Via @keithlam & @scottconnor, found this great essay by Paul Graham, Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. The essay describes my challenges with being a manager vs. a maker almost to a T. I was particularly struck by these paragraphs:

For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

This is further complicated by the challenges of trying to be great at your job. I’ve found I can only be either a good manager or a good coder. Every single time I’ve tried to do both (outside of a very small team of similar aptitude/motivation), I perform below my own standards at one of them. Either I cut corners in my code or I ignore my team too long. In the worst case, I do a bit of both. So, at my day job, I make the choice of being a manager.

This is also basically why I work into the night when I am coding. Working after emails die down and Heidi goes to bed offers that unbroken expanse of time to be creative and just get stuff done. This is again in conflict with the manager’s schedule so jobs that require a morning start time (early being, say, 9AM) make it hard to stay up late.

There’s something to be said for the discipline of getting up early and getting to bed early, but building neat things isn’t necessarily a question of that kind of discipline. In fact, Graham gets to this point right at the end:

When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I’d sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.” I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.

While at Fanzter, I did the dinner to 3AM stint pretty much every day. It was my most productive time. It also led to tension as we had morning people in the company and the schedules never quite lined up. I made it work, by coming in earlier (10/10:30 or so until dinner-ish). His pattern of dividing the day is also pretty much how I ended up doing it, and if I had thought about it more, I would’ve even formalized it. As it was, I always felt as if I was doing something wrong. That’s why it was so satisfying to read this. It’s like someone sat down and decided to explain how I work.

I’m going to make Heidi read this, and I’m going to paste this to my wall if I ever do a startup again.

PS. Graham’s Hackers and Painters is still one of my favorite books. It’s a collection of his essays and many are about the same subject as the one above: what makes coders and artists similar and what makes them tick. Some of it is over-the-top almost hubris/presumption, but in general he has some excellent observations. Great read if you liked what you read above. Many of the essays are available on his web site. Hackers and Painters (the essay) is one of my favorites.

For those wondering where the heck I was and what the heck I was doing traveling for so long, you saw the results during the Apple iPhone 3.0 event yesterday. Being the secretive lot they are, Apple has asked us not to disclose any of the particulars of our time with them, the process, etc. So, no blogging about it for me beyond what they’ve disclosed: we spent about two weeks (less, in our case) building an app for the demo event. We actually built an app that we had postponed on our app roadmap because the 2.x releases didn’t have push notification available yet. So, the moment we found out about push, Alerts was the natural choice over our other, in development applications.

I’m happy with what we were able to accomplish over the sprint considering we built the whole thing, from the BottomLine to alerts feed, essentially from scratch. Dalmo, a new member of my team, did some great work, and I had a refreshing spell of doing nothing but coding and hands-on building the product.

One more thing: A lot of folks have been coming up and saying congrats and the like. While I appreciate it, this is only the beginning for us. Building a great demo app is one thing, but I really enjoy building great, innovative, released products. Being part of the teams that built FantasyCast, all the live-updating infrastructure at ESPN.com, and Coolspotters is what I work for. So, hold the congrats for when we launch our apps. We’ve got some good stuff coming. If you loved the alerts prototype, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

If you want to see me (and, really, who does… er, I mean, doesn’t), skip to 39 minutes in. We’re on right after Oracle. I’m the driver for the demo, walking on stage behind Oke.

Of course, she doesn’t actually support Hamas, but if you follow the far right blogs and columnists, you might be led to think so.

In an example of how ridiculously stupid any political conversation involving Israel gets in this country, my sister, along with hundreds of medical students, was named as a Hamas supporter and enemy of Jews and Israel by zealot blogger and columnist Debbie Schlussel. I’ve been debating whether to address this for the last day, but I don’t see how I can’t.

The short version of the story is that my sister, among hundreds of other medical students, signed a petition criticizing the Israeli government’s tactics in the assault on Gaza. The focus of the letter is the impact of the attack on civilians and the fact that the region is blockaded so no one can leave and humanitarian aid and journalists cannot come in. That’s a crude summary of a nuanced letter, so you should go read it. It was published in the medical journal, The Lancet. If you don’t want to register, you can use my email address, sujal – at – sujal.net and the password ‘password’.

That letter has caused Schlussel to call for the boycott and black listing of all of the students on the list, by name, on her blog. My sister’s name is there along with other medical students who only want peace so they can help the wounded. Equating signing a petition to full-throated support of Hamas is typical of the state of the conversation around Israel, especially since the petition only asks for a cease fire so humanitarian aid and doctors can get into the country.

