Remember that scene in Office Space about having a million dollars? Here is a neat little animated refresher:

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In the movie, Peter goes on to say that if he had a million dollars he would do absolutely nothing. That is the whole point. If you have enough money that you don’t have to work for a living (and a million dollars wouldn’t do that for most of us), how would you spend your time?

I think a better question is “what would you do with 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year?”

That is sorta kinda what I have. I made a major life change in March 2008 when I stopped working as a full-time employee in order to focus on entrepreneurial ventures. March 2009 was a little tough because I realized it was the one year anniversary and I felt like I could have been more intentional about how I spent that time.

As I am quickly approaching the two-year mark I am again reflecting on how I spend my time. Now that I have the freedom to decide how I want to spend my time, my life has become very ambiguous and unstructured. I think it is time for some self-imposed structure.

I was just reading How To Create a Balanced Life and it has some key steps that I really agree with:

1. Eat right: I had been doing really good about this, and my diet now is much better than when I was traveling all the time. There is room for improvement (like not skipping breakfast!!!)
2. Exercise: Again, I was doing really good, but this has fallen off in the past few weeks. Exercise time is really great for clearing the clutter out of my head and gives me more energy.
3. Know when to say “no”: My default has been to say yes to things until I am over-commited. I am hoping by creating a schedule for myself it will be easier to see when it is full.
4. Sleep: I tend to “work” until late at night. I am going to schedule down time at night and stick to it. This will help me get to bed earlier and thus get up earlier.

There are a few more suggestions, but those are the ones that I really agree with.

Tonight I am going to create the first iteration of my daily schedule. In addition to getting up earlier, including daily exercise, and scheduling time for meals, I also want to establish regular office hours where I will have dedicated work time as well as some weekly tasks like grocery shopping that I always seem to put off until the last minute. I also have a weekly schedule for when I have time with my kids. This allows me to schedule more intentional parenting time.

I have enjoyed the supreme flexibility of not having a schedule. I just feel like I can do a better job of getting done what I want to get done if I am more intentional about how I spend my time.

Admittedly, it is a good problem to have.

Afterthought: I think I will include time for a few blog posts a week, too

It has been a little over a year since I created a new venture with Nicholas Holland. We created Side Hobby LLC after Nashville’s first Startup Weekend to pursue our project gpsAssassin.

When we first started out we were (foolishly, but commonly) optimistic that it would just be a little 3 month side hobby (thus the name) that would either make a bunch of money or fizzle and die quickly. We thought the game would release before Christmas and we would be all done with it (or rolling in money) shortly thereafter.

It has been an amazing experience so far, and I think we are going to keep growing the business for a long time to come. TechCrunch has said gpsAssassin could be the next highly addictive hit game. We have been featured on games.com, had an article make it to Reuters, and even got an editorial shout out in the Nashville Scene’s Best of Nashville for Best iPhone Game Developed by Some Local Dudes. Needless to say, it has been an entrepreneurial success so far. (We aren’t making a bunch of money yet, but we are cash flow positive).

We have made some serious blunders along the way (I wish Nick’s BarCamp presentation was online, it was awesome). However, as a business we have addressed the problems, but as an entrepreneur I have learned a ton from them.

At times it has been stressful trying to juggle this “side hobby” with being a single dad while keeping up with the other projects I am working on. The freedom that comes from being able to pursue entrepreneurial ventures makes it totally worth it. I was able to spend every Thursday and Friday with my kids over the Summer, and for that I am really grateful.

So what’s next? We are keeping that close to the chest right now, but we are going to continue to grow gpsAssassin. Our numbers look good (and I think we are watching the right numbers). We are continuing to add new players. Most importantly, we have demonstrated that people will pay for what we are doing (thank you!).

I have not been using an RSS reader for months. Lately I have been trying to look at my NetNewsWire again, but there are a couple of things that frustrate me.

The first is that it is not easy for me to share items. I used to be able to clip them, but now that NNW syncs with Google Reader I want an easy way to “share” a post on Google Reader from NNW (maybe this exists, but I haven’t found it).

Also, I don’t want to subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds. Instead I wan to just get a list of relevant posts to me. I have been filling this need with a combination of Hacker News for tech stuff and Newser for news. That isn’t really what I want though.

The first thing I want is a list of posts that people in my network have read, commented on, linked to, shared, etc.

I want it to be sorted by an attention score so that a post that two people in my network read and one commented on places higher than one that just has two reads (which is higher than one with one read, etc).

I am actually hopeful about the future of Facebook because of their new News Feed. If I was a fan of all of my news sources on Facebook (and my network had the same strategy), then the posts that were getting the most attention would be in my News Feed. The problem is that Facebook is not really where I want this information. Secondary problems have to do with the technical aspect of actually getting that data.

