It gets harder and harder to maintain a personal online journal as time goes on. It was really weird at first to know my parents and my sister read this journal, but I got over it eventually. I know some friends from NC still read this journal from time to time, which doesn't bother me much at all. The only problem is that I feel guilty about griping publicly on this journal about my personal problems when some of my other close friends are going through very challenging times (moreso than me).

Anyways, I won't bother going into details about this, but I think today was when I first started to unravel a bit from the stress of the past few months. It's been one of those train wrecks that I bet some of you have anticipated - moving across the country away from my comfort zone, coupled with the stress of working for a start-up ... I think it was only a matter of time before it all got to me.

The sleep problems have reared their ugly head again ... even when I do manage to get to sleep, it's a very unrestful sleep - I keep waking up every few hours. I found an online site (yeah, let's trust the internet for FACTS) that Magnesium was a good natural supplement to sleep, so I picked some up. I read somewhere that an athlete swears by magnesium supplements - he said that the supplements turned his dreams very vivid ... he said it was like his dreams had become HD. Hah.

Anyways, I know I've been not online or responding to emails or phone calls lately - sorry. I have a tendency when I'm stressed to basically shut off all distractions in the outside world.

I bought a plane ticket back home to NC - I need to get away from this hectic-ness soon or I'll go nuts. The round-trip ticket cost me like $520 (good god!), but I have a feeling it'll be well worth it. I'll be back in town from March 23rd to the 25th. I really hope to see you guys back home ... I've been missing the tranquility of NC the past few days :)

Hope all is well with everybody!

Same :)

Aaron linked me to the SIMILE project, which has some really cool stuff. Finding myself with some "me time" today, I decided to play with SIMILE's timeline library. The timeline project allows you to generate a timeline based on data you pass in. For example, here is a screenshot of a timeline from my Tabulas:

You can see my actual timeline at here (Warning: It will take a while to load in your browser).

If you want to generate your own timeline, change the userid variable on that link's URL to your userid.

WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT SHIT.

vid link

If Hillary Clinton were to win the '08 presidency, that means two families will have held the presidency of United States for at least 24 years (if not 28 years). My sister will have never known a President that is not a Bush or Clinton.

The Internet allows you to deploy so many different user interfaces and experiences ... it's a shame sites just copy features from popular sites without considering the context of the features...

roy

let me break this down (and why i'm so pissed):

• whether or not henderson meant to clock hansbrough in the nose, it's clear from the videos he intended to commit a hard foul. this seems pretty indisputable to me. whether or not he intended it to be just a hard personal foul, it ended up looking like a flagrant. it's one thing to intentional grab somebody by the waist or arm to commit a foul, and it's another thing to attempt to throw your body at somebody else.
  
• the ncaa rulebook states that a player who commits a flagrant foul is ejected and suspended (source), meaning the referees deemed the foul as a flagrant foul, and followed the rulebook as such. any talk of "he didn't deserve an ejection" is nonsense. he committed a clear & flagrant personal foul and was ejected as such.
  
• what irks me is that if this happened with a close game, you can chalk it up to competitiveness
• however, in this case, this happens with 14 seconds in a game that's LOST. henderson went up, decided to commit a hard foul, with 14 seconds left in the game. hard fouls are made to psyche out the opponent. what is henderson doing here? psyching his opponent out for the next 12 seconds?
• should tyler been in? i don't see why not. duke called a timeout with 50 seconds left, and they were still playing the game. they were jacking up miracle 3s quickly to try to close the gap. what is roy williams supposed to do? throw in his scrubs and let duke catch up?
  

Ok, I need some help. I have a Dell wide-panel monitor, and I want to share it between my Mac G5 tower and my tablet PC. I don't need to share keyboard or mouse, so I don't think I need the whole KVM shebang-bang. Does anybody know a piece of hardware that would let me do this cheaply?

Bonus points: I might be buying a second monitor very shortly, and if I could plug that monitor into the switch and have a dual monitor set-up on both computers, that would be awesome.

Thanks, nerds. Don't let me down.

This comment from my coworker, PeteE:

Wait just 1 second...since when do YOU get any "me time". Back to work slave!

So fitting, because I just came back to work after putting in a pretty full 9 hours already :(

I sometimes wonder when people say they work 50 hours weeks, whether those are action-packed hours, or if some of it's just "killing time." I feel those hours shouldn't count. When I say I work 50 hours, it's generally a very full 50 hours.

