Bryce Canyon - Inspiration Point
Originally uploaded by hikingviking.
We took a whirlwind tour of southern Utah over Thanksgiving ... spent a day at Zion and a day at Bryce and an afternoon in Vegas. What an absolutely amazing part of the world.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Such a wonderful Thanksgiving break...
I married a geek
I married a geek
Originally uploaded by hikingviking.
Yep, and she was soooo happee to spend an afternoon at the Star Trek Experience in Vegas. Sooo happeeee.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Thoughts from The Ajax Experience, Boston
I just returned from three amazing days in Boston chatting up everything that's cool in the web these days. Here are some initial thoughts ...
- There are some hella-smart people in the field, and I think they were all there.
- Javascript 2, per Brendan Eich's talk, is going to have some great features, which will eventually make large portions of our frameworks obsolete. Too bad it'll probably take 4 years for everyone to be on it.
- Dojo has exploded in the last year. In fact, this almost felt like "The Dojo Experience" conference. Alex & co have done some fantastic work, and have lined up an amazing list of sponsors and contributors. The SVG library they just released looks pretty sweet.
- I love that there's a critical mass of people now focused on making the web user experience better.
- My god, things have matured so much since 2000.
- I'm grateful that TIBCO is pouring such money and attention into technologies like Ajax, and I suppose that there will always be an enterprise-market for what they're building (and I bet that market is HUGE). But it was almost painful to hear their keynote in the context of so many people out there who are heading in a much different direction.
- Ben and Dion, the Ajaxians, are super-great guys.
- I wish me wife coulda come :).
- There are some hella-smart people in the field, and I think they were all there.
- Javascript 2, per Brendan Eich's talk, is going to have some great features, which will eventually make large portions of our frameworks obsolete. Too bad it'll probably take 4 years for everyone to be on it.
- Dojo has exploded in the last year. In fact, this almost felt like "The Dojo Experience" conference. Alex & co have done some fantastic work, and have lined up an amazing list of sponsors and contributors. The SVG library they just released looks pretty sweet.
- I love that there's a critical mass of people now focused on making the web user experience better.
- My god, things have matured so much since 2000.
- I'm grateful that TIBCO is pouring such money and attention into technologies like Ajax, and I suppose that there will always be an enterprise-market for what they're building (and I bet that market is HUGE). But it was almost painful to hear their keynote in the context of so many people out there who are heading in a much different direction.
- Ben and Dion, the Ajaxians, are super-great guys.
- I wish me wife coulda come :).
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Friday, September 08, 2006
In honor of Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter
Redboy has posted a series of "Wildlife Warrior" shirts in honor of the Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, who was killed by a stingray this past Monday.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Adding up the numbers on a record deal...
Here's an old article about the music industry that recently resurfaced on one of those tech blogs I sometimes read while my computer is busy at work:
> Some of your friends are already this fucked
The author's numbers on the way a typical record deal for an indie band stacks up:
Record company: $710,000
Producer: $90,000
Manager: $51,000
Studio: $52,500
Previous label: $50,000
Agent: $7,500
Lawyer: $12,000
Band member net income each: $4,031.25
This is the same industry that sues dead people and shuts down guitar tablature websites. Every time they pull the "we're ensuring that artists have an incentive to continue their craft" argument, let's just remember how they really treat their artists.
> Some of your friends are already this fucked
The author's numbers on the way a typical record deal for an indie band stacks up:
Record company: $710,000
Producer: $90,000
Manager: $51,000
Studio: $52,500
Previous label: $50,000
Agent: $7,500
Lawyer: $12,000
Band member net income each: $4,031.25
This is the same industry that sues dead people and shuts down guitar tablature websites. Every time they pull the "we're ensuring that artists have an incentive to continue their craft" argument, let's just remember how they really treat their artists.
Friday, August 25, 2006
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Lunch 2.0 at Zazzle
Originally uploaded by jeremiah_owyang.
It was a good day. A very good day. That's Ed in the foreground and Robert and Ben and Rajesh and Melanie hidden throughout the pic.
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
NC License Plate Apparel
Thanks to Ed's fantastic photoshop template for the California plate, I've put together a North Carolina license plate and made a bunch of shirts at Zazzle.
