Category: Startupping

I am a lover of open source, so I really enjoyed using Mozilla Thunderbird and Calendar until we started using Exchange Server in our office and I stopped receiving mail from my CEO and our VCs. Everyone else was fine, mysteriously. So, I had to plug in to the Exchange Server and figured it was a good time to switch to M$ Outlook so I could also start sending an receiving calendar events.

Trouble is, you can’t export Thunderbird mail messages directly to Outlook. The help docs and various menus and screens create the appearance of a possibility, but after some investigation I realized this was all a ruse.

Quick note: Huned and co have finally launched Swivel.
Techcrunch loves them, and I do too. Go share data!

Part of the fun of producing web pages and applications is that we get to be medicine men: wave our hands, write some code, and suddenly the Golem springs to life. The truth of the matter is that we’re closer to Ed Norton’s character in the beautiful but mostly pointless movie The Illusionist. Behind every stage trick is a logical (and sometimes overwrought) explanation. The only real mysteries lie within our own hearts and desires, and we can master our environments by recognizing the distinction between mind and machine.

For my part, I am mystified by engineers who use cajoling as a debugging tactic. These are the people who talk to their dev environments like Han Solo, begging more speed from the Millennium Falcon: “C’mon baby, work for me… (screen refresh)… nooooooo! Why god, why?!”

Update: Respectr is live!

Huned and I sat down today to attempt to complete a Rails Web app. The bad news is that we didn’t finish, though we made some great progress. Rails is extremely fast – had we been working with a different hacker language like PHP, I think we’d have gotten bogged down in the details and lost focus.

We’re hoping to finish up the build this week, so we can dive into a private beta release, then jump to a public launch when we’re confident the code scales well.