Even worse is our political conversation around this topic. Any criticism of the government of Israel gets equated to anti-semitism and bigotry by zealots and the pro-Israel lobby. Only a very, very small number of Congressmen and Senators will say anything critical of Israel publicly. Glenn Greenwald has been trying to document the numbers here. This recent post is a good starting point.

This needs to stop. Israeli citizens have more internal disagreements on these issues than we’re allowed to have even though, quite frankly, Israel isn’t the United States. It’s not our country, yet we treat the actions of their government with the same jingoistic bullshit that has characterized Republicans in the Bush years.

It seems obvious to me that one can support the existence of Israel while also condemning actions like this which serve no purpose. It just requires a little bit of honesty and complex thinking beyond the binary good/evil framework.

Then again, I’m one of those people. Israel, like all nations, deserves to be protected and have peace. Still, Israel is making a mistake here. The government of Israel will contribute to the never ending cycle of violence in the region with this action. I don’t understand how it’s anti-semitic or pro-Hamas to say that.

I also don’t understand how it’s pro-Hamas to point out that there seems to be no forethought and no plan that anyone can discern. It’s unclear to me — and, from what I’m reading, apparently to the rest of the world — what Israel hopes to gain from this attack. If there is no benefit to Israel to pursue this war, how is it pro-Hamas to call for it to end? How is it pro-Israel to want for the deaths of so many civilians, an unavoidable but predictable outcome of this scenario? I found a recent editorial from Ha’aretz arguing a similar point from some blog (sorry, can’t remember which).

We need to fix the debate around Israel in this country by being honest about when someone is criticizing policy vs. expressing support for terrorism. We also need to start incorporating this into our voting and donation patterns. Israel is an important ally of the U.S. in the region, but we should be like good friends, able to talk each other down from bad decisions, rather than blind followers. It’s very clear that very few politicians are willing to take that approach. Until then, U.S. involvement in the peace process will continue to be ineffective.

It should go without saying that I’m proud of my sister’s work and of her sense of justice and the need to preserve life. Zealots on all sides will behave like Schlussel. To that end, there’s no more we can do than to keep doing what we think is right while engaging those who disagree with us.

Thankfully, Laura Rozen posted that a cease fire may be coming today.

Update: some edits for clarification.

That’s a screenshot of my RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire. Over the last few weeks, I’ve taken to streamlining the number of feeds in there, and I’m happy to say that on most days, by the end of the night, the count of unread items is zero. This wasn’t always the case. I used to have so many feeds in there that I would always have at least several thousand unread items.

I had hundreds of RSS feeds sorted into low and high priority groups. What I realized was that I was never getting to the low priority group, ever. Maybe on a slow weekend or something, I’d get down to one or two blogs in that group. That was it. So, I went through, cleared out the blogs in the high priority group I rarely read, and then basically dumped the entire low priority group.

In eliminating feeds, I focused on enhancing breadth over depth, so there are now a much smaller number of political blogs, more magazines like Newsweek and Foreign Policy, better conservative blogs/magazine, and more technology, streamlined to focus on stuff I need to pay attention to for professional reasons.

From the last few weeks, I find that I’m not really missing much of anything at all. I read more voices, different voices, and still catch the big story arcs moving through the news. Combined with Twitter, I’m pretty much able to filter and manage all the news I need to. It also helps manage focus during the day. The unread status is now useful, so I don’t unnecessarily flip to the aggregator to see if anything is new. I can just look at the dock. Imagine that.

I think I’m down to 122 feeds or so, with a large number (40 or so) that are low frequency feeds (twitter/technorati/google trend watching, alerts from hosts/service providers, and friends’ blogs and comment feeds). Seems to be a good number.

Sorry about the relative radio silence over the last few days. For those of you in-the-know about my real life, this is the weekend when, hopefully, we can start making some decisions on the big question facing us. For those of you not in-the-know, sorry to be cryptic. All will be explained shortly, promise.

As many of you know, after the 2000 election I began volunteering as a poll monitor, first with the Virginia Democratic Party and later with Election Protection. This year, in light of voter suppression efforts in the 2000 and 2004 elections, and in response to tactics the Republican Party is planning to roll out come November 4, the coalition behind Election Protection is starting a new initiative. In addition to recruiting lawyers and law school students to serve as poll monitors, they are now seeking everyone else to serve as poll workers through Pollworkers for Democracy. If you can manage to get the day off on November 4, I highly encourage you to consider volunteering.

There isn’t a post I’ve written over the past few months where I don’t find grammatical errors, spelling errors, or just downright poor writing. I’ll just randomly skim old posts because they show up in Sitemeter and typically have to fix 2-3 mistakes. Just wanted to say that I’m aware of it, and am trying to do better. Ultimately, trying to squeeze in blogging, which is fun and usually relaxing, into the start-up schedule means less time proofreading. And, as my wife tells her students, proofreading is the key to good writing.