The system I want is the same one I described in my 3D Social Networking talk at BarCamp Nashville 2006 (slides). Here is how I think it could work in today’s landscape:

1. Aggregate my social networks. Pull the social graph from where my networking is acknowledging attention to articles. Give a point to the friend score for each one.
2. Try to identify the accounts for that user that also share content but might not have a social network (Disqus, Intense Debate, Delicious, etc)
3. Pull down the content that is shared on those sources, which might include aggregation of their own posts to twitter (via links), on Facebook (via imported notes), etc. Give each occurrence of an article one point for each friend point (connected on three networks and shared on two gives it a 6).
4. Add up the article scores across all of my network and give me a news list sorted by that score.

This would result in a system where the posts of my friend would have an advantage, but posts that multiple of my friends shared would float to the top.

Then, when I am ready to read some news I would be able to go to that one place and see loads of stuff that is relevant to me.

I think it is a hard system to build because there is a whole lot of aggregation and parsing, not to mention a pretty massive database. I also don’t think it is something that could easily generate revenue. I am hoping someone builds it, but I am not holding my breath.

Which brings me back to Facebook.

A few months back they acquired Friend Feed. One of the features that impressed me most about Friend Feed early on was the idea of “imaginary friends”. I think they removed or de-prioritized the feature, but it allowed me to pull content in from additional sources and let it play in Friend Feed’s ranking system. I don’t think it is too far fetched to see something like this make it’s way into Facebook now. If Facebook added Google Reader integration it would go a long way too.

update:
Apparently there are a couple of related posts today, I would have known this earlier if I was using a feed reader. Why I don’t use Google Reader anymore and Why I continue to use Google Reader.

No, this is not a post about gpsAssassin (though that would have been a good and appropriate title).

I am talking about Google Maps.

Back in 2006 I first saw Google Maps on a phone with GPS. At the time I had a Sprint a900 and had to do a little hackery to get it to work. When I started traveling for work in 2006 I switched to a Palm Treo and then a Blackberry. Both of these had Google Maps, but the Palm didn’t have GPS. Again, with the backberry I had to unlock the phone in order to get Google Maps working, but once I did I found it to be one of the most freeing pieces of software ever.

I quickly started using Google Maps for much more than just seeing where I was. It quickly became my #1 tool for finding business phone numbers, locations and even websites. By using Google Maps in conjunction to my current location I was able to search for businesses and get location specific results. A great example is finding a nearby bank. I could have called the bank or gone to their website and used the branch locator, or I could just pull up Google Maps and type “suntrust”. Problem solved.

Unfortunately, due to license restrictions with how Google received their mapping information, they were not able to provide some of the most sought after features like audible turn-by-turn navigation and weather. Apparently that is starting to change.

Check out this video about the next version of Google Maps for mobile phones. It not only has turn-by-turn navigation, it also makes finding businesses along your route a simple task (as opposed to next to impossible with every navigation system I have used). What I am most excited about is the “layers” that they use to overlay the search information along your route. Mark my words, in 2010 Google will announce that weather data is available as a layer. Real-time weather in a draggable, searchable map. I can’t wait.

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Update:
It looks like Garmin and TomTom are in a world of hurt (for the short term at least. Their stock prices are down 16-21% respectively. That is a pretty serious one day drop. The question is, is it an artificially low price because of the news. I am tempted to sell all my AAPL and buy GRMN.

I can’t believe how long it has been since I have posted anything. At some point I just fell out of the habit of blogging and I started thinking that any posts that could break the silence would need to be quite substantial in order to warrant the infrequent posting. I don’t like that.

There has been lots going on in my life that I wish I had been posting about. My personal life is going through lots of changes, but I want to keep that private in order to respect the privacy of others.

Professionally, I have been staying pretty busy with gpsAssassin. That is something I am going to be writing lots more about soon.

So, this post is completely worthless, except to help me start getting in the swing of things again.

I just read an article in the Nashville Business Journal about some ambiguous program filed under the keyword “entrepreneur”₁. Read Chamber wants to lure tech start-ups to see what I mean.

First off, I can’t even tell what the article is about. Is it about some Chamber initiative? Is it about the Accelerator₂ program at Owen? Is it about the Virtual Entrepreneurship Center they are teaming up to create? There is a sentence about all three, but no substance. Let alone any inclination of how any of this is designed to lure tech startups₃ to Nashville. However, it did pique my interest enough to go search₄ the internets for more information.

