Greetings,

I'm definitely not an artist, and there's not much to work with from gotAPI. No logo on the blog, Twitter, and the site's main logo is textual. The favicon is the only piece of abstract iconography to work from, so that's what the Fluid icon is based on.

It works for me, because I'm a heavy-duty tab-user, there are often so many tabs that icons are all that's left, so I'm used to looking for the gotapi favicon.

With those caveats in mind, this png is what I'm using as my Fluid icon.



Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Originally published at CyberFOX Software Inc.. » Click here « to leave any comments.

Greetings,
That quote is from a Treasury spokeswoman, quoted by Forbes, on why the bank bailout will need $700 billion. A spokeswoman who probably has joined the unemployed today.

There's a lot of people suggesting that we should let them all die (including me, in a fit of deep fury, when the bailout first was proposed). Others have suggested that simply improving the more stable banks ability to give mortgages would help, so folks could refi with those, and leave the bad financial companies to wither.

Unfortunately it's long past being just a mortgages issue.

The original sub-prime mortgages have been securitized into investments which returned a good percentage with an aggregated low risk, and were part of the formula that many companies used to approximate future revenues. They loaned and invested based on that approximation. Several relatively small companies sold 'insurance policies' (its more complex than that, but it comes down to hedging against risk) that they weren't sufficiently collateralized to back. It turns out there was a lot more risk involved than was visible. When the bad loans became endemic, these insurance policies were called in by the major companies to preserve capital. The small companies folded, not able to actually provide the liquid assets needed to back the policies.

Where we are now is that there have been huge losses, and companies who offered hedges against those losses are backing out of their obligations because they don't have the liquid funds to meet them. Those companies will close, bankrupt, and because nobody will ever want to do business with them again (and there's probably quite a bit of legal action that will happen). They are mostly small to medium sized hedge funds and independent insurers, basically.

This leaves the larger companies holding the bag for billions in risky, unhedged investments. They want to get rid of them, not because they are all going to go to $0 worth, but because there's NOBODY who's willing to provide insurance on them right now, and in the financial market an uninsurable investment is not acceptable.

The bailout plan is to allow the government to acquire these securitized mortgages and hold onto them while the financial system rebuilds itself, and companies who are sufficiently capitalized to insure against the (now recognized to be higher) risks. Then the government can re-sell them back into the system slowly, hopefully recouping a percentage of the amount that ends up being spent.

The problem right now is that EVERYBODY wants to sell, and NOBODY wants to buy. In that kind of a market, even good quality doesn't protect you from being pounded flat.

The reason for the government investment is to provide the market time to come to its senses, and breathing room to realize that these are not universally bad investments, the risk was just underpriced. To make up a homily on the spot, if everybody's terrified into immobility of the mouse in the room, nobody's able to go and bring the cat in.

The reason this is far beyond mortgages is that when all these big companies have a large amount of risky investments that they can't hedge against, they don't lend money, because they aren't comfortable knowing how much spare they have.

When these large financial institutions don't lend money, people can't get home loans, home improvement loans, student loans, car loans, business loans. This trickles down to every single segment of society, from CEOs to greeters at Home Depot to startups to teachers to mechanics.

That's the disaster that we need to avert. And it pisses me off to no end that we're in the situation where we HAVE to hand money over. I've railed against this in public and private, but of all the insane things about it that make me deeply infuriated, the worst of all is that now that it's gotten to this point, we have no real choice. We're forced to make a move like this.

I too want heads to roll. The most common phrase around the office regarding this is 'Heads. On. Pikes.' There must be accountability, and it must be large and visible, not detail-oriented and generally annoying like Sarbanes-Oxley. Several CEOs should lose their jobs, sans parachutes. Several of the regulations which were eliminated in 1999 will be reinstated. Maybe there'll even be CEO compensation limits, and some government ownership of these companies in exchange for government assistance.

The reason that '700 Billion' was picked out of the air, is not because there's some knowledge of how much of these securitized mortgages there are out there (there isn't, and if there was, I bet it'd be a lot more than $1T). It's because what is needed, far more than anything else, is a symbol of motion. It's for one person to come into that room of fear-frozen people, and corner the mouse for a few minutes while someone else goes and grabs the cat. It had to be a number that shocks the conscience, because otherwise people would be asking nervously, 'Is..that going to be enough...?' And calming fear is, in the end, what this is really about.

