A Day in Paradise

It’s never good when you’re sitting in the living room reading slashdot and you say to your wife “Hey did you hear that the kid who hacked the iphone traded it in for a nissan 350z, and she says “Yeah, I read about it yesterday!”

I remember the good old days when you would hear about stuff on /. days before it would hit main media. Now you’re having mainstream media sourcing their stories from digg and fark and those of us who have learned everything we know from slashdot are left behind.

And for the record, I just read /. for the stories.

Filed for future consumption. THE SHARPE RATIO - by Bob Fulks - I should probably put this stuff in my del.icio.us… either that or start a link blog…

I think we do about 75% of these

http://www.intrepid.com/robertl/index.html

unfortunately most of them are broken.

Greg Stein (Director of the Apache Software Foundation) was Mugged - Accepting Donations

Last Friday night Greg Stein was mugged and seriously injured outside of his home in Mountain View, CA.

They gave Greg a black eye and a serious laceration to the head which required numerous stiches. Apparently, he was bleeding profusely when the ambulance came.

The doctors were worried about his head wound and he spent the entire night under observation and went through numerous CAT scans.

The fund is set up to raise $2k to send Greg on a vacation, overflow will go to the ASF. Greg’s work on mod_dav and subversion are IMHO some of the most useful features of Apache2.

More information at the fund’s google group.

http://www.open-realty.org/
http://wiki.open-realty.org
http://openrealtytemplates.awddesign.co.uk/listingview/55

This is a response to Lukas’ post over here… I hate blogging about comments I make on other blogs, but I also like to keep semi-coherent blog entries under my roof, so that I can have them should I ever need to refer back to them.

I am not a stock broker, but spend all my working hours with them.

There is nothing wrong with the stock market, the problem is simply with capitalism and greed.

I can’t agree with you on condemning the stock market for bad company decisions. Once you have opened your company up to private investments it is truly out of your hands. Although I do agree that it’s the very big players who make the power moves and the small players who loose the money.

A typical example of the volatility of the stock market was the crazy last week. A lot of the best stocks got hit the hardest, not because there was anything wrong with the company but because some big players lost a LOT of money on other stocks, and had to sell off their earning stocks to cover their margin calls. This sent perfectly good stocks into free fall and lost a lot of small investors a lot of money.

Yay capitalism!

I forgot who said this, but a great investment is to buy a lot of gold, and bury it in a hole (that’s actually not that good advice… since you’re going to pay a lot of tax… better go with a gold ETF).

Don Dodge coined Web2.0 as “Web App + 2 Founders + 0 Revenue”. Funny, and not too far off the money.

Don goes into detail about the various ways that Web2.0 firms are funding their efforts. This goes from Freemium (free basic membership with paid premium package) to Subscriptions to simple Advertising.

One thing that he doesn’t mention is the “community-in-a-box” business model. A community in a box is not about selling any specific product, it’s simply about creating an exciting product creating a buzz around it, and then delivering eyeballs and mindshare to a larger company.

Let’s face it, despite their best efforts Netscape’s Digg clone failed miserably. Google couldn’t do nearly as good as YouTube despite of the grotesque amount of money at their disposal. Yahoo’s Image Gallery could never do what Flickr does. Nokia could have never attracted a userbase the size of Twango. And whoever pays $x Billion for flixster (or the next social media site) is not going to care about monetizing the site they are going to care about the community they are getting.

One of the main differences between this boom and the first technology boom, is that, like Dan states, Web2.0 can survive as an idea + 2 young enthusiastic founders. All we need to build a community-in-a-box is a good idea, and a couple beat up servers somewhere and a couple hours a night spent cranking out some slick PHP or Ruby code.

We are in the process of re-doing our office, and are going to hang three 50″ plasmas from a triangular bracket hanging in the center of the office.

After scouring the net for good deals on the Panasonic 50″ plasmas we wanted, we came up with 2 final options.

1. Buy from some online store and get them delivered.
2. Buy from an offer at costco, and pick them up ourselves.

Getting them from costco would mean paying the sales tax, but the deal was better and with the 3% we get off from the corporate card + creditcard they came out to be the same. The kicker was that Costco’s came with a 1-year longer warranty period.

The initial idea was to use my car, but since we weren’t sure that 3 plasmas would fit in it (these things are HUGE) we decided to grab a truck from Home Depot. They only had open flatbed trucks, but the sky was clear and it wouldn’t rain in the 75 minutes it would take to get to costco’s and back. Right?

