Almost two years ago, I decided I was going to sit down and make some changes to my life. I had just finished a four year stint at microsoft, felt burnt out on tech, gotten out of shape due to working regular sixty hour weeks in front of a computer and smoking like a chimney. I sat down and thought about what it was that I wanted to achieve and came up with a list of stuff that I wanted to do. I decided to focus on accomplishing three -smoking, weight loss, and starting a company. I did several things to accomplish these goals, but one of the best, and easiest, was just changing my home page.
Nowadays, when I open up my browser in the morning, I’m greated with three pages. They are as follows: (my company) entrenza.com’s beta page, gmail, and foremost – a google docs spreadsheet entitled yyyy-mm goals and actions. The beta page is related to one of these goals, but lets talk about the spreadsheet. It’s really simple and looks something like this:

It’s been a pretty successful system. I don’t worry about huge strides, I just worry about accomplishing, one thing towards each goal each day. So far, ‘ve registered a LLC and and have regularly worked part time on a startup for over a year. We’re right about to go into beta. As for getting in shape, when I left seattle two years ago and got my California license, it listed my weight at 205lbs. I renewed last week and had 185lbs on it. Prior to leaving Seattle, you could add another 20 lbs to that. I no longer smoke.

I don’t know if this will be useful to anyone else, but I’ve had some success with it, and who knows, maybe it will work for you. If you try it out, I’d love to hear from you and see how it goes.

So my 2001 VW jetta is getting a bit up there in the miles – it’s about 95k at the moment, and while this isn’t too much for a VW, I’ve been wanting to get a new car and I figure I should get rid of it while I can still feel good about selling it to someone else. Besides, I want to get a convertible – I live in southern California, and if it’s not the appropriate climate for one, I don’t know where is.

Initially I went to carmax and they offered me $2000. Yeeps! I was shocked. Could it really be worth that little? Kelly Blue book said it was at least worth $4k. So I thought I would test the open market and write a quick perl script to give me the average price for an item on craigslist. Here’s how it works and the code is below. It should be really easy to modify for anyone who could use something like this:


./cl_get_prices.pl 2001+jetta

lowest:         1200
highest:        9999
Average:        6134.48214285714


another example where I search for porsche boxster:


nick:~$ ./cl_get_prices.pl porsche+boxster

lowest:         7600
highest:        33100
Average:        16865.6341463415


Anyway the code is below, and I’ll put a link to the actual perl script:

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#!/usr/bin/perl
$wget="http://losangeles.craigslist.org/search/cta?query=";
$wget .= $ARGV[0];
print $wget . "\n";
$html = `wget -q -O - $wget`;
        @words = split(' ', $html);
        foreach $word (@words)
                {
                 if ( $word =~ m/^\$/)
                        {
                                $word =~ s/(\$|,)//g ;
                                if ( $word =~ m/^\d+$/ )
                                {
                                        if ( $lowest eq '') {
                                                $lowest = $word ;
                                        } elsif ( $word < $lowest ) {
                                                $lowest = $word ;
                                        }
                                        if ( $highest eq '') {
                                                $highest = $word ;
                                        } elsif ( $word > $highest ) {
                                                $highest = $word ;
                                        }
                                        $amt += $word ;
                                        $count++;
                                }
                        }
                }
$average = ( $amt / $count ) ;
print "lowest:\t\t$lowest\nhighest:\t$highest\n";
print "Average:\t" . $average ."\n";

Here’s a link to the actual script you can download;. If you find it useful, let me know.

First and foremost, MMS should have been a standard feature in te original iphone release. This is a given. The lack of it is all the worse because it’s such a basic feature, and it requires responding to the inevetable question, “did you get that” with “well, yes, but I have to log into the site and I don’t want to do it on the phone, cause I can’t cut and paste and…” this reminds us that we don’t have cut and paste and how damn annoying that is.

If you haven’t seen it before, when someone sends you a picture message on the iphone you get a message saying, “Someone has sent you a picture, go to www.viewmymessage.com and login with the username and password: blah and blah” The usernames they pick are randomly generated strings of characters and not easy to remember, and really, this is an unacceptable solution.

Fix: Change the message. Instead of a username and password, give a direct link: http://viewmymessage.com?u=xxxxxx?&p=yyyyyyyy same information, slightly different formatting – problem solved.

Dear ATT, this is such a simple simple problem to solve, and one with a lot of visibility. Please fix it.

How a delayed flight can make a customer for life:

I’m sitting at JFK airport in New York as I write this, waiting on a flight that was supposed to leave at nine thirty pm. It, instead, is leaving at 12:30am. This is a crappy situation, but it’s not how a company deals with a customer when things are going great that counts, it’s how a company deals with it’s customers when things go awry. Air travel is unpredictable. They need to deal with weather, and lets face it: no matter what we have waiting for us on the other end, the most important thing is to get there safe. We all, as customers, understand that bad weather happens, and it’s not American Airlines fault.

That said, the girl working at the ticket booth has been making announcments about the time being pushed back. If, instead, she had walked over to the seating areas and addressed us in small groups, it would have been much more personal and it would have come across less as a company, and more as a sympathetic face. Even better would be if they had a small budget set aside for food and drinks. Lets compare and contrast:

Announcement #1 via the intercom:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, The aircraft for flight 4750 has not yet left Boston, and is now expected to arrive at 11:20, pushing back our departure time to midnight. Flight 4721 should be arriving at 11:35 and is expected to depart at 12:30. If there are any further changes, we’ll make another announcment.”

Announcement #2, in person, walking over:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m really sorry, but we’ve got some more delays. I know it’s been a long wait, so we’re going to put out a table with coffee, and some snacks. The aircraft for flight 4750 has not yet left Boston, and is now expected to arrive at 11:20, pushing back our departure time to midnight. Flight 4721 should be arriving at 11:35 and is expected to depart at 12:30. I know it’s been a long wait, and we’ll let you know as soon as we know anything more.”

Use what you’ve got:

The worst part of the whole situation is all it would take is a little initiative. Airlines already buy coffee in bulk. Airlines already have snacks. The only requirement is the industrial coffee machines and some of those magic creamers that don’t go bad at room temprature (how do those things work?!). I understand that most people choose air travel on discount websites based on the lowest fair, but if it was well known that if you missed your flight you’d at least get a cup of coffee and some snacks.