Luckily, the NBJ was scooped by Milt Capps₅ 8 months ago on Venture Nashville (link to Milt’s article). Milt actually has some details about what the Virtual Entrepreneurship Center is or will be. By “details” I mean that he has some quotes from people responsible. However, the lack of substance in their quotes leads me to the conclusion that a Virtual Entrepreneurship Center sponsored by a local Chamber of Commerce is not only a complete waste of resources, but also a solid step towards the continued mediocrity of Nashville as a location for tech startups.

Why is a Virtual Entrepreneurship Center a complete waste of time and money? The last thing people creating startups need is more web resources. Every kind of resource you can put on a website for entrepreneurs is already on the web. There are already some exceptional resources online for entrepreneurs. To add insult to injury, an entrepreneur who live in Nashville runs exactly that kind of resource. It is SmallBusiness.com and is run by Rex Hammock (and that URL is hard to beat).

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe they are creating something unique that is specific to Nashville and will eliminate a barrier that local startups have been experiencing. So, let’s look at the quotes and see what they have to say:

First up, Janet Miller the Chief Economic Development and Market Officer for the Nashville Chamber of Commerce:

“Our knowledge and attention to the needs of existing and future businesses, combined with the creativity of these students will surely lead to an exciting opportunity for Nashville, especially when it comes to supporting technology start-ups”

Oh, ok, so they know some stuff we don’t and by combining that with creativity (which I guess is where the entrepreneurs come in) then an exciting opportunity will magically appear. Surely.

Maybe she didn’t convince me, but I am sure Bobby Frist (who I think is really smart guy and is definitely a successful entrepreneur) will be able to explain the value to the entrepreneurs:

“I believe the health of this region’s economy begins with a strong entrepreneurial culture, and the creation of the Virtual Entrepreneur Resource Center will further develop that culture in new and important ways.”

Hrm. Maybe he was having an off day. In case you aren’t seeing a pattern here, Frist’s co-chair gave an equally fluffy quote:

“Nashville is full of smart, creative, independent people, and this Web-based Resource Center will help them achieve their goals as entrepreneurs.”

Here, let me try: By exploring synergies between the creative spirit of Music City entrepreneurs and the more than 8,000 years of expertise of our committee we will gain a better understanding for exactly how to provide resources to people in less creative and experienced areas like Alabama.

Now, I know I am being harsh. I have been a very vocal supporter and participant in the growing community of tech startups in Nashville. I would love for the Chamber of Commerce to participate in a meaningful way, but this isn’t it. I am sure some of the 82 committee members (who I think have great intentions), must have been frustrated with such a neutered and meaningless outcome. It must have taken a lot of time for a committee of 82 to come up with an idea this lame. I think the quotes above show that they aren’t very excited about it.

I hate to be critical of what I think are good intentions. It is going to take the collaboration of the interested groups in order to take Nashville to the next level (and this is currently happening with the Nashville Technology Council and the BarCamp / geek / etc camp). The reason I am writing this is that I think we need to praise innovation and risk-taking and condemn mediocrity in order to raise the bar for Nashville. The Virtual Entrepreneurship Resource Center reeks of mediocrity to me.

₁ - The word “entrepreneur” is becoming meaningless.

₂ - The Accelerator program at Owen Business School looks cool. I briefly toys with attending this summer.

It looks like I am going to get to participate in some pretty neat events in Nashville over the next month.

Technology Nashville - Thursday May 21st
I am going to be participating on a panel discussion on "Dashboards, Widgets and Other Components to Track Performance". The discussion will be moderated by Bayard Saunders and will also Michael Summar, Garrett Harper, and Major Wang.

Mobile Communications Roundtable - June 4th
I don’t know all of the details yet, but I think it is going to be a panel discussion of mobile platforms including Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and iPhone. I am sure we will include a little about Android too. I really like how the NTC has been evolving over the past year and am grateful for the opportunity to get to participate.

Nashville LAMP User Group presentation on AppEngine - June 16th
It looks like the LAMP User Group is going to be great. This month Jon Wage is presenting on Symfony (PHP) and in July Cory Watson is going to be presenting on Catalyst (Perl). AppEngine isn’t quite the LAMP stack (no L and no P and A isn’t Apache), then again alternate databases and webservers are getting more popular. I would love to see future presentations on MySQL, document databases like CouchDB and Tokyo Cabinet, and an overview of webservers including Apache and nginex (hint, hint).

So if you are interested in learning about any of these topics or just want to keep me from talking above my pay grade, come out and support some local tech events in Nashville and say hi.

I just read Fred Wilson’s recap of the Hacking Education meeting. I am really looking forward to seeing the full transcript. While we wait for that I thought I might share how a single magazine article about self-education changed my life.

