Back from the beach

I went to a wedding and then to the beach in South Carolina for all of last week, and am now back in the flow of my regular life. I have to admit, though, that I miss the beach. Big surprise, huh? 6 days of doing pretty much nothing at all. Wake up when I wake up, read a book, get in the water, read a book, eat, eat, eat, read a book, sleep again. Awesome.

I really needed the break, both from work and from regular life (six weekends in a row of weddings or wedding-related activities knocks the wind out of you). For some reason whenever I actually let myself take a break, I get sick, or nearly so. For the first half of last week I felt like a truck had run over me. Sore muscles, sore throat, headache, etc. Basically I felt like ass. Soph speculated that when I actually let myself relax that much that my muscles release any and all toxins that they'd been accumulating. Who knows. But I do know that after a week of aggressive relaxing, I feel way better. Almost fully awake.

And I've got another adventure/vacation in August. I should be fully functional by September.

Naming conventions for web-products... and the next fad

I had a fun discussion a few days ago with some coworkers about fads in the naming conventions for web products. It started because we were talking about the abundance of products launched in the last year or so with a missing "e". That all started with Flickr, but has continued to Flaggr, Wishlistr, etc. And a lot of Web 2.0 companies have also used new domains (instead of .com) to make interesting URLs, like del.icio.us or blo.gs.

Of course, this isn't just a Web 2.0 thing, it's a web thing. Why are Flickr, Flaggr, and their ilk missing the "e"? Because they all got used up by all the "eCompany" names in Web 1.0. Or the "o" 's got used up by Yahooooo, Goooogle, etc. And the "i" 's got eaten up by iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, etc. Anyway, so now in Web 2.0 we're missing vowels.

Anyway, the point is that web names go in fads. So here's the next fad, Web 3.0. I decided on it today with some coworkers.

Web 3.0: Company or Product names made up of words repeated twice.

• cowcow
• fixfix
• toptop
• boxbox
  

you get the idea. we discovered that most farm animals make interesting product names when used in this way. they don't mean much, but they're fun to say. a lot like the names kicked out by the Web 2.0 Name Generator.

Time for a vacation

I'm exhausted. Work isn't the culprit, really, although it's always moving at 110 mph at Yahoo!. No, this time it's weddings. I thought I made it through the wedding season a few years back, but this must be "Indian Summer" or something. We've had wedding-related activities every single weekend since essentially the 3rd weekend of May. That's like 6 weeks in a row or something.

I'm totally worn out. And we're not just talking about the kind of wedding where you show up, drink some champaign, and take off. No, these are the kind where I'm helping out, standing up, or in charge of something, which means that every Thurs/Fri/Sat for as long as I can seem to remember recently are wedding-filled.

Don't get me wrong; I'm stoked for all my friends. I just need a vacation. Thankfully, it's very close. I have one more wedding this weekend, and then I can take a break. Can't wait.

Digital Sneezing

This is a phenomena that my co-worker, Matt Fukuda, noted yesterday, and he's totally right.

Just about everybody in my group has a Nokia 6682 camera-phone. It's a cool phone, but basically just a basic camera phone to most folks. The cool thing is that it can run lots of next-generation application, like Zonetags, which was put out by Yahoo! Research Berkeley. Zonetags makes it a one-click step to upload camera-phone pictures to Flickr, and also figures out where you are physically in the real world, and adds that information as a tag. Very cool.

It means I put up a ton more photos on Flickr, and also means that I just take a lot more pictures with my phone. Since everybody on my team has this phone, and we all have zonetags, we're all always taking pictures of things. Pictures of each other in embarrassing situations, pictures of each other at our desks, pictures of what we're working on, pictures of buildings, pictures of just about anything.

Here's where the sneezing part comes in. When I see one of these guys take out his cell phone to take a picture of something, I get mine out, pretty much unconsciously, as if *I* should be taking a picture of whatever it is too. And it's not just limited to me. If one person gets out their camera phone, the whole group suddenly has their phones out, and are taking pictures. It's just like when someone sneezes, and a bunch of other people suddenly need to sneeze. What gives? Bizarre, frankly, but entertaining.