WRONG!!!

As soon as we got the Plasmas and our other gear loaded up on the back of the truck and got back on I95 the sky clouded up and a storm of biblical proportions headed our way. By the time the rain hit us, the rush-hour traffic had come to a near standstill, and we spent the next 45 minutes crawling along wondering how much of the $5k worth of goodies would survive the rain.

Thankfully, by the time we got back to the office the rain had stopped and other than soaking wet boxes, the plasmas themselves had not been damaged at all. The outside of the boxes were soaked, but no water had seeped through to the inside of the box, and the plasmas themselves were wrapped in 2 layers of plastic. Not bad for having sat on the back of an open truck for 45 minutes in heavy rain.

The moral of this story is: There is a reason why an industry is built around delivering stuff. So will we get the next thing delivered? Probably not, buying stuff at costco is just too fun

Posted by mobile phone:
I am looking into several different ife insuranmce packages. I’ve done quite a bit of research both online and offline, but before I make my final choices I wanted to draw on the infinite wisdom of you, dear reader.

My goals are both life insurance as well as preservation of capital.

Any personal experiences of what I should or shouldn’t do?

Posted by mobile phone:
I have been using Mozilla/Firefox since M7 back in 99.

It has served me well all these years and up until a few months ago I was a fanboy. I have been doing exactly the same thing for the last 3 years. I haven’t installed any plugins, and yet the browser gets slower and slower that I have had to go into IE to do a couple things.

This morning I gave up and installed Opera. I still use Thunderbird and hope that it doesn’t go down the same bloated road as Firefox.

A St. Cloud, Minn. woman in the middle of a custody battle is facing an unusual order from the court. A district court investigator is recommending that Christa Burton stop breastfeeding her 15-month-old child, Carter.

I guess in a custody battle everything is game…

Full Story Here

This is in response to Cal’s post on SEO experts.

—

It really depends on the framework… Zend Framework is very SEO framework. Others that rely on a lot of ajax or javascript POST callbacks to facilitate basic navigational tasks will stop a search engine dead in its tracks.

I have also seen frameworks which use strange http redirects as part as the controller, this has the habit of killing search engines as well.

Speed is also important in SEO, being able to output the correct http cache tags. You should have complete control over the output HTML, the ability to create descriptive css styles and have full control over the structure of your html output.

Clean URL support is good in ZF, but the default front controller still needs some modification to be truely SEO friendly.

When it comes to SEO experts I totally agree that they are the scum of the earth… but they are also just playing a game that Google set up for them to play.

The monetary value of being #1 on Google is just too much to pass up.

Posted by mobile phone:
Point your browsers at http://www.wormus.com/annie for the first website of a 6-year-old.

I helped her with some of the technical issues, but the content is all hers.

We are planning on starting a going-to-school blog, and building up a platform from scratch.

Its going to be fun.

Posted by mobile phone:
I am watching cnbc while on the excersize bike while blogging (multitasking++). They had a very.short piece about how yahoo customer satisfaction has grown 3 percent to pass google who has dropped 3 percent.

When I look at the two platforms, I have very little loyalty to google products.

Google search: I use it, but basically hate it. As soon as there is a viable alternative I am going to drop it.

Gmail: don’t really do the whole webmail thing. Gmail has some nice features, but hasn’t done much new in the last few years.

Google IG: pretty awesome, but for some reason I am not using it as much as I used to.

Google docs: Sweet, I love it. I wish they would add the concept of page breaks.

Adsense: a scam, I hate it.

Analytics: I use it but its not that great.

Youtube: great product, one of the only google acquisitions that has a community. We’ll see how google manages it.

And now some yahoo properties I use:

Flickr: premium member since they started. I love it.

Yahoo mail: great technology, by far the best webmail platform available.

Mybloglog: cool blogging community tool. Unique tool, nothing else like it available.

Stumbleupon: another awesome Y! buy a community based around what everyone does best: websurfing.

Yahoo finance: great product, far more features and more usable than the google counterpart.

Yahoo technologies: we use YUI heavily as well as other webservices provided by yahoo.

So you may have noticed that I hardly mentioned any products which were actually created by yahoo, and only a couple original google products.

Maybe the problem with google is that they merge the communities of their acquisitions with the general google brand. Yahoo does as much as they can to keep the communities intact.

We’ll see how google manages to break youtube and how the communities manage once the next big thig movie sharing site comes around.