First, a little background. For whatever reason, I didn’t do well in school. I got really high test scores throughout, but failed more classes than I could count. Well, technically the reason I didn’t do well in school is because I didn’t go to many classes. It strikes me as odd that I could not go to class, not do my homework, and yet, still get > 90 percentile on “the tests”.

Long story short, I dropped out of high school in my 3rd year (1994). Since I do well on tests it was easy for me to get my GED, take the ACT, and go on to college. I failed out of college (1996). After getting my head on straight I went back to school at a local liberal arts college (1997). A year or two later I read “How I Got My D.I.Y. Degree” in Utne Reader (best link I can find). It was written by William Upski Wimsatt. He wrote the following description of self-education:

So I quit college and enrolled as a student at the University of Planet
Earth, the world’s oldest and largest educational institution. It has
billions of professors, tens of millions of books, and unlimited course
offerings. Tuition is free, and everybody designs his or her own major.

1. Recognize that you’re self-motivated.
2. Enjoy yourself.
3. Team up with others.
4. Scare away your shyness.
5. Save all your ideas
6. Act on what you learn.
7. Attend conferences.
8. Feed and water your mentors.
9. Don’t quit school if you like it.
10. Recognize that friendship is learning.
11. Be prepared to be scared.
12. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

I would like to say that I read that article, gained a sense of purpose, and set out on a journey of self-education. Of course, that is not what happened. However, that article gave me permission to think about education as a series of experiences and outcomes instead of a process to follow and be graded on. That was a key shift in thinking that heavily influenced my decision making a few months later.

In 1999 an opportunity presented itself for me to quit college and take a job organizing a national conference on community service and activism. I thought I would go back to school, but instead I continued on in a series of quick careers that taught me more than I ever learned in formalized schooling. I organized that conference, created databases for non-profit organizations, worked with political campaigns, taught high school in the inner-city of DC, helped professors use the web in their classes, worked for some startups, opened a family business, almost went bankrupt, got fired, helped Fortune 1000 companies figure out how much money they were making and how to make that data available to decision makers, became a father (again, and again, and again), and now I essentially have my dream job (trying to build a business from scratch). More importantly than the work I did was the people I had the opportunity to work with/for and learn from. I was on my second or third salaried profession before many of my peers graduated from college.

During my bouts with school, critical thinking was neither taught nor valued. It seems to only to have gotten worse with the increased weight placed on standardized testing. “Teaching to the test” is the exact opposite of what our kids need.

I am not saying that the way I did things is any better or worse than the traditional education system, but it has taught me one thing:

The most important thing I can teach my kids is how to learn; how to figure things out.

Interesting note: I selected Upski as a speaker for that conference I organized. I didn’t realize it was the same person who wrote that article until later.

Remember the good old days when you had something to say and you wrote a blog post? If it was a topic you were really hot on it might end up being a few posts. The very act of writing the post would help you form opinions and thoughts. If you were lucky it would spur a thought in someone else and they would write about it and link to you.

I know it makes me an old fuddy duddy, but I miss that. Twitter is great, but the instant gratification conversation has acted like a pressure valve that keeps thoughts from becoming big enough to blog about.

The flip side to that argument is that the short snarky crap has moved off my blog. If you can’t make a quick joke in 140 characters then it isn’t funny enough to share. So in theory the quality of my blog posts should have gone up.

UPDATE: On a related note, I haven’t opened my feed reader in a couple of weeks either. GpsAssassins has been taking up too much of my time.

Nice theory, but I think I swung the pendulum too far. It is time to get in the swing of posting more frequently again. And what better way to start blogging more again than to write a blog post about my own blog and my process of blogging.

I was diving down the interstate in my truck with my wife and kids. All of the sudden I look to the left and there is an overturned car in the median. It looks like the car has been there a while, but I can see the legs of two passengers who are still in the car. The car appears void of color, almost like it is washed out or was burned in really hot heat. It wasn’t a fire though because the people in the car are not moving; they appear to be dead.

As I looked away from the overturned car I saw that there were several tractor trailers strewn about on the median and the other side of the interstate. Apparently there had been a very bad wreck. There were no flashing lights yet so it must have just happened. As I drove slowly around the turn I started to see more and more cars and trucks that had gotten tangled up in this massive pileup. The magnitude of the destruction that had taken place was astounding.

Everything was silent.

Just as I started to feel extremely grateful, I noticed that I was coming up on cars in my lane that had gotten tangled up in this mess. I could see people slowly moving inside mangled cars. There was a car just in front of me that was facing the wrong way; I wasn’t sure if it had gotten spun around or if it had crossed the median. There was a woman inside. She was trapped in the passenger seat. Crying. Banging on the dashboard in anguish.

