You know how it's not cool to announce your engagement at someone else's wedding reception? Stealing thunder, taking away from the bride's special day, all of that. But I've heard that it happens.
That's how I feel about Nick and Jessica announcing their separation late last night. Now I'm trying to watch parades and football and eat with family and there's this giant cloud over the day. Not cool. How am I supposed to give thanks when all I can think about is whether they've already taped another one of those hot variety shows or not? That first one was genius. It was like the Hee Haw writers had sold their souls for a chance to create one last show starring Pamela Anderson and her bland boy band husband. Like I said, a giant cloud.
In other news, I'm looking forward to Slashfood's upcoming lovely leftovers day, but I'm a little concerned too. Their last day was all about pumpkins and I made the nearly-fatal mistake of trying every single recipe they posted. Days later I was totally addicted to pumpkin and couldn't go more than a few hours without feeding my new habit.
Fortunately the Nicoderm CQ people make a pumpkin patch, so I'm back on track and ready for Thanksgiving.
Oh, who am I kidding? I didn't even watch the parade when I lived right on Herald Square across the street from Macy's. I'll be online a bunch, but I will probably watch some football with Niki's family.
Brian Alvey
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Thanksgiving etiquette and leftovers
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Hiring web developers and tech gurus
We're expanding our Weblogs, Inc. tech team. I'm looking for some talented tech people with web development, database and server management skills.
"Didn't you post about this a few weeks ago?" you ask.
Well, yes. Nice catch. Very flattering. Now we're looking for full-time team members. Things change.
The exact skill set is less important than these traits: bright, energetic, blog savvy, great communication skills (email, IM and in person), organization and problem solving. I'm not looking to fill a specific role like "MySQL developer". I want to find two or three people who know how to keep a giant blogging platform flying along and contribute to our always-changing stream of web projects.
But just so we don't get people expecting to work on something else we don't use, here are some real skills we need:
- Apache, PHP and MySQL
- ASP/VBScript, Microsoft SQL
- experience with blogs, blogging, tagging services, CMSes, forums, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 ;-)
- Windows Server, Linux OS, Mac OS
- regular expressions, JavaScript, AJAX
- FTP, remote control (terminal services, ssh) and file management
- experience administering DNS and email servers (Windows Merak Mail corporate mail server, qmail on Linux)
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It makes me want to wag my tail
Blogging Baby reported on my choice for Halloween wear this year and I am very glad that they have that line in there explaining that I am dressing up as Joe because Jack is dressing up as Blue. I was worried people would think I was just sitting around trying to choose between dressing up as Joe and dressing up as Stephanie from Lazytown and that my kids weren't even trick-or-treating this year.Niki also corrects me every time I tell Jack that Steve went off to Iraq:
"College! He went away to college. Please stop telling Jack that Steve went to Iraq."
Right. College. Not Iraq. Got it.
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Is it wrong to love Verizon?
Our Verizon guy just finished installing FIOS, their fiber optic Internet and phone service here. Even though my cable modem connection here gets rave reviews when people camp out in my home office, I was ordering some phone services and they sold me on trying FIOS.
I was convinced to try it for two reasons. First, they switch out your lines with fiber optic cabling and you get to keep that even if you cancel the FIOS service. That was attractive because my phone lines are legendary for their crackling noises. Second, it costs half as much as my business cable service and they promise way more speed up and down the line.
I did a speed test on Bandwidth Place and my existing cable connection rates 2.6 megabits per second and has a subjective rating of "Great".
Then I did a speed test on my new FIOS service and it rates 27 megabits per second and has a subjective rating of "Unbelievable". They aren't kidding!
That crackling is gone on our phone calls, too.
I'll let you know if it ever slows down or has trouble, but if you combine Verizon's FIOS with their EVDO -- which I can't travel without anymore -- I just might start loving Verizon.
Unbelievable.
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All I have are bananas and mustard
I love this interview over on Slashfood. Bob Sassone talks to Queer Eye's Ted Allen. Every time I read one of these great WIN interviews I get the urge to revive Meet The Makers and then I remember how the coolness of interviewing Darby Conley for an hour and a half was balanced by the pain of spending more than eight hours transcribing and editing it for publication. This longing for doing interviews recently returned when I read Kim Vonyar's two part interview with Stewart Stern, who wrote the screenplays for Rebel Without a Cause and Sybil. -
Yankees in the World Series
Maybe Steinbrenner didn't get Randy Johnson to win this year. Maybe George has a long term plan and the 57-year-old left-hander is a key part of that plan.
