I was a bit anxious about this one having slowly lost touch with my musical side, but now I’m revived. The new mixtape is ready and it’s about time. In fact, it’s just in time for my birthday (today)! And halloween! Enjoy.

Run Time: 41 minutes, 41 seconds

DOWNLOAD: (320kbps MP3, 95.41MB)

• Poorleno Mixtape #9 MP3

Hey all. Realizing I’ve all but abandoned this blog, I figured I’d make a note about what I’m up to these days.

Since finishing school last April, I’ve spent most of my time focusing working on Mavenry’s product which we’ve now finally deployed our first version on a production server and are beginning to send out logins to people we’ve been in talks with during development. It’s an exciting time for the product and for us to get people using what we’ve put our blood, sweat and tears into for so long.

Otherwise I’ve been doing freelance and contract web development off and on. At this point I’m pretty much exclusively working with Ruby and Rails both of which I’m dearly enamored with. I’ve done some smaller projects, worked for a few months with a past employer Practice Partner, done some fun work building an interface between an ecommerce app and vending machines (Ruby and Rails), and am currently working with a local startup HelpHive where I’ll be developing for their Rails applications.

Life otherwise is great. I was sharing a house with 3 others near Green Lake for the past year until June when I moved back to the U District subletting with a friend from high school through next month. I’m not sure where I’ll end up in September, but it’ll sure be an adventure!

Day-to-day I’ve been hopping around between coffee shops most days working on my trusty laptop and trying to spend as much time as I can enjoying summer and friends. I’ve faded uncomfortably far from my music interests, but hopefully after my next move I’ll be able to craft a work environment where I can spend more time listening to new music from my collection instead of just for ambiance via cafe music or pandora like I’ve been doing lately.

A few months back I took a last minute trip to Las Vegas for RailsConf due to winning a raffle from Gary’s List for a free ticket to the conference. I had a great trip which in turn inspired me to hone my craft even more with Ruby and Rails and to do more traveling. So I found the perfect way to combine the two (thanks to the extremely generous Tobias Crawley whom I met at RailsConf) and will be taking a 11 day trip to Asheville, North Carolina late August where I’ll be joining a team of Ashevillians for a Rails Rumble project and then carpooling down to Nashville, Tennessee the following weekend to attend the Ruby Hoedown. My next trip will probably be down to the bay area to bum a place to sleep from a few people I know down there and to do some coffee shop laptoping during the week.

And now, randomly, some recent favorites:

• Tea (loose leaf)
• Peaches (the fruit)
• Rice “milk” (trying to reduce my cow milk consumption)
• Poached Eggs (my primary breakfast item these days)
• Bibio (the music artist)
• Sandals (for your feet)
• Using conditioner and shampoo separately (as opposed to the magical combination called Pert that I used to use)
• foursquare (the web service/iPhone app)
• Doodle Jump (the iPhone app)
• Porters (beer), though I’m still more a fan of IPAs
• Cafe Allegro (coffee shop in the U Dist, where I’m typing this from)

Who cares? I don’t. I bet if I asked everyone I had contact info for, only a few would prefer one or the other (though hopefully one in particular).

Why do sites like Flickr still offer both as an option? I consider myself more knowledgeable than most on the matter simply because I know what the two represent, let alone what the technical differences are. And that being so, it makes no sense to put both standards (if not different versions of each) in the auto-discovery tags, especially for big sites like Flickr and consumer blogging software like WordPress. Only a rare developer building an application might care, and even in that relatively rare case I could reasonably assume they would be willing to read some developer docs. For the rest of us, our feed readers could care less. So please stop confusing us.

This seems like a dying issue. And then I see it on sites like Flickr! Tisk tisk.

What do most people eat for breakfast? Correction: people is too broad to be conclusive of my situation so lets make that americans. And, while I can’t reasonably guess, I’d be curious how averages differ from healthy and/or successful people.

I am to believe purely based on observations and penetration on grocery store aisles that most americans usually eat cereal or oatmeal when at home, probably with a glass of milk or juice on the side.

That being said, time and time again I have been told that our breakfast meal should be high in protein — an ingredient, as far as I can tell, that is not not highlighted in what I assume most people eat here. Maybe I’m just out of touch with what people eat at home. A better sample should be what I see at public places, right?

This brings me to my observance of the most easily attainable on-the-go breakfast items I see at coffee shops/stands and markets — the overwhelmingly likely choice for the between home and office breakfast-goers. So, what do I see? Bagels, muffins, scones, and pastries. WHAT?! Why so bread heavy? I must not be telling the whole truth. No. That is pretty much all I see. On a rare occasion maybe a place has some fruit or a parfait, but like I said, that is rare. Is it purely the difficulty of storing and creating more meaningful/healthy foods? I’m not satisfied or convinced as to why we, as on-the-go breakfast eaters, don’t have better options.

