Embracing Chaos

Last week I went to a different kind of Dork Bot meeting here in Seattle called the Catastrophic Cacophony Workshop. It was a maker-style event where we broke up into teams of people and in 90 minutes had to build a robotic musical instrument out of one supplied motor and whatever other parts we could scrounge together. Our team started with the basic idea of a repetitive percussive instrument with multiple hammers hitting multiple objects. So we constructed a platform to hold the motor and used tennis rackets to make a rotating frame that held a series of arms that…

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Wonder what I’ve been up to at work lately? Here’s a tiny glimpse. Google just launched another way to access the Google Talk network. It’s a web-based instant messaging chat client optimized for the iPhone browser. It’s not my primary project or my secondary or tertiary, but I did write a blog post about it and made sure the whole thing got out the door today. If you have an iPhone, try it out at www.google.com/talk. Warning: Non-iPhone browsers will be directed away.

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A bit over a week ago I had surgery to keep my arm from falling off. It’s happened at least a half dozen times in the last couple of years — while snowboarding, rock climbing or climbing Mt Rainier. Then the attachment became really weak and it would come off for no good reason at all — just taking off a backpack or even reaching for a glass of water. While I was wiping my ass was definitely the worst. Thank god for awesome roommates. Anyway, after a long process of finding a kick-ass orthopedic surgeon who specializes in shouders…

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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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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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