Maybe he'll be satisfied to watch ex-Yankee pitchers Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte take on ex-Yankee pitchers José Contreras and El Duqué, like when you hear that your ex-wife won the lottery. You know that you're still happy where you are now, but you wish her and your ex-best friend Sherman all the best. Really, it couldn't have happened to a nicer couple.
Maybe starting pitching is overrated.
Okay, I just checked out their rosters and besides one White Sox backup catcher the only ex-Yankees I recognize are all starting pitchers.
So maybe it isn't.
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Growing Pains
It's a great problem to have...it's a great problem to have...it's a great problem to have...just pull your headphones tighter and crank up the Foo Fighters, Ben Folds and Francis Dunnery.So every once in a while we get hammered with traffic beyond our ability to serve. It doesn't happen when we get Slashdotted. It used to, but we got over that. Now it only happens for two reasons: if Engadget and TUAW live-blog a Steve Jobs press conference or if AOL links to us from its home page.
The Apple live-blogging thing is no longer a surprise since we've trained everyone to give us like a week's notice now. We have things we can do to decrease the load on the pages people are going to be reloading over and over -- like turning off the ads they won't be clicking or adding more caching. I leave some Google AdSense in there just in case. It's no load on our servers to have Google in there and maybe someone's finger will get sore from hitting F5 over and over and they'll see an ad they like and click it...
Last week had the video iPod announcements and we came so close to having it all running smoothly. My one mistake was that I cached the 6 individual posts before they came out, but people were reloading the home page like nuts since they could get the news there. So I quickly diverted the home page traffic to the main Steve Jobs post and we were fine. We did way better with today's news, but today was not a crazy traffic day for Apple news. It was light.
Our next hurdle is keeping up with the AOL traffic that is heading to several of our sites that are still on our oldest CMS -- one that was never really called Blogsmith, so we just refer to it as WIN. The WIN CMS is missing a lot of the rollup tables and caching that Blogsmith has, so loading Autoblog and Luxist takes longer than loading newer sites like Download Squad, TUAW and Slashfood. Why haven't the older sites made the jump yet? Mainly time limitations and developer resources. Did I mention that we're always looking for developers?
So the last couple of days have included a ton of optimization and caching in the old WIN system -- code that will all be thrown away soon -- and we'll be pushing harder to migrate more sites to Blogsmith as fast as we can.
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A little pick me up
I've been a little down. I had an idea for a book series about a magician/detective who gets murdered and comes back as a zombie. His first case: solving his own murder. He uses a combination of zombie toughness and sleight of hand to track down his killers and bring them to justice. I was going to call it Abra Cadaver. I was psyched, but then I found that the domain name was taken by a company that sells Halloween supplies and who wants to work on something when you can't get the dot com for it?
Yes, the Steve Miller song was on the radio when I had this idea. I was going to use that as the theme song when they turned Abra Cadaver into a TV series.
So I needed a little pick me up. Ben McMath directed me to Jonathan Coulton's cover of Baby Got Back (via BoingBoing dot net -- and I think you know how I feel about that). I've listened to it twice and I'm feeling way better now. The whole way through I'm picturing Amy Poehler rubbing up against Horatio Sanz on SNL's Weekend Update. Life is good.
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Trusting your competition
Google confirmed that it will be providing free high-speed wi-fi in San Francisco. If I ran a competing company (and there might be a few of those in and around SF), it would freak me out to have my employees sending all of our private communications over our competition's wireless network.
I think about that all the time -- how dot com companies rely on gmail, AIM, Yahoo IM, MSN Messenger and Basecamp.
Is it safe to load all of our corporate plans into Basecamp when it is a 37signals product and they do design work for Gawker Media? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows. Does anyone else worry about this?
Does anyone else make ta-da lists with items like:
- Steal top developers from 37signals team
- Finish Cobol on Rails
- Build a Basecamp killer
- Heckle Jason Fried at Web 2.0
just to see if they're listening?
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Join our team
We're looking to expand our tech team by adding a jack-of-all-trades to help with server management and web development projects.
Our next team member needs to have the following skills:- experience with ASP/VBScript, PHP and SQL
- knowledge of Windows and Linux administration
- handy with regular expressions and JavaScript
- great X/HTML skills for working with our ad traffic team
- FTP, remote control (terminal services, ssh) and file management
- experience with blogs, blogging, tagging services, CMSes, forums
- experience administering DNS and email servers is a plus
- energetic
- blog savvy
- great communication skills (email, IM and in person)
- well-organized
GrimJack
EZ Street
Jon Sable, Freelance