30 boxes in my trunk!

Not that 30 boxes; I’m talking about 30 boxes of Costco pizza that is

Last night for the Plaxo party Huy and I picked up the pizzas from Costco. We ran into a few surprises:

1. Costco pizzas are huge. I hadn’t seen one for a while and was rather shocked at the pure size of each pizza.
2. Costco pizzas are heavy! I mean, watching Huy and I lifting all those pizzas was like a free ticket to the guns show… but seriously we could really only lift maybe 6 or 7 pizzas at a time.
3. An Audi S4 can actually fit 30 Costco pizzas in the trunk perfectly. It was almost as if they designed it for this exact purpose :O

When we got back though, we needed some help though

Check out the pictures of the party over on the Lunch 2.0 blog!

Party at Plaxo tomorrow night

If you’re an avid Lunch 2.0 fan you already know this, but for all those who should be avid Lunch 2.0 fans: we’re having a party here at Plaxo tomorrow night to welcome the HipCal team to Silicon Valley.

RSVP at the Lunch 2.0 blog or on the zvents page. We’ve got free pizza and beer, so come on out for a fun Web 2.0 mixer

Re: New Mac Ads… ummm what?

As a new Mac user, I of course now follow MacRumors and all the other good Mac news sites. Through those channels I found out about the new Apple advertisements available for viewing online about switching from PC to Mac. They’re pretty funny, but I have to say that the "Restarting" and "Viruses" ones are pretty bold statements to be making.

First off, I’ve had my Mac crash just as much as my PC ever did – if not more so. I rarely got crashes on my Thinkpad, even while I as running VMWare, random downloaded beta apps, and running 1000 instances of IE/Firefox/Word/Outlook/Powerpoint/etc. I was able to suspend and resume my machine for weeks at a time without a reboot; although it woulud occasionally run into a hiccup or two, my MacBook Pro is the same way. It doesn’t always return from suspend correctly and more than a few times I’ve re-opened the lid to find that the MacBook never suspended in the first place and the battery is completely drained.

Secondly, while I will say that Macs probably have a better inherent security model due to their unix roots, I wouldn’t make claims that Macs are impervious to viruses or that they are without security holes. Just today Rose linked me over to an article about security and speed of patches on OS X.

The advertisements are pretty funny though, and I’m sure they’ll get a lot of converts. After all, the commercials are fun and consumery and isn’t that what computer users are looking for nowadays?

Is it just me or…

Did A9 switch their search engine because Google poached Udi and they were pissed?

I mean there’s a lot of talk about how Amazon is finally realizing that Google might be a competitor, but come on… they’re pretty smart over there and they probably realized that Google was a potential threat years ago. I don’t think they all of a sudden realized it just now.

…and another thing: doesn’t everyone realize that, as usual, Google will ignore bloggers talking about how they have a double standard?

The NYT article was probably great for Google; after all, people have a naive love for the company while they have an inherent hate for Microsoft. It plays perfectly to that and helps their cause at the same time. Nevermind that the facts show that Microsoft is actually being the good guy here…

Finally! I can blog about visiting HipCal

See? I can keep a lid on unreleased news

Last month after our acquisition had closed, but before our public announcement today, I headed up to Troy, NY to welcome the HipCal folks and get them setup and kicked off. As part of the visit, I decided to forgo the hotel and instead, opt to stay at their frat house (they assured me that this was necessary in order to get the full “HipCal experience”… I’m still not exactly sure what that meant :O )

So I flew in and Garret and Pete picked me up at the airport. When I arrived at their house, I had this great banner welcoming me:

Not exactly sure where they got it from, but it was pretty funny

So they took me on a tour of their frat house and their “office” (which was really just a room they retrofitted as an office space). Since RPI is an engineering focused school, they’ve got a few mechanical engineers in the house and they built a lot of furniture themselves. For example, here’s a ping pong table they built – and it even folds up.

Here’s a shelving system they built to house a bunch of TVs for their video game room. On one side is 6 TVs while on the other side is stadium seating for at least 8.

They’ve also got a commercially outfitted kitchen, where the guys in the house take turns making meals Sunday – Thursday.

In college I had been a visitor to frat houses, but I’d never really been given a grand tour. I wonder if most frats are as geeked out as this place… hmmmm, maybe the HipCal guys will help us build some cool furniture here at Plaxo!

I’ve held off on uploading my pictures until today as well (so as to not give off any hints on our acquisition); check out my Flickr set for more pictures