And of course terribly geeky (someday it will be totally hip). At a swank Japanese restaurant last week, Nihon (Y! Local info), we were about 10 minutes into appetizers and suddenly more than half the table had their phones out and were taking pictures. of everything. everything. so geeky. so ridiculous.

but so entertaining. and of course the photos are fun to look at the next day, too.

This is just wrong

This site "christian social networking site", ChristianVibes, at least according to TechCrunch, is related to another site called "SmutVibes", which is like MySpace, but actually encourages pornographic photos.

If they really are the same company, that's absolutely ridiculous. Or rather, it's brilliant, assuming you're just trying to use one platform to target two very different constituencies. But there's something offensive about it as well. It would be like having an "anti-gun" site intended to attract the eyes of anti-gun advocates, and using the resulting revenue dollars to run the NRA site.

doh! delete isn't the same as edit

I deleted a comment today by accident, when I was trying to respond. and unfortunately, 360 doesn't give me the option to "undelete", and didn't give me a confirmation dialog. I thought it was standard practice to get confirmation for irrevocable actions?

Unconditional consumer love of Google

For those of you who don't religiously follow the internet industry (what's wrong with you?), TechCrunch is one of the best tech blogs for just keeping up-to-date with recent internet news, and for a quick analysis of new products, and it's relatively evenly delivered.

This article today vents about a lot of the "halo" effect Google seems to enjoy, even when they release products that aren't necessarily life-changing. But somehow everyone thinks they are.

I have huge respect for Google, and actually love the fact that having healthy competition has really benefited consumers (note Gmail and Google Maps). But seriously, the products aren't really "better" than other products out there, or if they are, it's marginally. But people have a love affair with the brand.

As a Yahoo!, it's annoying. I'm sure if I was a Googler, though, I'd be reveling in it, and laughing at folks like at Yahoo! and MSFT. Guess it just provides a nice challenge to those of us without the home court advantage of unconditional consumer love.

Building products fast

I'm giving a talk tomorrow to whatever Yahoo!'s want to hear my $.02 on how to build products quickly. I titled the talk "Building products fast - cutting through the red tape... but not really... but really", in reference to a line from Dodgeball. Quite appropriate in this case, because some of the "red tape" can be cut (ignored, reclassified, avoided, etc), some you can reduce with a little elbow grease, and some you have to deal with. But a lot of folks, myself included at times, get bogged down and end up letting ourselves think that it's the organization's problem, and stop taking the responsibility to just get the job done.

But I digress. Much more important is that while typing up the presentation (which I kept very light-weight, to give more time for discussion), I accidentally wrote a rhyme. Can't really call it a poem, though. That would be demeaning to the art-form. But a rhyme nonetheless. Here's what I wrote.

If your engineers are stuck, so are you.
If your designers are stuck, so are you.
If anything is stuck, so are you.
If you are stuck, your product is too.

Funny that it rhymes. But very true.

Make it burn

I go to a Power Yoga class at the local YMCA twice a week. It's a tough work-out, something I would never have believed before trying it. I thought Yoga was all stretching and calming. Not this one. Lots of stretching, but a serious serious workout.

Today, though, was a whole new experience. Ever "sit" with your back against a wall as though you were sitting in a chair, but simply using your quads to keep you in that position? Remember how it makes your legs burn? That was today. We held a position for 2 minutes, switched to another position that used the same leg and held *that* position for 2 minutes. And onto another position on the same leg. And a fourth. And a fifth. And then we did it all on the other leg.

That's basically 10 minutes making one quad BURN. Burn baby burn. Man. It felt like someone had injected molten lava into the veins in my leg. I had forgotten what that feels like. It's definitely not the same as simply tiring out... it's burning out.

We won the Webby Award!

Yahoo! Podcasts, a product my team launched last September, won a Webby Award for best podcast site. Cool!

