Just caught up with a good friend of mine who’s a tech geek and bachelor and needed some cooking advice. I’ve watched bachelor friends give themselves scurvy by getting home and ordering pizza every night. Being a tech geek makes it worse. Your $badnessOfDiet += $levelOfAlphaGeek**3 So my wife put together the list of recipes […]
February 25, 2010 | Startups | No comments
Update: The Fabulis story had legs like I’ve never seen before. When I posted it to Hacker News it shot to number 1 in about 3 minutes and stayed there for 6 to 8 hours. A few hours later Robin Wauters from Techcrunch picked up on the story and since then it’s appeared everywhere from […]
February 24, 2010 | Startups | 6 comments
This morning I called in to C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to answer the question “Is it fair that the Obama administration has been called anti-business”. To give you some context, I consider myself a democrat and I voted for Obama (and attended the rallies, etc) I’ve been ruminating over the issue for most of the day. […]
February 11, 2010 | Politics | 11 comments
At 09:28 on the morning of September 11, 2001, a Lebanese born engineering student named Ziad Jarrah and three “muscle” hijackers started moving the passengers of flight 93 to the rear of the plane and assaulting the cockpit of flight 93. Flights 11 and 175 had already crashed into the world trade center and flight 77 […]
December 30, 2009 | crowdsourcing | 9 comments
There has been some recent confusion about how much memory you need in a web server to handle a huge number of concurrent requests. I also made a performance claim on the STS list that got me an unusual number of private emails. Here’s how you run a highly concurrent website on a shoe-string budget: […]
December 1, 2009 | Scaling, Startups, Technology | 2 comments
My neighbor John Winkler just emailed this to me. He took this while I was fly fishing off our dock on Lake Sammamish earlier this year.
November 22, 2009 | Fly Fishing | No comments
About a year ago I received two old servers from Snapvine my former neighbors (now acquired by Whitepages). Snapvine got them from another startup in Seattle, I don’t recall which. I named them Rex1 and Rex2 and put them to work immediately. The graph below shows the disk activity during the last year on Rex1: […]
November 21, 2009 | WTF | 1 comment
Want to freak out your wife/husband/kids? On a mac that you have access to: Go to ‘System Preferences’. Under ‘Internet & Networking’ there is a ‘Sharing’ icon. Run that. In the list that appears, check the ‘Remote Login’ option. Then ssh into your mac remotely by downloading putty if you’re on a pc or launch […]
Hold your breath for a moment. In about 10 to 30 seconds you’ll be feeling a strong desire to take a breath. That’s not caused by lack of oxygen. It’s caused by excess carbon dioxide buildup in your blood. [Ok you can breathe again.] The trigger in mammals that causes us to want to take […]
November 11, 2009 | Startup Hacks, Startups | 1 comment
A month ago on Techcrunch, Michael Arrington wrote about “Twitter’s Revenue Dilemma”: “Your valuation can actually go down once you turn on revenue.”. “Turning on revenue” frames it as a binary thing. You’re either making money or you’re not. It completely disregards the most important variable in finance: Time. With the tiniest trickle of revenue […]