In any case, why do I find myself back in the office tonight? Well, my parents just went to bed (they're visiting, by the way!) cause they can't deal with the three-hour difference ("It's midnight on the East Coast," they say as they go to bed at 9pm...). ANNNNNNNDD MindTouch has yet another product in the pipeline. I don't think I'm allowed to say what it is, but if I were to errantly link to an old press release and continue linking (in a cavalier fashion) random sites, I'm sure you guys could figure out what 's in the pipeline. Of course, I could simply requote something from PeteE's blog:

... It was a good week in San Diego. I wasted about 2 days doing support, which I loathe, but the last two days were very productive. RoyK and I worked late Thursday night and got a TON of work done. We're preparing for the relaunch of our wiki farm and got all of our storage migrated to Amazon's S3 (which is a killer service, btw). Roy and I work well together and it was amazing to see what we could get done in such a short amount of time. Oh, and if AaronF or SteveB are reading this, whatever you're paying roy, it isn't enough. ;)

I guess making that second point BIG-ed might be a bit unnecessary, but I think not. Russian brides cost a lot of money!

Ha ha. Niceeee.

In any case, I've been busting my ass trying to get this up. (That's what she said ... haha double nice) To understand exactly what I've been working on, understand the context of our old wiki farm software.

DekiWiki was never intended to run multiple instances. The decision for one-installation was a deliberate one made early on - it let us cut corners during the early stages of development, and it worked out well for us. Well, until we were asked to power Wiki.com. I'm still not sure how it happened, but we pulled together Wiki.com's backend in 3 days. All of us worked around the clock to make it work ... but boy was the whole thing a mess.

I won't get too into details about the pains of our product, but there are a lot. And when you have to deal with a scalable infrastructure ... I mean, wow. Things compound very quickly.

The first task (as Pete and I saw), was fixing up the backend of the old wiki.com customers. We were assigning accounts to specific servers, because settings and files were stored locally. This would cause major scalability issues (each request would have to be parsed, then redirected to the proper server; if a site on one popular server got too big, then the rest of the accounts would go down in flames). So the first step was moving away from local storage, to my personal favorite site ... Amazon S3. That took a while (20gigs of files, and hacking our old source code to deal with S3 storage as opposed to local storage was a project in itself ... ), but it got done. The next step was then localizing all the specific site settings (like your site name) into a database location, instead of the LocalSettings.php file that was stored with each account.

Once those two were moved, this allowed us to scale our product - we can buy any number of cheap front-end servers, all which could process a request for any given site! Yay!

Of course, that was just the precursor steps in dealing with launching a new Dekifarm. The old registration code was pretty much useless, since we completely revamped the way sites were created ... so I rewrote that. Then I worked with the designer (we have a designer now! I don't have to do that! Yay!) in getting his designs up and running.

It's been a bit hectic, but we've done alright. To think, we only really started working on this about a week and a half ago? I've gone through this process of releasing/launching so many times now that the feeling of gratification and accomplishment are gone (I guess I've gone numb to that!)

So tonight, I find myself wrapping up a bunch of technical loose ends with our new release ...

The funniest thing to me is that previous customers will look at our launch and go, "What's changed?" And really, nothing has really changed. At all. I added maybe one feature (which was a really easy 20 minute); the codebase is still running the old version from Wiki.com! (We've had one version release since then, and are smack in the middle of the second release) It really is a testament to how difficult software engineering is - although feature-wise, it's difficult to list what changes have been made ... so many things changed that are invisible to the end user.

In any case, there is much work to be done tonight, so I will shut up and get on it.

Next few days: Driving up to LA with the 'rents tomorrow, hanging out with rents on Sunday, and flying out to Vegas early Monday morning! I'll be back in SD on Wednesday, where I can hopefully catch my breath.

Wiki software sucks right now. What features do you want in a wiki consumer site?

The big things for me (and ironically, none of these will be available in MT's product @launch):

• OpenID single login
• Exportability of data (unfortunately the lack of standardized formats make this hard
• API on my wiki instance (who wants to try to import content into a wiki using a lame webform?)

I'm a bit vague on the features ... I sometimes feel I've been stuck in the same "wiki feature set" mentality for far too long :)

I need to get swarmf.com back up ASAP, (man, I would have *loved* to build a Hansbrough/Henderson swarmf, oh well) because I'd like to see some mixture of Swarmf's functionality in a wiki ... sorta hard to explain right now, though.

