Stop watching Lost and start doing stuff!

Great video from Gary Vaynerchuck from Wine Library speaking at Web 2.0 Expo.

I can really relate to a lot of things he talks about. I'm thinking about where I am now and what the future holds.

• A lot of people are doing stuff they hate. There's no reason to do that anymore.


• Listen to your users, care about them. Do stuff to help them don't just listen and brush it off.


• Stop crying and keep hustling. Were building business here.. have a business model.. make some cash along the way.


• Be happy.. do stuff you love. Believe in what your doing.. or get out NOW.


• Build your personal brand / brand equity.


• The game is changing.. the people that used to control content (newspapers, tv networks) no longer do.


• Work 9-5pm, spend some time with your family, 7pm-2pm is when you can work. Stop watching Lost!

Stephen Fry explains GNU

Stephen Fry (a very well known comedian in the UK) explains all about GNU in a video he produced.

Although I use MacOSX extensively, I really see the benefit of using gnu/linux as the server. I have VPS (w/ slicehost.. great btw!) and use Centos.

The Power of the Dollar

I was reading an interesting article called Why People Hate Capitalism, which I passionately agree with.

People complain about US jobs going abroad, but still stock up on Wal-mart where most things comes from overseas. They get the most cheapest goods they can get and then complain about american jobs and how everything seems to break in a matter of weeks/months. There is an endless cycle of consumption that on occasion, sickens me.

You might suggest people don't have a choice.. That's rubbish. People always have a choice. They still have the money for expensive phones with expensive plans, huge LCDs watching premium movie channels, SUVs and go out to fancy restaurants potentially employing illegal workers.

Repeat after me, I HAVE A CHOICE. Now what are you going to do about it?

Heres a list of things I've actively tried to change by using my spending power.

• Use the public transportation. Cars are too big and inefficient in the US (compared to Europe where I've from). Concerned about terrorism in the middle east? What's more patriotic by limiting the amount of fuel you consume and limiting the dollars going into questionable regimes



• I don't (or try not to) buy anything with High Fructose Corn Syrup. There's been lots of press on how truly bad this stuff is and it's in a LOT of commodity goods sold in the US. Do yourself a favour and read up on it.



• I've discovered New-Balance trainers, which they make in the US. I used to be a Nike guy, but I've got sick of all the bad press of alledgly 9 years olds, working for a next to nothing and Nike selling them for $100 a pop.



• Organics food. I'm trying to use as much as possible, although its a little more expensive. The amount of chemicals that get sprayed on your food produce is incredible.



• Meat. I've a vegetarian, but a cow is not supposed to be the size of a Hummer. Only here they are that big. Think about why.. It can't be good.

Anyway.. hopefully something to think about..

Twitter comedy sketch

Oh this link is sooo funny.. The rise and fall of Twitter.. LOL

Travelers' Laptops May Be Detained At Border

I saw this on the washington post.

Travelers' Laptops May Be Detained At Border.
Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

WTF?? Can you imagine if other countries (say in Europe) started doing this? I would expect US citizens be up in arms, but this is being tolerated here.

I don't understand the reasoning. Don't they understand that with the internet there is a free flow of information (its in the tubes!). PGP file, ftp to outside the US.. done.

Is there really an assumption that bad people are stupid enough to cross the border with a laptop of questionable material?

Land Of the Free

*sigh*

VR-like head units with wii

Wow.. I just this utube video about using the wii-remote which is mounted on your head to change the picture of your monitor.

By tracking where your head is compared to the tv, it appears you get a real sense of 3D. I'm really looking forward to see how this progresses.

Here's his main site. I'm gobsmacked on how cool this is. It's very similar to Microsoft's surface technology. This might be the future of UI design.

Confused on how to do CSS?

Maybe you find those "Designing websites with CSS" to dry. Maybe you this form of communication is more digestible for you!

PoW camps

Interesting article written by the economist RA Radford while spending time at a Prisoner of War camp.

He talks about how it from an economic perspective.

Railsconf in 36 minutes

I'm watching Railsconf in 36 minutes. 3 days compressed. Interesting to get the names of the presenters that you didn't get a chance to see and links for further investigations.

