Archive for 2013

“My Startup is in stealth mode” is a euphemism for “my invisible company that doesn’t have a product.”

Whenever an entrepreneur starts talking about their startup being in stealth, all I can think is that they are really talking about their fictitious Canadian girlfriend who goes to a different school: “you wouldn’t know her but she’s really cool! And pretty too!” Yah, yah, I really believe you, that’s awesome, can’t wait to meet…

People ask me “how do you manage to run in to so many clueless wannapreneurs all the time?” The simple reason is that I attend about 80 technology networking meet ups per year all along the West coast and run in to pretty much every dumb frat boy with an idea for an app. It…

Raspberry Pi is on-fire. Oh shit! Hot! Hot! HOT! HOT! Yeah, that didn’t go down as expected. If you could avoid setting fire to the micro-controller, that’d be greeeaat.

A drill press is not like a CPU. Making it “go faster” when drilling titanium rods is not desirable.

Dining with a friend who immediately pours salt on their food before even tasting it: “I’m a super-taster and I have to do this to make the food taste right.” *facepalm* Words fail me.

One Thing = Everything. How you do one thing is the way you approach everything. Overly messy house = overly messy software architecture. Treat the wait staff badly = treat your own staff badly. This isn’t rocket science here.

Love Trello for personal project management. Need to renew my paid account later today. I wouldn’t use Trello for larger projects with dozens of employees working on tasks and sub-tasks. For small projects with two or three people, Trello is an amazingly versatile tool.  

Turning out new oven peals for my pizzas from the CNC. This is what $15,000 of hardware and software and wood shop tools were made for…

Woohoo! New version of IntelliJ. Some days I am excited because one of my development tools have a simple update. Other days I dread because one of my development tools (*cough* Android Studio *cough*) have a simple update.  

Many slices make up a sandwich. And they are all tasty. This is the art of entrepreneurship. Though I never understood why people slather strong tasting condiments all over perfectly good cheese. Maybe that’s the problem. It was never perfectly good cheese to begin with.

That one thing is not the one thing that changes everything. That one thing is just the next step to the next thing that won’t change everything either. So be prepared, that after this step, to take another step.

A long time ago… Potential Lead: “Do you think we could hire a cross-platform mobile development team in the Bay area that’d work on-site in S.F. for $5K a month?” Hahahaha!

Ate an enormous pulled pork sandwich for lunch. It was about the size of a dinosaur. Jurassic Pork.

Heading over to Powell’s Books for a browse. Thinking I might grab lunch at the bistro round the corner. Powell’s is one of those last great independent bookshops of mythic proportions you hear about. Powell’s goes beyond just being a purveyor of dead tree matter. It is a bookshop that has reached critical mass. Powell’s…

The University where I got my Bachelor’s offers an MSc in Mobile Computing. The funny thing is, I pretty much teach that entire course, at a more advanced level than what the MSc does in their courseware, in my own corporate training classes. I am trying very hard to reconcile in my head why I’d…

The you of today will look at your best work of yesterday and realise that you knew nothing. And realise that so many improvements could be made. And realise that you have gotten better since you made “that.” Your best work is not merely a one-off. And your best work is still ahead of you.

You cannot believe in yourself and not at least have a little bit of a God complex.

If you won’t divulge what you want to chat about until after you get on the call, it’s probably not worth anybody’s time getting on a call with you.

There are two Achilles heels (what is the plural of Achilles heel? Heeli? (It’s rhetorical, shut up)) with online grocery shopping. The first is that the person fulfilling the order scans the UPC but doesn’t bother looking at the item. Ordering Groundworks Angel City from Amazon, I have only once, in several orders, received the…