bengarvey.com

Author: bengarvey

  • Friday, 10/18/12 opening for the Jersey Corn Pickers

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    On Friday, 10/18/12 I’ll be opening for the Jersey Corn Pickers at the Bus Stop Cafe in Pitman, NJ! I go on at 7:00PM sharp and will be play mostly originals with a few covers mixed in. I haven’t played in forever and can’t wait. See you then! Bus Stop Cafe 148 South Broadway Pitman,…

  • iOS 6 Panoramas from Longwood Gardens

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    Last weekend we took a trip to Longwood Gardens and what better place to try out the new panorama feature in iOS 6?

  • Family Mystery: Solved!

    Family Mystery: Solved!

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    In every family tree there are squirrelly branches. There are stories, legends, secrets, and it’s hard to tell what is real and what was exaggerated for the sake of a better story. For me, one of those stories was the reputed last name of my great grandfather. My father’s, mother’s father’s last name was Delpino,…

  • What it’s like to do the Philadelphia Broad Street Run

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    Getting up at 5:30AM on a Sunday and forcing my body to run 10 grueling miles on Philadelphia’s most famous street doesn’t seem like a good idea, and yet, over 32,000 people including myself did that last weekend. What is it about the IBX Philadelphia Broad Street Run that makes it the most popular 10…

  • List of Interesting Places in 8-Bit Google Maps

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    I love the new retro 8-bit Google Maps, kind of an early April Fool’s joke. Just go to Google Maps and click “start quest.” It reminds me of old school Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior. Update: My memory is failing me a little. It’s not just a tribute to Dragon Warrior. All the tile graphics…

  • Review: Book a Week with Jen

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    I’m a painfully slow reader. I can only think of a few books I’ve read in under a week and some of my favorite books took me over a year to finish (I’m looking at you Cryptonomicon). I met Jen Miller through twitter in 2007. Back then she was working on a project reviewing 52…

  • Best Things this Year (2011)

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    Here are some best things I’ve come across this year. Not all are new, or even new to me, but they kicked ass in 2011 1. Kids Dungeon Adventure – A floortop RPG for pre-school age kids and their geeky parent(s). What started out as a little game with my daughter grew into a full…

  • Launched: Evidensity for Highrise

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    For the last few weeks I’ve been working on a new analytical dashboard tool for Highrise and it finally launches today! Read about it here. In the launch post I talk about what makes Evidensity different from other tools and my worldview on sales dashboards: Some people don’t want customizable line graphs They want actionable…

  • Creating a comma separated list

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    For years, whenever I have to create a comma separated list from an array I have been writing code that looks vaguely like this. $first = true; foreach($arr as $m) { if ($first) { $first = false; } else { echo “,”; } echo $m; } I’ve had it. There has to be a cleaner…

  • Pwning Complete

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    I can put the AK back on the shelf now. Previously: 37 Signals Sent Me a Gift for Pwning their Leaderboard

  • Spam as Spoken Word Poetry

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    This spam I got today on our lead generation form could easily pass for spoken word poetry at an open mic night. He ran another invisible priest eyes in the sneakers from the shorts with sky – arms, sardonic cigarettes and outward clinch’s, and he a was almost stiffly of area, finally just for moment. Like i…

  • 37signals Sent Me a Gift for Pwning their Leaderboards

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    This year I took an AK to the Answers leaderboard at 37signals, mostly answering Highrise questions. The Answers board is the best place to learn how to use Highrise because if you have a question there’s a good chance someone else has already asked it. I scoured it during our implementation in April, 2010 and…

  • Rock the Animals Theme Song

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    Sasha and I recorded a theme song for Rock the Animals today. Enjoy! Ben and Sasha Garvey – Rock the Animals

  • Philadelphia Hackathon

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    I’ll be doing a short talk about Dungeon Adventure tomorrow at the Philadelphia Ship It Society’s Hackathon. Tickets are available here. The Ship It Society is all about getting together and rapid prototyping a project to see if its feasible. Should be a fun time.

  • Happy Father’s Day

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    Happy Father’s Day to all the Dads out there, especially my Dad who was crushing it in the early 90’s. Mark Garvey – Fool Such as I UpdateAnd just a few days later we meet the new Mark Garvey.

  • Beercamp Philly 2011 Recap

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    Yesterday I sampled beers with names like Chocrilla, Blood Orange Berliner, and the Bee Sting Ale along with the spiciest shrimp I have ever eaten. I poured my own homebrewed Amber Ale called Yakima Sax to a few hundred beer geeks and watched the legend of Beercamp Philly Camp grow. The first Philly Beercamp was…

  • My low cost e-commerce stack

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    Since I launched Dungeon Adventure, an RPG for kids, a few weeks ago a lot of people have asked me how exactly I’m selling it. It’s for sale as a digital download and print out board game, or “floor top RPG” as Phil Nelson called it. Here’s how it works: I have a hosting account…

  • GeekDad Reviews the Dungeon Adventure

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    So the response to Dungeon Adventure have been pretty overwhelming. A few key highlights: 1. Sales of Dungeon Adventure exceeded my wife’s lifetime projection for it in about 12 hours. 2. I told Sasha, “Hey we sold 10 copies!” and she said, “cool! What’s a copy?” 3. I’ve already heard from a number of people…

  • The Dungeon Adventure: An RPG for Pre-Schoolers

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    A while back Sasha and I were playing with some toys and I built a maze out of blocks. With the blocks we had, you couldn’t make a decent maze but it occured to me that our maze would make a decent D&D style dungeon. We had some of her figures walk through the maze…

  • Everything Bad is Good For You

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    Parents can sometimes be appalled at the hypnotic effect that television has on toddlers; they see their otherwise active and vibrant children gazing silently, mouth agape at the screen, and they assume the worst: that television is turning their child into a zombie. The same feeling arises a few years later when they see their…