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Archive for February, 2008
Caucus
February 9, 2008
For the 2004 election I turned “of age” less than a week before the presidential election so, as you might expect from an underage voter, I didn’t follow any of the preceding primaries/caucuses for either party. This year I’m paying attention, though, and if you’re curious, I’m completely behind Obama.
Today was my local democratic caucus here in the 43rd district of Washington State. How I understand it this is a rather unique year because normally Washington doesn’t matter much but at this point the two candidates (Obama and Hillary) are so close that we actually matter. It makes me feel quite special in an odd normally-ignored-but-finally-noticed-for-once kind of way.
I’m really confused about the whole electoral process after looking into how just the democratic delegate selection process goes. The primaries ballot sent out to all the democrats doesn’t actually elect ANY delegates. Really, none at all. It’s what is described as a 7 million dollar beauty contest paid for by the state” Lovely. (If you agree this is stupid, I’m told it’s likely Sam Reed’s fault.) Instead, all delegates are chosen through the in-person and on-paper caucus system regulated only based on the honor system. Everyone (or at least, encouraged to) meets locally and chooses a number of delegates for their precinct based on the percentages of supporters for each of the candidates.
The location I voted at had I believe 6 precincts represented, one including the majority of the dorms on campus. I’ll just say I’m relieved to not have been in that precinct. Instead, mine was was about 55 people from only 4 square blocks in this area.
The whole event started by announcing the general rules for conducting the caucus then the person managing this location started to list off the precinct numbers being represented. After he got through announcing two of the numbers each group started to clap and cheer as if we were teams competing in some way. Each successive precinct tried to clap louder and louder. I was quite amused. Oh, foolish college kids (I won’t be one for long).
Our leader was a bit unorganized, but oh well — I respect him volunteering either way. We all filled out our choice of candidate on paper sheets then three people tallied up all the votes to make sure all was accurate. We ended up with 44 votes for Obama, 11 for Clinton, and 3 Undecideds. Then, one of the undecideds decided to change his vote to Edwards despite everyone telling him that he had already dropped out of the race. Being the slightly out of touch with the system, we went straight into a selection of volunteers to be primary and alternative delegates to attend the next largest caucus happening in a couple months.
After we began to select volunteers, we went backwards and two people stated their arguments for each candidate and one arguing to send an undecided candidate to be “flexible” and allow the next level of caucus sway our votes one way or another instead of us saying who we wanted (no, I don’t think that makes any sense). We had a perfect number of volunteers for Obama and one too many for Clinton. The solution? “Who want’s to not volunteer for Clinton?” Each group of potential delegates and alternatives worked it out on their own from there. My involvement lasted about two hours.
I’m glad I had the opportunity to get involved this year and I hope that we can all get behind whoever wins (though I would prefer Obama). While I respect Clinton for everything she stands for I can’t help but feel like most of the people voting for her at this stage are doing so based on principle that she’s a woman which is a bit frustrating. I talked with with Adam on this issue which was more the case at his caucus and commented that at least we are quite a bit more in touch with who we’re voting for here. The majority of the country still votes based on instinct and for such superficial (in my opinion) reasons.
Go Obama!
Unproductivity
February 3, 2008
Every once in a while a day goes by where things pile up and up and then the day comes to a close without having felt the slightest bit of productivity. I had one of those days today.
It started with a late start and lingering end to an outing I went on yesterday which finished with me getting home mid-afternoon with little energy from lack of sleep. I spent a short amount of time catching up on reading, watched a little of the Super Bowl, grabbed dinner, had my morning shower (late), decided to nap but failed, had an unsuccessful coffee run, then had a meeting where I was completely belligerent. I’ll stop my rant of daily activities here.
There is a distinct mental state that tends to fall into place following lack of sleep, broken eating schedules, malnutrition (including over-caffination), and the general feeling of being unaccomplished. When in this mental state any and every event that takes place, if not initiated personally, feels completely awkward no matter what it is. Not only does my brain move slow like molasses, but what comes out of each thinking spurt seems incomplete and off-topic. It’s quite a frustrating place to be.
The obvious solution is to do a “reset”. If I get back on a proper sleep schedule, eat normal again, and start to conquer small tasks it should be easy to get back into the groove. And that’s just what I’ll do. I can’t be the only person to experience these completely frustrating and seemingly unfixable situations, am I? People say this builds up from stress and over-working but I really don’t feel like I’ve over-worked myself the last couple days — but then again, maybe my standards for over-working are skewed.
I do have to mention, though, that since quitting diet soda a few months ago these occurrances have diminished dramatically. I’ve also made a conscious effort to get back onto a semi-regular schedule to avoid these situations. Oh, and I’ve also just purchased a sweet new thinking aide.
FAIL
February 2, 2008
I love this new meme of people/cats/things failing that’s spreading throughout the web. On one side it feels childish and sometimes people go a little too far past what is funny to what is absolutely horrible but mostly it’s just plain awesome. I don’t think any of this would have been made possible without LOLCATs (and of course i can has cheezburger), so lets keep the credit where it’s due.