> See Jan's NC License Plate Apparel
> See Jan's NC License Plate Apparel
Friday, July 14, 2006
What I'm Listening To
My music listening habits have recently turned back to garageband.com (they had the name before Apple started using it) as a fantastic source for indy and undiscovered musicians. They've been working on the "wisdom of the community" model for sorting through content since at least 1999. This makes them one of the more interesting sites to study how to apply "community software" to a site who's function is to organize content and promote the business model of an artistic community.
I have also turned toward emusic.com as my first stop toward downloading music. It turns out they're the #2 legal site for it, behind of course iTunes, because they've been able to carve out a business model of selling music without DRM. You get real, un-protected mp3's. Like garageband.com, you won't find Shakira and U2 there, but you will find a site aggregating the long-tail music content that's not handcuffed to the RIAA's distribution channels.
I've found great out-of-print indy records, like pretty much the whole Sex Police discography and even the original version of "Elevator" from Norwood Cheek's pre-Sex Police days in Notes From a Strange Mailbag. After waiting 15 months during 2002-2003 before finally nabbing the first Sex Police album I saw pawned on eBay, it's just amazing to me that now we can all download it digitally from emusic!
Other recent finds:
13 Stories - FunkyPopSexyHouseRap - A quartet of 20-somethings out of Atlanta who are unabashedly pop, they sound like Blondie meets the B-52's, and are a breath of fresh air for the 00's. I found out about them because my old guitarist's band glorydive (another group worth checking out) are opening for them in Raleigh in August.
Zero One - Psy-Fi - Not unlike the more known Zero 7, Zero One is downtempo "chill" electronica, my genre of choice while coding.
Lemon Jelly - '64 - '95 - Another psychadelic downtempo electronic album with a concept of taking samples from particular years, "'64 AKA Go" features samples of William Shatner. Must be a 00's thing. I can't get enough of William Shatner.
Behavior - The Story of the Mechanical Man - Discovered on garageband.com, downloaded from emusic. More electronica. Great stuff. Really, really great stuff.
Tom Kidding - Purpose - My co-worker's latest piece. It's quite good.
I have also turned toward emusic.com as my first stop toward downloading music. It turns out they're the #2 legal site for it, behind of course iTunes, because they've been able to carve out a business model of selling music without DRM. You get real, un-protected mp3's. Like garageband.com, you won't find Shakira and U2 there, but you will find a site aggregating the long-tail music content that's not handcuffed to the RIAA's distribution channels.
I've found great out-of-print indy records, like pretty much the whole Sex Police discography and even the original version of "Elevator" from Norwood Cheek's pre-Sex Police days in Notes From a Strange Mailbag. After waiting 15 months during 2002-2003 before finally nabbing the first Sex Police album I saw pawned on eBay, it's just amazing to me that now we can all download it digitally from emusic!
Other recent finds:
13 Stories - FunkyPopSexyHouseRap - A quartet of 20-somethings out of Atlanta who are unabashedly pop, they sound like Blondie meets the B-52's, and are a breath of fresh air for the 00's. I found out about them because my old guitarist's band glorydive (another group worth checking out) are opening for them in Raleigh in August.
Zero One - Psy-Fi - Not unlike the more known Zero 7, Zero One is downtempo "chill" electronica, my genre of choice while coding.
Lemon Jelly - '64 - '95 - Another psychadelic downtempo electronic album with a concept of taking samples from particular years, "'64 AKA Go" features samples of William Shatner. Must be a 00's thing. I can't get enough of William Shatner.
Behavior - The Story of the Mechanical Man - Discovered on garageband.com, downloaded from emusic. More electronica. Great stuff. Really, really great stuff.
Tom Kidding - Purpose - My co-worker's latest piece. It's quite good.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
'Zazzling' news ... when will they add us to the Oxford English Dictionary?
It's been a wonderful few weeks for getting the name of Zazzle (the startup I joined early last year) into the hearts and minds of the world.
It began with some business sites discussing that we hired Tuoc Luong to be our VP of Engineering. Tuoc is a very well-respected and well-known guy in Silicon Valley, and had done some amazing things at Ask Jeeves.
