The FuzzyBlog!
Marketing 101. Consulting 101. PHP Consulting. Random geeky stuff. I Blog Therefore I Am.

Thursday, July 04, 2002

For the Buffy Fans Out There If you liked Buffy the Musical then you probably will like this: http://www.buffyworld.com/buffy/music/ (the full sound tracks from the episode, all songs).  It's very cool if you like the whole Rock Opera genre i.e.: Rent, Hair, Jesus Christ SuperStar, etc. And www.buffyworld.com is pretty cool. 3:54:46 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

How Cool -- Tommy's Now Using the MySQL Version of Movable Type According to Tommy, he's now using the MySQL version of MT and he likes it a lot (MT is a blogging system written in Perl that is _excellent_).  Tommy also noticed my comments about a "Brand X" hosting provider and sent a recommendation: I host with a company called Digital Daze. It's not quite a dedicated server. They're using FreeBSD and they create virtual servers. I get my own ssh, command line, sendmail, httpd, etc. and it seems like I have a my own full-root server, but it's not quite the same. Most of the time it's no problem, and I'm technical enough to work around the differences   most of the time, but sometimes there's just no solution. I get 600MB for $80/month. That's a pretty good deal, and it's probably all I need, but I'm always curious about going to a true dedicated server. Digital Daze has been an excellent company to work with. They keep their packages up to date and reliability of my site has been excellent. I just wish they would offer their own true dedicated server package. I totally understand the desire to go to a dedicated server -- but 600MB for $80 / month is a great deal.  I'll have to think about that for a backup box.  Thanks for the input!  And the great picture. 2:36:29 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

You Go Dewayne!  Congrats on the Engagement!  And Thanks for the Help! Wow.  This is so cool.  I just heard from Dewayne that he and Michelle just got engaged.  This is just very cool.  Dewayne's great people and he's also been a huge help to me recently when he helped analyze some fairly difficult cross platform browser issues for a web service that I hope to release shortly.  A Plug for Dewayne: He's a great guy, good worker and then the job market for full or contract technical work either on site or remote.  Here's his resume.  His skills include IIS / ASP / PHP / Oracle and he gets the whole software quality issues.  Dewayne's a friend so I'm clearly biased but he's good.  Dewayne: http://radio.weblogs.com/0101015/   8:14:27 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Honesty and Real Time Blogging World Wide ... Last night, about 15 minutes after I posted the piece on "Big Things", I got an interesting IM from Joe Friend.  Joe's in Indonesia, someone I correspond with regularly, and he had already read the piece and had some hard questions for me.  Joe knows that I've had some stability issues with Radio.  He asked a valid comment -- if that's true, why did I sign up with Paolo.  Well that's a hard question.  There were a bunch of reasons -- NOT a single one of them had anything to do with money -- this is totally not a sell out by any means.  (Can you believe that from Indonesia, my silly little blog sparked an IM?  This is just so strange). Here's why, among other reasons, that even if I have problems, I did it.  There are bugs in everything these days.  Now it may just be me, engineers who used to work for me have called me the "Bermuda Triangle of Software Bugs" (I can find bugs or UI issues in just about anything), but I find the quality standards in high tech deplorable.  So is it fair to Radio for me to give it crap when Microsoft (and others) have the same -- and significantly worse bugs -- across both the application and platform layers?  No it isn't.  I'm not going to hide the issues -- but I will work constructively with totally cool, passionate people like Jake -- to get the issues addressed.  So I didn't sell out at all.  If anything I hope to make Radio just a little bit better by feeding them some additional input (example -- I'm now a beta tester as I am for www.drupal.org). NOTE: clearly you can see above that I just discovered the url syntax for www.dictionary.com. 7:01:32 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Passion: Why Small Companies and Small Groups Make a Difference I just had a really, really interesting IM session with Jake from UserLand and it made it even more clear to me why small companies matter: Passion.  Take a look at the time of this post -- that's right 6 am approximately EST.  And, for those people outside the U.S., bear in mind that it's a major national holiday.  Was Jake surfing the net?  Looking at pron?  Playing a game?  Nope.  He was adding Meta-Weblog API support (both XML-RPC and SOAP) to Manila.  For him it was 3 am approx (and he'd been working most of the day and into the night).  That's passion.  And, what was I doing up?  Working on internal productivity tools for next generation distributed task lists (just IMHO, but I don't find that the current Outlook model works anymore at all -- we're all too diverse, too distributed, too non-focused, too interrupt driven).  That's passion.  This is why I love small companies / small groups.   I see that same passion in open source projects like www.drupal.org which my friend Kjartan works on.  I mean, come on...  How many engineers at Microsoft, IBM, Sun, etc do you think are working with this level of passion?  And I don't mean the time they work.  Jake clearly cares about his work to a degree that is wonderful.  Take that same passion and multiply it across small companies / small groups all over the globe and then you see why I say "they make a difference".  We're in the middle of a revolution right now and we can't even see it because it's all around us.  Take something like Drupal for example --if that had been available to me when I was VP of Engineering at a now defunct dot com, I could have saved > 1,500,000 in software development costs and cut my staff from 35+ to about 7 to 10.  That's a revolution whether we acknowledge it or not. So, to close this piece,   Jake -- Thanks for caring, thanks for the passion you bring to UserLand and this community.  We do notice even if most of the time we don't say it. And Happy Fourth of July!!! (the FuzzyBlog will be active -- we don't ever seem to stop)   6:36:37 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This