As I’ve tried new and different options, I’ve come to what I consider my ideal breakfast: a sandwich composed of a wheat english muffin with pan grilled ham, and a fried egg; and on the side, a cup of orange juice and a multivitamin. I’m feelin’ good and ready for the day just thinking about it.

But my ideal breakfast rarely happens. If I’m really on top of things, I’ll have this maybe a week a month coinciding with a trip to Trader Joes to buy their delicious english muffins. Once the muffins are obtained, my one man food store must contain enough non-expired eggs (rare) and lunch meat to fill 6 breakfasts.

And so I just eat cereal or oatmeal (I can buy them in bulk, less frequently) or at a coffee shop. Put another way, I eat grain, oats, and bread for breakfast and it is never satisfying or energizing.

It’s a shame. It seems like an obvious, untapped market, doesn’t it?

Wow, it has been long time since I posted a Poorleno Mixtape (or any blog posts for that matter). With a refreshed design and a combining of my blog, mixtapes, and radio archives, lets not let that time waste any longer. Here you go!

Run Time: 42 minutes, 25 seconds

DOWNLOAD: (V0 MP3, 73.2MB)

• Poorleno Mixtape #8 MP3

As per Dive Into Mark.

As zachhale

tarsi:~ zachhale$ uname -a
Darwin tarsi.lan 9.2.2 Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar  4 21:17:34 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

tarsi:~ zachhale$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
81 git
65 cd
46 nano
44 cap
34 ssh
31 ss
23 ls
20 scp
15 sudo
11 mate

As root

sh-3.2# history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
77 svn
44 ls
30 cd
18 pwd
11 sudo
10 nano
10 mate
10 cp
10 apachectl
7 mysql

Don't be afraid, join the meme!

• I forget how nice Seattle gets in the summer. Winter sure is a downer, but once it starts to get nice it gets nice.
• Diet drinks (or rather, the fake sugar replacements) are starting to scare me. I have almost completely cut diet sodas and drinks out of my diet.
• When out of shrimp, I can attest for imitation crab being a suitable replacement for the shrimp portion of shrimp cocktail.
• Does anybody actually buy pre-made cocktail sauce? Ketchup + Horseradish is not hard.
• I’m being patient until I get around to trying green tea + ginger ale. When I do get around to it, though, I’m not sure whether I should try it cold or warm. Heat up the soda or cool the tea?
• Lists are beautiful.

This is not a recent occurrence but Twitter is turning into quite a nice platform for getting unsuspecting users to learn about you and/or your company with very little effort.

Three easy steps to making me angry and confused for spending time to learn about your spammy self.

1. Get a Twitter profile
2. Post enough times throughout the day to make it look like you are somewhat legit (whether or not you are legit doesn’t matter)
3. Start maneuvering the public social graph on Twitter adding anyone and everyone you find that looks like they aren’t a friend hoarder like yourself and will give you the light of day to visit your profile, read a few tweets, and click on your link
4. … profit?

It seems a little bit petty to be complaining about this but I’m honestly unsure as to how to combat these people who follow me on Twitter and are obviously only doing so as an advertising mechanism. Some are legitimate, reasonable people with interesting lives and are only out there to find other interesting people to follow. Most, though, have a following-to-follower ratio of over 100-to-1 – obviously they are not showing much discression.

Twitter gives me a few options for these people: block or do nothing. Should I block them or just ignore it? I don’t actually care if they follow me, but it sure inflates my own following-to-follower ratio. I don’t want to come off as an ass and block someone legitimately interested in following me (though I don’t know why that would be the case, either).

Petty, I know. Yay social media marketing. :/

Several times now I have revisited my current setup for personal information management and whether or not I am comfortable storing private personal hyperlinks on the web. My concern with using online services is that when I store hyperlinks on wikis, messages, emails, etc. and click, the other site will see me in their referrer logs.

This isn’t an issue for most webmail services like Gmail because it is normal for these services to obfuscate urls beyond recognition making it impossible to identify any referrers. You see urls full of hashes and hard to recognize identifiers that are meaningless to anything but the application itself. I doubt keeping urls unidentifiable like that was a primary concern in the design of webmail systems but it does provide this obvious advantage.

The concern I have is with services like Backpack, Basecamp, or any hosted blog or wiki where you have a unique and easily identifiable url associated with your data. On hosted sites like the aforementioned Backpack and Basecamp, your account is identified by a chosen subdomain which is very likely easily identifiable to you personally or to your company/organization. For example, Startup Weekend uses the domain “startupweekend.grouphub.com” — obviously identifiable. On a personal domain like say for example “zachhale.com” if I were to set up a private wiki at “wiki.zachhale.com” and do everything necessary to protect it with a robots.txt and require http authentication, if I put create a link and click on it referring to another site they will see where I came from. Even if your domain name isn’t identifiable by name to you, there is still whois information that can be dug up and tracked back to you.

