Last night, my wife’s water broke and delivered our first child 7 weeks prematurely. Luckily everything looks like ok for our baby and for my wife, but our baby will be staying in an incubator as a precautionary measure. We’re still thinking about the name and have narrowed it down. I can’t really write coherently tonight but will try to write more once things settle down a bit.

Now that Reed got me all wound up, I decided to check out Google News to see what types of haircut related stories were out there.

• “Let’s trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle”

  This is the article that Will and Patrick read that got them so interested in my grooming habits. Let’s be clear here, I don’t think I’m vain about my hair, but I do hate having long hair as it seems to make me hotter and less comfortable. This second article is pretty good too so I thought I’d throw it in here as well.

• Nice benefit

  This guy sounds like a terrible boss but he did give that intern a nice benefit by telling him to get a haircut once a week.

• Not very helpful at all

  This guide to getting a good haircut wasn’t very helpful. Although getting a haircut where it grows out evenly is actually a problem I’ve encountered before. It looks ok in the chair, but 5-6 days later, you look like a bad chia pet with patches of hair sticking out further.

• McCombover

  Can we really have a president who is insecure enough to necessitate a combover?

To get haircuts to stay cool. Now a source as storied as the NYTimes is confirming what I’ve known all along. Getting a haircut is “cool”.

So to Will, Patrick, and Robin who all mocked my predilection for a fortnightly haircut, a pox on your unshorn heads.

In any case, I got a hair cut YESTERDAY before I saw the article, putting me well ahead of the curve on this new trend. My hair feels nice and short now.

I wish I had these kids as friends when I was about to tie the knot.

With the launch of Benchcoach, the next step is getting the word out. As an engineer, this has always seemed over emphasized to me. Basically, my attitude was, build a good tool and people will come and appreciate it and tell others. So until recently, 99% of our time was spent on building the product and making sure we had enough compelling features.

Well now here we are, and want to get several thousand users signed up over the next month. Well we told all our friends. So now we have 3 users. Just kidding, more like 4. But that’s not enough. We’ve planned a Google and Yahoo AdWord campaign and it’s exciting to see users come from these searches. I’ve now taken on the role of Chief director of brand and message amplification officer. As you can see by my new title, I’m trying to get into the swing of marketing speak.

Some other approaches we’re taking are as follows:

• become more active members in the fantasy baseball community and when appropriate (emphasis on the WHEN), to link back to our site information relevant to the topic at hand.
• Try to start conversations with respected names and writers to increase the visibility and the reputation of Benchcoach.
• Building tools which drive traffic back to our site. Such as an embed able trade analysis.
• Conferences and conventions for some face to face introductions and meetings.

As you can see, not much I learned as an engineer or by hanging out with so many engineers.

This is a little late in coming but Benchcoach has launched. This is an effort by Will and I over the past 6-8 months. There’s still much to do, but we think it’s a compelling tool to help analyze and try out various scenarios in fantasy baseball.

Hop on over to Benchcoach and check it out.

So it’s been a while since I last posted to this blog. I have been posting intermittently, to benchcoach’s blog but even then, not as often as I would like.

So basically, I’ve been working with Will on getting benchcoach up and running. It’s been a grind but we’re gaining some traction and making some real progress. We’ve got some office space, we’ve hired a couple of people, and we’re getting our design together as well as a bunch of backend plumbing.

I do get some slices of time to unwind and recently, I’ve been in the process of attaining accreditation as a Guitar Hero. The current plan is for Will and I to battle after we launch. While Will may have the edge on me on technical skills, I intend on wearing leather pants and a mesh shirt to win the artistic portion of this contest. It’ll be epic.

So my wife asked me last night if I knew what a Push Present was. I did not. Evidently, it’s a gift that a new father gives the mother of his child, for going through labor and giving birth to their child.

I shit you not. Click here for the Fox News report, or here for the USA Today version.

Stop the world please, I’d like to get off here.

Part of me wonders if these 2 reports are examples of Stealth Adverts sponsored by the jewelry industry. But realistically, this is where we’re headed as a culture.

