I got an email from Ari this morning that Filtrbox added real-time alerting to their service. I dogged them a while back because I thought it was the killer feature they were missing.
I turned it on a little while ago and so far it seems to right on top of things! (3 emails so far with about 15 Lijit Alerts) I'm looking forward to trying it out as Google Alerts have become pretty annoying and not much use to me. I'll report more later but wanted to give them a shout out for getting this going and listening to their users!
Wow.. A couple weeks ago I wrote about the toolbar distribution deal where the Java update jacks toolbar's into people browsers, BY DEFAULT essentially acting as a virus on your windows desktop.
Frankly, if I were Sun I would find the entire thing embarrassing. In that post I grapple with the entire notion that it can't be that profitable compared with other Sun business units. Why would Sun associate themselves with this kind of nefarious behavior? Come on now, it is totally deceiving.
Well, I was wrong. Really wrong. Apparently it's so profitable, that it's becoming a new product to be announced at JavaOne. It's the JavaStore (most likely), and Jonathan describes it in his podcast today. As a friend of mine used to say, you know it's true because you just can't make that that shit up.
So, it's come down to this. The huge value unlocked by millions of hours of software development, blood sweat and tears and the greatest intellectual software minds is…
A Trojan horse. Sun, you nailed it. I can't believe I'm saying this, Oracle – stop the madness. WTF.
Years ago as the CTO of Raindance, I reluctantly, along with the rest of the management team underwent assessments by an industrial psychologist. This is not uncommon among larger companies and one of our major investors was all about it to determine how compatible the management team was with each other. Special note: if you're doing one of these, you probably aren't compatible as a management team J
The result of that assessment was a report that each executive was given. It's about 20 pages of stuff about your psyche. I tested mine by giving it to Lura to read. She, laughed and said, "Yeah, that's dead on". While I take exception with parts of it, I too believe it's a fair assessment of my likely behavior and motivations - at least in a business scenario. My take away is a sentence in the report that both makes me laugh and bums me out. "Todd has a unique ability to understand everyone's position around the table, he just doesn't always care". I guess I translate this to the ability to empathize just not always sympathize.
I got news this week about a friend that I have known for a long time and some career changes ahead for him. Strangely (for me) it really rocked me. Not because of the change, these changes happen all the time, but rather the way it kept entering my mind. I have a weird corner of my psyche that I don't think the assessment found. I am a hopeless romantic when it comes to people with an enduring work ethic. I have a fundamental belief that if you work hard, good things will happen. Of course, it's hard to boil things down to that, we all know someone who puts in the hours but for one reason or another, the magic just isn't there. I can't and don't have the perspective to make an assessment of circumstances, but I do know that person has always been a huge supporter to me and a great resource.
At the end of the day, Stuff happens to Good people. Something else I have picked up in my life, every time I thought I was faced with a setback – I was way better off 3 years later. I have a feeling this is one of those situations for my friend.
A couple weeks ago I went to the Lotus Stage II driving school in Pahrump Nevada at the Spring Mountain Raceway. This school built upon the first Lotus school I did a year earlier. As I look back on both, I have to say they are excellent and I highly recommend them to anyone that wants to learn the hidden dynamics of how cars perform at high speed and how to harness that behavior like a racecar driver would.
This lotus school dealt with learning how to effectively use brake enduced over steer to rotate the car faster in turns without bleeding off too much speed.
Huh? What does all that mean?
If you learned to drive a car like everyone else, you learned how to "drive" the car, but you didn't learn the dynamics of the car. If you have been driving for while you have experienced the dynamics of the car – probably at inopportune times, probably when you did something wrong or the weather was bad.
If you have ever driven a rear wheel car in the snow and hit the gas kicking the rear end out, that's over steer. Over steer also happens at high speed in a corner when you suddenly lift off the gas pedal shifting weight from the rear drive wheels to the front wheels. Lift on the gas after going into a corner too fast and you'll get a 360 degree view of the racetrack! Brake hard after entering a corner fast, spin out even faster.
The other common dynamic you have likely experienced is under steer. Basically all street cars are built with a bias to under steer. This is because peoples nature reaction to under steer is to slow down which corrects the problem. Car manufactures want your brain to save you. You may have experienced under steer in your every day driving when you were messing around and tried to take a corner faster than you should of. You come into the corner fast and turn the wheel but the car kind of plows the front wheel forward even though you have them turned (like when you're on snow). This happens because you are on the gas and have most of the vehicle weight over the rear wheels making the front wheels light reducing friction and pushing the front end out.
While these examples of vehicle dynamics that can get you in trouble, some of these dynamics you can use to your advantage. I don't mean the awesome power slides you see on TopGear but rather the more subtle, but equally amazing way you can coerce the car into invisibly rotating in a high speed corner to carry amazing speed, through the corner. You can feel it when you're in the car, but you can't see it outside the car.
This brings me to the punch line. A lot people I talk to say they would be interested in attending a driving school but the just don't have a proper car for it. The fact is, you can bring any car (probably not a Van) to the BMW driving school twice a year in Pueblo and have a total blast and learn a lot. It's all about going fast, but not about racing. The fact is the less tuned the car is the more you can feel the dynamics and the more you learn.
I strongly encourage anyone who hasn't taken part in driving schools to try it. I plan to bring both my daughters at the appropriate time to learn how their cars behave when they find themselves out of the vanilla pudding envelope of everyday driving, be it because they intended to or not.
For fun, here is a video of a lap at Spring Mountain during the Stage II School. I took the video on my blackberry during an instructor lap!