Wow, talk about putting all the dark horses in one bracket:

NCAA EAST
1 North Carolina
16 E. Kentucky

8 Marquette
9 Michigan St.

5 USC
12 Arkansas

4 Texas
13 New Mexico St.

6 Vanderbilt
11 George Wash.

3 Wash St.
14 Oral Roberts

7 Boston Col.
10 Texas Tech

2 Georgetown
15 Belmont

Long story short, my beloved car is in Orange, California (next to Anaheim near LA), whereas I am now in San Diego (a smooth 100 miles away). I will leave it up to your imaginations how this happened (there was no accident).

It's been one tiring weekend. I'm going to pass out, wake up at like 5am and fly out to VEEGGAAASSSS

roy

Two times I've flown out from San Diego's airport. Twice I've almost missed my flight. I'll get better at this, I swear.

Woke up at 530, caught a flight to LAX ("Going back ... to Cali, Cali.."), then got into Vegas around 9. It's so ... red and orange here. No green (unless you're on the inside the casino, then it's green everywhere - I wonder if that's psychological). They had slot machines in the airport itself. Ridiculous.

I hate Orbitz. They called me at 330am (and AGAIN at like 5am!!!!) to let me know my flight would be arriving on time. Thanks. I didn't even ask for that service ... so whatever few hours I would be sleeping were rudely interrupted halfway.

I'm at the Red Rock Casino/Hotel, which is a $40 cab ride from the airport.

And now ... back to work :)

roy

This is a crosspost from my OpenGarden blog

Note: I'm dead exhausted, so forgive me for any errors in this post. I've been traveling all weekend, and just got into Vegas this morning for the Community 2.0 conference.

MindTouch has just launched wik.is, whose predecessor you may be vaguely familiar with if you follow Web 2.0 news. You can create your own personal wiki once again! Yay!!!

When I joined MindTouch two years ago, I was excited to start working for a company that would be working on an enterprise wiki ... but my heart's always been with projects for the common Joe. My side project for three years (since college) has been developing a blogging/image sharing platform, so I've always had a user-centric view of the product.

I'm *ecstatic* that MindTouch is starting to extend DekiWiki for this purpose, and given the future plans for MindTouch in the enterprise market, I think there's a huge overlap which will benefit you guys quite a bit!

Rather than extol the virtues of wik.is, I'll focus on things that wik.is lacks: (can you tell I'm an engineer and not a marketer?!)

• Editor woes! It's a step above TEXTAREA, but it's still FAR away from the ideal editor experience. I can' t tell you how often Steve, Aaron and I have sat around fighting with the editor. Since getting more developers on board, we've made fixing the editor a top priority for Itasca (possibly Hayes).
• No export! AHHHH! DATA LOCK-IN SUCKS! TOTALLY true! We didn't leave this feature out on purpose to keep you guys on wik.is - we just didn't have time to completely engineer a solution that works well enough to offer it to you guys. Rest assured, if you want to move your data off of wik.is, we will work with you. I'd suggest posting in the forums; we can provide you with a database snapshot and a tar of your attachments.
• Lack of skinnability. I think the most important feature on any site is the ability to project your style and themes onto a site. This is 50% why MySpace is so friggin popular (and 100% why I curse when a MySpace hottie's page freezes my computer... yet I keep going back ... JK!). For now, we threw up a proof-of-concept feature for Pro accounts that allows you to set a header via iframe ... but what I'd like to do (for a future release, and I'm just thinking out loud here) is allow for full CSS override access, allow and HTML footer/header inserts. But we'll see :)

Anyways, I'm wiped. I'm very proud of wik.is, and I hope you guys enjoy using it :)

I saw 300 last night ... awesome, awesome. A related cartoon:

source

I was walking across the room (while trying to find my wallet) when Aaron took this photo of me. His immediate reaction upon seeing it appear on his camera ... "Dude it looks like you're about to take it"

teams that worry me in order:

1. ohio state (by FARRRR)
2. kansas
3. georgetown
4. texas
5. florida

now watch us get bounced by msu

My first big complaint: The engine oil dipstick is useless. It's got this retarded little "well" which makes it nearly impossible to read. Do other Mazda's have these same retarded dipsticks? I had a completely flat dipstick in my Ford Taurus which was easy as hell to read ... I'm completely flummoxed on how to read the engine oil levels on the Mazda 3's dipstick. The damn thing showed "low" so I put in another quart of engine oil... and this flooded my engine (which caused the car problems last weekend).

I'll have to take a few pictures so you get an idea of what I'm talking about.

An interesting article entitled "The Renter's Manifesto: Why home ownership causes unemployment."

The article title is a bit misleading; it implies that home ownership causes unemployment. However, it explicitly states in the article: "English economist Andrew Oswald has shown that across European countries, and across U.S. states, high levels of home ownership are correlated with high levels of unemployment."