Then on Thursday last week we awoke to find a bunch of Zazzle stamps plastered all over -- and I mean ALL OVER -- the front page of the SF Chronicle. Since the USPS let us start putting corporate logos on custom postage stamps a few weeks ago, we've lined up some partnerships with the big guys, like HP. It was HP's buzz that landed the article, but there were the stamps, with "www.zazzle.com", in LARGE legible letters on the front of the newspaper. Here's the article:
> Personal postage gets a corporate stamp
Then, today, *this* article gets circulated. Bingo. We have finally entered the vocabluary, at least over in the UK.
> New generation is going global to find a 'third way' (Zazzling)
It began with some business sites discussing that we hired Tuoc Luong to be our VP of Engineering. Tuoc is a very well-respected and well-known guy in Silicon Valley, and had done some amazing things at Ask Jeeves.
Then on Thursday last week we awoke to find a bunch of Zazzle stamps plastered all over -- and I mean ALL OVER -- the front page of the SF Chronicle. Since the USPS let us start putting corporate logos on custom postage stamps a few weeks ago, we've lined up some partnerships with the big guys, like HP. It was HP's buzz that landed the article, but there were the stamps, with "www.zazzle.com", in LARGE legible letters on the front of the newspaper. Here's the article:
> Personal postage gets a corporate stamp
Then, today, *this* article gets circulated. Bingo. We have finally entered the vocabluary, at least over in the UK.
> New generation is going global to find a 'third way' (Zazzling)
But even more 'third way' than this global brain tapping is what's called 'Zazzling' in the US. This is all about people doing it for themselves, not for corporate megaliths.
It's named after Zazzle, a Californian company, which got seed funding from legendary venture capitalist John Doerr, who was also a seed backer of Google, and wait for it, Doerr reckons Zazzle will be even bigger than eBay.
...
The 'Zazzle' phenomenon is spawning a whole new generation of web-based 'minipreneurs' to complement the two to three million people worldwide who now count eBay as their primary or significant second source of income.
Something radically disruptive is brewing.
Friday, May 12, 2006
Whopping 2 Feet of Air
Jan
Originally uploaded by !HabitForming.
I wonder how many photos there really are of me floating around Flickr? Gr33nl34f failed to capture Jeff, who was doing forward flips up onto this thing.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Razorfish SF Interface Devel Team
Razorfish SF Interface Devel Team
Originally uploaded by yahooza.
Wally seems to have this un-ending supply of *ancient* Razorfish photos that he posts at random to Flickr. From left to right, that's me, Little Ben, Muffin Friedman, Carlos (on the bottom), and Happy Mike Sheridan. 2001, apparently.
Thanks, Wally.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
New Release Tuesday
Kyler's been recording again! Check out the new songs in her radio at kylerengland.com.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
McViking Wedding Poster
McViking Wedding Poster at Zazzle
Originally uploaded by hikingviking.
Buy the poster at http://www.zazzle.com/dekana*/product/228529029102048609
InstaFlickrPics
Cognac
Originally uploaded by hikingviking.
Well, I tried doing this before the trip, but finally got it all figured out tonight:
1. Configure the unlocked cellphone bought on eBay to work on Cingular's MEdiaNet and even configure the MMS settings correctly (the step I left out last time).
2. Get a Flickr email address to upload direct to my hikingviking account.
3. Click a shot of tonight's after dinner drink.
4. Send to Flickr via an MMS message.
5. Blog from Flickr to Blogger.
I love technology.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Welcome to HikingViking 3.0
Well, when your server crashes and you lose 30 sites of data, and you're fed up with the ineptitude of your ISP, and you realize you've let down a ton of people who aren't yourself, several things happen.
1. You leave the country for a month to get married (in Ireland) to the most wonderful woman in the world and trek through New Zealand and basically take the best vacation you've had since you finished graduate school eight years ago.
2. You cancel your dedicated server account because there's no way you can run a successful business with your ISP.
3. You start the process of un-incorporating Dekana Inc., because you're now a full-time employee at a Web 2.0 startup and no longer need liability protection for big-company contract jobs. Hell, you left the hosting business anyway (see #2).