I mean we give gifts for everything. Anything we do, we need to commemorate by purchasing something.

Mother’s days presents, christmas/hanakah/holiday presents. Anniversary, wedding, engagement, birthdays, sweet sixteens and now graduation presents. For kindegarteners!!!

What happened here? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t celebrate these events, but when did gifts become the appropriate manner to express celebration? Isn’t it enough that people come together and celebrate their health and friendship? One of our bookshelves is littered with crappy wedding favors. a small jar of candies, a CD full of crap music, small picture frames, small coasters. Can’t we just remember and enjoy?

Once I digested the news of the push gift, I thought ahead to a bleak future.

The first shit gift. The gift for the child that finally hits the mark and begins the end of his diapered period. Nothing like teaching kids that everything they do is a momentous event that everyone needs to commemorate.

The other push gift. For the constipated person who’ve finally succeeded.

The pass gift. To commemorate the passing of the painful gallstone

Any other ideas on events to celebrate?

So last night I went to the Hayden Planetarium for the first time in decades. I went to their Tuesdays in the Dome event which was a virtual exploration of the universe.

It was an immersive experience that illustrates how much and how little we know about the universe around us. It’s amazing that we know very little about the neighboring galaxies, but one researcher at the presentation made it his project to learn more about the very first galaxies at the edge of the universe.

I suggest the trip out to planetarium if you’re nearby and even if you’re not into space. It’s a fun visual experience for those not interested in space, but for those that are, it puts an image to the scope of things researchers are thinking in terms of.

In any case, here are some amazing photos from
Hubble

One note: If you do go to the dome, I highly recommend sitting in the back near the entrance to the dome. I sat opposite the exit and near the end felt I was trying to look through the top of my skull to see everything.

So I just finished watching Aardvark’d, a documentary that follows 4 interns at Fog Creek Software as they develop, debug and ship a program from the ground up.

For entertainment purposes, the documentary fell short in many ways. The story of developing Aardvark was herky jerky. We see snapshots of the progress the interns make, starting with Joel Spolsky outlining the idea for the program, the development of the splash screen logo, the demo of the product and the shipping of the code. Interspersed, we see the developers doing some debugging and usability testing with users. To be fair, developing a documentary about software development would be pretty hard. Most of the development process is done solo and the conflicts that need to be surmounted in general tend to be highly technical.

The other angle to take in a documentary like this would be to better understand and tell the story of the interns themselves. You get a whiff of some of the conflict between the interns during their conversation on the distance between their office and the other building. This is not really explored, and the directory chooses to gloss over these dynamics and chooses to tell us about the cockroach problem, the failed attempt to throw a party, and the tomato plant on the balcony. These tangents felt like mini sitcoms and were obviously reenactments that the director chose to have the interns re-live.

At the end of watching this film, I had no real understanding of who this film targeted or what it’s purpose was. As a developer, I got no real insight into why Fog Creek was any different from any other internship or about the people there. As a viewer wanting to be entertained, it really didn’t have any compelling storyline or characters. The only way this film makes any sense is if I was a potential recruit still in college. I would be somewhat impressed by a company willing to film and the amount of responsibilities I’d take on as an intern.

Some other questions I had about the film.

• -There was a shot of a cocktail party, with one of the interns playing with a cat. I might have zoned out for a minute there, but there didn’t seem to be any context for the party. Who’s house was it, why were they having a party. It just seemed like a random, “join us, and you can come to our housewarming party” kind of scene.
• - The cockroach scene where they were talking about the insane amount of work to ship the code. And the conclusion of the scene was one of the interns freaking out about a cockroach. What happened to the project? Did everything get done ok?
• - If this was a promotional/recruitment video, why no shots of the fun stuff they supposedly do? Where were the trips to yankee stadium?

I still like reading the joelonsoftware blog and was the reason I decided to fork over some cash to watch the movie, but I came away after watching this film with a great deal of confusion and not much more information or insight.

keep looking »

Recently Written

• Hello World
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• I knew it was perfectly acceptable
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• What the? PUSH?????
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• Aardvark’d

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