And now, thanks to the wonderful people of the internet, we have an entire blog dedicated to fail (also shipment of fail).
I request that someone start a meme or at least make some sort of visual LOL/FAIL concoction featuring our supreme deity the flying spaghetti monster.
Google helps boost the future of the social web
February 1, 2008
These are really exciting times. Until recently it’s all been small standards-backed movements to build an open base for the structured web to live off of but now big players are really taking things seriously and embracing all these wonderful standards. We have all the people behind the standards pushing as hard as they can with things like OpenID, XFN, microformats, the web standards movement in general, the diso project. But now just recently amazing things have happened. First just recently Yahoo! adopted OpenID and now Google has created an API for parsing the social graph.
This is amazing. I’m speechless. I’m stoked that all this is happening so quickly and can’t wait to see how things evolve.
I wish I was working on a project right now that could utilize this new Social Graph API by Google. It’s fun testing it out but I really want to see some concrete stuff built off of it!
I sure hope that Microsoft’s recent offer to buy Yahoo! doesn’t hurt this trend. Microsoft really sucks at helping push the industry in the right direction and with the situation being as it is, I predict Yahoo! will take Microsoft’s overly generous offer and get sucked into a black hole after the fact. As Gruber mentioned, if Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo! they would probably sell off all of their properties worth anything and use it as an opportunity to gobble up new users. It sure would be amusing if people revolted and went to Google if an acquisition takes place — that would sure screw over Microsoft — I might even celebrate.
That went off on a slight tangent. Anyways, I’m happy to be experiencing all of this. 
Skillbit, a Startup Weekend Seattle production
February 1, 2008
This last weekend I participated in an amazing event over in Fremont at the Adobe offices with 121 other Seattleites at Startup Weekend Seattle (of the greater movement aptly called Startup Weekend). We started with nothing but human capital at 6pm Friday the 25th and left with a beta product live at 9pm Sunday the 27th after 51 hours of fun and excitement with amazing people. The product we created is skillbit™, a knowledge discovery application that provides you with the tools necessary to unlock the hidden potential of your team. I’ll describe more further down.
My general opinion of the event as a whole is that it was not only an amazing opportunity to start up a company and leave with [a small amount of] equity in another company, but I had an absolutely amazing time working and socializing with a slew of amazing people with great ideas and perspectives and that I couldn’t have wished for anything more from such an event. The Seattle techie, entrepreneurial crowd is a wonderful group. It was a great opportunity and a pleasure to be able to work with not only my close peers at the event but to spend time associated with such an amazingly skilled, bright, and diverse crowd. Andrew Hyde did an amazing job putting on the event and all of the team leads involved (Chris, Cassie, our glue man Matt, and the others whom I am not aware who was a lead) really made this event a huge success.
Startup Weekend as an event
As a networking event it couldn’t have been more valuable. Other networking and technically minded gatherings around the area all have one dynamic in common — they are social gatherings. None other, though, actually places you in an environment (except for maybe training events) where you actually have a chance to build working relationships with people. That, my friends, is priceless. It’s near impossible to accurately evaluate the workability of a person through conversation. But with a real company with real motivation to work for a shared goal not only is there a natural reason to meet and make relationships with a great number of people, but you actually get to know people.
As a startup and company generation platform I think that it’s a great idea that will sustain itself over time. The investment to put on such an event is (what I would imagine) fairly low and not only do you provide a networking event worth it’s price in gold but the investment put in by the majority of participants is only a weekend letting them leave with easily more than .5% of a company. The risk is only that of a weekend and the potential gain is so high. That being said, there obviously still needs to be people to carry on the projects which is why a core team is elected to continue with the project, but that’s only a fraction of the people involved. These events could even be held more frequently than they currently are and serve as an extremely lucrative business.
Seattle rocked the adobe
Our startup weekend went quite well. We ended up deciding to pursue an idea of a sort of ride sharing/carpooling website the first night but then bagging it a couple hours in due to new information on the competitive landscape and feasibility of the business taking off. After re-evaluating, we ended up with what is now called skillbit.
You work with incredible, talented people. Do you know the knowledge, skills, tools, and resources your people have?
Use skillbit™!
skillbit is a knowledge discovery application that provides you with the tools necessary to unlock the hidden potential of your Team!Use skillbit to address your talent and skill sharing needs. skillbit captures the knowledge, talent, and skills of your Team, enabling you to discover quickly the depth and breadth of your Team. Access this information in a flexible, fun way with skillbit!
Throughout the event a few people wrote wonderful accounts of what was happening on our startup weekend seattle blog and since several people have written about their experience as well as a new blog was started to collect thoughts, tips, and tricks — a few to note: Andrew, An, Anthony, the skillbit flickr group. I recommend taking checking those out but of course, go check out skillbit or if you’re feeling adventurous sign up and test the private-ish beta.
Some press (check out those awesome FAQ’s including several written by yours truly) has been written including an entry by our own local seattle venture blogger John Cook. We even had a King 5 news crew come during the event. Here’s the bit:
Go on! Get your skillbit on!
Random thing I found interesting was how close our name is similar to the immediately previous Startup Weekend Atlanta’s product.