Hi, I'm Jaxon Rice. By day I run a Johannesburg based web company
called Soup and by night I am the frontman of
a country punk band called the Diesel Whores. This is my personal blog where I air my views on everything from rain spider nests to South African start ups.
This blog runs on Community Server 2007. I am a CS MVP, and I designed a number of the default blog skins that ship with CS2007. If you are looking for an ASP.NET enterprise level community platform that is bult by really clever people and runs some of the largest forums and blogs in the world then check it out.
As with any personal blog theme this is a work in progress, so please bear with me if there are occasional bugs and layout problems. The shoemaker's children and all that, you know? I am currently playing around with Jquery and JSON feeds, and thinking a hell of a lot about geotagging. I am a short attention span kind of guy, in case you hadn't already picked that up. I designed this layout using a modified grid version of Blueprint 0.5, a new CSS framework. Frameworks are good.
I also blog sporadically on the Mail and Guardian's Thought Leader blog site. Please do not be fooled by the name - that's just a clever way for the M&G folks to get us to submit content. I am very interested in social networks and folksonomies, but I do not have a personal Facebook account, which I guess makes me a hypocrite. I do, however, have a Last.FM account (and so should you) and I store my bookmarks at Delicious, and my photos at Flickr, which redeems me slightly.
I don't believe in God, the Easter Bunny or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I have a predeliction for singing songs about satan, simply because its fun. If you happen across my band in your travels please come up and introduce yourself. I will gladly buy you a beer. I buy most of my legal music from Emusic (and so should you), and will never, ever buy DRM crippled songs from any of the major labels.
I am involved in building a damn exciting startup. If you twitter, have an openid and are interested in microformats and location based services and would like to check out something new then contact me and I will try to organise a beta account for you.
My dream project would be to build a device that collected medical information every day from its user (weight, body fat percentage, blood pressure, cholesterol levels and any other measurable), and upload it via the mobile networks to a central repository. I think that that if we had millions of these devices out there we would learn so much more about diseases and the human body and we could really change people's lives for the better. We have dashboards for our cars, our computers and even our fridges. We really need one for the human body. I truly believe that we will see such a device in my lifetime. I hope with all my heart that it is open source and free (as in beer).
If I could work for any one company in the whole world it would be 37Signals, helping them build the device I described above.
I am also fiercely, proudly South African
Thanks for visiting my blog. I hope we meet up in the real world too one day.
Later
Jaxon Rice
23 November 2007