I finally caved and bought a set. I went to the driving range for the first time yesterday and it was, uh, amusing.

I was asked recently by a former colleague why I “ended up” working on a site like Coolspotters when anyone looking at this blog would put “celebrities” at the bottom of my list of interests. I never write about them, right?

The fact of the matter is that, it’s true I don’t really care about what Lindsay Lohan and Jessica Simpson are up to today, nor do I have any particular interest in what sunglasses Paris Hilton owns. Like most Americans, however, I do pay attention when celebrities and things I do have an interest in connect, because I’m a fan like most everyone else, and, as most of you know, I do watch movies and TV and have favorite stars, bands, etc.

So, Coolspotters to me is about more than fashion and celebrities, even though that’s a big, big part of it. I save links to it when I see things like the charity work Angelina Jolie is doing or the fact that Barack Obama drives an SUV (though a hybrid) and a gas guzzling Chrysler (come on, Barack!). I’ve also been keeping an eye on the Tesla Roadster and who’s buying or test driving it. I want one, and it will be the only extravagant thing I splurge on if I make it rich one day. Gotta see what the folks who can afford it today are saying in case I should wait for the cheaper Fisker Karma.

The technology vision behind Coolspotters is also a big draw for me. We haven’t really talked about it much on the Fanzter blog, but there’s a lot of details going on behind the scenes that go toward building a good, open site like Coolspotters. I’ll write more about this on the Fanzter blog soon, so keep an eye out. There’s more to the site than what you see today, and hopefully in a month or two, you’ll start seeing the next iteration of our tools and technology on the site. (odd factoid: I’m tracking the word ‘coolspotters’ in blogs and the news and only one site so far has even touched on the technical dream here…)

One last random thing: as some of you know, finding out about the music behind the commercials, TV, and movies you see are a particular passion of mine. It’s no accident that commercials and music are categories on Coolspotters.

That’s the great thing about the platform we’re building. There’s a lot of things it can do, and where it ends up going is up to the users who show up and shape the site. Stop on by.

Coolspotters is live to the world! Check it out, add some content, give us some feedback in the forums (link at the bottom of the page).

So far, things are going well. We’ve got lots of people signing up, adding content, and even more just browsing around checking stuff out.

The “for most of you” in the title is just that we pointed “coolspotters.com” at our actual site instead of the placeholder site we had. That change takes a little time to show up at your ISP, so for some of you, it may not have flipped over. It should by tonight.

I want to watch the Phillies game, but don’t want to spend $200+ on DirectTV’s MLB package or $120 on MLB.tv’s package. So, it’s MLB.com’s radio player instead. Not quite the same as being able to watch any game, any time at my desk.

For a while I’ve been torn between supporting Obama, and my lingering feeling that John Edwards was the better candidate. Looks like the choice has been made for me. It’s weird. A year ago I wouldn’t have predicted seeing Guiliani and Edwards dropping out this early.

Update Sigh. You know, I’ve always respected Nader, but these gadfly White House runs strike me as a waste of his time and energy, which could be better put to use elsewhere.

Update 2 Salon has an interesting article on the dilemma.

Speaking of end of year giving (give via Kiva.org!), another organization I give to every year is the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). I mention this because the entertainment setup I describe below is one that the movie industry would like to outlaw directly and have, with current laws and lobbying, managed to indirectly make very difficult. The EFF fights these laws that are both anti-free-market and anti-consumer (a more common combination than you might think).

In fact, the setup I describe below is really only possible with a little bit of labor and using DVDs as opposed to HD-DVDs or BluRay sources. The movie industry tries to “protect” their movies and music with a technology broadly called DRM, which makes it impossible to view the movies you buy in the ways you want to. New DRM technology is why I’ve sworn off buying HD media. To make this clearer, let’s walk through my new setup.

Here’s what my goal is with the new setup. I want to be able to use my computer as a digital video jukebox with my TV. Basically, I’d like to end up with my movies on my computer so that I don’t need to keep the DVDs in the same room as the TV. This way, I can also copy the movies to my laptop when I travel (again, no discs to break or carry), or put them on my iPhone just in case I’m stuck somewhere.

The first part of getting this working is to get the movies onto my computer. Because of the DRM the studios use, this is more difficult than it ought to be. I’ve written up how I do this on the Mac in an older post, so if you need help, check that out. Please note that I’ve since changed my process a bit, though it involves some commercial software. Specifically, I’ve switched to using a great piece of software called VisualHub. It has presets for every device, including Apple TV, iPhone, PSPs, etc. So, everything from Step 6 onward has been replaced with the simple, “fire up VisualHub, select your device and quality and hit GO.” I typically use the Apple TV settings, with H.264 checked and High quality. I let iTunes cut an iPhone specific version as well when I need one.