Free running is mad!

Just saw this video. Its called Free Running and is based on Parkour. Its Crazy!

Free running is a physical art, in which participants (free runners) use the urban and rural areas to perform movements through its structures focused on freedom and beauty. It incorporates efficient movements from parkour, adds aesthetic vaults and other acrobatics, such as tricking and street stunts,

NewsPuppet

I've knocked up a little rss news portal aka popurls called NewsPuppet.

Please take a look and let me know if you have any comments. At the moment, the feeds can't be adjusted. There's lots more improvement that can be made into user customization and amount of feeds and categories.

It's written in RoR if your interested.

RailsConf 2008

Last week, I ventured forth into Portland (thats in Oregan) to RailsConf08.

It's quite an event.. Lots of technical presentations, lots of networking and general shooting the breeze.

Something that I found particular valuable, were the Birds-of-a-Feather sections. These are less formal than the others.

Overall a great time.. I look forward to investigating more of these:

- Pool Party: Autoscaling on EC2
- Quick and easy custom servers using EventMachine
- Skynet - A Ruby Map/Reduce Framework

I have an interest in cloud computing and dynamically allocating resources to handle load; it was good to talk to people who are actively using it.

Elements of Sustainable Companies

Sequoia is one (if not the top) VC firm in the Silicon Valley and shows us what they are looking for in a startup. Elements of Sustainable Companies highlights certain traits like 'Clarity of Purpose, Large Markets, Pain Killers" that is essential for startup to focus on.

xeyes++

Remember in the old days when you ran xeyes on your xwindows display?

Things have certainly progressed. Freaky!

Idea evaluation

Just saw an interesting post from Evan Williams, cofounder of Twitter, about the best way to evaluate ideas:

-How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
-Is it clear why people should use it?
-How much value can you ultimately deliver?
-How many people may ultimately use it?
-How many people may ultimately use it?
-How will people learn about your product?
-How hard will it be to extract the money?
-Do you really want it to exist in the world?

Optimus Maximus

Looks like we may see the Optimus Maximus RSN. Engadget has a video.

I love how you can paint on the keys... Is this the future?

Why have static keys? Keyboards with come different symbols for english, hindi, sanskrit etc.

J-D-I

Back in few years ago, when I was working in finance in NY, we had a phrase called JDI - "Just Do It" from the Nike ad. In fact it was usually delivered as JFDI. (I'm sure you can work it out)

This is the way on Wall St.. you get used to it. It sounds scary and I suppose it it.. However it toughens you up. When you can trust your colleagues to get things done and they on you, you'll be surprised on what can be achieved.

This hasn't been my experience since coming to the West Coast. Things are more 'fluffy' here. People takes other peoples 'feelings' into account. Maybe its because I'm an INTP and so makes me less patient.

Case in point, it's taken 2.5 months to get a machine sorted out. (That's install linux on it and configure it for our setup.. WTF!?). A piece of configuration (5 mins works) can take 3-4 weeks to get done (huh?) and nobody seems to say.. WTF RU DOING? JFDI!

I've rebuilt my VPS in about a day, with not much clue what I was doing. A trained, skilled admin should be able to do it in super-quick time. Maybe its all this VC money that people are bathing in...

This is when I start letting out a bit of NY. I try and not push people too much.. I try to be nice. Give people a chance.. but if your taking the piss, then you deserve everything that comes your way.

Hence the reason for this post.. :) I read this article and it made me think back.

It's labelled 'Do it Fucking Now.'.

Read it and take it to heart. You'll be surprised on how awesome you can be.

Letter to America

Theres a great post funny floating called 'John Cleese’s “Letter to America”'.

I need to save this for July 4th. :-)

Life advice

Some great advice on how to live your life.

Database verses MapReduce

You might have noticed that there's been a discussion by some dbase guys about how MapReduce is a step backwards.

The article is a little shortsighted IMHO. It's quite well known that databases DO NOT SCALE. Trying running a distributed database on 10,000 machines. In order to get the scalability of facebook, google etc you have to take the data OUT of the database, and generally dump them in memcached.

In any case, here's a nice response to the above article by someone who works for (but not speaking for) google.