Dreaming Of Beetles

Seeing that it’s Worlds AIDS day, I wanted to mention the new social networking site from the UNAIDS Commission – AIDSspace.org. This is a new initiative to increase the level of communication between the siloed agencies and programs around the world working to battle this pandemic.

I also want to mention that I was part of the team working on this site. It was a huge effort requiring 100+ hour work weeks, but in the end it was well worth it. I’m able to look at the site and be proud, and hope that it makes at least a small difference in the world.

The site was “soft” launched last month in Geneva and is now being ramped up for a larger, formal launch. If you are in this field of work, sign up on the site and get in touch with others.

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I’ve been keeping a secret. My friends, family, and stakeholders know, but I’ve been mum on the subject until now. The time is right, and the new team is firing on all cylinders, so I get to spill the beans.

PropertyMaps, a startup I co-founded four years ago and put more blood and sweat into than anything else, has been acquired. I spent a week in Austin, doing a full knowledge dump on the very capable team. I was immediately impressed by their level of understanding and how fast they picked up the code base (I won’t get too technical in this post).

The new CEO, Jeff Chambers, is the former US product director for HomeAway.com. He is a brilliant leader and has more and better ideas for the direction of PropertyMaps than I ever dreamed up. He has a very solid plan in place for the rest of this year and the year ahead. I can’t imagine a better person to run PM than Jeff.

As for me, I’ve taken a consulting role with the company so I can help move those plans forward (and I get to watch my baby grow up).

You can read more about the acquistion in the press release: PropertyMaps Has Been Acquired

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Almost three years ago, I first heard of Twitter. I didn’t get it and quickly dismissed friends that pushed it on me. A waste of time. Idiots! All of them.

Fast forward two years and I finally signed up. Too many people sent the “I want to follow you, join Twitter” email so I just went with it, plus the previous years of subliminal brainwashing got me thinking this might be more than just a flash in the pan. A week later I was addicted and spent all my time learning the ins and outs; the bots, spam, DMs, follow limits, action limits, follow ratios, automation tools, the API, etc.

Twitter is much more than a network, it’s a protocol. A new way of communicating. A guilt-free way of communicating – not as synchronous as chat, but not as asynchronous as email – you can reply when you want to and you don’t have an inbox piling up. For me, that is perfect.

Follow me on Twitter!

image flickr/Pierre Beteille

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I finally realized I was about 7,000 miles from home in a foreign county.

I was in bed reading, trying to get tired at 2:30, when the call came. I needed to get to Japan immediately. I packed as fast as possible and headed to the airport without even a ticket. The prices at the various airlines were outrageous topping out at $4,500. A quick web search got me a ticket for $1,200.

Twenty hours later I arrived at my in-laws. With severe jetlag and sleeping pills flowing through my body, it all felt like a dream. Two days later I finally came to the realization of what had happened.

I won’t go into the details of why I’m here, but the trip was absolutely necessary.

I’ll be on a brief hiatus from blogging while I’m here but will continue twittering.

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Quick personal post, see I’m not just a geek.

I just found this site that Owen Nieder put together for the old Del Mar Skateboard Ranch and it brought back a ton of memories. I’m proud to be included in the list of The Last Great Ones as this was a huge part of my life when I was growing up. When the park closed, I thought it was the end of the world.

I’ll contribute a story or two – maybe about the time I made a huge fireball with Cremora or when I broke my wrist and kept skating for the rest of the day or the last night the park was open – this stuff should not be forgotten.

image: Pushead

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My General Interests

I’ve given up on traditional bookmarks. I haven’t bookmarked a site in years. Anything that I want to come back to again and again, I subscribe to in my RSS reader – NetNewsWire. It’s free, and it’s great. I use NewsGator to sync my accounts across my Macs and iPhone. I actually prefer the iPhone version of NNW over the Desktop version.

Here is a rundown of how I manage my reading list:

1. I currently have around 100 RSS subscriptions right now. I used to have over 200 but now limit myself to what I can realistically handle.
2. I provide full access to the OPML file for all of my devices (MBP/iPhone).
3. I scan the feeds, usually from my iPhone and “Save to Clippings” anything that looks interesting.
4. On my MBP, I review the clippings and scan the item in the NNW Browser.
5. If the item is of interest, I add it to my bookmarks DB where it is queued up for reading.
6. When I have time (waiting at the DMV, trying to go to sleep, etc.), I pull up the page of bookmarks and read what I can. Once done, I mark it as read and it goes into my Recently Read Articles. This allows me to later reference an article I have read and also gives others an idea of what my interests are. (The image above is a tag cloud generated from my DB).

This only covers the blog/magazine articles that I read. I have other systems for my books, movies, and email queues.

You can subscribe to my Recently Read Articles Feed (added by popular request). If anyone is interested in my OPML file, let me know.

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I have to admit that I’m an Apple fanboy. I’m not one of the switcher fanboys, but one of the longhaul fanboys. My first exposure to a computer (well, after the teletype my father brought home) was our family’s Apple IIe and my first programming was done in Apple basic. I had an Apple sticker on my bedroom door when I was 10.

When I first saw a Macintosh, I was blown away. I knew right there and then, the WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing) interface was the future. I got my hands on one in the computer lab and was infected.

I’ve never owned a Windows box. My brother got one when I was in high school and this is what I used to check out the Internet while Netscape was still in beta. I hated it.

I went off to college and gained quite a bit of experience with Unix (and VMS). Indiana University is one of the top most progressive schools with technology so often times we were forced to turn in our homework via ftp on Unix. I was intrigued. I guess it was the days of Adventure and Zork and Apple Basic that made the command line something comfortable, not frightening. So I became as profficient as possible with the command line, but not gaining root hampered me a bit.

When I got seriously into computing, I bought a PowerBook 5300ce, one of Apple’s most infamous products. I suffered through all its problems, but it worked well enough for me to learn. And that is what I did. During this time, I wasn’t really a fanboy though, I didn’t know who Michael Spindler was or who Gil Amelio was and I didn’t really care. OS 7.5 and all its elegance was what mattered.

Skip ahead a few years, and I’m riding high on OS 8/8.6. I started following Apple religiously – their stock price, the hardware, the software updates, third party support, etc. I was very happy to see them buy Next rather than Be and kind of laughed when I heard that Steve would be a special advisor to Gil. I knew this arrangement wouldn’t last very long and it didn’t.

I’m not going to recount the story of Apple’s re-emergence from beleagured computer manufacturer to dominant media company, everyone knows that story. It’s the stuff of legend.

I’m happy I was able to see Steve Jobs speak twice, but kind of bummed I never got to meet him. I haven’t met Gates either, but met Ballmer and that was no fun.

While Steve enjoyed the limelight and kept the inner workings of Apple top secret, he is not an idiot. He brought in the highest caliber people possible and instilled in them the Apple spirit and these are the people that run the day to day of Apple. With Steve out of the picture, I’m sure the pipeline is not going to dry up – just read the story of Jony Ive coming up with the 2nd gen iMac. And Jony Ive is a pre-Jobs fixture at Apple. (I got to see him in the first Apple store in Tokyo).

For a while Steve was CEO of both Apple and Pixar, how could they BOTH do so well. Surely it wasn’t Steve micromanaging 24/7, it was his brilliant ideas like putting the Pixar bathrooms in the middle of the building so everyone crossed paths eventually.

I’m not worried about a post-Jobs Apple and will remain dedicated to the best OS and software ever produced (hardware is a different story). So when I start going Apple Fanboy in my posts, I’ll point people back here for reference. I’ll try to keep my Apple slant out of my writing though.

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