Category: about me

Pure Vanity.

The Lunch 2.0 story so far

Lunch 20 @AOL.COM

LUNCH 20 @AOL.COM
AOL, Mountain View, California

Nikon D70, Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G
f/4 at 1/25 second, iso 500, 12mm (18mm)

Summer is here and Lunch 2.0 is starting up again. There are two events scheduled already, and from two of my favorite Web 2.0 startups to boot!

The first one will be at LinkedIn. Which is important because their founder is on the board of the company that pays my salary. We’re the second entry in their newly-born corporate blog! Next step: get Mario to blog about my LinkedIn Haikus (they really work, honest!).

The other one will Ning on June 14. Little known factoid: Ning was our very first Lunch 2.0, even if they didn’t know it. (Ahh, back in the good old days when Lunch 2.0 meant sneaking into a company’s cafeteria and sticking our Lunch 2.0 flag in the ground… or fork in their cake.)

IMG_0563.JPG by Mario Sundar

Gina Bianchini of Ning and Reid Hoffmann of LinkedIn at Web 2.0 Expo. Two people dear to my heart. And it’s not because they’re hosting Lunch 2.0.

Oh, who am I kidding. It is. We love you guys! 😀

The what and wherefore of lunch-two-point-oh

Lunch 2.0 is about participating in an interesting conversation over a free lunch.

If you are interested in being a diner, going to a Lunch 2.0 is really easy. Just say you’re going to attend and our hosts will deal with the fallout. 😀 Afterwards, write about it in your blog, post some photos, or produce a video. (Send us an e-mail so we can link it.) While that’s not a requirement, it’s that sort of buzz is what pays the bills when our hosts have to justify this craziness to their corporate overlords. Or, if you are a corporate overlord, host one yourself…

If you want to host a Lunch 2.0, it’s really easy to become an “eatery.” Just send Mark or me an e-mail. We really want to eat your lunch. Honest! Mark explained our philosophy best:

Lunch 2.0, much like Web 2.0, is all about being open. We welcome any companies that are interested in hosting Lunch 2.0 events 🙂

C’mon Lunch 2.0 has got to be hipper than that moleskine that you carry around to keep your lo-tech creds up.

Lunch 2.0: Taste the buzz.

Warning: A long and inconsistent story ahead

Speaking of waxing nostalgic, I think it’s about time I finally post this article about the Lunch 2.0 story. The first time I tried to write this was in response to a query by FutureWorks back in October of last year. The second was in February to celebrate the first anniversary of Lunch 2.0. This will be the third attempt, so it’ll be a long one…

It’s about time I got my story straight about this Lunch 2.0 thing (or at least, my lies consistent). What follows is the honest-to-God truth (uh, sort of).

[How we created Lunch 2.0: The True Hollywood Story after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 27

It’s going to be ugly

My favorite productivity trick has got to be moving everything on my desktop into a folder to be looked at later and everything in my inbox into the ” refile” mailbox.

An empty desktop and a clean mail folder and all of a sudden you’re more productive.

I think the technical term for this is “pushing the reset button”, except in my version of it, there is no shutdown notification. (If I weren’t such a poser, I’d twitter it.)

I tried that today.

[The fallout after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 3

What people want

“2 Drink Minimum” by 500hats
You’ll have to read until the end to find out why I included this photo.

Holly wrote recently that your most passionate users don’t necessarily build the best products. It’s really worth a read.

I think the problem comes from the fact that there is often a large difference between what people say they want, and what people really want.

Forgetting that this difference exists and being insensitive to a customer’s true desires is the source of many mistakes I’ve made and lessons I’ve learned.

What follows is an example of each of those things two things: a mistake and a lesson.

[Michael and me after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 9

Reading too much…

“Sara would read anything you handed her…She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car…If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house—reading, to her, was a kind of pyromania—and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupon. Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with the volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through on of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine.”
—Michael Chabon, “Wonder Boys”

I can relate.

This leads to the famous line in the movie: “She was a junkie for the
printed word. Lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.”

Posted on by tychay 6

Reading my height

I got my kitchen closet shelving today. (It’s actually a coat closet, but I’m turning it into a kitchen one which says something about my priorities.)

In about 3rd grade or so, we had to write down a self-description. The teacher gathered the cards, read them, and the class would try to guess who it was about.

My description started out: “I am 3′ 11″ tall…”

That’s about all I remember and it’s just about as far as the teacher got before the entire class guessed it was me. While I thought it was a pretty impressive number, I was still the shortest kid in my grade.

I’m standing in the elevator reading the side of a box I’m hauling up to the apartment. The shelves are 48″ long, an inch longer than I was at the time, and how this event comes back to my mind unbidden.

Posted on by tychay 0

Amazon Prime a**hole

I paid for Amazon Prime because I’m rich and lazy. Besides, I spend about 15 hours a day at work, now.

This means whenever I have an urge to get a spatula, I just order it and it gets sent two day shipping at no charge. (Yes, I’ve actually done shit like that.)

But the new thing is they tried to sell me digital access, which, while a neat idea, is like a dumb ass version of Safari so no thanks.

Doing that must have caused a big mess up in their order flow because it just sent the stuff to my old company using my old billing information. I went to my accounts page to correct it but because the Amazon Prime thing, my order was being processed and I couldn’t cancel.

Dave IM’d and said it was a convenience tax.

(Just think what would have happened had I had 1-click turned out.)

[Updates after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 7