I have, in the past, worked for startups of varying forms. I worked for a spinoff that ultimately failed but had the most awesome product I’ve ever seen (neural networks were involved, need I say more?), I helped a buddy very early on with his startup, which did great until angel investors crept in, destroyed his vision, and failed completely to understand the Long Tail vision my buddy was trying to achieve, and I worked for a web 2.0 startup which was pretty successful, and was subsequently purchased… by another startup!

Working in academia for 6 years also exposed me to people who are firing up businesses, or projects that accidentally become businesses, and some of those go nowhere, while others seem to be on the verge of NYSE listing now, while a year ago they were housed in the smallest office I’ve ever seen, using lawn furniture for their workstations.

Of course, I’ve also consulted for, and been interviewed by, a …

I’m not someone who wakes up every day and looks at how my blog is ranked by all of the various services. I check out my WordPress stats, but that’s really about it. However, someone went and did some of the work for me, and they’ve decided that, of the blogs that they read or that were suggested to them, this blog ranks #20 in a listing of 25.

I’m really flattered, but wonder if it’s an indicator that this is a quality blog, or that they should aim higher in their blog reading ;-P  Either way, listing 25 bloggers in a flattering way is a fantastic marketing technique, because most of us are probably egomaniacal enough to say “Hey! Look!” and link back to the list on *your* blog, resulting in lots of traffic. Kudos, and thanks Mobile Maven!

Having a Google account is sometimes useful in ways you hadn’t planned for. For example, at a few different employers I’ve been at, I’ve had to prepare for reviews by providing a list of accomplishments to my supervisor. One decent tool for generating this list is email, though it can take some time. Another useful tool is the Web History feature of your Google account.

Though this isn’t necessarily indicative of everything I’ve accomplished in the first half of 2008 per se, it’s definitely indicative of the types of things I’ve generally been into so far this year, and it’s interesting to look back. What does your Web History say?

• Gearman - this is used by some rather large web sites, notably Digg. It reminds me a little of having Torque and Maui, but geared toward more general-purpose applications. In fact, it was never clear to me that …

I’ve been working with what I used to call “utility computing” tools for about 6-9 months. However, for about the past 2 months, I’ve been seeing the term “cloud computing” all over the place, and there is so much buzz surrounding it that it’s reaching that magical point best described using Alan Greenspan’s words: “Irrational Exuberance”.

When Alan Greenspan used those words to describe the attitudes of investors toward the markets, what he was basically saying was that there were people who didn’t really know what they were doing, putting more money than they ought, into things they knew relatively little about. Further, he was saying that the decisions people were making with regards to where to put their money were a) bad, or at least b) not based on sound reasoning, or the ‘facts on the ground’.

This, I think, is where we are at with “cloud computing”. The blog post that put me over the edge is …

If there’s one thing that bothers me about using a ready-made solution like wordpress for my blog, it’s plug-ins. I hate software plug-ins. The first question every support engineer for any software product that supports plugins asks in response to a trouble report is “are you using any plugins?” And when you say “yep, I’m using plugins!” the reply from support is to disable them immediately and see if the trouble goes away. That’s a problem.

What’s worse, if the plugins are maintained by a third party (often the case), there’s no telling whether or not they’ll exist when the next version of the base software is released, or whether they’ll be supported in future versions of the software.

Two examples that touch my daily life are Firefox, and …

All right! In the past, some books seem to be delayed in getting into O’Reilly’s Safari site, but on the day that Baron announces the book’s arrival, I find that I’m able to access it in Safari right now! Sweet!

I’m going to OSCON in July, and I know that just about everyone I know who is a participant in this crazy life we call IT (or web 2.0, or whatever it’s called now), is flying to a conference or something in 2008. I’m starting to notice more and more posts like this one, so if you can avoid it, don’t put anything in a checked bag that you can’t afford to lose, and avoid US Airways, and pass it on, because when you see the list of things they don’t cover in their lost baggage policy, you’ll suddenly feel like you’re lucky to still have anything you ever checked with your bags.