Cecelia Feld Exhibiting at Splash on 7/7/10 at the St. Julien
If you are a fan of my mom’s art (Cecelia Feld), she’s part of an exhibit at the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder called Splash. The opening is this Wednesday
If you are a fan of my mom’s art (Cecelia Feld), she’s part of an exhibit at the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder called Splash. The opening is this Wednesday
The Feld job board has one for you today. If you are a sys admin and live in the Boulder area, StillSecure is interested in talking to you. The spec is below – if you fit it and are interested, please email Rhonda Grosz. StillSecure, a network security software and services company is looking for a Systems Administrator for their Superior, CO office. We are looking for self-motivated, talented individuals who enjoy working in a fast paced environment. This individual will be responsible for managing, maintaining the IT infrastructure of the company and has at least 4 years of experience. He/she should be proficient in Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Windows Desktop and Server operating systems. Networking, Linux and Mac OS experience is a plus.
This just makes me want to crawl under my desk and cry for a while. Can you imagine how much it would hurt if you threw that at a lawyer or an accountant and actually hit them with it? Skadden Partner Completes 409A Handbook: “ Sneak Preview Here Regina Olshan Erica Schohn Flashback: Regina Organizes Push for 409A Extension” (Via 409A Dismay.)
More from our friends Nate and Natty at Everlater – this time on debugging. One of the most important techniques we used when learning how to code is debugging. It allowed us to do two things: fix our own code when it was broken and parse through others’ code to better understand how they were doing things. From a backend perspective, debugging is essential. When I first started writing code, I would write what I *thought* was the correct way to do it. Ninty-nine times out of a hundred I was wrong and the code would blow up with some ugly exception that I had no clue about. Copying and pasting the exception into google got me decent mileage, but the real silver bullet I discovered was just start from the beginning of the method and step through it using the ruby debugger and figure out where I had gone wrong. Almost always I had forgotten to assign some variable or I was calling a method that did something different than I thought.
When I arrived at my house in Homer, I hadn’t been here for two years. It took me one phone call to get Internet (DSL) working again (ACS had to reset my password) and within about 15 minutes everything was working just fine. Except I couldn’t print. I have an old HP 3330 with a JetDirect USB to Internet print server. The printer doesn’t have many miles on it – I’ve only used it for a total of about three cumulative months. It took me about thirty minutes to fight through all the nonsense of the Internet to figure out how to set it up as a print server for my new Mac (which I’ve never used with it before) and for Amy’s Windows 7 computer. It turns out that nothing really works except hard wiring its IP address into our printer setup. Um – yeah – that’s obvious – especially for someone who doesn’t know what an IP address is.
I know it’s been a few weeks since my last Nate and Natty / Everlater post on learning to program. I’ve gotten a few notes asking for more – expect a couple of posts over the next few days. In the mean time, here’s Nate’s view on how to divide tasks between partners – in this case him and Natty. Having good systems in place around your coding is just as important as the coding itself. Natty and I spent a huge chunk of our time figuring out a great workflow that would allow us to program more effectively, and we think it’s paid huge dividends over the lifespan of Everlater.
Mobile Monday Colorado is hosting a member of the TechStars mentor family, Dion Almaer, for their July 19th event. Dion is Managing Director of Developer Relations at Palm (now part of HP). Besides his involvement with TechStars as a mentor, he is a celebrity in the AJAX community as the co-founder of Ajaxian.com, and previously held senior positions within Mozilla and Google. Dion will be able to shed some light on how the largest consumer device company in the world will be integrating WebOS into various product lineups including tablets and intelligent printers. He will talk about the direction of the WebOS operating environment specifically and the future of mobile and the web. It is sure to be a solid event worth checking out.
I’ve been quiet on my reaction to Bilski because I’ve got an OpEd floating around that might get published in the next few days. It’s been rejected by one major publisher because according to the senior editor “it didn’t fit their opinion on the case” and another major publisher because “no one really cares that much about patents.” Ok – whatever. Fortunately, I have a blog, but I’ll wait a few more days and see if I can get someone in the traditional media to care.
I’ve been in several board meetings over the past month where the companies are having a killer Q2. A year ago everyone was still pretty rattled from the financial crisis and there was plenty of belt tightening, consternation, and general anxiety. By Q409 we’d had a number of companies we are investors in end the year strongly and their growth has continued into Q1 and Q2. Over the past 15 years, I’ve sat through plenty of good meetings and plenty of bad board meetings. I always try to acknowledge the efforts of individual executives when they’ve exceeded expectations and the full team when they’ve crushed it. I’m not afraid to be direct and critical and I always speak my mind, but I try never to forget to praise people for their efforts.
Gearbox, one of the teams that I’m mentoring in this year’s TechStars Boulder program, is starting to blog about their product. One of their taglines is “reinventing the ball” and while this potentially generates plenty of 14 year old boy jokes it’s pretty amazing stuff. The ball, which consists of a custom circuit board inside a 3D printed spherical shell (which is pretty cool all by itself) with lots of fun things on it, is completely controlled by a smartphone (in this case, an Android).