Category Archives: me

I love T-shirt irony

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A few weeks ago when my mother and brother were visiting, we walked out of my apartment and saw a drunk guy stumbling down the sidewalk. He had sunglasses on, a nappy beard, and was clinging to the wall of my building to stand upright as he slowly made progress down the sidewalk. I believe he was also mumbling incoherently – obviously drunk out of his mind. He was wearing a t-shirt that read “Smooth Operator.”

Today my friend John pointed out this gem. There is a fairly hilarious t-shirt on bustedtees.com which shows a bride and a groom cutting a wedding cake, with the caption “big mistake.” You’d think it would be a big seller with men, theoretically men who are enjoying the freedom of the single life. The availability chart suggests a slightly different demographic:

T-shirt Irony

It’s either fat married men, or fat single men, in either case one would think they’re better off being married than taking their chances on the dating scene.

It got me thinking more about t-shirts that might make for great ironic images. For example, I’d really love to see a guy with a “#1 dad” shirt beating his kid publicly.

Colbert Report vs. Daily Show

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I don’t watch either The Colbert Report or The Daily Show religiously, but I catch them from time to time. Last night they both happened to be on while I was in the gym, although I was only half paying attention (I was watching an episode of Lost on the ipod). The bits I did catch confirmed this sneaking feeling I’ve had in what I’d seen of each show recently. I think The Colbert Report is funnier. I did a quick search to see if people are actually comparing these shows head to head, and it looks like others agree with me. At the very least, it seems like it’s become popular to compare the two shows.

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Soccer's flaws make it hard to get into.

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This year I watched more of the World Cup than I ever had. I was in Europe for the Euro two years ago, and I saw how exciting soccer could be (namely, when you’re in a bar with a ton of excited drunken people).

Watching quietly at home, it’s somewhat exciting only because the stadium is full of screaming fans. Beyond that, I found a number of aspects of the sport annoying. Namely:

  1. After overtime, penalty kicks. No one seems to like this rule – the fans, the announcers, no one. Penalty kicks aren’t soccer. They might as well say “after the game ends, the two teams will play miniature golf to determine the winner” because the activity they’re participating in is not the same sport they’d just been playing for two hours. If no one likes this method of ending a game, they should just change the rule.
  2. Mid-game penalty kicks. It seems a fact of the sport is that the games are going to be low-scoring (compared to basketball, football, or even baseball). If two teams play well on offense and defense, that’s how it’s going to be. You only get a handful of shots on goal, and of those shots, only a small percentage of them go in. However, if a foul happens in the penalty box, that’s a penalty kick. The odds of scoring on a penalty kick must be several orders of magnitude higher than scoring in the middle of the game. The goalie is at a huge disadvantage, and basically has to guess at which way to jump, and often look foolish jumping away from the ball. Unlike a free throw in basketball, which doesn’t count for much relative to the rest of the scoring, one penalty kick can count for 100% of the scoring in a soccer game (as just happened in the France-Portugal game).
  3. There always seems to be someone crying on the ground. I think this has a lot to do with point #2. Because the penalties can be so severe, it encourages people to pretend they were injured during a play. It’s far worse than a typical basketball “flop” to try and earn an offensive foul. It eats up more time, and generally looks wimpier. Flopping in basketball these days is an obvious thing. People don’t pretend to be hurt, they just make it obvious that they were knocked down. They then get right back up.
  4. The clock doesn’t make any sense. Why do they let the clock run, and then add on time at the end? If they’re keeping track of the delta between active gameplay and real time, why don’t they just save themselves the math and stop the clock when the gameplay stops? That way teams can accurately manage the clock throughout the half, and strategize appropriately. As it is, it seems like the clock runs out, and then you find out how much extra time you get. You can’t manage that time until you know how much it is. Maybe it’s just my love for [American] football that causes me to place a lot of value in clock management.

I won’t knock Soccer for being low-scoring, because that’s kind of a cop-out complaint. If you really love and appreciate the sport, a low-scoring game is probably very exciting. However, the fact that it’s low scoring does make it harder to get into for new people, because scoring is an easy to appreciate aspect of any sport.

First impressions of Farecast

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I have been beta testing Farecast, and I just recently used it to book a trip to Atlanta. The service claims to predict whether or not airfare is going to go up or down, helping you decide whether you should buy your tickets now or hold off. The idea is cool. The implementation, when completed, will probably be cool too. What I’ve experienced with the beta is that it feels like more of a novelty than a useful tool.

When I first started playing with it, I couldn’t find a combination of dates and locations that would produce anything but a statement that fares would be increasing, so I should buy now. That had me skeptical – after all, why would they tell me not to buy when they make money only when I do?

When I used it to book the Atlanta trip, I found a case where it did tell me to wait. I need to be in Atlanta by noon on a Friday, which means that I’ll have to leave Seattle late Thursday night. Farecast told me a Thursday->Sunday roundtrip will be decreasing by an average of $20 over the next 7 days.

But… it then occurred to me that the information they were providing me isn’t useful. I needed a late night flight on Thursday, so I could go to work during the day. So, even if the average ticket price dropped $20 over the next week, what if all the late night tickets sold out? Or, what if morning tickets drop $40 and late night tickets increase $20? The averages aren’t useful when you care about specific times. That said – according to the site they are working on predicting how airfares will move within time ranges. The ranges will be broken up into 6 groups, which seems like sufficient granularity for most cases.

They are not guaranteeing anything with the price predictions (which is probably for the best). They tell you that they are “80% confident” in their prediction. So, there’s still some element of gambling here. If they’re 80% sure the prices will drop for your trip home for Christmas, and you wait, and the flights end up doubling in price or selling out (which is a possibility 1 in 5 times), then you’re pretty much up a creek. It seems like they’d be well served to build in some monitoring tools for the case when they blew their prediction, and they can let people know as soon as possible.

I do like what they’re trying to do though – if they work out some of these details, it could be a very useful service. I double-checked other price searches and didn’t find any better deals, so if nothing else they seem to have a top-notch flight search.

The TechCrunch Party

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The TechCrunch party was a good time. It featured free pizza, free beer, and a free opportunity to meet up with some of the bigger names in the local tech field. John Cook was there and wrote an article about it. Michael Arrington was there of course, and I was able to briefly pitch him my startup idea. I also talked to Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine, about what it was like to start up a company, and how he went about financing it. The CEO of Wetpaint was there too, and we talked briefly about what it’s like being at a party made up of a subset of the 53,651. ie. not the real world.

The three main sponsors also gave demos : TripHub (a tool for organizing group travel), Farecast (a neat tool for predicting if airline ticket prices are going to go up or down), and Redfin (a real estate site geared towards Seattle and San Francisco). Each of the demos was fairly interesting. TripHub might be worth using for Callahan’s Bachelor Party. Farecast could be useful too, but it’s still in private beta.

Times Square here I come

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This Friday, the CEO of F5 Networks, John McAdam will be ringing Nasdaq’s opening bell. 3 Times an hour, they will be playing a 30 second video spot about F5 on the big board on times square. It opens with a 5 second scene of me walking through the lab and fiddling with some equipment. It may not be a picture in Fortune magazine, but it’s something. If you’re in the New York area, check it out. I’ll be available for autographs anytime.

Kind of a bummer

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Well, the gift site I’ve been working on has been beaten to the punch, although the site that got out first is lacking a lot of the capabilities that we determined were required for the first release. It’s probably good that it’s going to motivate us to move faster.

Also, by all means, don’t bother signing up for our future competitor 🙂