That all said, one political party has de-regulation as an express political plank of their platform. I know I'm generally preaching to the choir here, but they should learn just how out-of-touch that particular political plank is on November 4th.

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Originally published at CyberFOX Inc. Blog. » Click here « to leave any comments.

Greetings,
I don't know why this post from shaterri drew me in...but it was pretty easy.

All I had to do was pull up iTunes, and look at the top played songs from that list...  :)

The first is one of my favorite lustful-but-not-explicit songs.  The second is an iconic 80's song for me.  The list is generally part of my caffeine replacement plan, with a few exceptions for cute...

Anyhow, all of these are in my regular playlists.  Luka is last, because if it comes up, I have to be in the right mood, or I'll skip it.

44. Touch Me (I Want Your Body), Samantha Fox
1. Walk Like An Egyptian, Bangles
12. Everybody Have Fun Tonight, Wang Chung
19. Mony Mony, Billy Idol
18. I Think We're Alone Now, Tiffany
98. (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right To Party, Beastie Boys
24. I Want Your Sex, George Michael
37. Control, Janet Jackson
75. Big Time, Peter Gabriel
40. Land Of Confusion, Genesis
26. Only In My Dreams, Debbie Gibson
58. La Isla Bonita, Madonna
52. Luka, Suzanne Vega

1987 also saw the release of New Order's Substance album, which contains one of my all time favorite pure energy songs, Shellshock.  It was actually released in 1986, but I encountered it off that album.  Also, Erasure released Circus that year, which had a bonus CD track, a wonderful synth version of "In the Hall Of the Mountain King" which has remained on my playlist in one form or another since then.

--  Morgan

Greetings,

So I've had this in my playlist for years,  but shuffle just brought it up again, and the need to push it welled up.  It may only make sense to folks who've lived in New York and California, but...

Dar Williams - Southern California wants to be Western New York

It's not my usual fare (leaning more towards meaningless high energy pop, techno, etc., and the occasional story-rock), but it makes me oddly nostalgic.  :)

--  Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

View this post on my main blog

Greetings,
This is in response to:
http://wabisabilabi.blogspot.com/2007/05/when-vendors-get-nuts.html
"When vendors get nuts"

I'm not sure I deserve the shout-out from Kelly G, but I appreciate it! :)

To address one point in the post, though, you have to step back a minute and remember that those McAfee posts are probably made by one of their devs.  They're human and, while it's been over 13 years since I've been anywhere near there, they probably wish that the company was unnecessary as much as we did back then.

We (meaning I) always used to dream (not fear!) that Microsoft would destroy the anti-virus business by actually implementing a good file and disk security system in DOS...only in nightmares did we imagine that it'd be 2007 and this crap would still be around.  I lay most of the blame at Microsoft's door, for some fundamental design failures (too-easy blending of data and code), but it's also possible we didn't do enough to evangelize TO the OS vendors.

Still, shareholders be damned; for the people in the trenches of anti-virus work, what many REALLY wanted is the world to be a better place, so our software wasn't necessary.

It was often quite exciting work, and I freely admit I made a small bundle out of it (not anywhere near as much as some, and I got screwed by the IRS in the end!), but there was always that thought of, 'I wish these twits would stop writing this crap.'

Every single time you talk to a customer (which even devs did back then) it was driven home once more how much heartache viruses caused people.

What I wouldn't give to take every person who wants to write a virus because they think it's 'cool', to sit on a customer support line for a few hours, talking to people who've been hurt by viruses.  :(

I've never (before or after) been exactly a law-abiding citizen online, but after my experience at McAfee I had a very strong aversion to building things that can cause pain to others.

There are people who build viruses because they're paid to, and there's nothing really to be done about that, and there are people who don't care about anybody because of psychological issues...
If you just think it's cool, though...just imagine someone you cared about, losing all their data, because of what you're doing.  Find a better hobby.

--  Morgan Schweers

View this post on my main blog

Greetings,

Five hours to home,

Five hours to go.

Five hours to drive us there...

Five hours too slow.

