Fun weekend at Whistler and the Tulip Festival

Went up to Seattle this past weekend to visit Rose (her mom and brother were in town visiting too). We went up to Whistler for a fun day of spring snowboarding. Even though it’s already mid/late April, the snow in the upper mountain was pretty decent. The peak at Whistler actually had a good 6 inches of heavy powder. The sun was out and you could see for miles, which made for some great photos:

We stayed at the Hilton Resort and Spa (which I believe is relatively new). They have some strange things there, like bidets in the bathrooms and a huge bear statue; but overall the hotel is nice. (whistlerblackcomb.com claimed it was 5 star, but I think it’s really closer to 4; it’s definitely not as nice as the Pan Pacific, Westin, or Fairmont)

On our way back from Whistler, we stopped in Vancouver and then the Tulip Festival in Mt. Vernon, WA. Rose and I went to the Tulip Festival last year too, but it was raining so we didn’t really get out of the car This year the weather was phenomenal though, so we parked on the side of the street and walked around the flower fields for half an hour.

Rose isn’t a big tulip fan – I’ll let you guess what her favorite flower is – but it was still a fun time. I’m halfway through my Flickr upload quota for this month… I better step it up if I want to use it up like last month!

Me and Plaxo are on Shmula

Peter Abilla contacted me a few months ago with questions about interviewing at Google. I believe he got the job offer, but turned it down. Anyhoo, he’s started a blog called Shmula where he’s currently profiling disruptive companies. He did an e-mail interview with me about Plaxo and posted it up a few days ago. Good stuff

6A and Attensa business blogging seminar

I heard about the SixApart and Attensa Business Blogging Seminar a few weeks ago and decided to fill out the form. They invited me to come so I checked it out last Thursday. It was good to see some familiar faces – Niall and Anil were there too – and it was good to finally meet Matthew Bookspan in person. Matt’s the Director of Product Management over at Attensa and we connected through blogging back when he was working at Pluck in Austin. He an ex-MSFTie and techie geek – he’s also a Plaxo user

The seminar was probably a little bit too beginner for me, but it was fun to hear Anil spread the blogging gospel. He’s definitely a great evangelist for the technology; after the seminar I had an uncontrollable desire to buy 20 licenses for MT – just kidding!

Seriously though, I oftentimes wonder if there’s an easier way to get the word out about blogging: what it is, how you can use it, and what it means for businesses. It seems that I’m always at these small conferences where people are educated about blogging 20 or 30 at a time… maybe someone should make a site called teachmeaboutblogs.com that just has a video recording of Anil giving his presentation. That might save Anil a lot of time

At Plaxo, we’ve been stepping up our blogging efforts; a little bit over a month ago, we got together and decided that we wanted to get into blogging for realsies. So, we fired up MT, and started blogging regularly. We turned on comments/trackbacks and set out on a goal to blog at least something everyday. We’ve missed a few days in the past few weeks, but overall we’ve had a pretty good track record.

I think the perception of Plaxo in the blogosphere has been just so-so over the past few years. We’ve got a lot of happy users who’ve become huge fans out there; but we’ve also got a lot of people we’ve pissed off. So as part of our blogging efforts, we’re seeking to engage the community directly as a company. We’ve had employees like myself blogging for a while, but we’re now seeing what happens when there’s a voice for Plaxo as a company out there too. We hope the experiment works out well, either way, sounds like a case study to me

Blogging on the Mac

I’d been using w.bloggar on my PC and was hooked on the ease of a desktop blogging tool. So when I switched to Mac, one of my first requests to Terry was for a recommendation on a good Mac desktop blogging tool. He recommended Ecto, which I’ve been using for the past few weeks.

I’m pretty satisfied with Ecto so far; it’s much more powerful than w.bloggar (it actually syncs your entries down and makes it easier to manage multiple blogs) and it does well at the basic stuff too. Overall, I’m quite pleased with the experience. Here’s a quick screenshot of Ecto in action

I haven’t found a good replacement for the Flickr Uploadr tool though. Yes, there’s the Flickr Uploadr for Mac, but I’m using Aperture now to manage my photos and there isn’t an Flickr export plug-in (or I haven’t found one yet anyways). I’m currently trying out PictureSync, but it leaves a bit to be desired. I can’t upload a batch as a Flickr set to select the pictures I want to upload I have to go through a strange roundabout way – you put the pictures in a special Aperture folder and then PictureSync grabs them from there.

Aperture is a great tool for organizing photos, but I wish there was a tool that made upload to Flickr easy, like Uploadr did on the PC. I suppose if I can’t find something relatively soon, maybe I’ll just code up what I want. That would probably be a fun exercise, but challenging since I’ve never coded on a Mac before… is Xcode just like VS.NET? Do I dare find out?