Panopticon

What a cool word. What is it? A very interesting type of prison where a very few number of guards can see all inmates, each inmate has a window to the outside world, and no inmate can see another inmate. Check it out on Wikipedia.

I heard the concept in the context of a talk given at Yahoo! by Jamais Cascio (cascio@openthefuture.com), where he talked about the Participatory Panopticon. The idea is that once everyone has a mobile phone capable of recording photos or videos at any time, without the target's knowledge, we basically are in a situation where you live your life as you do, but at any moment you might be recorded (seen by the guards).

Question: If everything is always recorded, does it destory social fabric, or does it require forgiveness, since nothing is forgotten?

Natural high

I decided yesterday to do a "sprint" workout, something I haven't done in a long time. I was partially motivated by the fact that I want to play ultimate frisbee this weekend, and would like to get the lactic acid out of my legs ahead of time. I was also partially motivated because the more I've done Yoga, and stretched out my legs, the more I feel like I need to do something to tighten them back up. Just stretching all the time is uncomfortable.

Anyway, the point is I ran some sprints. And it was EXHILERATING. Man, it was great to run at full speed. It feels like I'm flying. And almost immediately after finishing the first sprint, I could feel the runner's high hit me like a freight train. I had a huge grin on my face. I felt awesome. So I ran a few more sprints. And I felt awesome. But then I quit, because I knew I was running on borrowed energy, so to speak.

About 15 minutes later, as I was getting ready for work, I crashed. I felt sick. It was brief, thank God, but it was real. Unsettled stomach, spinning head, the works. Yeach.

So what's the point? I need to sprint more often.

A great idea finally comes to life

I had this idea maybe 5 years ago; I just didn't know how to make it happen. Iomega has launched a wifi NAS... what is it? It's a set of hard-drives that you just hook up to your home network. You put all your photos, music, etc on there, and it's all available to every computer or networked television (Tivo, Windows Media Center) in your house. Not only that, but because there are multiple hard-drives, the data is backed up. Even if one hard-drive fails, you haven't lost the data. You just swap out that one drive and keep going.

It's probably still not sufficiently user-friendly to hit a mass market, and I doubt most people would get the benefits, but someday something like this will be either part of your home stereo setup, or part of your internet setup.

I'm glad it's finally happening.

Denali!!!

I'm totally stoked! Soph and I have cemented our plans to take off for Alaska this summer, something I've wanted to do for a while now.

We'll be spending about 5 days backpacking in Denali National Park (pictured here). The mosquitos will suck (literally), but it's wide-open, no trails. Basically hike wherever you want for days on end, with nearly endless sunlight. Cool.

Then we'll take an SUV down the Denali highway from Fairbanks to Anchorage for a couple of days. The road parallels the park, and has great views of the mountain. The whole thing is unpaved, too... Off-roading!

So then after a full week+ of exhausting vacationing, we'll take a cruise down the Alaska/Canada coast for a week, taking in the sights, doing day excursions if we have the energy, and basically soaking it all up with very little effort.

And then we come home and collapse for a day before returning to work/school.

I am SO stoked. I can't wait. I'm starting to compile a list of stuff I may need to buy in anticipation of the trip (and probably sell on Craig's list/Ebay again after we're back). Things like:

• 600mm lens (for bears and wolves and such)
• GPS (no trails, remember? and my map/compass skills are ok, but maybe not ok enough)
• mosquito netting (nasty suckers)
• solar recharger? (camera batteries, gps batteries)

If you've been to Alaska and have any recommendations, throw 'em my way.

Crush List

Soph and I both realized lately that we have become buried in our work and hobbies, both individually and together. It seems like whenever we have free time - weeknight or weekend - we try to fill it with things like watching a movie, reading a book, surfing the web, playing a game, photography, etc. We're already super-busy during the week with work and school, so perhaps it's understandable to want to relax.

The effect, though, has been that we're not investing in people's lives the way we once used to. We used to have at least one night a week that we spent with friends, or with people we were hoping would become friends. And that time really was a great way for us to both be encouraged and have fun, but also a way for us to pour ourselves into other people.

