Geoff: What have I accomplished? What have I given back to the world?
Lisa: You’ve started a company and dated a hot girl.
Geoff: Dating a hot girl isn’t giving back. That’s totally selfish.
Hopefully by the time I have another cool looking binary birthday, I’ll have a lot more to say…
In Unix, everything is a file. On MySpace, apparently, everything is a profile, such as the new Post to MySpace feature (similar to Facebook’s). That’s not the only thing that’s a profile…
I’ve stopped writing book reports on this blog, partly because I’ve been reading more books in parallel (that is, never finishing them), and partly because doing so is really dorky. However, I will share that I recently read William K. Zinsser’s On Writing Well, a guide to writing non-fiction. It serves as a shining example of the form and gives concrete tips to improve your writing, such as bracketing superfluous words and then killing them remorselessly. I read it so that I can improve my email and blog writing, but I don’t guarantee any instant results to you, dear reader.
The author stresses writing simply and humanly, with hilarious examples to the contrary. His attack on unnecessarily complicated airline-speak bears an uncanny resemblance to the George Carlin routine. Carlin and Zinsser make the same point: people will complicate their words in order to sound important. Don’t do it. I’ll add one thing: the smartest people I’ve ever known have a way of communicating complex things in simple, elegant ways. Doing that demonstrates true understanding of the topic at hand.
Using complicated language can also backfire and make you look stupid. The country is big and we deal with people in different time zones. Specifying a time zone for a meeting or a call is often necessary, and people will sometimes use abbreviations like this: Thursday, February 14th at 1PM EDT/10 AM PDT. It looks really official, but it’s wrong because PDT means daylight time. There’s no reason to use an abbreviation. It’s hard to read and understand, and in this case, it’s confusing.
Make it easy and say Pacific time. If a place is special, like Arizona, say Arizona time.
And to think I started this post trying not to be dorky….
I know you’ve been waiting for my next post here. I’ve even felt moderately guilty for not updating this blog. I do have an excuse, though. Web APIs have been popping up everywhere, with the Facebook API getting most of the limelight last year. (See Programmable Web for an excellent summary of all the APIs.) I have a lot to keep me busy these days, with my MySpace Developer account and Amazon SimpleDB account approved last Wednesday! Check back for updates…
The fine folks at Mashup Awards picked Find the Landmark as their Mashup of the Day! Thanks, MashupAwards Judging Panel!
TechCrunch has covered our funding. For you following at home, our investors George Bell and Bob Davis are the old CEOs of Excite and Lycos respectively. Bob also holds the world record for taking a company public fastest, at 10 months.
And it looks pretty good to me. Welcome to Going, Chicago!
Next stop, LA.
It’s been nearly a decade. I’ve carried this burden long enough. It is time for the world to know.
As most of my longtime readers know, my first job was at Knowledge Adventure, Glendale CA, makers of smash hit children’s educational software such as Jumpstart 1st Grade, followed by a staggering number of sequels and prequels. If we could have made a Jumpstart Fetus, we would have. Kids and parents loved KA’s stuff.
I was in the far cooler and less profitable edutainment department. We made puzzle games, including the critically acclaimed Dr. Brain Action Reaction, the first first person 3d action puzzle multiplayer internet game for kids. I did the AI and multiplayer stuff, and maybe a trampoline or two.
Well, the multiplayer aspect opened up the possibility of exposing players to the language of other players, which of course may not be the cleanest or most well-meaning, and the last thing we wanted was to debate free speech with our customers. Enter the bad-word filter. Enter the list of bad words to filter. That was a fun project in itself. You get to pick the brains of smart, creative people for everything they consider offensive. To protect the children!
Simple enough to implement, but as packaged consumer software, we needed to ship the product with the list, or to be exact, two files containing slightly different types of words. We didn’t want to put it into the executable, so we just stuck them into two files in the install tree. I suggested encrypting them or at least rot-13′ing them, but my lead programmer said that would be too much work. I should have just done it and saved him the work of thinking about how much work it would have been. The other programmer on the team, a Mac guy (and this was when Macs weren’t cool) suggested obfuscating the filenames as Windows-esque curiosities that nobody would touch for fear of breaking something. His suggestions were the best.
If you install Dr. Brain Action Reaction, you’ll find two files, SysCom and WinTrans in the install tree. You can open them in your favorite text editor and see what the best (worst) minds of KA in 1999 came up with. To protect the children!
It always cracks me up. I couldn’t keep myself from laughing as I typed the two filenames above.
The biggest API since Google Maps (in my humble opinion, of course), Facebook’s API promises to open up our online social interaction to the best the web has to offer. Like, iLike (nice Youtube video search built-in), Lolcats (stupid app, but LOL!), and of course, Going.
Get on Facebook and Get Going!