I started to get really scared. The pileup was closing in around me and there was no place to go. If I stopped the people coming around the turn behind me would hit me. I was worried that if I continued the pileup would envelope me. Maybe it was clear ahead, but it seemed to be getting worse. There was an exit just ahead, maybe I could make it there. I needed to get my family out of there before I called 911 or got out to help. I needed to ensure my family was safe. It was my job to steer clear of the wreckage.

Then I woke up.

It was a haunting dream. I can still see the anguish of the woman in the car.

I remember studying dream analysis for a few days in a college course once. We were taught that dreams are a way for our subconscious to bubble up concerns and deep seated emotions. The meaning of this dream seems crystal clear.

It is the economy.

It is my job to get my family though this. I do not have an employer whose job it is to make sure I get paid. That means I do not have to worry about getting laid off as so many others have. It also means the entire responsibility is on my shoulders. I see the destruction and turmoil around me and I see it closing in. I cannot see around the bend to know if it is going to get better or worse. The pain and suffering around me is real; it is closing in. There is no way out to stop or get off the highway. We have to go forward and it appears to get worse up ahead.

It was a terrifying dream. It is a very stressful reality.

One of the goals that I have is to help nurture the entrepreneurial spirit in my community. Specifically we have a growing technology community that has some thriving startups (as well as some not-yet-thriving startups). I want to help them work together and promote the city / state as a whole.

That is why I have decided to participate in the SpringStage Startup Blog Network. I have signed on as the catalyst for Tennessee Startups.

Check it out, subscribe to the RSS feed, etc. I will be posting about Tennessee-based startups as well as events and topics that are of interest to the startup community.

I have converted. I never thought it would happen. There are some things that I expected would never change. This was one of them. It shocks me that I am about about to write what I am about to write. The thing is, it is a paradigm shift so major that I can’t keep it a secret.

Ok, are you ready for this?

I am actually kind of hesitant to admit this.

Here goes.

“Owning” music is completely absurd except in the rarest of circumstances.

I am now a believer in subscription based music. Over 80% of my music listening is now done via Pandora. Sometime I will listen to the “recommended music” on the Last.FM channel. Other times I will listen to the Drum & Bass Arena Podcast. On a very rare circumstance I will listen to music that I have purchased or downloaded over the years. Usually if I am listening to music files that I have stored on my computer or ipod it is because I want to listen to music on the home stereo while making phone calls. If I could run Pandora on my Apple TV then I might never listen to music I “own”.

This conversion has not been quick. I used to think Pandora was neat, but I didn’t want to count on an internet connection for music. Two things have changed since then:

1. I am not traveling nearly as much. Until there is internet on airplanes (which is coming) travel would be a deal breaker for Pandora.
2. I bought an iPhone and downloaded Last.FM and Pandora apps.

Those two changes set the stage for…

3. Christmas. I dig Christmas music, but most of it sucks. Also, owning Christmas can screw up your iPod 11 months out of the year.

So I decided to create a Pandora station for good Christmas music. I started adding in the good stuff I already owned and then expanded to stuff I wished I had. I temporarily screwed up the channel when I added this really great song with Christina Aguilera and Dr John; the station was filled with shitty pop for about 45 minutes. Then I rated the crap down and it started getting really good. It started playing tracks that I couldn’t find anywhere else (like a McCoy Tyner Christmas song off some out of print compilation). Being able to share the station was an added bonus too.

Then, after Christmas we drove down to Disney World for a (really quick) family vacation. On the way back Sabrina wanted to listen to some Classic Rock. I am not sure if you have ever noticed, but Classic Rock stations on the radio are fucking horrible. I apologize for the profanity, but I can think of no other way to describe these stations. They play the same crap over and over again. The amazing thing isn’t really the crap that they play, but rather the amazing music they don’t play.

So, while Sabrina was in Starbucks grabbing a cup of joe I was able to fire up the Pandora iPhone app. I created a station with The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and The Stones. We were then able to listen to some Rock that didn’t suck while driving 70 mph down the Interstate. (Ok, I will be honest. “95 miles an hour girl, it’s the speed I drive”). We down voted a few songs, but it was tons better than the crap on the radio. The added bonus was that there was no ads and that we never drove out of range of the radio tower (and luckily the Interstate system is painted prety solid with 3G from Atlanta to Nashville).

When I got home I promptly became a paying Pandora customer. It doesn’t really make the service more valuable, but I figure paying for it is the way to try and keep it around. Which gets to the interesting part.

