the real Nate Clark

You may or may not know that Atlanta is in a severe drought right now, and the Governor recently asked Atlantans to cut back their water consumption by 10%. Reminds me of a mantra of an old friend:

When it’s yellow … let it mellow
When it’s brown … flush it down

Yeah, that’s a little gross, but seriously we could do better to conserve water. Especially when taking a leak … it seems like such a waste to use all that water to flush away something that’s already liquid. I read this week that one county’s schools are going to those waterless urinals. A great step in the right direction. Let’s also get these in airports, malls, everywhere.

Also, I recently came back from Paris, where all the toilets have two flush buttons … one that deploys a smaller flush for #1. What a great, simple and effective idea. Why don’t we have these in our homes?

It looks like they’ve caught on in some airports:

Photo by jessamyn on Flickr

I was on my way back to Atlanta from my friend’s wedding in Ohio, tired and worn out from a whole weekend of eating, drinking, and partying. Despite my mentally drained state, sometime during the flight home, the idea just came to me. I get new ideas all the time. One or two a month … at least. Most of them are written off quickly as too hard, too silly, or too expensive … so I let this idea soak for a while.

Hours later, I’m at home in bed. It’s 4:00am. My brain won’t turn off.

I slide out of bed and into my computer chair. A few clicks later, and I’m whipping out my credit card to register a handful of domains at GoDaddy. “Fantastically simple, but this could be huge!” I think to myself. With the comfort in knowing that my domain names are secure, I get back into bed and sleep soundly ‘till noon.

I’ve been working diligently on my build-your-own-social-network startup, Wamily for quite a while now. We’re weeks away from a public release. Did I really want to divert my already sporadic attention to something totally new at this point in the game? Was this mini-startup worth giving up precious development time? Is my co-founder gonna be pissed at me for putting Wamily on the back burner? Am I crazy?

After careful consideration, the answer to all of these is yes. I gave myself one weekend to hack something out, then I have to get back to Wamily. Hell, it’ll be fun.

Three days later (ok, fine … a long weekend) and it’s up. Using the Google Maps API and Ruby on Rails, I hacked together a neat little search tool to find biodiesel filling stations around the world. Yeah, I didn’t expect you to get it right away. But just wait a couple years, this alternative fuel thing is going to be huge.

So, am I glad that I did it? Well, yes and no. But mostly yes. This little mini-project has given me the opportunity to work with a couple of tools that I hadn’t had the chance to learn before. In one short weekend, I created a cool and useful website, and also got to:

• play with the Google Maps API and the YM4R Ruby plugin
• implement the MaxMind GeoLite City database to detect your site vistors’ city and country from their IP address
• deploy a production application on Edge Rails
• open up my first Google Adsense account
• help save the world by making alternative fuel more accessible
• hedge my bets on Wamily

The only downside, really, is that I find myself wanting to spend more time on Find Biodiesel, when I really should be getting Wamily ready to go. Oh well. What’s another weekend in the big scheme of things?