company Hiring; and Personal Responsibility Gnip is growing, so I'm face-to-face with the beast that is hiring. Finding smart, compelling, passionate, committed, persistent people is hard. Assuming you find one (big assumption), testing your thesis is the big gamble. Even if you do a half-dozen face to face interviews, some "try before
weather Cloudy skies and rain. I'm a data junkie. Monitoring data brings awareness in so many forms. Some of it is very personal, and some of it's great for business. One of my favorite data generators has been the Vantage Pro [http://www.davisnet.com/weather/products/vantage2.asp] weather station
sensors Two things that will change the world. Last night my backordered "smart" powerstrip [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0014GZFJA] arrived. It kills power to other outlets when the master voltage drops (e.g. the TV goes to sleep or is powered off). Simple, genius. I had the same level of excitement plugging things into
programming Forecast: Sunny Skies & Windy It took us a few days, but we've ported our system over to AWS. We're not clustered in the cloud yet, but that's next. We'll be conducting load tests next week. My first impression of AWS is posted here [/tomorrows-forecast-cloudy-skies]. What'
summize It's all in the timing. Some good friends of mine started a company called Summize [http://summize.com/] a couple years or so ago. It's comprised of a few of the top search/math/algorithm brains on planet Earth. I'd argue they have the highest ratio of search genius to employee
clouds Tomorrow's Forecast: Cloudy Skies & Sunshine Our managed hosting solution reach a tipping point yesterday. We hit a environment configuration bump that was going to eat 24-36 of our precious startup development hours. This was second bump we'd hit with our hosted hardware provider, and it caused me to pick up the phone to
api Mozilla Gecko Embedding and fresh air I'm so stoked to see Chris Blizzard [http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/] resurrecting Mozilla Embedding with full force! I used to manage the Mozilla Gecko Embedding team several years ago, and it's been fun to see how things have progressed, and how much focus and energy
Brad Feld effect Brad Feld linked to a page in my blog last month, from his blog [http://feld.com]. The significant, temporary, traffic impact was comedic.
clouds SPOFs and Clouds I'm really excited about the Cloud computing frenzy in the marketplace right now. So many under utilized CPU cycles within large corporate data centers (eBay, Amazon, Google, AOL, Microsoft, others) are begging for communal use. Amazon leads the pack by far right now, but I'm anxious
conservation Electric evolution. Alternating and Direct Currents have been on my mind quite a bit over the past 48 hours. It started by dragging out the AC powered Onkyo phonograph to play an original Star Wars LP on Saturday [http://valeski.org/2008/03/original-star-wars-soundtrack.html]. As a side note, pure analog music
Original Star Wars soundtrack Star Wars LP [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jvaleski/2374753571/], originally uploaded by valeski [http://www.flickr.com/people/jvaleski/]. We're 50% of the way through the original Star Wars LP produced in 1977. What a great score for the film! The depth of sound in analog LPs
printing Daily Camera's Goss Metro is no-more. Back in 1973, the year I was born, the Boulder Daily Camera installed a Goss Metro printing press as a major upgrade to its printing services. Over the past couple of days I've been watching the preparation for its disassembly as I walk to, and from, meetings in
patterns Push me, Pull me, please me, tease me! Several of us (Josh Kopelman [http://redeye.firstround.com/2008/03/feed-frenzy.html], Brad Feld [http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2008/03/i_need_a_news_f.html]) are having deja vu around various notification schemes floating around the network today. We're seeing the exact same pattern
work Gnip Gnop & Abuse Brad [http://www.feld.com/] swung this by my desk the other day; thanks man! It's an original Gnip Gnop game by Parker Brothers. Notice any resemblance to Gnip's logo [http://www.gnipcentral.com/]? I'm particularly enjoying the condition the game is in; it&
diet My diet, and data. I'm getting older. It's mid-winter. I have trouble keeping aerobic exercise going during these colder months because I'm a mountain biker, and plowing through snow and ice in the high-country during the winter is a pain. To top it off, I only eat at
work GNIP's official! TechCrunch published our funding [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/14/mybloglog-founder-to-launch-new-startup-gnip-with-1-million-in-funding/] scenario earlier today. Eric Marcoullier [http://www.marcoullier.com/blog/] has done a super-human job of pulling this thing together and getting it off the ground, and I'm stoked to be working with him! Things have
corporate welfare Bailouts, aka Corporate Welfare How is it that we constantly lose sight of the bigger picture? With the constant flow of massive financial bailouts on the part of the US Government, it makes me wonder if we have a privatized economy at all? Feels a lot like Socialism at the end of the day,
carbon Of Carbon, Marketing, Consumerism, and Natural Capitalism I’m really happy to see that “carbon neutrality,” as a concept, is making its way into mainstream media and business. It is a sign that our impact on Earth’s resources is real, and that everything has a “cost” associated with it. We’re at the beginning of the
data URI, favicons, small graphics, and latency The "data" URI scheme [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Url] has been around forever, however IE7 (effectively the only browser ever to *not* support it) dropped support for it years ago, which has pushed its use into obscurity. My hope is that with IE8 bringing back support
programming lazy loading and UX The concept of lazy loading is an old one in the context of software programming. The idea is that you only do an expensive operation at the last possible moment, as to not do a bunch of expensive, slow, stuff unless it's absolutely necessary. As an example, you
meta-data collapsing meta-data I've been looking at several companies and products recently, who are all trying to derive context/categorization from content. Editorially it's pretty easy to see that a blog post is about "cars," but programatically it's not so straightforward. The combination of user
merb scaling an abstraction The applicability of "long-tail" content applies beyond UGC [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-generated_content], into applications and programming languages themselves. 37signals [http://37signals.com] has pushed the industries' thinking around building applications fast with Ruby on Rails [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_on_rails]. It
apple YouTube quality No offense to my friend at YouTube, market dynamics are what they are, but YouTube needs to evolve. With Apple TV now pumping YouTube content to my large HD screen in the house, I need remotely decent video quality. The cheap pixelated gunk that YouTube sends isn't going
work Migrating platforms; out with the old, in with the new! A CTO friend of mine asked for my advice today on a topic I spent roughly a year immersed in during my stint at AOL. He's a faced with moving a large IT/engineering organization off of an old "legacy" platform and infrastructure, over to a
work Combining forces with Eric Marcoullier Eric Marcoullier [http://www.marcoullier.com/blog/] and I have partnered up to execute on an a much needed piece of the tubes infrastructure, and lo' and behold, parlay that fancy new whatchamacallit into a tasty business. We'll be more forthcoming in due time, but we'
