Archive for the ‘misc’ Category

Well, not grown up—but in training pants anyway.

For the past three months I’ve been coding (and for two years before that, planning) bloowish.com. Bloowish seeks to solve the problem my wife and I had when we were getting married: we had too many wish lists to keep up with, and too many sites to visit to make things available for our friends and family to purchase for us. Even after the wedding was over, I found myself clinging to unmanageable and un-RSS-able wish lists on all the major web store sites. Once I started down the path of making this thing happen, I saw a few other folks had started with the same germ of an idea; the problem I found, time and again, was that design and production had suffered on these sites in the name of making a quick “web 2.0″ buck.

Bloowish is the site I personally wanted to find and use but never could. It mostly just gets out of the way and lets you get to the task at hand. I’ve built a bookmarklet that allows you to add items from any web store, and I’ve included RSS feeds for every account. In my own daily use, it’s been really fun and easy. The feedback from my users has been positive. And the best part is that not only is it free to join, but it’s wide open—meaning no “beta lottery” or waiting around for an invite. Simply head on over and get started.

All I ask is that you be willing to post some feedback either to feedback (at) bloowish.com or at our customer service tool provided by the awesome folks at Get Satisfaction. So, now that the cat’s out of the bag I hope you’ll all (all four of you) come on over, have a look, and stick around!

Oh, before I forget I’d be remiss not to mention our awesome logo designed by the folks at goopymart—creators of the Webkit Squirrelfish logo among others. They do great work, are lightning fast, and could even decode my terrible art direction. Thanks!

One of the best quotes from this long piece on the birth of the internet in Vanity Fair, Fake Steve Jobs talks about building the iTunes Music Store:

But I really think that Apple came along and took all the risk. Apple said, O.K., we’ll invest in making this hardware device and in making a store, and running that store, and making all these deals, and working with all you scumbags and assholes in the music business. We’ll put on our asbestos suit and deal with you people, right, to be able to, like, sit in the same room and breathe the same air that you criminals in the music industry, you retarded criminals, do, right?

Right.

When we went to see Iron Man the other night, I was greeted at the ticket window by a “cash only” sign. I never carry the stuff, so my saintly wife—who does—stepped up and asked, “two for Ironman, please.” Ironman, like that’s his last name. It was just adorable.

So today in the office we’re listing out all the superheroes whose last names could also be (strange) surnames. Like Kip Spiderman (”Yeah, you know Kip Spiderman. He lives in our building? He made those frittatas you liked at Karen’s party?“). It’s absolute meme gold, I tell you.

About four months ago, as gas started to inch its way toward $4.00 a gallon, my wife and I decided to start looking into a new car. I drive 100+ miles a day to work and back (another story altogether) and I could sense that very soon $90 would be leaping out of my pocket every week just so that I could keep doing it. My current car is also an all-wheel drive, heavy Subaru. I love this car in every way except for its habit of drinking gas like your prom date drinks vodka and purple Kool-Aid.

Of course our first notion was the Toyota Prius. We took one home for a weekend and loved it, but thinking we could get a better deal if we haggled we returned it and said “not yet thanks” on Monday morning. Life got in the way, my job moved into a new office and my wife produced a play. Now that we’re looking again in earnest we can find nary a Prius under twenty-six grand. What used to be the sole domain of soy-sipping hipsters and tenured english Professors is now standard issue survival equipment, and surviving the summer can mean only one thing: real, no screwing around, car shopping.

This is one of many times since hitting my latter twenties that I’ve opened myself up to being marketed to in not so subtle ways. Perusing the web for cars that seem like good matches for us I’m bombarded with images that threaten to shake my beliefs about what I am: in nearly every shot of the Honda Fit in action a slender hipster is casually recumbent in the backseat, swilling a lookalike Starbuck’s latte and surfing on his MacBook. Similarly, the Kia Spectra5 seems to have been placed into production entirely to transport indie-rock bands to their well-attended gigs in Brooklyn. Even the Nissan Versa, sensible in almost every other aspect, assaults the viewer with Juno-style quips while images of its interior load. Room for big hair, indeed. After a while the cynicism sets in so deep that you even start to feel like your friends and Consumer Reports are lying to you about which car to buy. Later, the prospect of buying any car seems like madness and the concept of what constitutes “good” gas mileage becomes contorted and twisted, until all you want is some theoretical car that runs on moonbeams and good thoughts.

