July 2012
1 post
March 2012
5 posts
“How do we know Google+ has limited appeal? Because Larry Page is the #3 most...”
What do restaurant guests want?
Saison’s Chef’s Counter
I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to enable restaurants to serve guests better.
Because my company SeatMe handles both the guest-facing reservation side and the restaurant-facing restaurant management side, we have a real opportunity to improve a guest’s experience at a restaurant.
As a frequent guest to restaurants, there are a lot of things...
Downloaded - The Napster Movie
Alex Winter mailed me the other day saying that the Napster movie Downloaded is finally nearing completion. I’m super excited to see how it comes out.
Apparently it’ll be a full-length feature that I’ll be able to actually go to a movie theater to watch it. I’m stoked. It’ll be interesting to see how everyone is portrayed. I think everyone has their biases and my...
What are other good anti-charities?
The only problem with my Rick Santorum Diet is that he could drop out of the race making my pledge to him less effective as a deterrent to breaking my diet.
So what other anti-charities could I donate to that would be as effective?
My criteria for a charity is as follows:
The charity involved must be antithetical to my beliefs
I must be publicly shamed by donating to the charity
There must be...
The Rick Santorum Diet
“The notion that college education is a cost-effective way to help poor, low-skill, unmarried mothers with high school diplomas or GEDs move up the economic ladder is just wrong.” - Rick Santorum
I’m not good with diets. There have been some that worked for me that involved strict adherence and hundreds of dollars in pre-packaged foods. There have been others that have been...
January 2012
1 post
August 2011
1 post
Passwords as Madlibs
After this wonderful xkcd comic about the futility of obtuse passwords, I’d like to propose a new standard for passwords: the madlib password.
When you sign up for a new website, you are shown a random madlib to fill out which constitutes your password.
Ok the formatting needs some work, but it should be relatively easy to remember and provide a good amount of entropy. There are some...
June 2011
1 post
How would you dominate the 15th century world?
My girlfriend and I occasionally play a little game of past world domination. The rules go like this:
You are able to travel to any place and time in past. You may not bring anything (not even clothes). It is a one way trip. Your goal is to dominate the entire planet. Nothing you do in the past will affect your existence (no grandfather paradox).
What time period would you travel to, where...
May 2011
1 post
Landing a job with LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a fantastic tool for landing a professional job if you know how to use it properly. Nearly every company decision maker at every company in the US is on LinkedIn as are every kind of recruiter. Unfortunately, most people seem to think of LinkedIn as a place to stick your résumé.
I worked at LinkedIn as a product manager in the data analytics department. During that time I had the...
April 2011
2 posts
iPhoneTracker Is Awesome
Apple tracks and caches the location of every cell phone tower that you encounter and syncs the log to your computer. With a special program called iPhoneTracker, you can retrieve and map the data.
Sure, this could be a *potential* privacy violation. The police could confiscate it and prove you were at a particular location at a particular time (though I imagine AT&T also has the same...
Is FoundersCard worth it?
Last year my friend Cliff introduced me to FoundersCard, a startup/entrepreneur invite-only community. Cliff went on and on about the hotel discounts and how great the discounts were for a startup founder. I was starting a new company and figured I’d get one.
I should note is that FoundersCard is not free. If you get a referral from someone, they’ll offer you a $200/year membership....
March 2011
1 post
A Manifesto
We will be shackled no longer.
We do not deserve the treatment that is shown to us.
There is no reason.
There can be only one solution to our treatment at the hands of our unjust masters.
Snowboarding.
Without.
End.
We will show
How epic it is.
How exhilarating.
How stoked.
And at the end of our triumphant winter wonderland expedition where we have melded our souls with nature, our...
February 2011
2 posts
“Be excellent to each other.”
– Bill S Preston, Esq. (and future corporate motto for my unnamed startup)
1 tag
Mobile-only is a dead end
A common vision of the future these days in the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley is that the web is dead. We have moved beyond it. The future is individual apps. Everyone is going to have an app for Facebook, an app for Twitter, an app for Amazon, etc.
This has been driven mostly by the mobile space. Everyone can see that in the future, everyone will use their phones to access the internet for...
