Quick update:
- The Titanic dinner at Mint Julep Bistro was wonderful. Rich's wine pairings especially rocked—as did his beef tournedos in port reduction. Mmm. Not so much fun was Metra's return schedule (featuring a 3-hour gap between 21:25 and 0:35), nor my reading of it (I did not remember this three-hour gap). The fine for taking public transit out to the suburbs (because driving to a 10-course, 9-wine-plus-apertif dinner seemed irresponsible) was $80, paid to the All-Star Taxi Service.
- I did, in fact, buy a Kindle, and I love it. I've now read three books on it and numerous articles (converting a .pdf or text file costs no more than 10c for automatic downloads), and I hardly notice the machine. It only holds 1.5 GB of stuff, but the complete works of Shakespeare ($4) only takes up 4 MB so space is not exactly at a premium.
- I may have a new release of Weather Now out today; if not, then tomorrow morning. I'll be writing over the next few days more about what's different, and why it took nearly two years to produce something that, to some, will look almost identical.
- Tangentially about my Kindle and software releases, I'm now reading Almost Perfect (hat tip Coding Horror), Pete Peterson's account of the rise and fall of WordPerfect. It's a fascinating tale of what happens when everyone in the company is just like you, and when entrepreneurs can't let go.
Finally, in a tiny piece of good news, it looks like we'll have tolerable weather Friday for my first Cubs home game this season.
Last night, while studying for an economics exam, I took a moment to execute the following SQL against a client's production database:
UPDATE table_name
SET column_a = 'Equipment', column_b = 'Equipment'
WHERE column_a = 'Boojums'
GO
UPDATE table_name
SET column_a = 'Borfins', column_b = 'Equipment'
WHERE column_a = 'Nerfherders'
GO
The client called this morning to ask why the application suddenly had two different types of equipment, one which looked suspiciously like a collection of borfins.
You can see what I did, of course. I copied the first statement and forgot to change the copy's second argument. And I quite deservedly looked stupid.
What makes this even funnier: I executed the statement against a staging server first, carefully (I thought) checked the results, and then executed it against the production server. This is why having someone else do quality assurance is a good thing for most programmers.
I still haven't committed to buying a Kindle, and Mark Morford echoes of the reasons:
[M]any creators loathe the beige slab because of how ruthlessly Amazon owns every aspect of the experience. Authors and publishers have little control. Readers -- that is, you -- have even less. Want to share a book you finished with someone else? Too bad. Want to upload and circulate your own text without using Amazon's system? Screw you. Want to, well, do anything at all that's not 100 percent within the company's power and revenue stream because you don't actually own any of the books you buy? Amazon says: Bite me.
I like having paper books. I have a sinking feeling that having a Kindle would result in me buying books twice, once for my bookshelf and once to read on a plane.
I had a conversation with Joe over at Urban Outsitters this morning when I picked Parker up. It seems he's had run-ins with Yelp as well. He mentioned a ratings service that, he thinks, actually works: Angie's List.
The difference? Angie's List members have a reputational risk of their own when posting. The members may be anonymous to the vendors they're rating, but they're authenticated, and can be held accountable for their content. Also, the List, being member-financed rather than advertiser-financed, has no potential conflicts of interest. Yelp and other advertiser-supported media always have a potential for payola. Always.
If the website has community-written reviews, you can destroy it by soliciting bribes from the reviewed businesses:
With the Web site Yelp still responding to allegations by San Francisco businesses that it manipulates the prominence of positive and negative reviews, some Chicago merchants are adding to the heat.
They allege that Yelp representatives have offered to rearrange positive and negative reviews for companies that advertise on the site or sponsor Yelp Elite parties.
Yelp's CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has been taking his side of the story in this controversy to the Web, the media and even Twitter.
In a conversation with the Tribune, Stoppelman denied the allegations, saying, "I guarantee that there is no link between" review placement and advertising. He said that the people selling the ads have no access to the architecture of the site and so cannot influence placement or review content."
This bears investigating. Check out the original story in the East Bay Express, too.
Via The Atlantic's James Fallows, a report that Microsoft's latest round of layoffs means the end of Flight Simulator:
[A]s of yesterday, it's the end of development for the venerable FS franchise (and probably the associated Microsoft ESP, the new commercial simulation platform based on FS), one of the longest-running titles in the history of the PC.
Sigh.
I've been slaving over a hot keyboard for a few days to finish the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™—the Idea™—release 1.10. I've added two major components to support auditable business objects and money, the latter being much more interesting but a lot simpler to code. For the truly geeky, I've also published a Software Developer Kit (SDK) for your perusal. Some of the documentation may be slightly out of date as I needed to get the bits out sooner than the docs.
<SelfPromotion>
If you're extraordinarily geeky, or looking for a great buy-not-build decision, I'm open to licensing and consulting deals.
</SelfPromotion>
I spent the better part of the last few months looking for appropriate office space to hold a team of developers. We estimated we'd need about 325 m² for 18 people. For some reason we could not find appropriate space. I therefore found an Evanston city consultant's recent report fascinating:
Consultant Marty Stern of U.S. Equities Realty says, in a report to be presented to the city's Economic Development Committee Wednesday night, that nine different generally suitable Class B buildings have a total of 50,072 square feet of vacant space.... In addition, Stern says there is about 141,000 square feet of more expensive Class A space available downtown and 21,000 square feet of less expensive Class C space, most of it downtown.
That comes to 19,700 m²—almost five acres of office space. Slightly more than we needed, of course, but probably workable.
So, in January I started a new job, right around the corner from my old office. Then I moved out of my old office. Today I'm moving back in, with three of the developers who work for me. It's temporary, and it's surreal. I'll have before-and-after pics later.
Joel Spolsky's latest column in Inc. is a must-read for entrepreneurs (and I include anyone who has founded an organization) who have grown beyond the garage:
The great employees will be devoted, sure, and it's completely reasonable to expect them to work their butts off. But unlike founders, employees are concerned about what their jobs are like today. They're not as excited about making sacrifices for the long run. So don't tell your star salespeople to take the bus and stay with relatives when they make that call in St. Louis, even though that's what you did when you started the company.