Semantics aside, this reminds me of the mentality shift I had a while ago regarding home ownership. I remember when I first started at MindTouch, I was saving a decent portion of my salary since I was living at home. Needing a goal to invest towards (it's really hard to save money when all these technology goodies stare at you from your RSS reader), I decided a "home" would be a good goal. I would save to buy a house.

A few months ago, I decided that buying a house would be a net-negative on my life. The article above gives a few reasons why (I drew similar conclusions), but the biggest reason why I had this shift away from house-buying was that house buying limits your career flexibility, and that is the best invesment of all - investing in yourself.

If the goal is future financial freedom as well as future happiness (my oversimplified definition of happiness: "being able to wake up/go to bed satisfied with your attempts at fulfilling your dreams"), then why should I willingly tie myself down to an area and set down roots? A house, if anything, clouds my decision making ability when it comes to a career, because I'll let the roots I've set down affect my career decision-making.

Realistically, if I had bought a house a few months ago in NC, could I have moved to San Diego? Would I be willing? If I had left MT, where would I have worked? IBM?

The most important advantage I have going in my life is my flexibility. My career mobility and my lack of roots will let me objectively determine if a specific job is the best thing for me.

I think it's a riskier path than taking a plush job at a big company, but it has a better potential upside. Risk, risk, risk.

Updated: Read the comments; Bert's broken down the math even more to make it a better net-plus to own vs. rent

Alright, I've always been REALLY unsettled by the prevailing mindset that "owning is better than renting." I'm going to finally sit down and do the math. I know jack-shit about home owning, so any hidden financial benefits of owning a house like tax write-offs are lost on me. Feel free to comment with any errors in the math here.

Let's say Bob (a 25-year old single male) has $60,000 of cash saved up and is attempting to determine whether renting or buying is the better decision (mathematically).

Bob, who has certain standards of living, has decided that if he were to buy a house, wants to buy the priciest house he can afford (since those $200-$300K value houses have the great appreciation value). Given his initial $60K, he decides to buy a house in the $300K range (which gives us the round 20% down). For the sake of mathematical simplicity, let's assume he goes with a traditional fixed-rate 30 year mortgage (so we can discount HELOC and the 80/20 loans, which as far as I can tell, are even worse financial net-negatives).

Let's say that Bob wasn't stupid enough to constantly sign up for new credit cards offers that gave him $250 statement credits (unlike an idiot named Roy), so he has decent credit. Mr. Moneybags at the Bank gives Bob a nice 7% rate. This means:

Bob put down $60K for a $300K loan @ 7%

(For the math, I got lazy and used this calculator).

This equates to a monthly payment of $1597, of which roughly $16,000 your first year is an interest payments alone.

I asked my mom about some added costs of owning a home (roughly in that price range): annual property tax: $6000, annual insurance: $1000, maintenance: $500

This works out to about $2200 per month to own a house.

Let's look at the flipside. Bob decides to rent an apart instead for $1300 (number pulled out of my ass, but I can safely say that living in my $1300 loft affords roughly the same level of luxury as a $300K house)

The annual rental cost for Bob works out to be -$15,600.

The average annual cost of a house is -$21961 (6000 + 1000 + 500 + 14461).

This is a net difference of $6000 in owning a house versus renting an apartment. But wait, when you buy a house, you're buying a piece of investment!.

Very true; the principal you pay is a part of your investment into your home.

So let's say that the difference in costs between owning and renting ($6000) is the amount you need to clear on your house's investment in order to be profitable in the short-term (notice I've discounted the actual value of the house). That means that a measly 2.5% appreciation on the value of your house will make it the net-positive move.

But wait! What about that initial $60,000 you DIDN'T put away when you rented? Investing in the S&P 500 over a long period if time returns roughly 10% annualized... this means you need to make $6000 year on your house(~5% appreciation per year for your home)

So the 10-minute conclusion is this: if your home will appreciate more than 5% per year, buying a house in the short-term is the smart move. Otherwise, rent.

Bert or somebody smarter, please feel free to tear this math apart. I'm sure there's a bunch of logical errors here that I'm missing.

Borst IMed me a few days ago and said he enjoyed my recommendation of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days, a book of essays written by start-up founders. I'll try to give more recommendations via this blog now of stuff I've read.

I got Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software last week and blew threw it oretty quickly (it was an entertaining read for me).

The book itself covers the startup of an overly ambitious software project and follows the trajectory (of failure, mostly). While reading it, I could relate to the happenings in the book (MT has repeated some of the mistakes to a certain degree). The book provides great insight on why software projects fail, and why it's so hard to write software. If you're in the software engineering industry, I definitely think it's worth a read.

