The High Order Bit

I am a big fan of Easter Eggs. The kind I leave for myself and don’t find for months, or sometimes years. My natural tendency is to pack things away in the smallest of corners and never think once about throwing something out - drives Carrie a bit nuts with physical things — and if you still think I’m referring to the eggs you eat, you’re probably thinking that maybe you don’t want to come visit my house. But of course I’m referring to euphemistic easter egg. The favorite guitar pick left in a coat pocket. The photos from Phoenix, AZ squirreled away in some random cupboard. And today, this file, simply named “READ.rtf” buried in my mini’s hard drive. Every few months or so, I come across this file, and every so often I actually am curious enough to open it. And every time I’m glad I did - it slays me everytime…it’s contents read:

Walt Whitman

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

It avails not, time nor place–distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d…

————–
I’m overall still very happy with the move to London - but at this moment, right now, I miss NYC. I feel like I’m in high school again with a crush on two different girls.

Ouch - I was just schooled by a project manager - it happens sometimes. Couldn’t find a search module for Blogger - he suggested I just look at the code in the header bar for a blog that had the Blogger header bar active. Doh - I was clearly over-thinking things. Just create a search field input box, name it “q” and send the action of the form to your blog’s url/search - and example result would be like this:
http://www.belikeminded.com/search?q=priority

If you’re really lazy, just hit this:

There you go! Happy Blogger Search!

Ha - just noticed, I can track where I’ve been by looking at my Mac’s memory of wireless networks to which I’ve connected. I’m not sure what that says about me…It’s sad that memories are sparked by “Washington Dulles WiFi” “Wireless Vienna Airport” “Inn at Sonoma” “Inn at Sonoma 2″ “Catfish’s Network” “ShadyShores1″ “VitalogyWiFi” “Enchanted Garden” and “2GoldFish” among hundreds of others.

Incidentally, here’s a tip for all you wireless roamers: when you’re on the road, especially in a public wireless network, it’s best to be really careful about surfing so as to keep your belongings secured at all points (”Did you pack your own bag?”, “Was your bag with you at all times?”, “Have you let every person in the airport know your email password by sending it unencrypted over our unsecured wireless network?”) . I can never remember to be that careful, so here’s what I do - be ready to be geeked.

I setup a secure ssh tunnel and proxy my web traffic through that. I happen to have a few servers that I can run this through, but you can always use your broadband connected home mac (or PC with ssh-server installed). At the command line, I type:

ssh -D 9999 evan@freshkills.xyz.com -p 22

Then in Firefox, I go to my network preferences (Firefox, Preferences, Advanced, Network, Settings) and select “Socks Host” and type 127.0.0.1  with 9999 as the port. This routes all network traffic in Firefox through freshkills.xyz.com over ssh (secure shell).  Fun stuff, I know.

Oh - by the way - check out http://www.no-ip.com/ if you want to setup a free url that points to your home machine at all times. And remember to update your router to handle ssh traffic!

So, with the Christmas holidays around the corner, family has been at the front of my mind. Mutant Media’s holiday gifts have been received by many, and thanks abound. Clients typically get the highlights, but we often send along something of appreciation for friends of the business and partners. A comment in response to such a gift has me feeling really thankful.

It attested to one of our goals as founders - treat people with respect, treat them like we’d like to be treated and build lasting relationships. Why is that so hard for companies to get? JetBlue had it and seems to have lost it. Virgin America seems to have grabbed a taste for it - let’s hope they keep it. But it seems hard for companies to keep building relationships with people that matter. The shortcut to profit and money always seem to get in the way - and I certainly have empathy for those who skip the relationship part - or at least make large compromises in that effort, but it is indeed short-sighted. When you treat customers and clients right 99% of the time, they’ll be more forgiving of mistakes in judgment, true? Anyway, a huge holiday ‘Cheers’ to our clients at MM - we’re proud of the work we do for you, proud to have such great clients, and hope we all continue accelerating innovation.