The first time I ever shopped for a car on my own, I test-drove a Plymouth so old it had lived through the first oil crisis. The marketing materials that accompanied that one were a newspaper ad and an address I thought I could find without too much trouble. I became aware three blocks in that the brakes were shot, and the shift linkage was gone. I drove a harrowing four miles down a rural interstate before turning around and making a deal right there on the spot. I was absolutely smitten to have found a car that was about as snotty and recalcitrant as I was at 20. Soon it had the requisite Apple sticker and a rebuilt transmission, and my future wife would even ride in it—but just once, enough times to convince her that it hated her and that the feeling was mutual.

But this time I’ve pledged to be more sagacious, resolute even, in our quest to get a car that fits all of our varied needs. We’ve created a composite of this car and it has three hundred airbags, 800 horsepower, a built-in Mac, talking nav that knows where to get really good Pho, and theoretical tie downs for the theoretical car seats our theoretical children may one day ride in. Oh, and alloy wheels. And an EPA estimated 85 miles to the gallon.

What I’m getting at is that I’m bad at this, and all the marketing doesn’t really help as much as I thought it might when I was younger. At 12, staring at the pictures in car magazines like most boys do at that age, I was convinced that car buying was not only easy but probably fun, too. The wise, current-day version of me knows what it’s like to have to tell a car salesman that I do not always, in fact, “wear the pants” in this marriage. The pants are shared, thank you very much, and I try to make it so that my turn happens when my wallet is missing so that we don’t end up with more Plymouths. 

The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

Here’s the weird thing: I first heard that line about the 100-yard dash from Ballmer himself, maybe a decade ago.

(Via)

The truth is that I’d like to quit my job and start a rock band.

The truth is that I hate my commute, except for the part when I cross the bridge and the part when I pull into the drive way. The truth is that I stay pretty tired, but it’s okay cause our bed is pretty comfortable. The truth is that I desperately need to get into the gym, and write more posts, and take more photos with a real camera and fewer with a phone. The truth is that Juno was much better than National Treasure Part 2, or whatever is was officially called.

The truth is they might sell the company I work for, and I’m not having much luck caring or even understanding what that might mean—the truth must be that consolidation is Good™.

The truth is I bought a two pound bag of jerky, and have convinced even my wife that it’s awesome stuff. The truth is my XBox finally caught the red ring of death, and we might get a Wii assuming I can find one. The truth is it feels good to tell the truth, even a small one.

1.) When my dog amiably holds my gaze for just a second too long and I realize he is probably a reincarnated Buddhist monk, thanking me for the scrap of turkey I gave him under the table.

2.) When my wife calls me three times in a row in a twenty minute period to converse about essentially nothing, just so that she can say “I love you” at the end.

3.) When my in-laws give me a birthday card signed “may the force be with you” to accompany a Star Wars DVD boxed set.

4.) When people look at me–straight-faced–and call Internet Explorer version 6 a “web browser” in an non-ironic way when in fact IE6 is really just a trap, sent here by evil demons from another dimension; the same demons who want me to spend the rest of my life breaking perfectly good code instead of reveling in the first two things on this list.

I wonder if every line of work has an “IE6″? I’m sure it does. But this one, as they say in the marines, is mine. Yet again I’ve spent an evening wrestling my own hands to the desk where they can’t fly through my computer screen, thinking the same thoughts about just what would make a group of humans make a piece of technology–in general such a liberating and beautiful thing–so awful. It’s like being given an endless bankroll and a clock with no hands with which to make a piece of art and making You, Me and Dupree instead. I just don’t get it.

For now, though, I have the other two things. They’re enough. I didn’t code a single table today. Buddha and my wife are winning.

In the Fall we like to use as many fresh vegetables as possible. We do this in other seasons, too, but there’s just something about hearty fall veggies that my wife and I really love. So tonight, as I waited for Leopard to install, I used one such veggie–several fresh local sweet potatoes–to make a tasty soup.