Now that I have a version on my computer, I need to get it on the TV. Since I own an Xbox 360, this turned out to be pretty easy. The XBox can connect to a Windows PC and stream videos, photos, and music to the XBox and out to the TV and receiver you have it connected to. It’s not just for playing video games, after all. I assume that the PS3 allows similar functionality, but I don’t own one to try it out.

Now, I don’t own a Windows PC, since I’m a Mac/Unix person and only have Macs in the house. That would be a problem except for a nice little program called Connect 360 made by the fine folks at nullriver. They have a free demo so I downloaded it and fired it up. Within seconds, I was able to fire up the XBox, navigate over to the Media tab in the Dashboard, select Movies and I was thumbing through the films on my laptop on the big screen. These movies are at DVD quality, which is roughly 480p for the HD enthusiasts here. Sure, it’s not as pretty as an HD source, but the XBox does a good job upconverting to 1080p.

I wanted to see if the software and network could keep up with a 1080p video without trouble so I borrowed a 1080p rip of Transformers from a friend because I don’t know how to convert an HD-DVD yet. I’ve streamed that using the above setup with great results. The video is gorgeous and I could still surf the Internet off the same computer. Not a bad setup.

Of course, if the movie industry had their way, I wouldn’t be able to do what I did. Technically, the DRM on the DVDs should prevent me from doing what I did. Because, however, it has been broken by numerous hackers over the years, it merely represents an inconvenience in this process. You could argue that I could easily just buy my movies off of a service like iTunes or Amazon Unbox but that still presents the DRM dilemma.

For example, in my setup, I have devices from 3 different manufacturers and several different movie studios. Microsoft makes the XBox 360 and Apple makes my Mac and OS X and Sony makes my PSP (which I’ve stopped using for video in favor of the iPhone). If I chose iTunes, I would need to buy an Apple TV in order to watch the video on my big TV. In fact, the movies I’ve bought from iTunes don’t work in the setup I’ve described because the XBox doesn’t understand Apple’s DRM. Amazon doesn’t support Macs or my iPhone (yet), so that’s a non-starter as well. The only way to do this is with a DRM-free copy of the movies.

Which brings me to the title of this post. There are two ways to get DRM free copies of your favorite movies. The first is to do what I’ve done, buy DVDs and go through the trouble of stripping the DRM off and encoding them for your computer. It’s a lot of work (takes about 4 hours per DVD on a MacBook Pro).

The other option is to download these movies via a peer-to-peer (P2P) network or BitTorrent or whatever. This is technically both against the law (for the person making the video available) and opens one up to civil lawsuits from the movie studios.

Think about that for a second: To use the devices I own in a way that they all enable, the convenient choice is to download the movies for free. All I want to do is use the hardware I already own with movies I’ve paid for and my choices are to circumvent the DRM on the DVDs or to download them from the Internet.

It’s ridiculous, and really shows the idiocy of the current copyright fight between the studios and their customers. There’s a future here for a nice little video jukebox device with a couple of USB ports for devices like the iPhone or iPod that serves as a nice hub for all your media. My Mac is almost perfect, in fact, but imagine a little $200 device. Believe it or not, they exist already, and the only reason they’re not more popular is because of stupid DRM battles from the studios that do nothing to stop piracy anyway.

Anyway, I’m considering moving my old iMac downstairs so that it’s attached via the wired network to the XBox 360. Leave all the videos on an attached terabyte external drive and I’ll have my video collection available whenever I want.

Also, consider this an thumbs up for Connect 360. The software has made all the videos and music available on my XBox and offers some nice other features that I’ve yet to take advantage of. The software retails for $20 and is worth it if you plan on making use of a setup like this. Enjoy!

Update: PS. HD Podcasts that I download via iTunes look GREAT. No DRM on those, and they look great on the TV. I can recommend the Political Lunch as one to start with. It’s a good rundown of the day’s political news. Good stuff.

So, a little more about my struggles with Verizon. It wasn’t enough that they mislead all users who want to switch their plans online. After I switched my plan on Sept 5, they continued their general “evilness” by billing me incorrectly. Not just by billing me for the higher priced plan. But, FOR BOTH PLANS. In Sept, I got my bill for Oct (Verizon bills their customers one month in advanced) and it was $134.52 (the price of both plans).

