A long time ago, I blogged elsewhere about Flock’s shelf feature and how it made my life easier. The feature is a little drag-and-drop area where you can dump images and snippets from web pages for later use in blog posts (or, I suppose, just as reminders).  I never used it much for assembling blog posts, but as a quickie spot to take notes, it actually helped me out. When I just wanted to jot down a quick thought that I wasn’t ready to flesh out into a blog post yet, I’d add a note to the shelf. I found that doing this actually prompted me to blog more because it reduced friction; I felt like I could write a quick note without committing to trying to write a whole blog post just yet. Not too long after I developed this workflow, the shelf changed, and the ability to add a typed note was removed (you could only drag things).

This week, wanting to take some notes about a book I’ve been reading, I found myself missing the feature again. Now that we’ve released 1.0, I think the feature has probably reached something close to its final form, so I felt comfortable writing a little addon to include the functionality I wanted. It adds menu items under the Tools menu and to the main context (right-click) menu inviting you to create a note. Selecting the item pops up a simple two-field dialog box that includes the note text and an optional title (the first 30 characters of your note are used if you specify no title). This gets added to the shelf (we call it the web clipboard now, though), and you can get to it later when needed. The web clipboard doesn’t allow you to edit notes once you’ve added them, but you can otherwise use these notes as you would any other web clipboard item (blog them, stick them in folders, delete them, reorder them). You can enter HTML if inclined, and it’ll render in the preview and in blog posts, though if you do this and don’t specify a title, the item itself in the web clipboard sidebar gets some weird formatting.

So there. Friction-free note-taking right there in your browser. Hope somebody besides me finds this useful. This won’t work in Firefox, unfortunately, as Firefox doesn’t have the web clipboard feature.

Blogged with Flock

This weekend, I conquered my fear of the circular saw. I tried using two different saws to help cut lap joints for a compost bin I started work on. The first is a little battery-powered deal that’s light-weight and easy on the wrist but that loses juice pretty fast and won’t cut very many boards. When it wore out, I decided to try my dad’s old circular saw, which I’ve had for a couple of years now but have never tried using because it’s huge and old and seemed maybe a little dangerous. But I had 32 lap joints to cut and was darned if I was going to do it all the old-fashioned way (which after a couple of hours wrangling various tools I figured out would have been easier anyway, at least for the part I was using the circular saws for). So anyway, as I got my dad’s saw out, I took a minute to think about what I’d do if I happened to chop a finger off. I’ve seen on TV or read that you can transport small amputated appendages to the hospital for reattachment in milk (why milk and not just ice I’m not sure). But this actually represented something of a dilemma for me, as we have two sorts of milk these days, the cheap skim stuff that keeps me from cultivating big floppy man boobs and the 2% creamy organic stuff that we think is probably less likely to make Lennie bear children with extra limbs and radioactive teeth. Which milk should I stick my amputated (and as I pictured it, still twitching) finger in once I picked it up from where it lay partially buried in a drift of sawdust? When I was relating this train of thought to a coworker this afternoon, my dilemma deepened as I realized that breast milk represents a third option in our home, though not one as readily available for amputated appendage transport. I’m happy to report that I didn’t wind up having to make this difficult decision, having kept my fingers intact and having only one close call with the circular saw. Sadly, I’m still not sure which would have been the best option.

Just over four months ago, I finished Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and did a quick read of DeLillo’s Falling Man before taking on Pynchon’s latest, Against the Day. His very short The Crying of Lot 49 aside, this is the first of Pynchon’s book I’ve read in one go, if plodding through it over 4 months can really be considered a single go. I went through start to finish with no stamina-loss-related break, in any case. My slowness was the result primarily of a paucity of time to read for long at a stretch (that reality TV’s not gonna watch itself, you know). When you’re reading in 10- to 20-page increments, it’s hard to get through an 1,100 page book very quickly.