If you examine Jesus' life, you'll see that he was almost always inviting someone to join him in *whatever* he was doing. Every moment, it seems, was a chance for him to invest himself in someone else. That's how he made disciples. My Dad refers to this as the "With Me" principle. He even wrote a book on it called "The Joy of Discipleship".

Anway, both Soph and I came to this conclusion on our own at about the same time a couple of weeks ago. So we decided to institute the Crush List. This is a concept we borrowed from a friend of ours from his "single" days. He had 5 women on the crush list, and 5 in waiting. It might seem like a strange concept, but it makes sense. He was basically focusing on the set of people he wanted to develop relationship with. So Soph and I now have a "Crush List" with people that we really want to target developing deeper relationship with. The list changes regularly, and the number of people on the list isn't really a set limit. But it gives us some focus relationally, and gets us off our butts when we have free time.

360 drafts...

I really really wish 360 allowed me to save draft blog entries.

This entry, for example, I am writing in notepad because I just posted another post. I don't want to post all my thoughts all at once, but I need a place to capture the thought when it occurs. I've also run into plenty of instances where I'm halfway through writing a post when I need to shut-down, close the browser, whatever. I can't save the draft, but I don't want to post a half-finished thought, so what can I do?

Why multiple blogs are useful...

I constantly find that there are things I want to blog about that for one reason or another I can't. Usually it's because it's related to Yahoo!, or product strategies of competitive companies as they relate to Yahoo!, etc. Obviously I can't blog about that stuff in public, because, well, it's not public information.

But sometimes I *really* want to talk about it. So now I have three blogs. I have this one, purely for personal stuff. I know some people are much more hip than I and use their 360 to write up their thoughts on Web 2.0 stuff, but most of my thoughts can't be expressed publicly anyway. So this blog is for personal happenings, opinions, etc.

I have *also* started a blog internally at Yahoo!, behind the corporate firewall (sorry to those of you who don't work at Yahoo!), where I *can* comment about these things. Actually, I've started two internal blogs. I started one for my group - the Advanced Products Group - and one for myself.

It does mean, though, that I've neglected this blog for a number of days, maybe even weeks, since I've been posting to those other two blogs. Sorry about that. I'll try to make amends over the upcoming weekend.

Snowboarding blind

Since my trip out of the country for work was postponed, I took advantage of having no meetings scheduled for Friday to take the day off and hit the slopes with Soph. We headed up to Kirkwood early in the morning, and had an awesome day.

The snow up there is crazy deep. Like 20 feet or something. We were going down blacks and double blacks that were essentially just blues. All of the gullies and gulches were filled in with snow. It was a blast.

It was blowing really hard, though. I couldn't see the lift until we were one pole away. No visibility at all. And the wind was so strong at the top that if you just stood up on a flat area, it pushed you along like a sailboat. One run we went on was so whited-out, that it felt like I was in Antartica. A little bit disconcerting.

But the snow was awesome. I love being the first or only person to make tracks down a long run. What a blast!

Rain, rain, go away, but just the same, leave the snow to stay

What a crazy March in northern CA. It has rained a ton! here, which of course also means it has snowed a ton up at Tahoe (for you non-californians, rain in SF = snow in the sierras).

Alpine Meadows is reporting an all-time record for snow-fall in a single month, with 189.5 inches just this March. That's nearly sixteen feet of fresh snow. 16. That's nuts. I hope I get up there soon.

When you're so mad you can't see straight

I rarely get this upset, but something happened yesterday that really lit a fire. I won't bother with the gory details; let's just say that I have to keep telling myself not to break stuff. I'm trying really hard to get my thoughts together so that I can express my frustrations correctly even to myself (I must be learning something from my wife). In the meantime I'm trying not to take it out on people who just happen to be sitting near me, something I failed at last night with Soph. Thankfully she has lots of grace for me.

What it comes down to is this: I don't like being manipulated. At all. Really only two things can get me this pissed off with any certainty. One is causing me unnecessary physical pain. The other is being manipulated, and I definitely feel that way right now.

Just needed to vent.