My friend, Tim, over at Backblaze wrote up how they build petabytes of cloud storage on the cheap (gigaom also wrote them up). Super cool! 67 terabytes for $8k. No more having to empty that pesky trash can.
Thanks for the open source hardware, Tim & co.!
My close friend, Rich, had his contractor’s dog take an unexpected fall. The dog, BowWow, is fine, after coming through Rich’s kitchen ceiling sheetrock! Great look on BowWow’s face…
Congrats to my friends Emmanuel and Paul and the gang over at Simplify Media. They now handle photos on top of music for sharing media across your devices and with friends. Here’s the TechCrunch piece on the release. Nice way to take a quick break at work – catching up on some of the latest family photos on my wife’s computer.
Was interested to read the rumor that Amazon may buy Netflix. The Venture Beat piece has a worthwhile link to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ wikipedia page, to a section that discusses the Netflix innovative business practices.
I was curious today about what technologists and high tech leaders think of as the differences between CTO role and VPE (VP Engineering) role at a startup. This blog post by Brad Feld has a good viewpoint. A key point: for up to 20 engineers, one person can play both roles. I would expect at 12+ engineers that someone with leanings towards VPE would have a Chief Architect and someone with CTO leanings would have a strong Eng Director.
Interesting article on TechCrunch about Google Latitude used for tracking down a stolen purse. Re. the privacy issues with sharing location info with Google, Navizon Free version (downloadable app for blackberry, iphone, and many other phones) has a much more private approach for people who want to track down their phone but don’t want more. Navizon’s “MobiFindr” feature taps into your phone’s SMS to TEXT you your phone’s location if you TEXT it a password that you preset. I haven’t gotten this working yet, but it seems a good alternative.
The TechCrunch story also reminds me of my Yahoo! colleague Ben Clemens’ very funny real-life story from 2006 when his phone was stolen off a commuter train. The phone was set to automatically upload pics taken to flickr and his blog, and guess what started showing up? Pics of the family, Chiuhuahua, and car. Much less practical but more fun that just getting your purse back!
How should you deal with people who dangerously tailgate you on the road? Befriend them! Here’s what you do: wave to them. It works amazingly well about 70% of the time. The driver either drops back and stays back, or they go around you, or occasionally they inspire a smile when they shyly drop back and change lanes as if to hide.
About 20% of the time they don’t respond, and about 10% of the time the person is a bit aggressive when going around you, but that matches well to the 1 in 10 psycho factor (1/10 people are crazy).
Try it next time someone is too close!
I liked this article from ZDNet on the new Yahoo! CEO announced today.
Pizzerias my brother, Howard, owns & runs are closing today for a week to take 60 employees + families on a vacation to Costa Rica with tip money they have been saving for 13 years! Talk about a long-term goal. See Flying Pie page about it and Fox 12 story.
My old Yahoo pal and one-man design think tank, Ben Clemens, posted this interesting piece on mozilla ubiquity as a potential ultimate social media tool. Check it out.