Review of my S4

J commented that I never followed up about how I was liking my S4, so here we go

Well, I’ve been driving around with 340 horses on tap for about 4 months now and I have to say, I’m getting quite used to it. Now when I drive, I always know that I can pass at will and enter/exit the freeway effortlessly. The ride quality is firm, but it’s more than comfortable since I was used to driving around a Celica (where I’d describe the ride quality as almost twicthy). I like the overall presence of the car, it’s very smooth and refined; here are some words I’d use to describe it: powerful, refined, comfortable, willing, confident.

Now the bad stuff. My experience getting service at the local Audi dealer has been a little less than stellar. First, taking it in for standard service, they needed to keep my car for a couple days (there was a part that needed to be replaced under warranty) and they wouldn’t give me a loaner car. They had a courtesy shuttle, but it was only to/from the dealer – not much help when you need to get from home to work. Even Toyota picked up a rental when they had to make warranty repairs on my Celica. I can’t believe VW/Audi wouldn’t capitalize on that marketing opportunity. It seems to me that it would be a free opportunity for them to try to sell me my next car. Let me test drive a A3 or TT, give me a car with DVD Nav, maybe I’ll get one next time. At least make me want to come back to the dealer for service… isn’t that where you make your money anyways?

Then, I had to replace a button on the center console because the face had started to peel off. The button cost $30, which was a bit much, and then the dealer wanted to charge me $70 to install it. They claimed that they’d have to take out the entire center console, so a bunch of work, yada yada yada. It seemed fishy to me so I just went home and tried it myself. With a simple flathead screwdriver I was able to pop out the old button and put the new one in. Total time: 2 minutes. Carlsen Audi in Palo Alto, you’ve lost a customer here…

Aside from the dealer experience, what I’ve become aware of is how quickly I can get acclimated to nice things. When I first got my S4, driving anywhere was a treat – I will admit, I was uncommonly willing to run my errands those first few weeks. Nowadays, I’m just used to it. I’m so used to it that when I went to UNC and rented a car it was horrible (it was a Jeep Liberty, which I’m sure is a decent vehicle, but compared to my car it felt like the worst vehicle ever produced).

Lastly, as expected, my gas mileage would make a Prius owner cry – well, maybe until they realize that disposing of that huge NiMH battery pack at their car’s end of life is going to destroy the environment just as bad as marginal gas emissions on regular cars I’m lucky to get 15 miles / gallon on a normal tank; on the freeway I get closer to 20 though.

I saw over on Autoblog a link to this French Audi advertisement for their new RS4. The clip makes me drool, but I wish they’d cut out the speaking parts and show me more driving parts… turn up the soundtrack on that RS4 engine note too please

Feedburner e-mail subscriptions now available

For those who haven’t picked up an RSS aggregator yet, I saw via TechCrunch today that FeedBurner has made it possible to easily get e-mail subscriptions to blogs

I just set mine up, to subscribe via e-mail, just fill in this form:

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

I also got all my redirects set up so now everyone’s pulling my feed from FeedBurner – sorry for anyone who’s been having trouble with my feed over the past day or two. Finally I’ve got RSS metrics

Blogging essential to a career?

I saw over on Scoble’s blog that Bubba mentioned me and the Boston Globe article about blogging and how that is intertwined with bloggers’ careers. I don’t think blogging is necessarily essential – actually, I think it’s much more complicated than that.

In general, my opinion is that if you’ve got nothing to hide, blogging openly will help both you and your future employer(s). Through your blog, people will be able to see what you’re interested in and what kind of personality you have; I think of it as kind of a free market, where buyers and sellers can browse around and (hopefully) make more ideal matches. It works both ways too; if a company gets into blogging, then potential employees can kick the tires a bit before they decide whether to apply – good matches will try even harder to get in, bad matches will self-select out. (We’re trying this out on Plaxo’s blog right now, we’ll see if it works out )

Some might look at my experience and think: “but look, you got yourself into a world of trouble, wasn’t that a huge negative?”

But in actuality, getting fired from Google might be one of the best things that happened for my career (and not just because it made me famous infamous). It was clear that there was a culture mismatch when I worked at Google – I wanted to be open and transparent to customers, while their strategy was to strive to be opaque. Now at Plaxo, there’s a much better fit culturally, and career-wise it’s a much better opportunity as well.

