With The Band

I’m a technical person, a hacker. I happen to also be a pretty good designer, at the same time. While they both are weaved together so often, they often form a bizarre dichotomy.

Spending a good chunk of my high school and college years learning to be a pretty programmer/scientist, I was taught from the ground up to be a problem solver. I know how to identify a problem, then design and implement a solution. While there may be many different ways of solving it, you know when something works. Same goes with entrepreneurship: identify a need, fill that need. You have a pretty good idea when something fills a need.

Design is totally different. There is no right answer. Something may look good, but so does another design.

I’ve redone the design half a dozen times. Each time, I love it. Then I see a design on another site, and get inspired to come up with something different. I spend hours tweaking fonts, spacing, colors (colors might be the worst to deal with, I wish the whole world were color blind).

You’re never done with design.

To sum it up, as soon as there is enough money around, I’m hiring a creative person to take all the creative stuff out of my hands!

Big changes are going on, as you can guess by the title. We still have to work out the details. It’s a lot less stress, because I no longer have to confront everything myself. But, at the same time, it introduces all the issues that arise when working with other people - trust, delegation, responsibility, legal - these come up regardless of how close people are before/during/after.

But overall, having a partner makes it much more real. It’s not just a little side project I can sweep into my own personal deadpool anymore. It has got believers, co-founders.

Plus, it’ll be nice actually being able to use “we” in referring to a project, for once

Momentum.

From the San Diego fires…

via LAist

Fired up Mozilla Thunderbird this morning, to find an update for Mozilla Lightning, the calendar plug-in for their e-mail client. I had installed it before and absolutely hated it mainly because of the crappy/ugly interface. The new interface, however, is really slick. Thanks open source!

Background: Startup Weekend is an idea where area developers/entrepreneurs/geeks gather and, from idea selection to launch, develop a web application, and hopefully start a bona fide company out of it.

DC’s Startup Weekend is this weekend. I never signed up because of various other commitments going on, but I am proud to be a cosponsor of it. Wish I had time to stop by!

They are doing a location-based social network, geared towards condos, apartments, etc. Similar to LifeAt, which was covered in TechCrunch earlier this month. I thought some of the other ideas they came up with would have been more interesting, but hey, since when do startups listen to investors :-)? While the utility is questionable, I think it would be fun to see more about who lived around me… and what the hell kind of music the guy above me insists on blasting in the middle of the night. I can actually think of some cool integration points they could do with my own startup. I’ll be in touch.

Check out holaneighbor!

Best of luck to the team for the rest of the weekend, and beyond!

Thanks to Micah for doing all the blogging and keeping us posted as to the goings-on down there in dirty Virginia.

Technorati Tags: dcstartupweekend, washingtondc, startupweekend, holaneighbor, lifeat

Members of Palestine’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group aligned with
the Fatah political party, has admitted to using Google Earth for
mapping targets for rocket strikes.

Had to happen sometime.

Missile Attacks on Israel Increase with Updated Images on Google Earth

I’ve been using Freepository to host my current projects, but Unfuddle looks good enough to switch to, and their plans seem pretty decent. I had been getting pretty sick of the current issue trackers I’ve been using, which always seem to be butt ugly.

It’s commonplace among technical entrepreneurs to have a form of ADD when working on web applications.

You sell yourself (and maybe one or two others) on a great idea, pursue it ruthlessly for some short period of time, then, just as it is nearing completion, hit a wall (like advertising it) or come up with a better idea, lose interest, and already moved on to the next project. As time goes on, you build up your own personal cache of dead applications, lingering forever on the internet until you forget to renew the domain name or do a round of web housecleaning.

My own deadpool is in the double digits. I should write about it sometime, I still think some of them may have value for others.

I’m not letting that happen with my current project. I’ve invested far too much. I’ve sold it to far too many people. Moreover, I’ve sold myself on it. Months after initial conception, I still believe in it, far more than I did when I first came up with it. Below are my beliefs, organized in a way only logical to someone on their tenth shot of absinthe.

-People need help. Always have, always will.

-The proliferation of technology into our lives only makes things harder, not easier. I’ve spent more hours helping my grandparents figure out their cell phone than they ever have spent talking on it.

-Whatever you need help with, there is someone in your area who can help you.

-If someone needs help with something, they’ll first ask the people around them, friends, families, etc. If they want they are gutsy, they’ll try and figure it out themselves using resources available to them.

-If that fails, the only option left is to call a professional service.

-Professional services, quite often, suck.

-Between DIY/Friends/Family and Hiring Professionals lies a huge gap.

-People could always use an extra source of cash, even if the rates are lower than their full-time position. Heaven knows how much I charge during my day job, but sure, I’d take an extra 40 bucks for a couple hours of work in the afternoon.

-People like that, who know what they are doing, can charge a lower price, and provide a better service.

-Why do professional services exist? Most of what they are doing is based on the knowledge in their head, sometimes combined with tools the ordinary Joe has in their garage? The only thing they provide for the workman (in most cases) is dispatching/scheduling (which can be done online automatically), and advertising (inefficient).

-Online marketplaces create efficiences for connecting buyer and seller at the right price. eBay, anyone?

-Bartering - you help me with this, I’ll help you with that - is dead. There are now millions of specializations, not a dozen or so (carpenter, blacksmith, raging savage), such that making a match is inefficient. Cash is king.

More to come.

I was playing around with FriendCSV, which exports data on your Facebook friends into a format that can be imported into any number of applications. It’s cool, but the only worthwhile information are birthdays (Facebook, taking the black-hole approach to data retention, doesn’t let out essential contact information)… and the user IDs of all your friends.

Quick lesson for non-geeks: All electronic data, including, say, a user’s profile, is almost always assigned a unique number, usually starting from 0. That number is used to represent “you” in other places in the application, when you make posts, add content, interact with other user’s, etc. Therefore, the information, in this case, a user, that has the lowest id number assigned to it was the first to sign up among your friends.

A quick excel sort showed the order in which all my friends signed up on Facebook. It follows how Facebook opened up, in general (it’s not perfect, due to segmenting). My childhood friend Rafi is the first one I know to sign up, followed by the other kids I know at Harvard - Facebook was founded there. Then, my friends in other colleges. Finally, all my Maryland friends. And on and on. Last is one of my Canadian cousins, who is in high school. Pretty neat to see. There’s some aspect of geek cred by having a low number, on anything. It shows you were there first. In some cases, as with ICQ, it meant your contact information was easier to memorize (ICQ had no screennames, everyone talked to each other using those id numbers). Even, years later, AOL Instant Messenger still keeps track of who signed up when, you just need to download Pidgin to view that.