Early Saturday at Indy Hall
View more photos from Indy Hall.

Independents Hall is nested nicely in Old City, two-floors above Strawberry Street (or what could be called an alley), and is now the venue for the future of coworking in Philadelphia. Spending the better part of the day there, on a Saturday, working with a few other people is a real joy. The space, the people, the weather – all factors in inspiring productivity.

My main reason for coming to Independents Hall on this day was to be part of the judging panel for the Viddler MealToday contest and to use the space’s grand opening party as the backdrop for the announcement of its winner. Alex Hillman, and the rest of the coworkers at Indy Hall, were all extremely accommodating – allowing us to take over a few of their desks for the day, a good portion of their second floor, their projector, and their board room. Really, we couldn’t have asked for better hosts.

I had a ball seeing all of the people in Philly again and had a great time judging MealTodays with Scott McNulty, Marisa McClellan, Rob Sandie, and Gary Vaynerchuk. We’ll be releasing a video later today We’ve released a video on the Viddler Spotlight (our blog), which shows what went on that night and that should give you a good glimpse into what it was like to be at Indy Hall’s party and to be judging the MealTodays.

With well over 100 people in attendance there is no doubt in Philadelphia’s interest in coworking and community (and probably champagne). Such support makes me both jealous and inspired to someday setup a coworking space further north of Philadelphia. But that won’t be until I have time to settle down.

If I didn’t get to say hi to you while in Philadelphia, sorry. I’ll be in again this weekend for Podcamp Philly.

This week I weighed in at 193 pounds which means I’m on track for my goal that I set last week.

My goals for this week are to hit at least 191 by getting out to exercise more this week than I have in previous weeks. I should be able to visit the gym tonight, basketball should also be possible tomorrow and perhaps Friday.

This weekend I’ll be in Philadelphia (on Saturday only) for Viddler’s MealToday contest – so I’m hoping to get outdoors on Sunday for frisbee or something.

A note to James Mathias: You and I have been part of this “diet thing” since the very beginning and you have been a major inspiration on myself and many of the dieters that have been on this journey with us. I wanted to reply to a comment you left on my MealToday where you said: “No worries bro, I got the hint, I’ll back off. Just leave you with this thought. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. I think you know what I mean. Sorry for bugging you in any case.”. I strongly believe you take me far too seriously. I think if you watch the video again you will hear sarcasm in my voice. I have always, and will continue, to value your input on my dieting habits as I know that you have far more knowledge than I in the areas of food and health in general. Please, please, please, never stop trying to help me succeed! Sorry if I came across as though I didn’t want you to call me out and help keep me on track.

Side note about eating healthy: I don’t know if I will ever, ever be able to live up to “eating healthy”. I try. But frankly I believe that there is a balance between being a food nazi and simply trying to change your diet and exercising more. I take the simple, fun approach to my health which is to try to keep my calories in check (while still eating what I enjoy) and being active. I do not believe I’d ever enjoy life living to the strictest of food rules. I realize there is great value in eating the best of foods with no preservatives, the best ingredients, etc. etc. – I’m just not that guy. If it means that my life is shortened by 2-months because I like Perkin’s Peanut Butter Silk Pie than by golly I think it is worth the sacrifice.

Thanks James – keep bugging me!

That’s it from me… see you next week (I like these much looser weigh in posts).

I knew I’d be going to ViddlerHQ to giveaway the second iPhone for the month of July. Giving away an iPhone is a production in and of itself. You have to prepare the entries. Get everything together to do a video “broadcast” to announce the winner and try to build a little hype by involving the community along the way. This alone is a pretty big thing to accomplish in a day.

My mobile setup – at the offices of Viddler

We weren’t certain that we’d be launching a brand new version of our site and our player on this same day until about the day before. Yesterday we launched a new player that, although aesthetically the same, takes advantage of an entirely new infrastructure that the Viddler team had been building for quite some time. Video playback and responsiveness should be vastly improved for most people, especially those that were viewing videos that had a high amount of traffic associated to them. We also managed to release Viddler Groups which allows our users to create their own little communities to add video and discussions to. I’ve personally been waiting with baited breath for Groups since before we launched Version 2.0 in April.

Rob working hard

While we were rolling out Groups we had a hiccup. I’m no system administrator (not by any stretch of the imagination), but from what I gather it wasn’t something we could avoid because we experienced a problem during a routine automatic upgrade process that happened to coincide with our update. I’ll let Rob, Kasper, and/or Todd elaborate on this if they feel the need to. We were able to restore everything fairly quickly once the problem was indentified and release groups with much success!

While one contest was ending, another one was beginning. Our MeToday contest in July was such a success that we wanted to do it again – so we came up with what I think is a natural extension to the MeToday contest – the MealToday contest. Just tell Viddler what you ate or drank today and you can win your choice of an iPhone or Canon TX1 HD camcorder. We’re running this contest with two of our favorite Viddlers WineLibraryTV and ForkYouTV for the entire month of August. We’re now planning an event in Philadelphia for September 1st to giveaway this prize in style!

To top off the day our very own Viddler Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV was scheduled to be on Late Night with Conan O’brien! How much more jammed packed and fun could one day get? After watching Gary’s few moments with Conan last night – I have to say he did an extraordinarily good job. We’re all so proud of the success that WineLibraryTV has worked so hard for and we’re sure this trend will continue.

So that was my day; how was yours?