The double switch

*iPhone rings*

“What’s up?”

“You called me earlier.”

“I’m at work now.”

“What’s that noise in the background.”

“I’m watching the latest BubCast. There is something about Spock. They’re hosting a Lunch 2.0 soon and I need some fodder for our announcement. All I found so far was that shit TED posted.”

“TED?”

“You know…from Uncov? I met him last week. Someone on the website said he looks like Steve Jobs and John Lennon’s love child.”

TED drinks the blood of Web 2.0 startups

TED drinks the blood of Web 2.0 startups
Mars Bar and Restaurant, SOMA, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX, built-in flash
1/60sec @ f/3.2, iso800, 17mm (25mm)

“Bub.blicio.us is everywhere. I was talking to some guy the other day saying how bub.blicio.us is everywhere and he says, ‘I write for bub.blicio.us.’”

“Who was it? Alex Ho?”

“I don’t know.”

“Asian dude, carries a Canon, takes event photos.”

IMG_6082

“Founders of Lunch 2.0” by genereationexe1

“Yeah, I think that was him.”

*watching video* “Geez, what’s up with this cute-girls-reading-geek-news thing anyway?”

Alison McNeill does BubCast

“I suppose that’s the new booth babe. That reminds me of the double-switch. Did I ever tell you about the double switch?”

“No.”

[The double-switch, t-shirts, and Lunch 2.0 after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 8

Your personality recharges your batteries

Nowadays, when I mention that I’m an introvert to someone, they can’t help but let out a short laugh. More than a couple people have called me a social butterfly recently.

…

My senior year in high school, a friend’s mother was having us play a charades game where you’re given a description of yourself and act it out as the other people in the church group tried to guess. Mine was wallflower. And maybe it’s a testament to how much of a wallflower I am when I say I had no idea what a wallflower was, let alone how to act it out.

I had this friend, J—, who had transferred in that year. He has that sort of natural good looks and handsome charm that girls just go for, but had the misfortune of being placed in our top math class.

(Oh sure, that’s a good thing if you wanted a 5 in your Calculus BC Advanced Placement exam, but it probably didn’t help the very much if you are a social animal like J—.)

I think we only became friends because one day in class I was really tired and started to rub my eyes in a manner he thought funny. My recovery was saying that this was an ancient oriental secret and he should start rubbing his eyes that way also and then he’d start getting better grades in the class. Sure, a side effect is that his eyes might change and his hair might darken like mine, but it’d be worth it.

[About J— and me at parties after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 11

Socializr is looking for kick-ass-coders

Jonathan Abrams, the junior programmer at Socializr, sent me this. He is looking to double the size at the Socializr World Headquarters!

They have put together #1, #2, and #3, but they need #4, #5 and #6 to complete Socialzr.

Jonathan needs you to complete (his company)

Jonathan needs you to complete (his company)
Socializr World Headquarters, SOMA, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX
1/80sec @ f/2.8, iso250, 16mm (24mm)

Jonathan sez: “Form feet and legs; form arms and body; and I’ll form the head…FORM BLAZING SWORD!

I’m behind on my Lunch 2.0 postings so I’ll post it here first.

Socializr is looking for Kick-Ass Coders — Employees #4, #5, and #6!

Socializr is a new Internet startup founded by Jonathan Abrams, the award-winning serial entrepreneur who created Friendster, and the co-owner of San Francisco nightclub Slide. Socializr is a free web service for sharing event and party information with your friends. It is our mission to be the best site on the web for online event invitations, event promotion, social planning, and event photo sharing. Socializr’s offices are located in the South of Market area in San Francisco.

Socializr is a very unique new company offering a dynamic and fun work environment. The company is currently only three people, and we plan to stay lean and mean. We are looking for our first additions to our software development team. The ideal candidates will be able to quickly contribute and create results. We need energetic and fun people who are passionate about building a great consumer web application with large traffic and growth.

If your idea of a fun afternoon is rapidly prototyping a cool new feature, creating an API, integrating with 3 other web services, AJAX-ifying something by hand with tight code instead of bulky libraries, and tuning a SQL query to be 100 times faster, all in one day, this may be the job for you. On the other hand, if your idea of fun is sitting around in meetings or working on code that doesn’t scale or products that no one will ever use, Socializr is probably not the right place for you.

[Mad skillz after the jump.]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 4

My Plaxo Spam

Now that Pulse is officially out, I decided to “spam” my Plaxo members. I don’t know if it’s really spam since these are only the people already on Plaxo and I had to add them each individually (I wish there was a bulk function.)

A peek at Plaxo Pulse

[About Plaxo and Lunch 2.0 after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 9

Updating the college application for the MySpace generation

At dinner after the Facebook Lunch 2.0, a bunch of us at the table were trying to guess people’s ethnicity. Being in California, the correct answer might be like “part Paraguayan, part Uzbek” and shit like that. Half the people I know probably fucked up the scantrons when they applied to college and had to fill in the ethnicity bubbles.

Which got me thinking that colleges should just ask the same questions they do on your social networking profile. That way, when you get accepted, you can save yourself the work of making a Facebook profile.

Ethnicity? How many times did you looked at it and said to yourself: What!? The have a box for Eskimo and not for _____? Relationship status is a hell lot more useful in the real world. It’s going to tell me if I’m going to get a message from my friend that reads, “Are the food and drinks free?” (In a Relationship, Looking for Friendship) or “Are there any girls there?” (Single, Looking for Women). (Married? When was the last time you got a text from a married person? BTW, they should add a “With children” box to the Married profile to increase its utility.)