We’re set to move. After a week of looking (yes, I make decisions fast) we found a great place in West Hampstead on Pandora Rd. That link is bound to break at some point as we just got the papers back from the landlord approving all the contracts & whatnot.

I’ll be a little different than our 500 sqft apartment in Manhattan, and much much different than our 1200 sqft cottage in South Mimms. Looking forward to using the garden! They don’t have it pictured as the house is covered in scaffolding at the moment, but it’s really quite nice. And there’s a sub basement for storage! It’s a wet basement (floods when it rains) but if we keep stuff up off the floor it should come in quite handy. Only thing I’m not looking forward to is the parking - but life is full of tradeoffs, isn’t it.

More pictures when we move - the 16th of Dec.

Cheers!

And hire all the BBC’s. Dr. Who, Band Of Brothers, 8 Out of 10 Cats, Top Gear. The programming is far far superior than the crud in the states. Smart programs. Amazing. Few laugh tracks. Amazing. Great stuff. The only thing I’m missing is Three Sheets on MOJO. And my TV of course.

So, Mutant Media has been producing some pretty cool Facebook apps for some clients lately. So naturally ideas starting bubbling up to the top of my head for my own. Well, turns out that Facebook and I aren’t getting along. I think it would be interesting to segregate my contacts into lists. The basic first step, which has been done already by Facebook & an app or two is to see which contacts know other contacts (mutual friends) but cross list. For example, just by browsing around, I noticed one of my work friends knows an old college friend. They don’t know each other through me, but both know me. Ok, easy enough. But next, I wanted to dive one deeper. I wanted to find people out there that I didn’t know but who 2 of my unconnected friends know. That would be interesting so that you could suggest to those mutual friends that they meet through their mutual friends. Alas, Facebook API doesn’t seem to allow you to fetch a friend’s friend list. Bah humbug. Onto the next idea then.

Well - the decision has been made. We’re off to London in the Fall. Exciting times! We have several really good friends on that side of the pond - and lots of our NYC friends are planning a mass exodus. Exodus! Been listening to too much Bob Marley lately apparently. Anyway - time for a big change. Can’t wait to see Dr. Who real time. Can’t wait to be closer to Scotland & Ireland & the rest of Europe. More to come.

I know Microsoft & Yahoo have been in periodic discussions for some time, but they’re back on the radar and for once my infrequent posts have helped me draw some connections. Since the news broke, in the back of my mind I was always thinking Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo didn’t make too much sense. From way back here in the audience, anyway. But re-reading my old posts got me thinking.

I wrote about Photosynth a while back - a Microsoft owned application that can take photos from a stream and mash them together. So, a source like Flickr would be ideal to contribute to something like …oh, I don’t know, a world collaboration to map the earth? Yahoo owns Flickr. Microflickrhoo could conceivably take a significant chunk out Google’s maps and who knows what else? Maybe that’s where they came up w/ their valuation - throw everything Yahoo away except for a few properties Microsoft doesn’t have…say..Alibaba? My gears are turning on this..

This video of Randy Pausch’s ‘Last Lecture’ became the talk of the internet (deservedly) this week. Dr. Pausch clearly deserves all the positive comments posters, bloggers, commentors, are giving him.

I don’t know if I could summarize my take on his lecture well enough to chat about it here. But what I can say is this: I’m 99.9% sure I met Dr. Pausch in a typical Evan story.

When I was deciding where to go to college back in ‘94, I applied to Cornell (accepted), Princeton (thank you for your application fee - it will go toward funding excellent student programs to which you won’t be a part of) and UVA (accepted? how did that happen?). Well, not realizing UVA *could* accept an upstate NY kid like me, I was clearly unprepared for the news. And I had to decide quick - see, I had applied early to Cornell & it was tick tock before my application would be thrown into the gen pop of applications. So, hearing the news on a Wed, my family bought me a round trip ticket for that weekend to whatever small airport serves UVA and I made a reservation at a Best Western. It wasn’t my first flight, but that didn’t make me less of a space cadet being by myself -hell, I even lost my return ticket on the plane.

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