Fall Veggie Soup

• 2 large sweet potatoes, cut into 1 inch cubes
• 1 large onion, rough cut into one inch pieces
• 3 cloves of garlic minced
• 32 ounces of chicken stock
• 3 par boiled chicken breasts (smallish ones)
• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 teaspoon canola oil
• A palmful of each of the following: cumin, paprika
• Sea salt and fresh ground pepper

Prep

Heat butter and canola oil in a dutch oven or deep stock pot. Add garlic and sauté for a minute or so. Add onion and sauté a little longer, until onion is mostly translucent. Add sweet potatoes to mixture, stirring often. Add cumin, paprika, salt, and pepper and continue to stir just until pan begins to dry out slightly. Add chicken stock and scrape pan bottom. Cover and simmer while shredding chicken, for about 20 minutes or until sweet potatoes are tender. Add chicken and cook an additional five minutes to give flavor to chicken. Serve in large bowls, optionally topping with any nutty cheese.The best part of this recipe is the broth, which has this complex flavor of onion and garlic with the sweetness from the paprika. Great stuff on a rainy fall night.

Several things happened this week to draw my life into sharp perspective. First, I realized I’ve been making tiny changes to the same eight documents for the last eight months; granted these documents make up a larger project and encompass several programming languages. But the damage was done before I could really rationalize my way out of it. This then lead me to the realization that my life’s work as of this moment fits comfortably onto a two-hundred fifty-six megabyte flash drive, a three quarter by two inch piece of plastic attached to my keyring.

Right now, I’m not managing anyone or anything. I write isolated (for now) code that one other designer–despite a good nature and eagerness to learn–invariably ruins when trying to use it. I find myself in meeting after meeting being asked to pantomime some measure of authority or involvement, only to be shown time and again that my only real function is as a pair of hands and a walking CSS reference.

Sometimes this makes me want to start a tomato farm or a pizza parlor. Coupled with my commute it’s all I can do to drag my carcass to the car every morning. It certainly doesn’t imbue me with much enthusiasm about my work, except for being home with my wife cooking and playing XBox 360.

So today I made a mix for my wife. The best code I’ve written in months is part of the package. Here’s to the things that keep us going.

When George Bush declared, in response to negative feedback about the then-nascent war on terror, “you’re with us, or you’re against us,” he undoubtedly had no idea he was following in the footsteps of King Leonidas of Sparta. But as Frank Miller and the screen writers of ‘300′ would have us believe, that’s exactly what he was doing.

‘300′ is a fictionalized account of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, wherein Sparta (not alone mind you, but as part of a “coalition of the willing”) fought a statistically superior Persian conscript army to the death in defense of a narrow passage to Greece. In particular the film is concerned with the valor of King Leonidas and has merry band, who held the pass for three entire days before they were ultimately obliterated. The resistance, though very costly to the outnumbered Greeks, ultimately set Xerxes I up for a defeat at Plataea some years later.

This is one of the classic stories of human valor in the face of almost certain death; of the ability of a few to overcome the tyranny of the many. This story has nothing to do with homeland security, WMD’s, secret torture camps or no-fly lists; but in the darkened theatre as I watched these rippling Spartans slash their way through row upon row of hapless, Scimitar wielding Islamist extremists I was unable to avoid the parallel. Such connections are easy to draw, in a world where commercials for the Marines air in between segments of American Idol.

In one scene Leonidas’ manages to mock not only the feckless intellectuals who wish to prevent his launch of a preemptive military campaign against Persia, but also the girly Arcadians and their lack of a professional military or warrior class. One is reminded of the equally maligned French who, upon announcing they would not be attending the war Bush was throwing, were met with cries of “cheese eating surrender monkey” from ‘Mericans stuffing down plates full of ‘Freedom Fries.’

In Miller’s vision the Spartan is a fascist super man riddled with arrows, gritting his teeth to gut a few more magic carpet merchants before scaling Mount Olympus one last time. Before battle, cries of “ooh ah” fill the air, and utterances of love for the folks back home are not advised–lest you be compared to those namby pambies in the senate, with their logic and fondness for young boys.

It’s all quite a spectacle. Though the battle scenes are exhilarating and match the dynamism of the comic book quite well, it feels like watching a combination of Marine recruitment film, excerpts from Triumph of the Will, and something you’d see at a Texas Republican party fundraiser. So while I like a little violence, sexism and hyperstylized heroism just as much as the next guy I think I’ll stick to getting it from Fox News like everyone else and save the movies for escapism, not further programming from the state.