--  Morgan

View this post on my main blog.

Greetings,

Melissa and I got to see the Daily Show! June 4, 2007, with Ron Paul (the Republican's Kucinich). Melissa found out about 2 days ago that tickets had become available, and we jumped on it. We got there in line about 3 hours early, and were about 10th in line.

It was AWESOME!

They had a warm-up with a comedian who came out and joked around with the audience, and then introduced Jon himself.

Jon was GREAT. I'm really happy we got to go and see it in person! It's really just as long as the show, no retakes or anything.

We're still giddy, it was a real blast!

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

View this post on my blog

Greetings,

I'm in New York.

Glen Cove, my home town, to be precise. Even more precisely, I'm staying at a mansion converted to a hotel that is one block away from the high school I graduated from. :)

I still remember the structure of Glen Cove (despite having never driven here), but most of the details are new... It's a strange feeling coming back after about 14 years.

Anyhow, I'm off to show my wife around my old stomping grounds...
-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

View this post on my blog

Greetings,

(Sorry, technical difficulties...pictures will have to be included later!)

So my wife and I are in the midst of a grand adventure, driving across the top of the country. Starting from Seattle, heading to New York, puttering around there for a few days, and heading home.

We left on Saturday, around 1pm, after saying good bye to our good friends who are watching our house and cat (whom we also said goodbye to). First, a stop at a local drugstore to pick up a chotsky to act as our talisman for the trip. We then started for the eastern half of Washington, with the fervent hope that we could get out of the state before the end of the day...

Cresting the Snoqualmie pass, there was a traffic advisory for just a few miles ahead...an accident had left a mess of traffic behind. A mess that mostly involved putting the car into Park, while still on the freeway (but by a beautiful lake!), and just waiting.

That seemed to clear up entirely all at once, without much of the slow growing back to speed that normal traffic jams get, so about an hour later we were moving at a decent clip again, and once again hopeful (although less so) that we'd make it out of the state.

At one point along the way, we saw a sign for 'Wild Horses Monument', and decided to take a breather and check it out. It was also a lookout point, which gave a beautiful view of the valley below. The main point of the monument, however, was a metal sculpture set up on the top of a nearby hill (with a very steep climb up to it) of a herd of horses along the hilltop, silhouetted against the sky. It's very evocative, and worth a stop, although we decided it wasn't worth climbing up to also...

Washington is a truly exquisite state, and the forests and lakes gave way to rolling farmland, and some neat traveler-friendly features. For example, for about 14 miles, someone decided to put signs on the fence beside the freeway, every odd while, with the name of the crops that were being grown at that particular point. Peas, Field and Sweet Corn, Potatoes, Wheat, and even Peppermint flew by.

And then things turned ugly. :) In the back half of WA, we found a small town, whose city name in the ubiquitous green freeway signs, read simply, 'George'. A few groans later, and we had reached this annoyingly named town... There, they had a business named 'Valley Forge Fruits', and 'Martha's Inn', and the home of the Half-Ton Cherry Pie. *sigh*

We started punning (*I* started punning, I should say, despite physical threats against me, and it dragged out my wife's competitive nature to respond with puns), and that brought us through a lot of the remainder of the state...

After reaching Spokane, and realizing that indeed, we would make it out of state (albeit barely), we made the decision to end in Couer d'Alene, ID. The small panhandle of Idaho was our stopping point for the first day.

Driving down the main street, the first thing we saw were a pair of Very Large feathers, like from a seagull, but scaled up to truck size. Confused, but dutifully camera-happy, we caught one of them in the camera, and moved on...

Also in Couer d'Alene was the large burger-hoisting Paul Bunyan cutout, which we dutifully took pictures in front of, and Melissa got an onion rings from the associated Paul Bunyan Famous Hamburger. (Mini-review: 'Greasy and tasty as onion rings should be.')

Back to our hotel, across the street for some Outback (and a photo with the outsized alligator in front), and back to the hotel to crash...

Oh, and I finished about 1/2 of The Hobbit over the course of the day, another purchase in the drug store we started from.

All in all a good first day; out of the state, and the speed limit started being 75, which didn't really change my driving, but more merely legitimized my normal speed.

