Drewidia

For those who don’t know, I’m leaving my job on July 11 to work full time on my own projects before I move to Bloomington August 20 to start grad school.

That’s just a little over a month to get everything done that I want; professionally, academically and extracurricular… ly. I’ve created this Quittin’ list of everything I wanted to accomplish before the move. Each major workthread (professonal, personal and academic) will be completed more or less concurrently.

Major Professional Goals After Quitting

• Get PayOwe Facebook app up and running (3 days)
• Finalize PayOwe and get it beta-ready (6 days not including the Facebook component)
• Get secret Craigslist project completed (4 days)
• Redesign Drewidia (2 days)
• Redesign Inkitecture Blog (1 day)
• Begin iPhone App for PayOwe (4 days)
• Start on secret Flex finance project (8 days)

Major Personal Goals

• Complete a century (100-mile) ride on my bike (daily Chicago trail training, targeting August 19 for all-day ride)
• Give up coffee UPDATED: Okay, realism; drink less coffee. Maybe only on Sunday’s.
• Work out at Quad’s Gym daily (starting July 11)

Major Academic Goals

• Refresh understanding of Flex, Flash (12 days including secret finance project)
• Read required HCI/Informatics books (2 days)

Of all of these, I have the greatest doubt of completing a century on my bike. I’m going to give myself all day to complete the century when I think I’m ready. My friend Dave tells me this is a difficult thing to do less from an endurance reason, but moreso from a logistical reason (tremendous amount of calories and water on the day of). We will see. Indeed, we will see.

As of late I have been asked the same basic question with a fairly consistent regularity, “What have you been up to?” and “I never see you any more, are you married?” and “Why don’t we have any grandchildren yet?”.

The answer to most of those questions can be answered with PayOwe.com . PayOwe is a way for people to keep track of their everyday, friend-to-friend loans and debts. It works through Twitter, the online social networking site.

How it works: Essentially, you send a message through Twitter with the amount someone owes you and why (“Bob owes me $4 for lunch”). This debt is received by @PayOwe and added to the database. An balance sheet of accumulated debts can then be viewed/managed through PayOwe.com. If the person who owes you also uses Twitter, it will show up on their balance sheet as well (pending their approval). This allows both parties to control the state of the debt which I guess makes PayOwe a social networking site.

PayOwe is the first offering from Inkitecture , which is Jay, Kunal and myself. Jay came up with the original idea for PayOwe and it’s underlying architecture to be based off of Twitter and Jabber messaging. We’ve found Twitter + Jabber messaging to be an excellent means of sending/receiving messages.

The site is in it’s alpha phase right now, and we’d greatly appreciate any feedback on the site. Please check it out and let us know what you think -> info at payowe dot calm.