And with all the strange grade inflation going on, really, you can find a lot more about a person from the music they listen to, the books they rea… “Hello? Hey man. Are they hot? Hold on for a minute.”

And hotness can cross any ethnic line.

Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 4

Really bad thoughts

The other day at Lunch 2.0, I made the mistake of calling ValleyWag the National Enquirer of Silicon Valley in front of a Vallewag reporter. I was promptly corrected that it was the US Weekly. I guess that embarrassment was penalty for not paying attention to the mastheads when I’m at the supermarket.

Valleywag stops by for a quickie

Valleywag stops by for a quickie
Lunch 2.0 @ Ning, Palo Alto, California

Nikon D200, Tokina AT-X PRO 16-50mm f/2.8 DX
1/40sec @ f/2.8, iso800, 26mm (39mm)

Megan McCarthy of Valleywag. Don’t mess with these peeps—their keyboard is mightier than your coding skills.

Had I been thinking more along my sort of reading, I’d have called Valleywag the “Talk of the Town” of the Valley, but nobody actually reads that. If I said it was the “Page Six of the Valley”, you’d understand.

This is all a really bad segue into the fact that a friend of mine appeared in Valleywag recently in which they made a passing reference to a certain trait of hers I never noticed. And this reminded me of something that occurred in high school and why I have a natural defense mechanism to be oblivious to these things.

[Having really bad thoughts, after the jump]Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 9

Bribe Your Siteops Day

Mariano tells me that it is important to keep your siteops well fed, because they are the ones that make us software programmers look good. SiteOps keeps your machines running and when you’re as big as Tagged, that means five people on call 24-7 maintaining hundreds of machines for you.

Things went ugly on Wednesday when us and half the Web 2.0 world went down because 365Main failed—“World’s Finest Data Centers”? Give me the second tier then—at least they won’t have three backup generators failing at once on the same day they issue a press release bragging about their two years of continuous uptime. Fuckers.

And even though our SiteOps was first on the scene, they couldn’t get in because the power outage locked the doors as they watched helplessly as the co-location decided to play five-year-old with the power on our server tier—machines never designed to be powered off at all. As the folks at uncov said:

“The only real victims of yesterday’s outage are the poor sysadmins who had to line up outside the datacenter to make sure their machines came up correctly. I really feel for these guys, they’re the only people in Web 2.0 who are doing honorable work.”

True dat.

Recovering from that hell, plus a scheduled power upgrade this weekend, and prep work for a massive site-wide software upgrade means that our poor SiteOps is going to be very busy this week in order to make me look good. So when I heard that it is System Administrator Appreciation Day, I thought it’d be apropos if I gifted them some clearly addictive substances in order to get SiteOps on my side—in this case a dozen cookies from Specialty’s.

Specialty’s

Specialty’s
Financial District, San Francisco, California

Apple iPhone

Keep your sysadmins happy!

Now don’t you wish you worked at Tagged? 😀

Posted on by tychay 3

Perfect Ringing (This iPhone)

At work today Mark Kater and Sarah were joking that I’ve been as sick as long as I’ve had my iPhone. I guess my iPhone has bad Feng Shui.

Then Mark mentioned that the song in the iPhone television commercials, gives him the classically Apple 38 seconds of “all is good in the world” before he wakes up back to reality. I hadn’t heard the song, but when I mentioned this to our graphic designer, he said he hears the song in his sleep. The song is “Perfect Timing (This Morning)” by Orba Squara.

Hmm… that would make an awesome ringtone. 😀

Perfect Ringing

Perfect Ringing
North Beach, San Francisco, California

Nikon D70, Nikkor 85mm f/1.4D, Canon 500D close up filter
1/45sec @ f/1.4, iso200, 85mm (127mm)

It was indeed “Perfect Timing” because today was also when someone posted a desktop app for customizing the iPhone ringtone.

Some notes:

  • To get the song, there are a lot of ways. I purchased it in iTunes Music Store, burned to CD, and reimported as MP3
  • Intel Mac binary only. No PowerPC, No Windows
  • “There is no Step 1.” 😀
  • If your unlock fails, you have to click the “skip” button the second time around. Else it will keep playing the pig zapper sound.
  • The “Put the iPhone into Recovery Mode” means to hold the home and sleep buttons on the iPhone for 25 seconds until you see the recovery mode icon
  • Just kill “iTunes Helper” so iTunes doesn’t start up on you
  • Remember to select the ringtone (a green + appears next to the ringtone)
  • The iPhone speakers have a shitty bass

Have fun!Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 4

No whammies, big money

A funny rumor appeared on TechCrunch about the company I work for.

I won’t comment about the rumor. (To be honest, I’m so bad with numbers I wouldn’t be able to get the number right even if I did.) Instead I’d like to point out Comment 26:

“15M can hire the BEST engineers and product team in the bay area, word on the streets is that they already have 3 of the hottest sh*t php engineers, and a famous architect boot. I would watch out for them in the near future.”

Famous architect? Moi?

Pshawww!

P.S. Tagged is hiring. I don’t know about the others but I’m looking for some young, hot sh*t PHP engineers who don’t mind working with a “famous architect” for a profitable, growing, hot startup with tons of money. (The beauty here is you don’t work for me. I’m like the color commentator of your code.)

We’ll see who can kick out more product. As long as you kids don’t keep stealing my hearing aid, I’ll give you a run, I promise. 😀

Contact Mark Jen and Terry Chay (especially Mark, I’m just an engineer… but apparently a “hot sh*t” one. :-D).

Posted on by tychay 0