Sunday was all about the Future Pot Roasts of America. ;)

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

View this post on my main blog

Greetings,

Programming should be fun, it's what gets us programmers into it in the first place, and it's what keeps us going at it.

Too many layers have been heaped on programming these days; most IDEs are oppressive, process-oriented beasts.

I, and many other programmers, have been concerned about how the next generation of programmers are going to be introduced to the joy of programming when all the tools out there seem to suck the fun out of it.

Enter why the lucky stiff, and Hackety Hack!. Taking one back to the days when programming was as easy as typing something in, and hitting enter. :)

Hackety Hack! is about learning to program, and being able to do really cool things in a very few short lines.

I've been a fan of _why for a while, with a really wild approach to teaching Ruby, and a lot of really interesting code, and this is even cooler.

If you're new to programming, or have kids, or just want to play with one of the simplest ways to write programs, get Hackety Hack!

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

View this post on my blog

Greetings,

McCain/Guiliani vs. Edwards/Clinton, 2008.

Unless one (or more) of those four do something distinctly career-suicidal in the next 2 years, at least.

For now though...  It was a good day.
--  Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

View this post on my blog

Greetings,
I'm with Lorelle on tab usage. I regularly have between 2-5 windows, each with 30+ tabs. I do it because I'll be reading an article on something I want to know more about, and I'll run across an interesting link in the article, but not want to lose the flow of what I'm reading. I'll middle-click, and continue reading. Once I'm done with that article, I move on to the next link, and the next... I also keep a baseline of about 20 tabs of personal and work stuff (gmail, financials, calendar, development reference, etc.) which never closes.

I used to do this with 'new windows' in Netscape 4.x, and I got into a long discussion with a Netscape engineer about my usage patterns (having 40+ Netscape windows open tended to crash it badly eventually), and they acknowledged that the program was unstable under that kind of usage. :( Worse, was that the email reader ran in the same process as the browser, so crashing the browser crashed my mail. Tabs (and Firefox, as a lighter browser) saved my sanity.

I try to never close my browser, and I reboot my computer only every couple of weeks (and that's only if it's my Windows box). Happily with Session Saver, I never had to worry about shutting down my browser, as it preserves my tabs and windows. (I miss Session Saver in Safari...)

If you find that Firefox 1.5 is unstable under too many tabs (it worked pretty well for me), get a session saver. It's a life-saver when your browser crashes and you would otherwise lose 100+ tabs that you clicked to look at later, so you don't know what the URLs were...

Firefox 2 ships with (x) on each tab. Bleh. Fix it by browsing to:
about:config
Filter for:
browser.tabs.closeButtons
double-click it, and set the value to:
3
You can create it if it doesn't already exist.)
I recommend the FF2 extension 'Restarter', until they add the Restart option into the menu standard, in order to deal better with adding extensions. For the IE7-ish 'preview' mode, I'd suggest the extension Showcase, or Reveal if they update that plugin to 2.0.

I'd also suggest turning on session saving for all sessions, by adding configs:
browser.startup.page=3
browser.sessionstore.resume_session=true
Now if only I could revert to the old 'shrinking tab' behavior, at least down to a certain width.

Update: You can set this by changing your config options as follows:

browser.tabs.tabClipWidth=35
browser.tabs.tabMinWidth=25
This will set your tab width to 25 pixels minimum, which will let you see a LOT more tabs than the old setting of 100. I chose 35 for the clip width, based on having divided the minWidth by 4, I divided the clipWidth (default of 140) by 4 as well. However, my tab usage often means that I need nothing more than the favicon in the tab to know where I'm going, or I never random-access the tabs, closing one to continue reading at another page.

Anyhow, these have been some power user tips from a dedicated Firefox user.

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

View this post on my blog

Greetings,

If Speaker Dennis Hastert is forced to step down, due to the issues surrounding what he knew and when he knew it, does that mean he's been ex-Foley-ated?

--  Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

View this post on my blog

Greetings,
I joined another startup...  Not quite as small as Scoble's new venture, and not part of the bubblicious blogging/vlogging/podcasting, etc. world, but still relatively small.  However, I have about 8 months of mortgage payments in savings, and several small side-services that make me enough to cover utilities and food if we're really careful.  I no longer would really think of joining a startup without that partial net, but then I have responsibilities that I'm not willing to fail on.
The only thing I'm really afraid of if my company tanks is losing health care...  When you don't have that safety net, one serious health issue can mean the difference between surfing the web and getting sucked under the waves.