So, what did I think of it? I’m not sure. The first 700 or so pages were for the most part very engaging, and it’s the easiest long Pynchon I’ve read yet. Whereas GR was hard to follow a whole lot of the time, AtD was pretty manageable. The next 300 pages were harder to get through because the dominant plot line just wasn’t as interesting to me as some of the others. As Pynchon closes up the book (which he really does with more tidiness than I might have expected) in the last 85 or so pages, it’s a more fun read again, though not nearly as much so as earlier parts of the book. I guess I liked it well enough. Although it’s physically heavier, it didn’t feel as content-weighty to me as GR did. Something about it doesn’t seem as important to me as GR did, though I can’t articulate what the difference is or why GR has a feel of importance (maybe I’m swayed by its having won an award?). I’m sure my enjoyment/slogging ratio in AtD was higher than it was in GR, but GR I think is the better book.

One thing that really hit home for me during this read was a difference in the way I appreciate certain books. Some authors or books make me wish the whole time I’m reading them that I were able to go out and write long fiction. They inspire creativity in me. Steinbeck in his best books and Richard Powers in The Time of Our Singing make me feel this way. An author like Pynchon doesn’t. I appreciate the complexity in his books, but they don’t inspire me to want to do my own creation. Both sorts of appreciation are valuable to me; too much of the former would continuously highlight my personal creative deficiencies and make me feel like crap all the time.

I’ve been pushing really hard for the last week or so to get through to the end of AtD because I’m traveling a week from today and didn’t want to have to carry that brick around with me the whole time. Now I’m off to do what I predict will be reading of a lighter style in Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish and Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. I’m also picking through Best American Nonfiction for 2007 (edited by David Foster Wallace, one of my faves). From there who knows? Maybe the book-length study of Wallace’s Infinite Jest that should arrive in 30 days or maybe another reread of the subject of that study. Maybe back for a second shot at Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. Zadie Smith and Gass are on my wish list, so maybe they’ll round out my year. Or more likely I’ll punctuate hours and hours of TV with the occasional batch of poems or shorter fiction. Recommendations always welcome.

For nearly three years now, I’ve worked for a company called Flock. For nearly three years, we’ve been working toward releasing a 1.0 version of our product. And yesterday, we finally did it, amid much less fanfare than I might have expected (not even a company blog post). Starting as far back as version 0.5 just under two years ago, I’ve been using Flock as my primary web browser (that’s what we make, a web browser built on the same platform that drives Firefox), so I’ve been around to see all the changes the product has gone through.

Our first public beta was released to much hype with subsequent fizzle. It had a neat skin, a photo viewer/uploader, a rudimentary blog authoring tool, and something we called the shelf, and that was it, besides the basic browser functions. Although we had many early enthusiasts (some of whom are still with us), reactions tended to be along the lines of “this is what the hubbub is all about?”

In June 2006, we released version 0.7 of the browser and saw lots of downloads and a lot of press (I worked 20-hour days for a week to keep the new web site from dying under the strain of our traffic). We were thinking at the time that we’d have a 1.0 version by the end of the year, but change was in the air, and after some executive turnover, the end of the year had come and we didn’t have a 1.0. In the first couple of months of this year, I feel like we really hit our stride and started executing. We pushed a 0.9 version with subsequent updates that got tolerable reviews, and our 1.0 beta releases over the past few weeks have been met with the customary skepticism, but for the first time, a lot of that skepticism is beginning to turn over. People are posting that though they found our product either not compelling or too buggy in the past, they’re loving it now. And plenty of newcomers are saying that they’re addicted.

I’m going to do a little sidebar here on the social web. I’ve always been pretty cold to it. What need do I have to send to Twitter every half hour an update about what I’m doing, or to read in real-time that my social-web-addicted buddies are going out for coffee or sitting through a dull meeting? Do I really want to read another “20 Questions” type post on MySpace? Basically, I don’t often have time or the compulsion to fool around on social networking sites. I spend my day working on the computer and so don’t typically like to spend much time playing on it. A year or so ago, I signed up with MySpace and Facebook basically because my work compelled me to. It was another way for Flock employees to consume our own dogfood, so to speak, and to network with users of these sites who were interested in Flock. But there wasn’t much personal value to me in signing up on these sites. I had a profile but I didn’t use the sites with any regularity.