I got in a bit late to the office today (running some errands, plus I was a bit wiped from a dinner party I held at my place last night). I didn't feel like today was going to be productive ... but wow. I closed 15 bugs today. That's like a record, or something. Granted, they weren't huge bugs (a few of them were gimmes), but it was definitely a nice feeling to be "in the zone."

Of course, the downside to this is that I'm totally wiped. I think I'll go pass out ...

I was chilling on the couch, reading a book, when there was a little tap-tap at the door. I don't have any friends, so I was a bit apprehensive about opening the door...

As soon I open this door, this girl tries to walk in. A smokin' hottie, too! Of course, I'm somewhat confused (hot girl? Roy? huh?), so I'm just sorta frozen there. Unfortunately, she meant to go over to my next door neighbor's place ... rats.

My neighbor, she sure has hot friends... perhaps it's time they meet my acquaintance!!!

... and that is my exciting story of the day. A hot girl *almost* entered my loft. Oh bugger... I need to get a life (forreal).

Catching the red-eye back to NC! I'm so excited! 3 days away from the computerrrrrrrrr and the internets... the best gift I can give myself! :)

But before I leave, a thought:

By the way, being a huge pop-culture fanatic during the '90s, I feel confident in now saying that the Backstreet Boys were *by far* the best boy band of the mid-to-late 90s. (NKOTB were a bit before my time, so I can't make an apt comparison.) Listening to BSB, N'Sync and 98 Degrees lately ... there is no comparison between these bands.

BSB was far more polished than its peers - it almost seems now that the later N'Sync albums ("Celebrity" especially) were testing grounds for JT before he launched his solo career - could "Justified" (an awesome album, btw) be as polished if he hadn't had a chance to experiment in "Celebrity"?

Oh the questions that'll never be answered....

Have a wonderful weekend, everybody!

GO HEELS!

I get on the plane:

"This is the captain speaking ... for those interested in the Georgetown/Carolina game, they just went into overtime, tied at 81. We'll let you know when we find out more."

They went an hour without letting me know what happened. The bastards! I finally asked a flight attendent ...

"This is the captain. Unfortunately..."

I didn't even need to hear the rest.

I haven't watched a minute of it, but I'm half-way tempted to buy the game on iTunes just to see how badly we blew it (by all accounts, it seems like it was a meltdown for the ages).

I'll probably go catatonic, so I won't.

roy

After a (long) day of work, I decided to treat myself by going down to Dublin Square Irish Pub for my favorite Irish-themed dinner: a chicken boxty served with a Newcastle.

I thought I could escape nerd-talk for dinner ... but the moment I sat down at the bar ... I hear ... "Microsoft Windows Remote Access is far superior ..." I glance on over to my left. A notebook with some Microsoft material. I take a look around the bar. Not a single cute chick. Crap. I've walked into a TOTAL nerd-fest without realizing it... it then dawned on me that etech was happening close by. RATS.

I CAN'T ESCAPE THE NERDSSSSS. HELP ME! EVERYWHERE I GO THERE THEY ARE!!!!

I missed a call from Steve last night. When I came in this morning, he told me that he called me to let me know that him and Aaron were hanging with Jeff Bezos. Jeffrey frickin Bezos! (He's the founder of Amazon.com) I can't believe it. I'm the biggest Amazon fanboy ever. I buy everything from Amazon (using my Amazon credit card!), and Amazon S3 (I've written about this countless times) is my favorite web product ever. If I had met Bezos in person, I'd probably emit a high pitched squeal (much like those Japanese girls) and chase after Jeff Bezos until he gave me some free $25 gift certificates. Alas ...

Another company I think is kick-ass is Yahoo! They're doing some really exciting API stuff. It's great to see a big company like Yahoo! really embracing standards and the development community like this. I know MS is trying to do the same thing, but whenever they reach out to the community, it just doesn't seem as ... benevolent.

A few quotes of the day from the office:

Aaron on the true nature of me: (upon posting up this poster to his wall):

Hey Roy, this poster should appeal to the inner Japanese girl in you!

Max on programming progress: Hey, we're getting a 404 now ... we're making progress!

Me chatting with Bert on my plans for life:

thug4liferoyboy (6:11:44 PM): i could finally trick a girl into dating me
thug4liferoyboy (6:12:03 PM): roy + fame + money = girlfriend?????

And with that, I am off to enjoy a nice dinner and a quiet evening! Have a wonderful night!

"Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection... the lovers, the dreamers and me." #