I'll pass along a piece of advice for anyone looking to start a company, from someone (me) who's been through several startups.  (McAfee Associates and PayPal being two very notable, very successful, and very different, ones, in different decades.)  The advice is useless ever since 1994 because the 'free money' vibe of the VCs has infused the business world and made it hard to follow, but it's free advice anyway, and worth whatcha pay for it.  ;)

If you're going to start a company, be profitable FIRST, before you ever talk to VCs.  If you don't NEED their money, but you're on one of the beautiful adoption curves, they'll fight each other to be the one who gets the right to give you money.  Sure, you don't need it, but if spent right, it can (1) pay for the dog'n'pony 'going public' show, and (2) move you one or two rungs up the doubling curve.

The funny thing to me is that people take the money out of the get-go, to move them up 1-2 rungs when the power curve is low, boosting them from 1000 users to 4000 users.  What they should (in my oh-so-not-humble opinion) do is grow slower for a little while, then take the money when jumping the power curve would mean the difference between 250,000 users and 1 million users AND you're not dependent on the VCs for your existence.

This means growing slower at the start, only growing as fast as you can afford to, keeping yourself as close to cash-neutral as you can, and always being one cost-cutting exercise from being profitable.  It's not the preferred method for a class of folk who were raised and bred on tales of overnight millionaires, and 'get big fast' (which only works for a very SMALL subset of companies) but it's the way to build a sustainable, exit-strategy-free business.  (Exit-strategy-free meaning you don't NEED one, not that you don't HAVE one.)

I saw it done at McAfee Associates, and we completely dominated the conversation with the VCs.  It wasn't a request for money, it was a bidding war on the part of some top-notch firms, and that was in 1992, before the first bubble even started to be blown.  We were chugging in about $10Mil/year as I recall, and spending less than a quarter of that.  I don't believe that company was EVER unprofitable, from the quarter it was founded.

McAfee Associates took the company from "the three Fs" (family, friends, and fools) to profitable without really going through the intervening step of angels or venture capitals.  (Now, for what it's worth, some of those 3Fs were...understandably upset that they didn't see any return when the company made it big, but that's just part of the darker side of the history of McAfee Associates, and not directly relevant to the point I'm making.)

Now McAfee Associate's distribution model was nearly free (distributed by BBS), advertising was 'make a good product and get people to talk about it and show its use off', the product was...well, you could joke that it was viral. ;)  People used it, found it was useful and necessary, and handed it to other people who probably needed it.  The product was free and fully functional, but every run it put up a message, basically that 'if you're using this in a company, educational institution, or government organization, you must purchase a license'.  End users paid the registration fee sometimes, which was a nice base source of income, but companies leapt to license.  Mostly because their employees were using the software, needed the software, and were handing it around inside the company.  Someone would point out the license issue, and the company would call us to pony up.  We never had to call anyone to sell the software, it sold itself, and our users sold it for us.  Most people wouldn't imagine it, but companies really are decently minded when it comes to dealing with other companies.  Or at least so afraid of lawsuits that they're willing to be decent citizens.  Sometimes a big company would use their size to pressure us to give them a discount, which we were happy to do, because it was nearly free money anyway.  Our overhead was fixed, we didn't advertise, we told them to download themselves a copy each quarter, or if they paid enough we'd send them a floppy once a quarter.
What's changed in the world since then?  Well, a lot, but I'll put forward that mainly the scale has changed.  Free distribution through BBSes reached a large percentage of the computer using population back then.  Distribution through the Internet reaches a HUGE percentage of the computer-using population now.  If you make a good product, people can talk much more widely about it with blogs.  Companies are still looking to be good citizens, primarily, and there are a LOT more of them out there.  Oh, and you probably don't have to mail them a floppy each quarter, no matter how much they pay.
So the one of the biggest things I'd suggest to 'start profitable' is to target your product at corporations, but make it attractive to end-users as well, so they'll bring it into the company.  As Willie Sutton didn't say but is said to have said, when asked about why he robbed banks, "That's where the money is."