I called customer service and at first they wanted to give me a $40 credit. I pointed out that if that was all I got, I would still be paying more that month than my bill was before I switched to the lower plan and they responded with, “huh.” After spending over 30 minutes with a very nice, but not numbers smart person, they finally responded with, “So how much of a credit do you think you should get?” If only I wasn’t such a nice guy. I finally talked through the fact that I should receive a credit for the over payment in Aug and Sept and that the extra plan should be removed from my bill for Oct. They finally got it and agreed to give me a $114.28 credit and they said they would remove the extra plan from my bill.

I let them know that since this happened through an automated process, they should tell someone in management about it. I truly believe this will happen to anyone who changes their plan online (unless the computers only hate me and are planning my demise).

So, I get the bill for Nov, and my credit is $111.70 (a difference of $2.58). And I wouldn’t care about it at all except they CHARGED ME FOR BOTH PLANS AGIAN!!!!

BBB.org got another submission.

So, yesterday, I break the switch on the mic from my XBox 360 so I can’t talk. Today, a nice, 1-pixel wide, vertical blue line shows up on my 1+ year old Samsung LCD TV. Everything online says it’s a hardware issue, so I’m looking at warranty service and no TV for some time. Joy.

And the DirecTV guys are supposed to come on Friday. Wonder if there will be a TV here when they show up?

Anyway, I have no point… just whining. Carry on.

I’m working at home today and was thinking I could catch up on Heroes on my computer. So, I go over to iTunes and realize that iTunes doesn’t have Season 2 because NBC pulled their content from iTunes. Wonderful.

So, I have to watch it o NBC’s web site, but since I can’t float the video like I can the iTunes window, I’m only able to watch a sliver. A screenshot of that half of my laptop screen is below the fold. I also couldn’t tell you what the TV commercials are for. I’m assuming that’s the revenue NBC wanted, but I’d like Sprint (the ads on the page) and whatever other video advertisers know that I ignored the ads on the NBC Video Rewind Player. It’s too easy.

And, on top of that, NBC/GE shareholders, they just lost $1.99 an episode from me. I missed 4 episodes, to that’s $8. Yes, yes, I can download Heroes episodes from Amazon except that I don’t own a PC. I don’t want to store them permanently on my Tivo. I’d like to take them on my iPhone and iPod. I can’t with Amazon’s inferior product. I’m not saying that you HAVE to go with iTunes, but keeping the most popular portable music player, the fastest selling phone, and a rapidly growing platform in mind would be a good thing, don’t you think?

So, NBC, thanks for screwing me out of a good experience and yourselves out of some cash. I’m sure I’ll miss more episodes of Heroes, and I’ll do the same with your online player. The irony is that my views will count just the same for the player, and NBC will count it as a success even though, quite frankly, the advertiser is getting screwed. Page views and video starts are pretty opaque stats, but that’s all that gets reported to advertisers.
(Click here to read the rest of this post)

I’m talking about this image taken at the local garba at Newington High School. See if you can pick out the funny part:

Not seeing it? Click on the image to see the funny part centered.

We had a good time at the garba, though Heidi enjoyed herself more than I did. It was our first time going as a couple and that made it fun. A nice bunch of undergrads from Wesleyan joined us for the Raas, giving us a nice little group. Nisha and Pat joined us, so that gives me the excuse to post this pic:

See you there next year!

• I just thought of a new Twitter idea. Perhaps someone is doing it. #
• Can’t decide if I like the Radiohead album… love the Radiohead business model, though. #

Just messing around with the TwitterTools plugin from Alex King.

For those of you that don’t know what Twitter is, it’s best described via analogy:

• Facebook Users: It’s like Facebook status, but you don’t need to use Facebook and it works with your IM client and SMS.
• Bloggers: It’s a micro blogging platform where you can put in up to 140 characters of text or urls and push that to everyone that’s using Twitter.

It integrates with IM so you can update from your IM client instead of having to log in, fill out the form, etc. (though that’s pretty easy, too). If you’re an SMS junkie or have a Blackberry or iPhone, you can have it work with SMS, too. It’s a pretty handy tool if you have friends updating their Twitter accounts. Like most social services, networks effects do make the service more useful.

So, as of today, for the foreseeable future, FatMixx posts will also show up on my Twitter feed. Enjoy!

http://twitter.com/sujal

Hey everyone. I am having an issue and I was hoping someone might be able to point me in the right direction. I just got a new computer with Vista (yeah, yeah, I know). Well, I am using TivoToGo to transfer .tivo files to my computer. I also have a program to remove the .tivo rapper and turn the files into .mpg. The problem I am having is that in Windows Media Player 11 and Windows Movie Maker 6.0, the total time display of the file is not the total run time of the file (on either the .tivo or the .mpg file). So, WMP 11 only shows 10:23 for the half-hour shows I Tivo and move to my computer. It plays all 30 minutes fine, but the time and the blue cursor stop at 10:23. It does the same thing with the hour shows, only listing 20 minutes for them.

