The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 18,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
One of the many reasons I’m proud to now be working at Twilio is the way the team honors those who came before us. Check out what the team added to the website last night.
How many boxes does it take to pack up six and a half years of employment? It turns out that the answer is two.
I finished packing up all my things from work today, with tomorrow being my last day at SugarCRM. I also spent a good portion of the afternoon cleaning up the files on my laptop, removing personal files and accounts. When it’s all said and done, the only things left are one more message in my inbox, one more meeting with my boss, an exit interview, and a going-away lunch with the crew. I’m ready to put it all to bed.
This isn’t the first time I’ve left a company, but it’s the first time where I feel like I haven’t wrapped everything up cleanly, with a clear transition in place. When I finally left Netscape/AOL, it was because my business unit was closing down, and there wasn’t anyone left to hand things to. When I left Sun Microsystems, there were other people doing the exact same job as me — albeit in different product lines — but they certainly knew what to do in my absence.
However, with SugarCRM, there isn’t an immediate replacement coming in to do my job. In fact, my job has been a mixed bag of responsibilities, sort of a jack-of-all-trades position. I pretty much molded it to me after taking on the current role, and my varied experience with the company was my calling card. I’d seen it all, so I could cover anything that came my way. While there are other people in the company who could certainly fill my shoes, they’re in other critical roles that would leave just as big of a hole if they were to leave. Institutional knowledge goes a long way when you’ve been there for nearly the entire life of the company.
On the other hand, that won’t be my problem once tomorrow afternoon rolls around. I’ve tried to tie things up, leave things in an okay state. Inevitably, there will be things that fall through the cracks. Hopefully, it’ll all be a memory in a couple of months.
2011 has been a pretty big year for me, and there’s still more than three months left. First it was my girlfriend moving in with me. Then it was my girlfriend becoming my fiancee.
And now I’m happy to announce that I’ll be starting a new job soon. This coming Tuesday will be my last day with SugarCRM. A week from Monday, I’ll join Team Twilio as their new Director of Support.
I’ll get my first real taste of Twilio later this week at the first ever Twilio Conference; no better way for me to learn than to attend two days of Twilio goodness prior to my official start date. If you’re going to be at the conference, say hi to me when you see me there!
Trying out a new theme on the ol’ blog, as I get ready to do some writing this weekend.
The theme is called Chunk, which now makes me think of The Goonies.
Ndamukong Soup Nazis
Here’s the second half of my 2-part series on my fantasy football drafts this year. After this post, I doubt I’ll mention fantasy football again the rest of the season… unless something really interesting happens!
Thursday was the draft with the co-workers. Fifth year we’ve been doing this league, but for the first time, we had enough players to split into TWO leagues.
Brief details on structure: 12 round snake draft with 12 players; starting lineup is 1 QB, 2 RBs, 2 WRs, 1 TE, 1 RB/WR/TE flex, 1 K, 1 Defense/Special Teams, and 2 bench spots. Scoring is pretty standard for a Yahoo league.
Here’s the results of my draft, with commentary mixed in where appropriate:
Ndamukong Soup Nazis
Last year, around this time, I wrote two posts about my two fantasy football teams. I’m going there again, in spite of the title of this post. If you have zero interest in fantasy football, feel free to skip the rest of this post, as well as the next post.
*waiting for some people to walk out*
Okay, for those of you still here, thanks for sticking around!
First up was my “Balls of Shame” draft, although the league is being renamed this year to “Pigskin & Poker”, due to the fact that it’s a group of poker buddies. Last year’s draft is detailed here, as well as my victorious outcome in winning the league here. It’s a PPR league, 16 round snake draft with 8 players; starting lineup is 2 QBs, 2 RBs, 3 WR, 1 WR/TE flex, 1 K, 1 Defense/Special Teams, and 6 bench spots.
Also worth noting that this is a keeper league. If you drafted a player last year in the 8th round or later, and he stayed on your roster all season, you could keep that player and sacrifice the pick from the same round this year. My example was Santonio Holmes, picked in the 15th round last year; I kept him for this year, which means I didn’t get a 15th round pick. Seven of the eight teams elected to keep a player:
Here’s the results of my draft, with commentary mixed in where appropriate:
A couple of weeks ago, Apple released a software update to the Apple TV, and the news was mostly under the radar. The fact that Vimeo support was added got a bit more play than the feature I care most about — streaming previously-purchased TV shows through the Apple TV via iCloud!
I’ve written a few times about my use of external hard drives to store my iTunes media, and the purchased TV shows are the big space hogs. Then, when I had a major data loss, I resigned myself to never being able to get back to the media files that were lost.
We have two Apple TVs in the house, one in the living room, one in the bedroom. Any time that I wanted to watch something I’d purchased from Apple, I needed to have my external hard drive connected to a computer in the house, and leave iTunes up and running on that computer, in order to stream the media using the Apple TV. Not a big deal, but a White Whine / First World Problem on those nights when I go upstairs to bed, want to watch TV, but forgot to set up the computer downstairs for this scenario.
Now, with the Apple TV software update, the problem goes away. No more do I have to leave the hard drive plugged into the laptop and leave iTunes running. No more do I have to lament losing the previously purchased TV shows. I can now offload the files from my external hard drive, freeing up space for other things. This could easily be my favorite new Apple feature of 2011… which is kind of sad, now that I think about it.
Update: As I go back through the news about this software update, looks like John Gruber agrees that the pre-purchased aspect was more interesting than the Vimeo inclusion. Nice to know I’m not the only one.
If you’re a South By Southwester, you really should vote for this panel.
I may be biased, though… I’m engaged to the session organizer, the speaker is a friend, and the subject is my company.
Recently, April and I went to see Blues Traveler in concert at Villa Montalvo. Yes, Blues Traveler is still touring! They’re still a lot of fun to see perform, and they still sound great. They’re longer in the tooth, but you can see they still have a blast up on stage, hamming it up to each other even more so than to the crowd.
Blues Traveler is one of those bands that reached national prominence during my college years, whose music still holds up over 15 years later — man, I’m getting old! I’m listening to the Four album as I type up this post, and I’m sure I’ll still enjoy listening to this album in another 15 years.
Image via Wikipedia
If you live in the San Jose area, find a reason to go to a concert at Villa Montalvo at least once… beautiful setting, intimate concert amphitheater, and of course, terrific weather in the summer for an outdoor show. We were third row center, which makes you feel like the band is really playing for just you and a few other people, especially at a venue like Villa Montalvo. To give you an idea of these seats, if you look at the back of the head two rows in front of me, that’s Steve Wozniak there. As April noticed, The Woz spends a LOT of time looking at Foursquare on his white iPhone 4.
It’s really a good time when you’re at a concert, hearing John Popper singing.
But you know what’s even better? John Popper on the harmonica!
Jason Nassi 