The latest version of Flock has changed this because it brings the social web to me. The nifty services sidebar notifies me when I have new messages or pokes in Facebook, and it lets me drag content from the web to friends’ avatars to share it with them. I can find individual friends within my network more easily than by using Facebook itself because I can type part of a name in a textbox embedded in my browser to filter my friend list. I can see updated statuses easily, and an icon lights up for friends who have uploaded new media. When I click a person’s media icon, a media bar appears and is populated with thumbnails of their media that I can scan at a glance, clicking through to actually view only the things that interest me. Probably the best thing is that Flock tells me when there are updates so that I engage only when I have a good reason to rather than having to remember and bother to visit Facebook to look for updates. Since I’ve been using Flock 1.0, I’ve been engaging with people in my network, sending messages I wouldn’t have sent and viewing photos I wouldn’t have bothered to view. Flock 1.0 for me is like the Reader’s Digest of the social web. I’d never go out of my way to read a full-length bio of Meredith Baxter-Birney, but if I’m sitting on the can and have read all the jokes in my Reader’s Digest, I might thumb through the RD condensed interview with her, and I might even enjoy it a little.

That’s the main thing that differentiates Flock 1.0 from previous versions for me. I’ve long been a fan of the built-in feed aggregation, and it was Flock’s Flickr uploader (which also works with Piczo, Photobucket, and I believe Facebook) that prompted me a year ago to buy a Flickr Pro account. It previously hadn’t been worthwhile because, as a Linux user, I had no painless way of uploading photos in bulk. Flock also has built-in del.icio.us integration, the aforementioned shelf (now called the web clipboard, basically a little drag/drop area that lets you store dragged items for later use in blog posts), the blog editor, and all the goodness that comes with Firefox 2.0’s underlying engine.

I’m an employee of the company, of course, and so I have a vested interest in our success. But I really really do like the product and would use it for the built-in feed reader even if I weren’t an employee. (I’m not only the president of the hair club for men…) I suspect that there are plenty of people for whom Flock provides no benefit that Firefox doesn’t. If you don’t upload photos or read news feeds or belong to social networks, Flock’s probably not for you unless you just think it looks pretty. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for my dad, but I probably would for my sister and most of my friends. If you do do any of those things, why not give Flock a shot and let me (or our talented support staff) know what you think?

Lennie was born on June 24, less than two weeks before July 4. As happens with new parents, we hadn’t been sleeping very well, and though we expected your standard whistley firecrackers in our neighborhood, some neighborhood kids had more in store. Sometime late on the night of the 4th, we began to hear great reverberating booming sounds issuing from the cul-de-sac a few doors down. As in our windows rattled. There was definitely no ignoring these sounds, and as we had finally gotten Lennie to sleep, it was time for us to rest some. I angrily tossed on some clothes and stomped down to the cul-de-sac to see what was going on, and the son of my retired-military neighbor began hastily packing up whatever gear he and his buddy had been using. I confronted them and asked if they were making all the racket, and they denied it, looking rather panicked. I suppose I probably did come off as a little deranged. I glared at them and told them that if I heard the noises again, I’d — I’m a little embarrassed at both the fact and the wording of this statement — “call the law.” Then I stomped back to my house and got back in bed and probably was awakened shortly by my crying child. We later reflected on the incident and giggled over my phrasing and the picture I must have made, all but shaking my fist at the good-for-nothing whippersnappers who had robbed me of my sleep. That, over three years ago, was the first sure sign for me that I was beginning to show some age.

Fast forward to this evening for sign number two. Since before we had Lennie, we’ve done Halloween at our friends Dave and Karen’s neighborhood. The neighborhood we moved into last November has its own big Halloween bash, though, and we wanted to participate in that this year, as we’re trying to do better about letting Lennie out of the basement during daylight hours so that she can interact with neighborhood kids near her age. So our neighborhood has a cookout for Halloween, and everybody runs around with their kids for a while and hands out candy for a while and eats hot dogs at some point, and it’s all very hectic and disorganized, which is fitting for a holiday like this. With two small children and with three mouths to get fed, we had at some point to leave our Halloween candy unattended, which seemed safe enough from where we sat in the dark outside our next-door neighbor’s house. Oh, we figured there’d be some overzealous kids who’d take more than two or three pieces of candy, but the abuse we discovered after dark was really shocking.

