Daniel Ford

Got through Hurricane Irene without any real problems.  Not so for our neighbors here north of New York City.  There were four large trees down in the neighborhood, two were across driveways, one across the road itself, and one that barely missed a house a few doors away.  Except for a few flickers, we didn’t lose power.

I’m on my way home from a vacation that was planned long before I entered the start-up world.  It was only supposed to be two weeks long, but then things started to happen and “suddenly” I was going to be on the road for almost four weeks.  This is week four.  I’ve been traveling around British Columbia visiting family and friends.  After a side trip to Kelowna, I spent two fantastic weeks on North Pender Island.  I spent the last couple of days in Vancouver.  I grew up there, but I left in 1986 to go to grad. school in the East, and never moved back.  It’s a great city.

I did work while on the road.  A few weeks before I left town, I opened up a SSH tunnel to my development server sitting in my basement.  This gave me direct access to my git repository, Bugzilla, wiki, etc.  I finished up an OpenID implementation while on the move and got that checked in before things mysteriously stopped working.  There have been some intense storms that hit New York, and I suspect they caused more than one extended power outage at my house.  I have everything (server, cable modem, router, etc.) on UPS, and the server is set to reboot when power is restored.  It has been tested a few times with real outages and the backup worked like a charm every time.  But, I never tested the scenario where the power is out for hours and the UPS drains itself.  I can’t tell until I get home, but I suspect that the UPS doesn’t power itself on after it runs out of battery charge during an extended outage.

I can’t say that I recommend taking such a long break when just starting up, but having done it, it has it’s benefits.  You can never underestimate the value of “recharging your batteries” (personal ones, not UPS). I’m really looking forward to jumping back into things.  The break also gave me time to do a lot of reading and thinking, I’m bringing home a bunch of ideas and things to try out.

Meanwhile, life is getting even more interesting.  Last night, I flew into Richmond, Virgina, from Vancouver and drove along Route 64, right past Mineral, VA, the epicenter of the recent East Coast earthquake.  I didn’t see any damage, but wasn’t really expecting to.  According to Chip, back home in New York, they felt the quake, but there was no damage there either.  Having lived in California, and through a number of similar sized jolts, I’d much prefer to be in a quake there then here on the East Coast; there, the buildings get “tested” frequently and the bad ones get replaced, in the East, there is virtually no preparedness, a really big quake would wipe things out all along the coast.  Speaking of wiping things out, as I write this, Hurricane Irene is making its way up the East Coast, and is expected to pass over my house this Sunday as a Category 2 Hurricane.

Wish us luck.

A relaxed weekend spent hanging around JKF.  First dropping one person off for a flight early Saturday morning and then picking up another later Saturday afternoon; it didn’t make much sense to drive home in between.  The forced “downtime” did give me a chance to read up on various things, notably the Eclipse WTP project.

Spent the weekend camping in Yosemite Valley.  Hiked the Yosemite Falls trail on Saturday; the trail takes you from the Valley floor right to the top of the falls.  It is about 6km, straight up.  The Valley doesn’t seem like a particularly deadly place, but two people died hiking the trails when I was there, one on the Yosemite Falls trail that I hiked, and one on the Mist Trail.  The first apparently tripped and hit his head on a rock, the second slipped and fell from the trail.  I’ve been on both trails multiple times and never thought them to be perilous.  I  had planned to spend Sunday afternoon relaxing around Mirror Lake, but early Sunday morning the weather turned extremely nasty with high winds (50-80kph), heavy rain and then snow.   There wasn’t much point sticking around so after packing and being warned by the Rangers that Route 120 out of the park was covered in deep snow, I headed out south on Route 140 along the Merced River.  This is an interesting route that takes you deep into farm country in the California Central Valley.

After a bite of lunch at the Merced In-N-Out Burger, I headed west across the valley.  The warmth of the lower elevation melted away the chills of the snowy morning and the miles went by with ease.   The land is flat making it easy to see for eighty or ninety kilometers North or South.  The sky was dotted with a parade of  dark clouds all heading towards the mountains to add to the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada.  A few could be seen in the distance dropping heavy showers in the valley, but they all missed me.  I then drove past the San Luis Reservoir, and was surprised to see, for the first time ever for me, that the reservoir was full.  Usually the water level is quite low beneath a “bathtub ring” around its shore, but they had a particularly wet winter in California, and it shows.  Once past the reservoir, I headed through Pacheco Pass and into Coyote Valley and then North to Silicon Valley.

