Embracing Chaos

Sorry for going dark for a little while there. As expected, starting a new job while taking a full load of classes at school has been challenging. Also unsurprisingly, the Google job is very engaging. I’ll describe a bit of what it’s like on the inside and also how this affects the kinds of things I write about here. I spent my first week in Mountain View at the Googleplex. My entering class of “Nooglers” were subjected to inane videos and boring HR discussions. But a couple hours into it we powered up our laptops and within 15 minutes I’d…

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I caved. I took a job with Google as a Product Manager. I start today. I’m down in Mountain View all week to have kool-aid forcibly injected intravenously. Make note of this day and see if you can sense a shift in tone of my posts as time continues. We’ll see when I start thinking and posting about Google in first person. This change is important to you my dear readers for a couple of other reasons. Most significantly is around intellectual property. Google’s IP policy for its employees can be effectively summarized as “All your base are belong to…

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I spent Saturday hanging out with about a dozen hackers building Tagmindr: Remember the future. Here’s the site’s self-description: Put any bookmark in a time capsule and we’ll send it to your future self. Give us your del.icio.us username and we’ll feed you anything that you’ve tagged as: “tagmindr” and “remind:YYYY-MM-DD”. We’ll remind you via RSS, SMS, Email or IM, so long as it’s RSS. (SMS, Email and IM coming later.) The use case is that you find a page about a product or service that you’d like to look at sometime later so you tag it into del.icio.us thinking…

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After 6.5 years of having dreadlocks, I decided I was done. So while I was at Burningman this year, I had my friends help me cut them off. I wandered around on Saturday with a pair of scissors, and would ask friends one at a time if they would help me by cutting off one of my dreads. Some of them went into a bag for future nefarious purposes, and some of them got put into my new dread hat, and others got burned ceremoniously. In all, 33 people helped cut my hair. “It takes a village” Mason said. I…

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My talk about Venture Capital Term Sheets that I mentioned earlier has been accepted for the next Ignite Seattle which is tomorrow night at the CHAC. If just you want to come hear me talk, I’ll be speaking sometime after 9:45 PM. But the rest of the night (schedule here) looks fabulous so I plan to show up at the beginning at 6:30 PM. I’m doing my best to make this talk slower and more sane than my last talk. I hope to see you tomorrow!

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Here’s a shout out to my friends — this weekend I’m making my third attempt to climb Mt. Rainier. (The first two were successful.) But we’re in for a challenge since the glaciers are really broken up. I’m trying to focus this blog on more technology and business issues, so I won’t be talking much about it here. If you’d like to follow along, check out my ironically named outdoors blog Safety Fourth. (Look good, act cool, have fun… Safety fourth!)

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A number of folks have been courting me for positions as a software development engineer recently. Many of them sound really fun. I love writing code, and even though it hasn’t been my professional focus for years, I think I’m still alright at it. But I’ve had to come to a sober realization that I simply cannot take a job where writing code is my primary function. I’m just not physically capable of it. I just about cried during a job interview once when explaining this. People come in my office and say “that’s a cool keyboard.” My response is…

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I just got back from foo camp, a small unconference-style event held on the Sebastopol campus of O’Reilly. FOO stands for Friends Of O’Reilly. (The name came out of a joke about having a “foo bar” at a conference. This bar served me too much wine over the course of the weekend.) Tim O’Reilly likes the conference because it helps him spot upcoming trends early, which is an important part of O’Reilly’s business both as a publisher of technology books, and as an organizer of large public conferences. The conference is small and invitation only, and pretty much everybody there…

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Here’s the scene: It’s 1:30 PM. In 30 minutes the CEO of your company starts a conference call with analysts to announce quarterly earnings. PR told you he is going to tell the Wall Street analysts how cool your team’s website is. It is quite a success — in 18 months it has rocketed from non-existence to the world’s fourth most popular site in a very competitive industry. Sounds great to get some recognition, right? Only problem is, today your site’s kinda broken. The night before a database upgrade got confused half-way through with no possibility to roll back. One…

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First, I’d like to welcome everybody landing here after searching for something on Google. I hope you find what you’re looking for. I know Google has been crawling my site nearly since its launch, and I’ve been passively wondering when would this site show up in Google’s search index. It’s been in Yahoo and MSN for ages, and getting more and more links from high profile sites all the time. Well I just got the answer: as soon as I gave Google money. Surprised? As a birthday present to myself, I bought a few adwords like: Your Brain in a…

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