--  Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

View this post on my primary blog

Greetings,
Unfortunately, the John Edwards Keynote at Gnomedex was overly political. As Chris Pirillo put it, once you open up the session to the audience, the audience drives it to where they want it to go.

For the most part it was political questions, comments on the democrat party, and grandstanding by audience members.

Back in the day, I used to have access to the Congressional Record computer system, an VAX/VMS system. One of the interesting things it had was variations of bills as they went through various stages. One thing I learned back then was that all bills are 'patches' to existing government code. So the obvious question becomes how that is visualized, written, edited, and collaborated on by the Senate right now. Further, is there any way to expose that inner workings, and the steps involved publicly?

Specifically taking the wiki approach, adding in added/deleted/changed hilighting, along with version control and version identification. It would be IMMENSELY valuable to see which Senator made individual changes in the bills, for instance. The other related question, is how Senators collaborate on writing a bill. For instance, since it's all deltas to the government code, you have to keep track of what those changes are, and allow multiple disconnected Senators to send data back and forth in order to build the full text of the bill. This seems like a great place for wiki technology to be useful to improve the processes of government.

Anyhow, that was my 'technical' question, as opposed to the majority of the political questions/discussions.

We had a good chance to talk real technology with John Edwards, but it devolved more or less to a political mess, and I didn't even get to ask my question.

Meh.

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

View this post on my blog

Greetings,

Okay. So I'm a sucker.



I took a test I already knew the answer to. Still, it was fun, despite being not terribly work safe. They did a decent job of presenting different kinds of pictures for evaluation.

Skinny and Cute Raw score: 14% Big Breasts, 18% Big Ass, and 80% Cute!

Thanks for taking the T and A and C test! Based on your selections, the results are clear: you show an attraction to smaller breasts, smaller asses, and cuter composure than others who've taken the test. Note that you scored low on both breast and ass size. This means you appreciate thinner, harder bodies. You are most likely to appreciate a super-model. Relatively, you are less attracted to round, soft, sloppy women. My third variable, "cuteness" is a mostly objective measure of how innocent a given model looked. It's determined by a combination of a lot of factors: lack of dark eye makeup, facial expression, posture, etc. If you scored high on that variable, you are either really nice OR you're into deflowering teens. If you scored low, you are attracted to raunchier, sexier, women. In your case, your higher than average score suggests you appreciate a cuter, more innocent look. Kudos! Recommended Celebrities: Jessica Alba, an absolute goddess, and Natalie Portman, if you can handle her acting.

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 1% on tit-size You scored higher than 2% on ass-size You scored higher than 96% on cuteness

Link: The Tits, Ass, and Cuteness Test written by chicken_pot_pie on Ok Cupid.

Greetings,

“…and if you don’t stop and look around you might miss it.”

– Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

This is a purely personal blog entry, so if you're looking for technical info (especially on eBay's latest breakage), that'll have to wait until my next entry.

However, I want to thank all my JBidwatcher users who emailed me to congratulate me on my wedding. I'm so amazingly glad to have produced and supported something such that people wish me well in the other areas of my life. The well-wishes were overwhelming, and made me incredibly grateful for the folks who use JBidwatcher. I am a lucky man, in so many different ways. Thank you.

I’m married now, as of January 28th, 2006. The wedding itself was excellent. We should be getting the official pictures soon, but the day had started out (like many days this January in Seattle) pouring rain. Around noon that day, though, the skies started to clear up. By the time our ceremony rolled around (sunset), the skies were dramatic, gorgeous, and we had a perfect view of them over the water from our ceremony site. The reception was excellent, delicious food, and having my friends there with me kept the stress level just low enough that I could really relax and enjoy the night. For our honeymoon, we went to DisneyWorld (stayed at the Wilderness Lodge) for 5 days, then on the Disney Cruise for 6 days. We were incredibly happy with our decision to put our honeymoon in the hands of Disney, the whole experience was magical, and made it incredibly easy for both of us to focus on each other, and relax from the stress of setting up a wedding entirely ourselves.