The real problem is in the Movie Maker. When I import the clip it shows the same abbreviated time, but only allows you to actually work with the time shown. So I only get the first 10 minutes of my half-hour shows and 20 minutes of my hour shows. The weird thing is, the problem doesn’t exist if I do it on my laptop running WMP 10 and Movie Maker 5.1. The exact same files show the correct time. Now for another wrinkle. The error doesn’t happen if I recorded the shows using “high quality” on my Tivo settings (but the files are 5 times as big which is a big drawback).

I have only found two posts on the web with people mentioning the problem and no solutions. The only suggestion is that the files are being encoded wrong, which would make sense except they are fine in WMP 10 and Movie Editor 5.1. But, maybe I am missing something. I am just trying to see if anyone has had the same problem or heard of this type of problem or possibly know of anything I can try to fix it. Thanks.

Look who Joe met over the weekend!

So, I am taking a look at all my bills to see where I can make some cuts to save some money. I come to my Verizon home phone account and I re-look at my plan. I am signed up for the Verizon Freedom Plan for $55.99. This plan includes:

Unlimited Long Distance
Anonymous Call Rejection
Call Forwarding
Call Waiting
Caller ID
Voice Mail
Speed Dialing 8 and
Three Way Calling

Now, I know when I signed up for the plan 3 years ago, this was the cheapest plan that included unlimited long distance. Since I don’t get good reception for cell phone in my condo, and I mostly call the west coast, this was the best deal at the time. But, now they have some new plans.

Since I only really use caller ID and call waiting, there is a plan that just includes these options (plus voice mail) for $39.99 called Verizon Freedom Essentials. So, this is good for me. I can cut down what I don’t use anyway and save $15/month. I select the plan and the next screen gives a list of choices you can add on for an additional charge each month. They split the choices into two lists: “Your Current Calling Features” (where the three options included in the package: voice mail, caller ID, and call waiting are all checked and the monthly fee is “included” like you would expect) and the other list is “Add New Calling Features” which have a list of options like call forwarding, *69, busy redial, etc. all for an additional monthly fee.

Well, I like my selection with just my “included” options, so I just select next and find out my monthly bill comes out to be $45.69 with extra charges for “Speed Dialing 8 @ $1.70/month and Three-Way Calling @ $4/month. So, what gives???

I go back to try to look at the selection to make sure they hadn’t check any additional features automatically (which I may have just missed). First, it takes 3 different links to go back one page (an “edit” link on the first page, a “change selection(s)” link on the second page, and another “go” link on the final page). Once I finally get back to add features page (which you can tell they made purposely hard to do), I start scanning for these two additional features: Speed Dialing 8 and Three-Way Calling. They are no where to be found. But, I do find a nondescript link on the bottom of the page called “Show All Features.” Those slime balls. So, I click the link and magically the page expands to show a sublist under “Your Current Calling Features” called “Your Additional Calling Features” which is still different than the other list “Additional Calling Features.”

Yeah it sounds confusing, but basically if you are not pay attention while going through the selection, they have automatically added additional features to your plan and hidden them from you, hoping you do not notice when you proceed with your check out. Even though there is a list of 16 additional cost features which you could choose from to add on to your package, they try to literally hide 2 of them from you so you end up paying more.

How completely unethical. Shame.

For what it’s worth, my sister is in Lima and she felt the quake. She’s fine though and we were able to talk via Skype. Times like these, you wish all computers came with cameras. While she could see us and the fact that we were safe at home, it would’ve been nice to see her.

They just had an aftershock (literally 2 minutes ago, while we were on Skype), so I suspect they’re going to have a fun evening down there. I’m more worried about the tsunami warnings, but at least her current place isn’t on the beach.

(Heidi and I are in Washington D.C. this weekend to celebrate our first anniversary)

Tomorrow, I’ll walk through the National Mall and stand upon the land where history, real history happened, where Martin Luther King spoke of dreams and John F. Kennedy asked us to give to our country, where thousands and thousands marched against war, where real democracy and fierce debates shaped our country and created hallowed ground.

Dissent and debate matter in this country. Every positive change in this country has been marked by both, from the elimination of slavery to the recognizing women’s right to vote. These are marks of a vibrant democracy and a vibrant public and civic life. Without those protests and marches, we would be a different country today.

So, on the way to the Mall tomorrow, I will look toward the White House with great sadness because it’s current inhabitant has not been a steward of this legacy. He does not believe in the debate and the raucous exchange of ideas that have shaped our country for so long.

