follow)
• Won’t miss DM’s
• Expand your network
• More tweets in your Twitter stream = more chances to learn something new / interesting

Con’s

• Irrelevant tweets in your Twitter stream
• Makes it difficult to stay on top of your closest friends’ tweets
• Opens the door to twitter / DM spam (especially annoying if you get SMS notifications for DMs)
• According to twitterratio.com, it would give me a friend-to-follower ratio closer to 1.0 and thus make me less “popular”

As for now, I’ve adopted a policy of checking each user’s tweets before deciding to follow them (for spam and type of content). However, in the long run (once I get more followers / day) it might be more worthwhile to auto-follow than spend the time to check out each user.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

(Twitter graphic courtesy of Smashing Magazine)

My resolutions for 2009… please hold me to them!

• Attend SXSW for the first time
• Get beyond the brainstorming phase for at least one startup
• Find some possible co-founders (hopefully some developers and designers)
• Travel somewhere new / exciting with my girlfriend Amy (Any suggestions? did Europe in ‘05, Asia in ‘07)
• Find a second client for my consulting work (so I don’t have to get a “real” job)
• Regularly climb at a 5.12 / V4 level
• Get better at NOT procrastinating
• Get in better shape
• Regularly Blog (hopefully about something interesting)

All Dreamhost hosting accounts now come with 50gb of free personal backup.I’ve been searching for a while on a good tutorial for this and couldn’t find one, so I thought I would make my own.

1. Setup passwordless login for rsync (can be skipped if you don’t mind typing your password each time you want to sync)

• Open terminal and type the following (press return after each line)
• “ssh-keygen -t dsa” (press enter after all three prompts)
• “scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub remote”
• “cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys”
• “chmod 644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys”
• “sftp backupusername@backup.dreamhost.com”
• “lcd /Users/OSXUsername/.ssh
• “mkdir .ssh”
• “put authorized_keys .ssh”

2. Sync your files / folders

• Open terminal and type the following, then press return
• “rsync -avz BackupFolder backupusername@backup.dreamhost.com:DestinationFolder” (example: “rsync -avz ~/Documents bxxxxxx@backup.dreamhost.com:macbook_backup”)
• Optionally, you can add “–delete” after “-avz” (ie: “-avz –delete “) if you want to delete files on your backup once they’ve been deleted locally

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Over the past weeks I’ve noticed a few Twitter “Phenomenona” that I felt were worth sharing:

1. After Kevin Rose said “ask me any question, and I will @ reply you back (for the next 20 mins, then getting dinner)”, over 1,200 people @replied him within those 20 minutes. I was sitting on the couch with @brianshaler and we were both amazed that so many people were so closely watching Rose’s Tweets AND had a question for him.
2. Chris Pirillo managed to create value out of being helpful on Twitter. He frequently posted links to coupons / product deals on different e-commerce sites. What you may or may not have noticed was that each link was an affiliate link that surely earned him a small kickback on any purchases made on that site
3. After being @referenced in tweets from a few friends (@andrewhyde, @brianshaler, @t and @indiekid to name a few) who happen to have quite a few more followers than I do, people started following me at much higher than usual rates. While this seems so obvious, watching it happen really solidified my understanding of how Twitter “works”.

Being the tech-geek I am, one of the first things I did at my “corporate job” was ask how I could set up email on my iPhone. Unfortunately, I was told that Monitor uses Lotus Notes (I knew that Lotus Notes existed, but I didn’t actually think anyone used it). Long story short, I had to get a BlackBerry. Now, almost 9 months later, I’ve switched back to my iPhone, but have compiled this short list of things I’ll miss, and things I’m glad to have back.

Things I’ll miss from my BlackBerry Curve

• A much better platform for typing long messages / emails
• A phone designed to function while out of service (ie: email/weather on the subway)
• Multiple email addresses in one inbox
• Profiles (for volume / alerts / vibrate)
• Apps that run in the background (a la Google Talk)
• BB Messenger (far superior than SMS)
• Ability to handle all types of calendar invites
• Last, but certainly not least: Copy/Paste (you knew that was coming)

Reasons I’m glad to be back on an iPhone

• Brilliant UI
• Safari (the only good mobile web browser)
• Great MP3 player
• Incomparable application / game selection
• Adikus’ Backgammon App
• iTrans NYC (Subway Map)
• Ability to type one-handed
• Brightkite iPhone App