When I was a young lad I used to spend upwards of $100/month on recorded music (most of it at Tower Records on West End). I was able to go in and browse a pretty eclectic selection of music. Then around 2001 I jumped on the Napster Bandwagon and the amount I spent on music plummeted. There were years where I may not have bought any music. Now I might spend $300/year.

It is not that I am cheap; it is that the perceived value has changed (and let’s be honest, the real cost has dropped as much if not more). I would pay for a satellite radio subscription in a heartbeat if I thought it was worth it. I have had XM in quite a few rental cars and it is almost identical to cable TV - plenty of channels playing marginally interesting material. Hardly worth the price. (We also canceled all cable and satellite TV recently).

Pandora on the other hand is a different story. If I had to, and it I knew it would be available everywhere (especially on my Apple TV), I would pay $40/month. The difference in Pandora and Satellite is that I can be in control. I know what I like. I don’t need a DJ to pick out tunes. Sure, a great DJ is great, but most DJs more of a hinderance than a help. (Note: some girl on Vanderbilt 91.1 was ON FIRE the other day. It was Tuesday or Wednesday midday.)

I used to know this really cool opera major who attended Blair School of Music. She had an incredibly well developed set of musical preferences. I will never forget her telling me about some non-music major telling her that she had horrible taste in music. Her response was (rightfully) “who the hell are you?!?”. The great part of the encounter was that her take-away was not that others should not question her taste in music but that no one’s taste in music should be questioned. Taste in music should be celebrated, not criticized.

“Owning” music limits musical taste. You become shackled to your music files. You feel guilty for not listening to them. You feel like there are some you “should” listen to. You have some that you totally regret purchasing. You worry that something might happen to them. You can only copy them to 5 devices. None of that is enjoyable.

Tonight I started with Michael Franti which took me to Bob Marley via Ben Harper and Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. I am completely enjoying it. I will keep this station and refine it. I will add it to my collection of kick ass music whose taste I own while I am unencumbered by the files.

Speaking of files. I bought a new laptop a couple of weeks ago. I started writing this post because I was just about to copy over my music files from my old computer and decided that I didn’t want them cluttering up my hard drive (which is a cavernous 320GB). How much are they really worth?

Thank you Pandora. I have seen the light.

Note: After writing this I thought I would check and see if Bob Lefsetz had written anything about this. Turns out he was on a similar page 3 days ago. He even had this beautiful gem of a quote that sums it all up: “The stations come in perfectly. The sound is great. Only the content is bad.”

And then Upside Down by Jack Johnson came through the headphones.

A friend from school (I think all the way back to elementary school) has tagged me in a 25 things about me post on Facebok. Since I try and keep everything consolidated and then propagated, I am writing this on my blog, but will “tag” people on Facebook. I have written one of these “# things about me” posts before, but I don’t think I did a particularly good job. Hopefully this one will be better. Though some of the stuff most people already know, people who I went to school with on Facebook may not know it.

Note: It may be dangerous to do this during a time of reflection and clarity.

1. I am fiercely competitive. This shows itself in odd behaviors that may not appear to be driven by competition.
2. I have been blogging at jaxn.org since 2001 (shortly after 9/11, but I didn’t mention 9/11 when I started, even though I lived in DC).
3. I first started using a laptop in 1998. I have had a laptop ever since. It has changed my life; it gave me a career.
4. I am a partner in an LLC that owns two Plato’s Closet franchises (Cool Springs and Murfreesboro).
5. My first car was a 1986 Prelude that I got when I was 20. I had always wanted a Prelude. It cost $2,000 and had paint chipping off.
6. I am currently driving a 2007 Ford F-150. I am not sure I can go back to driving something smaller. Having a truck is also very handy.
7. I also have a 1969 Volvo p1800 that my Aunt bought used in 1970. It is slowly rusting away before I have the time / money to fix it.
8. I had the opportunity to do a 16 day Outward Bound expedition. I maneuvered a canoe through class 4 rapids, climbed a cliff, hiked for days with a 50lb pack, and more. Afterward, during a one on one debrief with a counselor, she told me “you have a very low tolerance for bull shit”. I will never forget that.
9. I don’t really give a shit if my kids use foul language.
10. I think believing in God makes doing the right thing less noble.
11. I have been arrested. As a juvenile I was arrested for things like graffiti and truancy; as an adult I have been arrested for drag racing and from an unpaid ticket.
12. Nobody can cook fried chicken as well as my mother. Seriously. World’s Best.
13. I changed “good” to “well” in that last sentence b/c I heard my mother correcting me in my head.
14. I correct my kids on grammar all the time. They will hear me in their heads when they take tests.
15. I love sailing and do not do it nearly enough. Hopefully my family will start to enjoy it more.
16. In 1998 or 1999 I created a partnership between Belmont University, Vanderbilt University, and the YWCA to hold Nashville’s first Take Back the Night. The partners did a phenomenal job organizing the event and as far as I know the partnership has lasted ever since.
17. Professor Bill Fletcher at Belmont University then nominated me for a “Do Good Stuff” award for my work on Take Back the Night and a Race Relations Group I ran. I was presented with the Regional Award at the 1999 C.O.O.L. National Conference in Salt Lake City, UT
18. In 1999 I read an article in Utne Reader about how we should drop out of college and start a path of “self education”.
19. I quit college and moved to New Hampshire when I was 22 to organize the 2000 C.O.O.L. National Conference. It was my first salaried job. There was strife over my keynote speaker: Billy “Upski” Wimsat who wrote Bomb the Suburbs and No More Prisons. It turns out Upski also wrote that article in Utne Reader (I didn’t know that until after the conference).
20. I met my ex-wife while I was living in New Hampshire. She was living in Florida. We met in New Orleans.
21. I have more debt than I should.
22. I miss playing music.
23. I failed out of Jazz school at Loyola in New Orleans b/c I was too self-conscious. Looking back, I think I had the chops and talent.
24. Sometimes I feel like I have left a trail of destruction throughout my life.
25. Sometimes I leave things unfinished. (when I wrote this in HTML I thought it was #24. Maybe I finish more than I know.)

