I'm a huge lost fan. In fact, Diana and I are both such fans that we recently went through all the season 1 dvds from NetFlix. We had seen most of them, but wanted to ensure that we didn't miss one minute of any episode.
Because I'm such a fan, I can't wait for ABC's new online game about Lost. (For more background reading, see gizmodo's article on this type of thing.)
If the content of the TV show is any indication, this game promises to be pretty cool. Of course, I probably won't have to play the game myself... instead I'll just find someone who devotes all his/her waking hours to playing it and blogging about the meaning of various nuances in the TV show. But, knowing me, I'm sure I'll play for a while.
One odd thing about the article.... it doesn't say what the site is. So, I don't know where to go to play along... maybe I'll have to watch the 3 May episode closely to find out.
Anyway, kudos to ABC for this kind of thing. I totally dig the idea that "online" stuff can match and extend "offline" stuff.
After nearly 6 years working at Yahoo, I decided to resign. I'm sure your first question is: WHY?
No, it wasn't because of the people. In fact, I love the people I worked with. And, no, it wasn't because of the projects that I was working on. I like the stuff I was doing, and the people on my team, and the challenges we faced. And no, it wasn't because I wanted more money. And, no, I wasn't fired nor did I leave in disgrace. In fact, I would highly recommend Yahoo as an employer to anyone who is interested. The people are fantastic, smart, and motivated (at least the overwhelming majority are motivated). The work is challenging and interesting. The benefits are superb.
So why did I resign?
Mostly because of my new daughter. At 5 months old, she's the coolest thing since sliced bread for me. And I couldn't bear the thought that I might miss her first crawl, first word, first _fill_in_any_other_thing_ because I had to attend some meeting about a project which, while interesting, was a hundred billion times less cool than my daughter. And, let's be honest, we can all find more meetings with more bug reports, launch checklists, PRD reviews, etc. I can not relive my daughter's first words. It would really crush me if I missed any of her major milestones for work.
Of course, this decision does leave me in a bit of a weird position. Neither Diana nor I work, but we have a 5 month old daughter and a mortgage payment. Not exactly the financial analyst's dream. But we have enough to do this for quite a while (thanks to Diana's spectacular ability at saving and budgeting).
Your next question is probably: What the hell are you doing now? Well, my last day at Yahoo! was 7 April. Since then, I've slept more, read more, actually done all my work for business school, and started on the enormous home project list. No, it's nothing really huge or dramatic, but I feel really good about it. I gave myself 2 full weeks of not thinking about work or work-related things. So for now, I'm just enjoying myself and my free time.
In the past week and a half, I've spent more time rolling around on the floor with my daughter than I ever have... and it's been everything and more than I dreamt. It's hard to describe if you haven't had a kid, and if you have, then you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Anyways, I plan to blog a heck of a lot more often now that my schedule is truly flexible. I can't promise it will all be good, but I'll try :)
And, of course, if you have a good idea for a new business or want to play 18 holes on a random Thursday morning, let me know :D
I read this and laughed out loud. It made me think of Rick and Geoff. Enjoy it!
I need to buy some new hardware for home use. Specifically, I need to get more storage space (for things like mp3s and miscellaneous files) and I need to start backing up my computers. I'd guess that I need at least 250 GB storage. I also have both a Mac and 2 winxp machines to backup. So the question is: what should I get?
After investigating, I think there are 2 general options for more storage:
As I understand it, an external drive is just a hard drive that's connected to one of my existing computers which offers tons more storage. The upside of this is that it's pretty easy to setup (just plug in a external hd to my desktop and start saving). Moreover, these are fairly inexpensive, like 300 GB Maxtor for around $250. The downside is that it's just a hard drive connected to my existing desktop - which means that it's only available if my desktop is running, it's only as fast as the network+the wire transfer time (from the desktop to the harddrive). (Usually I wouldn't worry about the second one, except my desktop is a bit old and I don't think it has USB2.0 or firewire available on the motherboard.)
On the other hand, NAS provides even greater storage capacity. But the price seems to be higher. For example, the Buffalo TeraStation which can handle 1 TB of storage costs $800. The upside of most NAS as far as I can tell is that they expand much more easily, the transfer time is limited to the network transfer time only.
I suppose a third option would be to rebuild an older desktop with some monster set of internal drives and just use that as the backup.
Of course, all of these options only solve the storage issue and not the backup issue - which would probably require some software or some rsync magic.
Any suggestions on what to get for storage or backup software?