4. You decide that you can longer have the time to keep up with open-source software updates, and ditch WordPress and MT and Twiki and all that good crap for everything except the one lingering freelance site you will always continue to maintain.
5. You let Blogger drive your blog, and your new wife's blog, because Google probably won't loose your data (like it or not) and you scale back to Flickr for all your photo sharing needs, because Y! is a better media company than Google.
6. You spend a Saturday night hacking up an existing Blogger template because you really don't have time to build another site from the HTML up again. And hey, Dan's designs for Blogger are awesome, and the HTML is really clean. Why reinvent the wheel ... again?
7. You sift through all your Google Cache saves of four years of blog entries and only keep a handful of the best ones ... ignoring a lot of the one-liners and all the posts with links to stuff I need for work (that's what del.icio.us/hikingviking is for, not my blog).
8. And you're left with this. Here ya go. HikingViking.com 3.0. No categories. No gimmicks. No fancy-schmancy schtuff (I'll channel all that energy into Zazzle). Just me. Just my random posts. And I promise they'll be more human, less geek, because April 2006 is a new beginning, a new life, with an old soulmate, and as much as I LOVE my job, I plan to LIVE my LIFE alongside it, not underneath it. Sinead deserves that. Hell, I deserve that.
Welcome to the new HikingViking.
1. You leave the country for a month to get married (in Ireland) to the most wonderful woman in the world and trek through New Zealand and basically take the best vacation you've had since you finished graduate school eight years ago.
2. You cancel your dedicated server account because there's no way you can run a successful business with your ISP.
3. You start the process of un-incorporating Dekana Inc., because you're now a full-time employee at a Web 2.0 startup and no longer need liability protection for big-company contract jobs. Hell, you left the hosting business anyway (see #2).
4. You decide that you can longer have the time to keep up with open-source software updates, and ditch WordPress and MT and Twiki and all that good crap for everything except the one lingering freelance site you will always continue to maintain.
5. You let Blogger drive your blog, and your new wife's blog, because Google probably won't loose your data (like it or not) and you scale back to Flickr for all your photo sharing needs, because Y! is a better media company than Google.
6. You spend a Saturday night hacking up an existing Blogger template because you really don't have time to build another site from the HTML up again. And hey, Dan's designs for Blogger are awesome, and the HTML is really clean. Why reinvent the wheel ... again?
7. You sift through all your Google Cache saves of four years of blog entries and only keep a handful of the best ones ... ignoring a lot of the one-liners and all the posts with links to stuff I need for work (that's what del.icio.us/hikingviking is for, not my blog).
8. And you're left with this. Here ya go. HikingViking.com 3.0. No categories. No gimmicks. No fancy-schmancy schtuff (I'll channel all that energy into Zazzle). Just me. Just my random posts. And I promise they'll be more human, less geek, because April 2006 is a new beginning, a new life, with an old soulmate, and as much as I LOVE my job, I plan to LIVE my LIFE alongside it, not underneath it. Sinead deserves that. Hell, I deserve that.
Welcome to the new HikingViking.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Enter thus the married life...
Jan Sinead C 043
Originally uploaded by hikingviking.
Well, I haven't been blogging for quite awhile. Horrible stories about my last ISP and stuff, then I was off in March to declare my undying love for Sinead in Ireland, and then celebrate our nuptials with a honeymoon in New Zealand. It's crazy to be back ... I'm actually exhausted and still jet-lagged. But what an amazing trip ...
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Hooray for Google
Sigh. Major server crash this week (I got attacked by killer robots) leaves me without most of my data. Amazingly, most of the important stuff is cached by Google, so most of it looks recoverable.
So here I am on blogger.com (a Google property), vowing not to host another blog on a private server without hiring a dedicated IT guy to install all the security patches. As I dig through 3 years of old posts from hikingviking.com, they'll (slowly) appear ... right ... here ... :)
Yay Google.
So here I am on blogger.com (a Google property), vowing not to host another blog on a private server without hiring a dedicated IT guy to install all the security patches. As I dig through 3 years of old posts from hikingviking.com, they'll (slowly) appear ... right ... here ... :)
Yay Google.
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