I haven’t really been keeping up with news and such for the past week (and it feel great). I have picked up bits and pieces of the stimulus debate.

Here is what it looks like to me:

Obama wants to act big to regain confidence.

House Dems used it as an opportunity to sneak in things they have been wanting to fund. (Reminds me of the Patriot Act and makes me sick).

Republicans are trotting out old ideas (that don’t work) as if they are new ideas. We are not going to fix the economy by giving tax cuts to people who already have excess They are trying to find a new word for “trickle down” but it just doesn’t work.

Also, people talk about this really dumb statistic about how fast the money will get into the economy. This is not a short term problem. There is not a shirt term solution.

We have financial habits in this country that are detrimental to our long term viability. We need to dump a shit ton of money into education and infrastructure to play catch up. We need to get more money available for innovation instead of consolidation.

From what it looks like to me, I am once again proud to cal Jim Cooper my Congressman.

When I bought my new laptop I decided to start from scratch instead of using the Migration Assistant. Some of the basics (email, settings, bookmarks, calendar) were handled by MobileMe (formerly .mac). I have been downloading the applications I use as I need them (I leu of a post about which apps I use, check out my slightly outdated iusethis.com profile).

One of the most interesting parts of the switchover has been noticing that there are some podcasts that I am missing. I have never been a big podcast listener. However, there are apparently some that I miss…

Drum and Bass Arena
Every few weeks the crew at breakbeat.co.uk post an hour long mix from a Drum&Bass DJ. This is great stuff to code to. I used to listen to Bassdrive.com a lot, but with these podcasts I have 20+ hours of mixes in various styles that I have rated. This is by far my favorite podcast. I have a couple of year’s worth of archives on my old laptop that I will move over.

The American Life
I used to listen to this podcast on the plane every week. Now that I am rarely on a plane I have found that this podcast is a great way to wind down at the end of the day. I don’t listen to it every week, but that means that I listen to 2-3 episodes some weeks.

Rachel Maddow Show
We no longer have cable or satellite TV. Instead we have Apple TV and over the air HD. I really like Rachel during the election so now her podcast is my goto political news fix.

So those three are the ones I really wanted back. I can’t remember the 10-15 others I was subscribed to on my old laptop (another reason “subscriber” stats are total bullshit).

I have also subscribed to a few new ones that I am not yet ready to endorse:

• President Obama’s Weekly Address
• Railscasts - A podcast about Ruby on Rails
• Grand Unified Weekly - a science podcast iTunes recommended (and I believe a grand unified theory probably exists)

I know there have to be others that I would really enjoy. I am not really interested in podcasts about people’s opinions (I have enough sources for opinions). What podcasts do you suggest?

We have started rolling out a new design for the public pages of statzen.com. This is in preparation of our public launch.

“What?!? You are actually going to launch this thing?!?”

I know; amazing isn’t it. Things have progressed very nicely. Right now we are working on help copy, some final UI details, getting our email service provider setup, and acquiring an SSL certificate. As soon as we get those things checked off we will be ready to flip the switch.

If you currently have a statzen account, now is a great time to log in and see how it is shaping up. (The contextual copy we are working on will go a long way to make it easier to use as well). If you don’t yet have a staten account, now is a great time to get on the waiting list or sign up for our emails.