I’d rather not let people know what I’m doing in those private spaces. Maybe I have a list of blogs I admire and visit frequently or maybe it’s a corporate information system with links to competitors sites. In many cases I would rather not send information to those people identifying my visits with me or my company.

There are a few solutions that I can easily see:

• obfuscate your urls and use a domain that can’t be tracked back to you, or
• use some sort of proxy that will spoof or remove any referrer information from your requests.

Obfuscating completely is difficult to do and often nearly impossible to do, so the only other reasonable solution now is to set up some proxy. In researching it looks like there are a number of client browser extensions/plugins for spoofing referrers, but any client side hack is tedious to enforce, especially across a large organization or with multiple platforms in the mix. The other option is to manually redirect traffic through another domain, preferably not owned by you. I found one service called referhide.com that provides this solution. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be too hard to set up a redirection script either with javascript or through passing parameters through the url. Either way, though, you now have to either manually or programatically change all your links to go through that intermediary service — sounds like a pain.

What I’d like to see is something similar to robots.txt but for referrer links. It would be impossible to enforce by strictly trusting web servers to do the ignoring since people could choose to ignore such a file without question. The only real solution I could see is standardizing this into web browsers so you could trust that anybody using a compatible web browser would know that their referrer traffic is being properly dealt with and anonymity is preserved.

Any ideas? Am I missing something major here?

My degree audit officially shows all green “OK”s and the message “All requirements have been satisfied” appears at the top. Woohoo! It’s been a long journey and I’m finally done.

And it feels weird.

Part of it is because I have not sought any form of employment other than working full time on my startup, but I think most of what’s weird is that I feel like I can do anything now. I’ve felt like that for the last few years, but now it’s unconstrained by long-term academic requirements. Nothing is holding me back from pursuing whatever ambitions I want to and that feels very, very good.

I still don’t have income as of now, though. I’ve had extensive conversations recently about this and about my lifeline being provided by my parents while I figure out how to get some income rolling in through my company and projects, and the pressure is really hitting hard. I’m a bit conflicted about how I will ground myself fully at this point. Do I diversify and hope something catches? Do I focus completely on the one most important future revenue generator? Do I stop for a short while, grab some projects for some income, then come back to everything? There’s no right answer to this so I’m sort of testing the waters if you will over the next couple of weeks.

What I’m working on now

We have been working on Mavenry for the longest time now and I have learned a ton about starting a business and how important it is to start with solid, accurate assumptions and to build from the needs of the customers. It’s been a tedious journey but I couldn’t imagine not having gone through everything we’ve gone through so far. I’ve even picked up the know how to build sales projections, financial models, business plans, neural brand identity maps, you name it. Anyways, this humongous learning process has swayed our direction back and forth and back and forth but we’ve been chugging on an incredibly solid direction for the last few months that should prove our efforts worthwhile in due time. I’m excited and passionate about the direction we’re heading — it’s all about staying focused and taking one step at a time.

Towards the end of the quarter I threw up a simple (and full of bugs that need fixing) application Glitchee for sharing mp3s with each other in sort of a “running mixtape” idea. Now there are a few solid competitors that have literally launched within the last week and attack sort of similar issues with different approaches, but I’m still sure that what I envision is not solved by either of the new guys out there so I’ll keep on chugging as a side project. I don’t expect this project in how it’s designed to be any sort of income bringer but who knows, maybe it’ll fill out to be something worthwhile that people would jump on and use.

And other than that, I’m building a website with mini CMS for my mom’s real estate presence as well as working on a store/gallery and mini order fulfillment system for my dad’s photography business.

Going through phases

It constantly astounds me how much my perspective on life, learning, relationships, projects, etc. changes so drastically and often these days. I’m at a point where my patience is extremely low for wasting time that could be spent producing something. While during school when I had a lot of forced projects and tasks to complete it seemed more reasonable to spend a great deal of time reading, learning, and running over and over plans for this and that, I’m at a point where all of that just seems like such a waste of time. I realize I only feel that way having already experienced that phase, but it’s weird to switch to an entirely different set of ambitions for what I spend my time on. I want to make things. I want to produce actual applications and products that can get out there. I’m tired of reading for hours on end about things that don’t produce results. I have a need for making things happen.

Git!

Now that I got all of that out of my system, I’m beginning to drink the cool aid and am moving my projects over to using Git and specifically the new cool kid on the block github.