At one point, I went over to check our candy level and found some teenagers sifting through the bowl to find the good stuff, which they were taking liberal helpings of. They scattered as I approached. Even after this pilfering, the bowl was nearly full, and full of good stuff (it hadn’t been too long since we had set some more out). Satisfied that we weren’t going to be short-changing the neighborhood kids, I went back over to eat another hot dog. A few minutes later, we packed up to bring Lennie home for bed, and as we approached, I saw a couple more teenagers hovering around our bowl. I could see in silhouette that they were each taking multiple great big handfuls of candy. I made some noise as we approached and they scattered, and I couldn’t help saying something snide to the effect of “try to leave some candy for the little kids” as I passed. Even having witnessed the greed in silhouette, I thought surely there would be some good candy left to hand out to honest trick-or-treaters, but the bowl was empty save for a few cheapo suckers.

Later, I was stewing over this a bit and found myself thinking things like “what could you possibly do with all that candy anyway,” for surely even as a teenager with unfetterable desires, I would have known that double-handfuls of candy times a few dozen houses would be more than I could be up to glutting myself on in any reasonable amount of time. And from this bit of retrospection, I thought about greed generally and supposed to myself that perhaps part of growing up was learning to balance greed vs. what’s reasonable (though I think this is probably flawed, as there are plenty of grown-ups who can’t seem to do this). And from there I got to thinking about it in terms of empathy and how maybe that was the actual defining characteristic of maturation, for while I was a little personally miffed that there weren’t a couple of sleeves of Whoppers and a Reese’s cup or two left over for me to enjoy, what really bothered me was the fact that any more trick-or-treaters I had to face for the evening would get the filler candy because a bunch of teenagers couldn’t see far enough past their own desires to understand that they’d really be as happy with 5 pieces of my candy as with two dozen at no cost to the pleasure of little kids who would come behind them.

There was no shaking of fists, but I can’t help seeing this series of thought processes as sign number two that I’m getting old. In fact, I wonder if becoming introspective about the nature of greed and maturity isn’t itself a sign of maturity into a different phase of adulthood. Surely sleep deprivation had something to do with my previous fist-shaking, but perhaps a certain general hot-headedness was at play as well; I was assuredly more hot-headed about other things when I was a slightly younger adult. Of course, the most famous of fist-shakers are the real old-timers, and if my brief history to date as an old-timer in training is any indication, I’ll be a righteous fist-shaker indeed. This is fitting enough if the old cliche about starting and ending life in similar states of mind and body is true. As I was born and will die incontinent and toothless, it appears that the beginning and end of my adult life may be book-ended by mirrored behaviors as well.

Well, Finn is an eater now. About a month ago, I wrote that he’d nibble on a carrot if one was offered, but at the time, he still wasn’t very much into eating spooned food. The last couple of weeks have seen a lot of progress on that front. At first, I could jam a spoon of rice cereal into his mouth and he’d sort of gag but keep most of it down. This past weekend, he really turned a corner and started opening up his little bird mouth and even moving his head (like a cobra?) to get to the disgusting purees I offered. So far, his favorites are brown rice with peas (shudder) and sweet potatoes. He’ll eat a medium jar of the former in two meals, which still doesn’t represent too hearty an appetite, but it’s a big step forward. We also have these barley teething biscuits that are, post-teething, the nastiest thing I’ve ever voluntarily touched. They dissolve pretty quickly into a light brown sludge that coats his chest and hands. I’m not terribly squeamish, but even I wince a little to pick one of these slimy things up for him when he drops it. Once we’re through this box, I think we’re switching to Zwieback toast.