Oh, and please check out our new design and let us know what you think!

I drove past a church a while back that had the following tidbit on the sign out front:

“Goals are dreams with a deadline”

Since then I have been trying to give myself deadlines. I need to do a better job of hitting my deadlines, but I am getting there.

Anyway, I don’t really have any New Year’s resolutions per se, but I am starting to think about some new goals.

For instance, I really want to get more efficient at using my computer. Ever since I switched to a Mac I find that I use the mouse more, jump around in a constant state of distraction, and listen to more music. I am grateful for the more music part, but I either have to get more efficient on my laptop or I am switching back to linux (even though it is not nearly as “good”). The good news is that the problem is not my laptop or OS X. I just need to take better advantage of the tools that are out there. I have hewn this desire into a goal yet, but I am getting closer.

I also need to finish a bunch of loose ends on various projects. Somehow in December I found myself on the 5 yard line on 6 different projects. I don’t care who you are there is no good way out of that. Some of it was bad planning and some of it was just weird luck. Regardless I am still digging out and it requires me to jump around moving the ball forward one project at a time when they all need my total attention right now. I dropped out of a couple of games and will complete another one this week. After that I am going into a full on post-holiday assault. I think the first step will be to set the deadlines and knock them out one by one.

So here is my goal: I am going to be back to solid ground by February 1. Until then posting here and interaction on social networks will be limited.

Happy New Year!

Seth Godin and Joel Spolsky are also thinking about goals (though more coherently) today.

I have been tagged in one of those blog meme things. I am now supposed to share 7 things about myself; some random, some weird. I have only been tagged for a meme 3 or 4 times in the 7+ years that I have been blogging (that is fun fact #1). I have always assumed that I am not tagged for memes because people either don’t find me that interesting or they think I am an arrogant prick who will ignore them (both positions are defensible). So, thanks for asking Marcus.

2. I have lived in Nashville, TN - New Orleans, LA - Manchester, NH - Philadelphia, PA & Washington, DC. I have always wanted to live on the coast.
3. I believe in omnipresence, but I do not believe in omnipotence. I believe in there is a realm we don’t understand but I don’t believe in God (except as a metaphor for that which we don’t understand, but may one day understand through the realization of a grand unified theory).
4. Speaking of fantasy, my fantasy football team is in the playoffs and it looks like I will win the championship. This year I used an Excel spreadsheet to help me draft players based on consistent average output (high average points with a low standard deviation). Math FTW!
5. I learned how to create an ordered list that starts at #2 specifically for this post.
6. I have struggled with depression for years (probably longer than I realize). I don’t have any reason to be depressed though. I am living The American Dream and I am incredibly grateful for that.
7. I am a left-handed Leo. So is Barack Obama.

Ok, now I am supposed to tag some more people. How about Cory Watson, Andrew Fielding, Kate O’Neill

Here are the rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. Note: no one seems to follow this one. 3 is a better number.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

On January 3rd I declared that 2008 would be the year of the editor. Around the same time Seth Godin was saying the same kind of thing. Turns out for once that I was right.

Today Gabe Riveria announced that Techmeme would start employing the use of editors to sort through the results of the automated algorithm. They have big hopes for the benefits of human editorial intelligence:

“The news will just get faster and more interesting. Obsolete stories will be eliminated sooner while breaking stories will be expedited. Related grouping will improve. Most of this will happen only on Techmeme, though other sites (like memeorandum and WeSmirch) will increasingly benefit from the direct human touch as well.”

I am hoping that an editor will increase the quality and timeliness of stories there. It may be asking too much to hope for a reduction in sensationalism since it is a business after all.

It has been a long time since one of my posts has been been linked to by Techmeme (that I know of). I don’t expect that to change (honestly, I want to read posts that are better quality than my own), but it will be interesting to see how human editors affect the variety of contributors to Techmeme. Will an algorithm or a human have a greater tendency to pick favorites?

BTW, I found out about the changes at Techmeme from a link at Hacker News. HN has become my goto source for tech / startup /etc news. One thing I prefer about Techmeme over HN is the related stories. If the quality goes up at Techmeme I could see myself preferring it.

Note: Techmeme is not the only example of 2008 being the year of the editor. I think Mahalo has proven itself to be a great resource during breaking news due to the process of editors (or curators).

I am a big fan of holiday music. The only problem is that the vast majority of it sucks.

So I have been working on a Pandora channel for holiday music that doesn’t suck. To me, that means it is at least a little jazzy and not very poppy. Stuff that makes me feel good, but doesn’t bore me to tears. I like a little dissonance.

If that sounds good then check out Jax Holiday Trax.