I’m speaking of the Bush administration’s utter contempt for dissent and disagreement, of loyalty oaths and and fake “town halls” where only loyal Bushies are allowed to attend. I’m speaking of a President who hides from protesters lest he hear dissent.

Of all of his failings, and he has many, this has been the key one. After all, thin skin breeds defensiveness and stubbornness. Those feelings breed rigidity and limited thinking. That creates poor policy and bad judgement. His administration is, in other words, a case study in why dissent is important for the health of the nation.

I wrote nearly a year ago that we should look at the fraud of “bipartisanship”, that “we should reflect upon the past five years and examine our ‘bipartisanship’ moments on the most important issue of our time.” Looking out at Washington D.C. tonight, I ask that we also take a look at the President’s fraudulent patriotism.

Patriotism on the President’s terms have brought us Abu Ghraib. It has brought us horrible lies and more lies. We now may be looking at a resurgent al-Qaeda. Supporting the troops in the Bush administration meant Walter Reed. All because when citizens and officials stood up to question the President or his war plans, they were brushed aside and ignored in the name of patriotism.

Over the last 6 years, those of us that have disagreed with the President’s policies have been called anti-American, defeatists, and traitors. Some, like Sen. Joe Lieberman, vilified even the mere act of questioning the President. The President and his supporters have continually invoked the language of patriotism in defending their long-failed policies. They would like our patriotism to be blind, closing our eyes while biting our tongues, lest we “undermine the President.”

When the President and his supporters speak of patriotism, they are speaking of blind support for them and their failed policies. That’s not America. Real patriotism involves questioning our leaders, following the examples of Martin Luther King and millions of other protesters over the years. We should learn from the patriotism the thousands of brave individuals around the nation who try to line motorcade routes or stand outside Presidential appearances even in the face of aggressive policing by the Administration. Real patriotism isn’t blind or obsequious. Real patriotism can involve dissent, which is the real tradition that binds us all together.

A lot of folks have been asking what I’m up to and, especially for the last few weeks, I’ve been more vague than usual about things. There were good reasons, but today I’m happy to let everyone know some more details on where I’m at and what I’m up to.

My original plan was to build and launch a travel-related site that my cousin had come up with. In essence, I would’ve been my first customer. I wanted to do that to build some credibility and to have the experience of building a scalable web site up without Disney’s infrastructure and with modern open source tools (Rails, Struts 2, etc.).

The idea was good and it looked like it would be easy (or as easy as these things could be) to launch and gain traffic. Unfortunately, the idea was so good that others had thought of it (always a good sign) and at least one iteration had already raised money (not so good for me). In fact, of all of the related startups, TripIt was probably the closest to the same idea, and that was pretty crushing. I was behind these guys and a solo developer on a new technology stack (Rails). It did not feel good.

Around the same time I was reaching out to former friends and colleagues to build out the FrequentMod end of the business. One of those leads worked out. Short version, I’ve recently joined Fanzter Inc., a local CT startup co-founded by a former colleague, Aaron. I can’t say much about what we’re building (more on that some day soon), but the idea for the first product is deceptively simple and powerful. We’re hoping to launch in September.

I said when I left ESPN that sometimes you just have to take the first step off the safe ledge before the opportunities present themselves. This is one of those serendipitous things. Had I not left ESPN, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to be here. Even better, Fanzter got their funding (and ability to hire me) right around the TripIt beta announcement. Timing, as they say, is everything.

On top of that, I had been working on a similar idea as one of my test/learn Rails and Symfony projects, and so I am coming into Fanzter with both a good understanding of where they’re going and what they’re trying to accomplish. To borrow a Disney phrase, there’s a lot of synergy here.

I won’t be blogging about the company much here. I’ll most likely be blogging about this at the Fanzter company blog. I’m excited to be working on this, and you should definitely sign up for the newsletter at Fanzter.com.

PS. To those of you who have reached out to me via LinkedIn or through email about FrequentMod, Fanzter is going to be my sole focus. I won’t be taking on additional clients or work until further notice.

I just found out that a paper I wrote in college is cited as a resource on Wikipedia. I’m frightened. The entry for Genius of Universal Emancipation contains a link to a section of a paper I wrote for a history and technology class in college. The paper was online because that was part of the delivery and it’s partially why I ended up getting a gig with the Maryland State Archives. Small world. The whole paper is online, and I’m afraid of how bad the writing actually is.

And, no, I didn’t add the link myself.

Update: In a quick scan of the article I already found 2 grammatical errors… I probably should fix them…

A lot of questions have come my way about what I’m up to now, and why I left. I’ve heard sentiments ranging from “Are you crazy?!” to “Congratulations, I admire your guts/courage (or my favorite, sack).” All of them make sense to me.