Finn is also a full-on crawler now. Mleeka and others wanted to allow that he was crawling long before I would accept his movements as crawling (I mean, c’mon, wallowing and spinning around on your butt to get to things within a 3-foot radius is impressive for a little tyke, but crawling it ain’t). Finally, a couple of weeks ago, he started doing real crawling, and now he gets around without any trouble, often making a bee-line for the cat’s water dish, which he delights in turning over. He also pulls himself up on things and can stand up assisted. This weekend, he woke up and crawled out of our bed and fell to the floor (which is a 3-foot-plus drop). We installed a gate at the top of our stairs and are trying to decide now what to do about his out-of-bed crawling, whether we can think up some sort of preventive measures or whether to see how long it takes him to learn a valuable lesson on his own about depth perception and exploring a bit more carefully.

I forget how it came up, but Mleeka was telling me the other day that she was trying to explain to an inquisitive neighbor what it is I do for a living. She knows I do computer stuff and that it’s most often web-related or system-admin-related, but these are still pretty amorphous things to somebody who doesn’t actually perform the tasks they entail. While raking leaves today, I was thinking about how I might have answered the question, which is a hard one for me to answer in a way that would be very meaningful to non-developers.

In a nut-shell, I call myself a web and analytics programmer, though I devote a lot of time to systems administration as well. The web part is fairly easy to explain. If you look at my company’s web site, you’re looking at my work. I don’t make the pretty pictures that compose the web site, but I take care of the parts that make it behave as it does, from sending emails to letting you post to the forums to displaying various types of content. I’m like the mechanic for the web site.

The analytics part I think can be a little harder to capture. At a very high level, I help facilitate the collection of statistics about our product and our web sites. At a lower level, I try to help coalesce these bits of data into meaningful, actionable numbers. For example, if we know that we have X users and Y monetizable actions performed in the product daily, then we can track Y divided by X on a daily basis and watch the curve to see what kind of money we’re making per user per day on average. If a given monetizable action begins to trend flat or downward, we might consider trying to make it easier to use the feature so that we make more money off of it.

The thing I’ve learned over the last year or so is that as you get more and more data, it gets really hard to do anything useful with it on demand. Imagine that each day, 100,000 users’ products phone home to check for a product update (I’m just making that number up). You know then that you have 100,000 users per day. If you want to track this over time, it only takes 10 days before you’ve got a million pieces of data to try to extract something meaningful out of. If you’re tracking more than one piece of data per user, your data volume increases at an alarming rate as your user base grows. The more data you have, typically the longer it takes to cull through it. And yet you have executives trying to make decisions based on this data who don’t want to sit and wait a long time for reports to run. The trick is to aggregate the data as it comes in, and as I was raking leaves this morning, I came up with what I think is a useful way of explaining how scale affects the ability to report and how aggregation helps. It’s easy to accept propositions about scale and aggregation abstractly, but concrete examples are often useful.

So imagine that you’re tasked with counting leaves. Further, imagine that on any given day, you might be tasked with reporting how many leaves there had been on some past day. Or more specifically, how many red leaves vs. yellow vs. orange. If you recount every time somebody asks you, it’ll take more time than is reasonable. The first step naturally would be to group your leaves by day (grant that this is physically possible). So on Monday, you count all the leaves and put them in a pile with a sign stuck in the ground that says “Monday: 45,031 leaves.” On Tuesday, you do the same for any other leaves that have fallen, and so on. On Friday, if somebody wants to know how many leaves you raked on Monday, you just look at the sign and tell them rather than re-counting. But what about leaf color? Well, you do the same thing, but you make a Monday pile for red leaves, a Monday pile for yellow, and a Monday pile for orange, each with a sign noting how many leaves of each color for that day. Then you add the sums and post a sign with the total for all colors for the day. If you do this as you go, then you can very quickly get back to the counts for any given day and report without having to recount. The general idea is that it’s much easier to add sums than it is to recount. The tricky part is defining in advance what sorts of information you want to know about your leaves before you ever do the counting; else you have to recount everything for all time, sorting into different piles to get counts per organizational criterion.