So for me personally, the article is dead on. But I would hesitate to say that it applies to everyone; I’d say blogging can boost your career, but think before you leap

Two weeks after the switch, verdict: meh

Well, it’s been just a little bit over two weeks since I made the switch to Mac. In the meantime, I’ve been using the Mac as my primary workstation at home and at work. I figured the only way to understand our Mac users was to become Mac and perhaps now I understand their frustrations a little too well

There’s always the obvious ones: websites that only work in IE, utilities that are only written for Windows, and the lack of a good docking station!!
Before I draw the wrath of all the Mac-heads out there, I’d like to say that overall the user experience is pretty good. A lot of things make more sense than in the Windows world; but of course, I think a lot of things make less sense as well – but maybe that’s just because I’ve been using Windows for 15 years or so…

Anyways, here we go!

• The idea that Macs don’t crash is a myth. I’ve had mine crash outright (a grey overlay appears and an error telling me that I have to hard reset my computer) and I’ve also run into the spinner wheel of death, where one application stops responding, then the rest of my applications stop responding – even after I “Force Quit” the offending applications. Yes, I ran some beta apps (for example, starting up Parallels is always a gamble), but then again, I ran questionable apps on Windows too. I probably ran more random applications back when I was on Windows than I do now on the Mac (I always ask Terry what the best program is for any particular task and he’s usually vetted them pretty thoroughly )
• My Mac is slow… or maybe it’s not as fast as I thought it was going to be. My Mac friends had always made fun of me when I said my PC was slow, they laughed and made fun because my NT kernel was so much less efficient than their BSD kernel. They made fun of the Windows renderer and how it still wasn’t fully hardware accelerated. But at the end of the day, I still end up waiting for the MacBook Pro to crunch away oftentimes. Now, I understand that I’m running many applications under Rosetta, so maybe I’ll take this one back when universal binaries come out for Office, Adobe CS, and Macromedia Suite, but as of right now: it’s slow
• The thing is HOT – and right now I’m not talking about it’s sex appeal. My MacBook Pro runs like a nuclear reactor. I have a sweaty palm problem and this brick of wattage isn’t helping Before you ask, yes, I have a Rev D. with a serial number starting with 8612. The area above the F keys is insane – hot enough to burn me – when I’m working the machine hard (which is pretty much always). At least I don’t have the high pitched whining noise problem
• It desperately needs a second mouse button. Don’t tell me it doesn’t, because every other thing I do in Adobe CS, Microsoft Office, and even around the OS needs a ctrl-click. Yes, I can connect up an external mouse or a bluetooth one (which I do when I’m at my desk at home or work), but when I’m mobile I just need a second button on this huge spacebar of a mouse button.
• There don’t seem to be any conventions on command key-arrow, ctrl-arrow, option-arrow, and fn-arrow. Maybe this is because there aren’t dedicated home/end/pgup/pgdown keys, but when I can’t seem to figure out what the convention is for moving my cursor over words vs. hitting the beginning/end of a line vs. hitting the beginning/end of the entire page. I usually just end up guessing and I have a 50/50 shot of getting it right. But then when I move into my next application, it works different – argh!
• The audio quality from the headphone out jack leaves much to be desired. Maybe I’m spoiled since I hear the audio out from the iPod Shuffle is really top notch, but when I listen to music in iTunes it just sounds flat vs. on my Shuffle. (I’m using the same Etymotic ER6is on both the MacBook Pro and my Shuffle, so I don’t think it’s the headphones)
• This one’s for Microsoft: I hope Sharepoint 12 has better support for Firefox/Safari We use Sharepoint pretty heavily here at Plaxo and it’s been pretty much death on the Mac. I usually just remote desktop into a Windows box and run IE.

Well, there’s my rant section. Maybe I’m just too early of an adopter, maybe I should’ve waited for the next version of Mac Office and Adobe CS… but oh well, now I’m just another voice in the Mac crowd hoping for improvements

Easter Service today :)

Oops, this is a bit late, but if anyone is still up and looking for a place to go to Easter service tomorrow morning, I’d like to invite you to come visit Great Exchange. Here’s the info:

Two services in the South Bay: 9:15am and 11am. Location: Santa Clara Mariott, 2700 Mission College Blvd, Santa Clara, CA
One service in San Francisco: 6:00pm. Location: Dolores Park Church, 455 Dolores St., San Francisco, CA

Here are the fliers we did up for this Sunday too

Happy Easter!

Good Friday service tomorrow

For the past few weeks, all of us on the Creative Arts Ministry at Great Exchange Covenant Church have been busting hump to get everything ready for Easter weekend. Easter is the highest attended Sunday service of the year for pretty much all churches so we wanted to make the experience a great one for all who are coming.

Starting things off tomorrow night is our Good Friday service. I designed these fliers that we distributed last week to our congregation to get the word out; we use PsPrint to create 4×6 2-sided full color club cards. If you’re in the Bay Area and are interested in checking it out tomorrow night, just come on by to the Santa Clara Mariott at 8PM.

If you do end up coming, ask around for me, I’d love to meet you!