Three years ago, I left a powerful position at a large hedge fund in Connecticut, in hopes of finding a more fulfilling job. Over these three years, I’ve consulted to various financial firms, mostly to keep the cash flow as positive as possible. I’ve also worked with several startups and have a few articles published on a wide array of topics from hedge fund technology to psychology of online behavior to looking at politics online. At the same time, I have dabbled in essays and fiction.

My interests have focused on financial engineering, technological engineering to social network engineering. I have moved from a strong focus on online synchronous communities to blogs.

I have worked with blogs on blogger.com, and livejournal.com, to more complicated systems like MovableType and quite a few different Drupal implementations. My writings are scattered all over the Internet in no coherent manner.

I have networked at sites like Ecademy and Ryze. I have dabbled in systems like Friendster, tribe.net. and Deanlink

I have become highly involved with the Howard Dean campaign.

This week, I found, as I have been expecting, my current consulting project to a hedge fund is coming to an end. I need to figure out what I do next.

The most important advice I have gotten so far has come from many sources. They all say: Follow your dreams. I don’t know exactly where my dreams are leading me. One person tells me to be a political consultant. Another wants to partner with me on creating politically oriented websites. A third wants to do financial engineering with me.

I feel that the most important thing right now is to try and bring as many of these threads together. One idea is to get a single website that I can organize all of this at in as accessible a manner as possible.

This brings up a few very pragmatic questions. I live in a 100-year-old house. Its name is ‘Orient Lodge’. I have wondered about naming my site Orient Lodge. However, as I did a search on this online, I found many references to Freemasonry. Should I use Orient Lodge as a name, even if it carries an overtone of Freemasonry? I also have a site, Group Mine. I could perhaps use this site as well. What does everyone think?

Also, I need to decide what software to use. Should I use Drupal, which I’ve been doing a lot with recently? I like Drupal a lot, but I don’t really like what it does to URLs. Should I use MovableType? MovableType is quite nice. Or should I move to a more sophisticated system, such as Slash or Scoop, which I haven’t really played with?

Give me your comments and I will mull them over.

I am at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Toronto.

I'm currently sitting in another panel on blogs.

I've been blogging some of this on my MovableType blog

This is a test of the new API from the MOO.

People have been talking about Blogspot not working with the XML-RPC since Google has agreed to buy Pyra. So, I am testing from my MOO to see if my App still works.

This is a demo Blog entry to show Dogwood_guest at LogMOO blogging from a MOO.

I have now gotten a test environment running for MOOs to provide information about their mailing lists using RSS. I've tested it with a few clients. If anyone reads this and wants to test it, please take a look at
http://ahynes1.homeip.net:9999/1462

Please drop me a note to let me know if it is working okay for you, and which RSS client you used.

Thanks

Today, I am testing the Weblogs.com XML interface from LogMOO

MOO Blogging. I have finally found why my Blogger API calls to Blogger weren't publishing at blogspot. I have updated @ajsend on LogMOO so that it can send to blogspot, Ecademy and LiveJournal in a single post. Unfortuntely none of them handle conditions exactly the same way, so it is a little kludgy. Nonetheless, it is nice to be able to write my blog entry once, and update all three locations with a single command.

My daughter just sent me a link to the website for James Whitman's campaign to become Governor of Ohio. ( http://whitmanandclark.netfirms.com/ )

It looks like an interesting campaign, grassroots, internet based. Worth a look.

This is a test of blogging from a MOO! I tried it yesterday, and the publish parameter seemed not to be taking, although it is working with Ecademy. (Non MOO based additional comment, the <param><value><boolean>true</boolean><value></param> doesn't seem to be taking, and I have to publish via the web)

Of late, I've been doing a lot of Blogging on www.livejournal.com. (Check out my blogs there at http://www.livejournal.com/users/aldon) This is where I do most of my blogging.

I also got set up at Blogspot (http://aldon.blogspot.com/) I've just tested this out a little bit, but don't really have much there.

And then there is Ecademy (http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=blog&op=view&uid=18670) This blog community seems to be mostly oriented around tech issues, so I've posted a few things here, but not a lot.

Today, I read a post on LiveJournal from a friend who posts everything to two different blogs. It seems as if there is a real need for some good tools to facilitate using mutliple blogs, crosslinking etc...

My first Blog entry