My sleep is seldom affected by being one of a few people at my company who spends part of his time doing system administration, but this week has been a sure exception. We moved our whole public server infrastructure to a new section of our data center (complete with new IP addresses and routing), implemented load balancing of two separate clusters of web front-end machines, migrated two database servers to new hardware, and set up database replication for our web-facing databases. And we did it in sort of a last-minute, pre-product-launch scramble with what shoestring planning we could cobble together, while working on other high-priority projects and with very limited down time and, as far as I can tell, very little in the way of experience among our staff with implementing any of these things in a production environment. I’m not sure it could have gone more smoothly had we planned it for three months. It’s inexplicable, really. Of course, helping to make all this happen necessitated my putting in long hours over the weekend and waking up at times like 1:00 a.m. or 4:30 a.m. before or after an otherwise full workday to minimize the impact of down time. We coordinated this with sysadmins in Germany, California, and Tennessee and a data center in Texas. With my dad coming into town this weekend and a pumpkin-carving planned for tonight, I aim to take off around lunchtime (having started work at 4:30 this morning after staying up late to watch the Red Sox take the second game of the World Series) unless somebody threatens to fire me for doing so.

A brief conversation I had with Lennie while going to the drive-through ATM today:

Lennie: Daddy, the bank is sort of like our house.

Me: How’s that?

Lennie: Well, it has bricks like our house.

Me: Do you think it has beds like our house?

Lennie: Yes, probably so.

Me: Do you think the money sleeps in the beds?

Lennie: No, money does not have mouths or eyes, so it does not sleep in beds.

This year, I went to the Knoxville Brewer’s Jam for the first time in my nearly nine years in Knoxville (this was its 13th year). I can’t help calling it the beerfest, thanks to that movie I didn’t have an adequate pain threshold to watch. I’m usually too cheap to spring $25 to go drink beer, my general philosophy being that I could get a lot more beer to drink in the comfort of my own home for $25 than I’d get milling about like a cow with a bunch of other drunken cows for the same price. And all in all, I think my instinct has been more or less right, except that you can find beers at this event that you won’t find on a daily basis, and I’m less likely to see a guy in lederhosen in my house unless I’ve drunk really entirely too much beer and chased it with some hallucinogens.

I was on a mission today to try stout beers, and I was really disappointed that there weren’t more. I’ve been turned on lately to the Highland Brewery’s oatmeal porter, which I can get at my local Kroger, and I had high hopes for their stout, but they didn’t bring any. I had their Gaelic ale instead, and it was good but was no stout. I was delighted to find that Rogue Ales had a booth, and I had two glasses of their Shakespeare Stout (which I had previously had and really liked at Barley’s here in Knoxville), but I was disappointed that they didn’t have any of their Chocolate Stout, which would have been a new one to me. Probably my most memorable beer of the day was the Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery’s milk stout, which is brewed with highly toasted hops and lactose, which gives the beer a slightly milky smell (unless my olfactory sense was tricked by my reading the blurb) and a very slight sweetness that balances the toasted hops very nicely (that’s how Dave put it, at least, and it sounded about right to me). I liked this one enough that I wrote the brewer a quick note when I got home.

I tried a number of pale ales and IPAs and one ESB, and I was generally pretty cold to them. Some were decent, but a number of them had a flatness to them that just made them not very interesting to me.

Even with pre-purchased tickets, we had to wait in a 45-minute line to get into the event, and though I didn’t have to wait in line for my first beer, lines got harder to manage as more people arrived and especially as brewers started running out of beer and the choices narrowed. After about three hours, it became unpleasant to weave through the crowd and stand in line with increasingly glazed-eyed people jockeying for positions in the decreasingly available queues. I’m glad I went, and I enjoyed it (in spite of a near-altercation in the porta-potty line the end result of which was my basically sprinting to get to the john before a guy in what can properly be called nothing other than a non-event-sanctioned stealth line got there, enough to his chagrin that I emerged from the potty prepared thankfully in vain both to receive and administer a punch, my alternative after negotiating the 20-minute bathroom line being to stand there a grown man and piss my corduroy pants, which dire straits made running to the potty no small feat, let me tell you). Chances are good that I’ll go again. But honestly, I’d probably rather spend $25 on micro-brews and invite a few friends to bring $25 worth of microbrews apiece over and sit in the comfort of my own home to try them out.

Tags: beer