After some dinner with some friends at the Willow Glen Willow Street Pizza it was off to the San Jose Airport for the flight back to New York.

As predicted, the weekend was uneventful other than the arrival of two books from Amazon, “Spring in Action” and “Spring Recipes A Problem-Solution Approach.”  I was also pleased to discover a couple of books on Hibernate on my bookshelf I hadn’t read yet.

The weekend marked a return to “Normality” which basically means driving our kids around to different sporting and musical events.  Saturday had a total of eleven such things to attend.  I didn’t write a lot of code on Saturday.  Sunday wasn’t much better, Winter in New York is over and Spring “popped” this past week. We went from completely bare trees to almost full foliage in about ten days.  This didn’t change the fact that Winter was pretty severe this year and the yard looks it, lots of branches down and general mayhem prevails.  This lead to lots of yard work, which is what I did Sunday, but you wouldn’t be able to tell.

Here is a good essay on Angel Investing.

Started off Week 3 of the adventure on Saturday with a “tourist” trip into NYC.  We had lunch at the KATZ Deli, where sandwiches go for a very reasonable $17, and a can of Pepsi is a bargain at $3.  Then we took the subway up to Times Square to see Phantom of the Opera at the Majestic Theater.  After the show, we stopped by the Stardust Diner for dinner, where all the waiters are aspiring Broadway actors who sing while they serve the tables.  It’s like a non-stop Karaoke show, but with people who can actually sing, and, where the burgers are just $20, each.  Sunday was another day in NYC, it included great weather and a stop at Strawberry Fields in Central Park.  There were many people around the memorial and the mood was subdued.  There were several people with acoustic guitars singing some of Lennon’s songs.    Dinner was at Nyonya, a Malaysian restaurant in Little Italy, which was packed with an eclectic mix of Asians, German tourists and Rastafarians; did I mention that globalization has hit New York in a big way?  The food was very good, and inexpensive.

I started off Week 2 of my start up adventure with a family trip over the weekend to Boston.  We stayed with my wife’s cousins who live just outside of  the city. One highlight of the trip included a visit to the Boston Common where the son of my wife’s cousin was playing in a Quidditch tournament on the pitch at the common.  I expect that you’ll think I’m making this up, but I’m not. In the game people run around with broom sticks between their legs trying to score goals (Think of the injuries!!).  There’s even a “snitch” that takes off at the beginning of a game (everyone closes their eyes so they don’t see which way they go) to be found by a “seeker,”  if they can.  They “run around” the city, or take the subway (the “T“) and then return to the field before the match ends.   This is where the match can get “violent” with much wrestling in the mud and tossing of bodies as the seeker attempts to grab the “golden orb” (a yellow sock with a tennis ball in it) from the belt of the snitch.  We also took a tour of the Granary Burying Ground which is right in downtown Boston.  The two acre patch of land has an estimated 5000-8000 people buried there.  I don’t think you could get that many people into an area that small if they were standing up!  I trod lightly.

Thursday

Took the 5:12 train into Grand Central and then the #6 Subway to Union Square for Tech Cocktail NYC to check out some other start-ups and to get a taste of what was going on in Manhattan.  The venue was Bar 13, a small bar near Union Square, where roughly a dozen companies were on display.  The place was small, crowded and noisy, so it was a bit difficult to visit each company, and difficult to talk to them when you did; but it felt like familiar territory for me.  There was a good mix of ages in both the crowd and the companies.  I was thinking it would be all “old guys” with martinis talking to kids with backpacks, but it wasn’t like that at all.

Some companies had a bit of signage, some had handouts, but most just had a laptop running a recorded demo.  Most seemed to be “executed” well, meaning that they had good design and graphics, and had actually produced a product or, mostly, a service.  The one that I thought had potential was Combine Couture; there’s a trend in high-end fashion sites that cater to an audience that spends money.  Sites like that can develop a critical mass of paying customers and become obvious acquisition targets.  Other than that, it was a bit like a food fight in an Italian restaurant, lots of spaghetti flying around, but in the end, only some of it will actually stick to the walls