On return, I've had to re-focus on work a lot, as taking a bit more than 3 weeks off to get married and have a good honeymoon ended up putting my projects in a little bit of danger. However, recently we've started seriously looking for a house, and cleaning up our credit in preparation for taking out a mortgage. What with everything that's been going on, and the everyday things I have to do, it's been a while since I've been able to sit back, take stock, and think about where I've been. It's been an incredible ride, but you have to pause to fix the moments in your memory, or they drift away with the morning fog, and that would be a terrible loss.

I have some pictures I took on our honeymoon, and I'll put those up eventually, but they are scenes, flashes, images, not the whole, the experience. They are best used to trigger memories, not as memories themselves. They are, in fact, mostly meaningless without context. A reflection of my photography skill, perhaps, but me being part of those memories, I can't imagine how I would be both outside, looking in, and also have actually enjoyed those moments at the same time.
I'll be writing more about my technical projects (reflected in the blog), and JBidwatcher as I get time, as those are things I want to focus on for the immediate future.

The mortgage and house-buying process may get some coverage also, as it's one of the most complex things I've had to do in a long time, and uncomfortable for someone used to purely living within their means up until now.

I've forgotten how nice it is to try to focus my thoughts, to put together a blog entry. I'm not a prolific blogger like Scoble, or any of the poli-blogs, so I find my writing tries (emphasis on the 'tries') to convey more, to make up for the lack of regular updating.

In any case, I am now happily, ecstatically, wonderfully married. That's enough for now.
Everything else will come in time.

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

View this post on my central blog.

Greetings,
Robert Scoble takes Mark Lucovsky to task over seeing passion in Google workers sticking around until all hours of the night.

This is a hard thing to explain if you haven't been there. I've been there twice, once with McAfee Associates, in full-bore, turbo-charged engineer mode, fighting against the world-wide virus writing epidemic in the very early days of McAfee Associates (from 7 people to more than 120 people). Fewer people would recognize that world as would recognize the world of a modern web site developer, so I'll focus on the second, PayPal.

I remember working at PayPal during their heyday just before and just after going public, when we were fighting the 'good fight' against eBay, and I'd work all hours of the day and night not because I had to, but because it was deeply, personally important to me that we win, and because the work was so deeply enthralling that I lost track of time entirely. That everything be right, and that we be first to market with features, that our code be spectacular, that we be innovative and brilliant and FAST was our world. And until we were bought by eBay finally (demonstrating, imo, that we had the better service), no matter the hour, I never was alone at the office.

When you're part of a brilliant team, trying to honest to god change the world, it's not about deadlines. It's about a form of love. It can be thoroughly, caustically destructive to everything else in your life, but it's an experience I would be a lesser person if I had missed.

If you're clocking hours at work, and the passion of what you're doing isn't keeping you rooted to your chair at all hours, loving the pure joy of creating, fighting the good fight, and trying to change the world, it doesn't mean it's not a good job. It's just not THAT experience.

I promise, there's far more call for people who work regular hours, meeting normal deadlines, doing solid, good work, than for those of us who burn so very, very brightly, but for so short a time.

If you're really in passionate love with the work you're doing, it's not about working to 3am to meet a deadline. It's about finally reaching a temporary point of closure for the days work, and raising up your head to suddenly discover it's 3am.

And if you really, truly believe in your company, and you believe in your project, and have a fire to 'win' in some way (usually against a more powerful competitor) it's not about accepting an imposed deadline that makes you work hard. It's about DEMANDING a deadline that makes you work hard, but that you know you can meet. Because you know it's important, and that every second counts, and you CARE about the company being not just first, but first with a brilliant, innovative, wonderful experience.

After it's all over, it's draining. It's exhausting. It's mind-numbing. You feel...dead, somehow, once the work is over, and you've been brilliant for so long, that you feel like your brain cells have used up all their energy. You go home, don't show up to work for a week, recharge, find out if you still have any RL friends, do something physical (skydiving, rock climbing, hiking, etc.) to get in touch with your body again. You come back to work eventually, and you work with others to clean up any loose ends, and slowly you get back the energy from your co-workers, and the ambience in the office, and eventually you're back on track to start another feature that'll knock the socks off your competitors.