Ultimately, it does take a little nerve to walk away from a great company, and it takes a great deal of nerve to walk away from the kind of money that I was making, could’ve been making in the near future, and probably would be making down the road. I had established myself and a reputation at ESPN and while I’m not saying being an executive was in my future, I probably could’ve set up a very comfortable situation for myself working on cool technology with the safety and resources of ESPN.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? I want to do more than just live a comfortable life in a comfortable job in a comfortable town. At some point, I imagined myself doing more, and and some point between then and now, I put “more” on hold. It sounds silly to say it now, but I wanted to be a millionaire by 30, and I dreamt of making billions and living off of a tiny percentage while operating the rest as a foundation. Imagine Bill Gates with a simpler lifestyle. That’s where I wanted to be.

So, consider this step putting “more” back on the front burner, and taking a chance to hit those goals. I’m only 31, after all, and if there’s one part of my cultural heritage I’ve mastered, it’s Indian Standard Time. Of course I’m a little late, right?

Also, I thought hard about ESPN vs. a startup. There are a lot of differences, most should be obvious, but I enjoy the startup atmosphere, and I enjoy a couple of other things. The first is the possibility of failure, which didn’t really exist at ESPN. I believe that cliche that we learn more from failure than we do from success. I’m not talking about poor execution but about being wrong about what customers want. While ESPN might’ve been wrong on that front occaisionally, they are never wrong about what advertisers want. So even an unpopular feature (*cough*Monday Night Surround*cough*) can be a “success” if you look at it from a business standpoint.

The second thing a startup brings is a singular focus on a (singular) product. Hard to have at ESPN, where my team was worried about Rugby, Soccer, and Arena Football in addition to MLB, NFL, NBA, etc. Again, it makes sense in a lot of ways, and this is easier to fix than most things, but it is part and parcel of being there, especially if you want to be a leader in that organization.

Finally, Heidi and I are in the right spot to do this. We don’t have children, yet, we both are working, and we have a house we bought using my Boston salary as the budget (several promotions and raises ago). We were good about saving the last few years as we were able to pull of buying a new roof and chimneys and having our wedding without going into debt at all. A year later and we’ve saved up enough to take this shot.

As for what I’m doing, I want to help build startups. I realized a while ago that while I do have a good head for product development, I’m really, really good at applying technology to solve product problems. I’m also pretty good with open source technologies, well versed in most of the latest technologies of the day, and building on the cheap, all of the other things that startups more than large companies focus on.

The trick is going to be figuring out how to consult with startups (and how to make money at it). I’d love to follow the model that my cousin built during the boom. That would be ideal, but may not be possible on the east coast as it was in 1999. We’ll see what happens. I want to keep doing the startup thing, but I don’t want to be the passionate advocate of every project I’m involved in. Sometimes, it will make sense to stay on for the long haul, if I really get the product and love the idea. Other times (and I’m guessing it’s going to be more often), I’ll just come in for a few months, help launch or help get past particular technical or growth objectives and move on.

I’ll have updates here, including if/when I’m ready to hire more staff. I’m still feeling out the space but I’m working on a project already that I’ve mentioned to some of you. I have a placeholder site for my consulting gig at FrequentMod.com. For those that have been keeping up with the name game, I’m going to simplify Modulation to Mod as it conveys the same thing without the extra syllables.

If you had me on MSN Messenger (or if you didn’t and want to), I’m no longer using my old address. You can add me as sujal at fatmixx (make that into an email address, including .com at the end).

If I don’t know your hotmail id, you may want to send a message to the same address so I can know who you are.

So, around the time I decided to pursue my dream and leave ESPN, I began thinking about how to leave without there being a lurch when I walked out. On the whole, I’ve done a good job, but only the folks still here after I leave will be able to tell. I truly do think I won’t be missed when I walk out of here. I’ve managed to have staff or other managers cover most of my daily meetings and responsibilities, and I’ve pretty much worked through my calendar and cleared out all of the meetings, making sure someone was taking them over.

I say all of this not so much to pat myself on the back, but to make this point: I am so freaking bored right now. My calendar is empty, I have no projects to deliver or work on, and my to-do list is empty. I don’t know what to do with the time I have left over the next two days, so I’m working with some folks here helping them move forward on some other projects. It’s amazing how long 8 hours is when you’re not pushing forward on a project.

Moral of this story: don’t deliver ahead of schedule on transitioning yourself out of an organization. It makes the last few days quite long.

Yes, I’m mostly kidding about this, but aside from the Sundays where I used to come in to watch football (just for fun), I have no frame of reference for sitting at my desk with nothing really asking for my attention. It’s just weird.