If you're in a company where you are the dominant force, you don't work like that. You don't need to, the hunger isn't there.

PayPal lost that hunger when eBay bought us. There wasn't anything to fight for, anymore. We'd won, in a way, and lost in a way. I even asked it, when eBay management had a big meeting with everybody to tell us about their vision for us. I don't remember if it was the meeting Meg Whitman was at, or not, but I asked something like, "We've been fighting eBay for all this time, and now we don't have to. What will replace that, to keep the drive going?" The answer was a mealy-mouthed mess of future strategy and becoming the dominant payment platform. It wasn't a battle anymore, we'd become the big company.

I left not terribly long after that, for health reasons. (Remember what I said about caustically destructive? ;) ) But also because I didn't feel the passion in the hallways anymore.

The woman who I will marry in 36 days stood by me through it despite almost never seeing me, my friends teased that they'd forgotten my name, I ended up needing major surgery for a condition I let go too long... But I was part of one of those winning teams, fighting against terrible odds, doing brilliant work, burning so very, very brightly, and changing the world one line of code at a time.

I think Mark understands that, as Google has Microsoft with an unlimited war-chest bearing down on them. From what I've read, I don't think Scoble completely does get it. He gets that passion is important (Channel 9 certainly shows that), but the fight against overwhelming odds that drives it to fevered peaks, that brings it to a different level...that's what's missing.

But it's okay. Even I'm working a day job these days. I still have the intense passion to program on my own projects, doing it until 4am regularly, but I'm in a larger cycle of recharge, get in touch with life, etc., before maybe doing it again if I find the right company. Or maybe not. I'll be a married man shortly, settling down in theory. Maybe I can't fight those fights anymore. Maybe I should work at Microsoft. ;) Just kidding...

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

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Greetings,
I'm sitting in a castle which is sitting on a hill, and before me is spread a beautiful green city, tall spires, rolling terrain, glittering buildings, and a harbor to the world.

Between me and the city flows a curtain of white, falling from the sky, making this already fairy-tale city even more so.

I'm sure on the ground, the people of this land are cursing, slipping, and hunching their shoulders against the cold, seeing the trees that are in their way, and not the glory of the forest of beauty surrounding them.

But for this moment, in my red stone tower on a hill, gazing out a window, all is peaceful, snowy, and beautiful.

Seattle in the snow.

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

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Greetings,
So, like many geeks, I've experimented with the blogging, content-management, etc., thing for a while. I got onto LiveJournal when I was relatively new, because most of the people I knew were on it.

Then, one day, I decided I wanted to set up a version of LiveJournal for my then work company, PayPal (now a division of eBay), so that we could set up some simple work-blogging, so I could easily post up the status of what I'd worked on each day. I chose blogging software because it's 1:many, where the many are self-selected. I chose LiveJournal because it was the only one I knew of (at that time) which was open source, and supported any number of users.

For a test, I set it up on my home computer, under a virtual host name that I had picked up a while ago. (I collect useful and interesting domain names, not to resell or anything, but because I have an idea to put on them.) The domain name has a meaning to (a specific subset)^3 of science fiction fans, but I didn't think anything of it. I set up the basic install, configured it, tested it, determined what I would have to do to make it useful at work, and promptly forgot about it. I set the one up at work, nobody used it, management wouldn't get behind it and encourage the idea, so it died.

That was roughly two years ago.

Today I'm setting up another virtual domain on the same host, this one for my wedding information. To my immense surprise, checking the logs, I find that people are going to that site. It turns out I left the registration system open (as it was how I intended the work system to be), and some people randomly typed the domain name AND were interested enough to create themselves an account. And validate their emails. And post. And bring other people on. And create their own little social network on this...test site.

I haven't touched it in two years (didn't even remember it existed!), it has over 250 users, and continues to be a functional community site, for a very small, accidentally selected community.

Some people say that the barrier to creating a successful service on the internet is high; I disagree. I've found that it's possible to create a community site by accident! ;)

In all seriousness, though, it is a testament to the desire people have to reach out and connect with others who they feel are like them, that they would take the chance to create a user account on a system they know nothing about, that hasn't been maintained in years.

I won't take the site down; something in me just likes the idea of people connecting through something so random.

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

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