The overall quality of the sessions was very high, among the best of any technical conference I’ve attended. A couple of duds, but some really amazing speakers, too, bringing the average way up. But what I thought was particularly interesting was that, of the top five speakers I listened to, one was the creator of Rails (so set him aside), and the other four are current and former Java luminaries.

Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland of Relevance are still doing work for clients in Java, but also in Rails, and were to my mind the best speakers at the event. They speak at a lot of conferences, so if you ever have a chance or choice, choose their sessions. Great energy, great speaking skills, and exceptionally well-designed slides combine for two of the best technical talks I’ve ever seen. As professionals still working in Java, their insights into what makes Rails special were the most clear and well-defended of any at the conference.

Dave Thomas and Mike Clark, by comparison, like to start their talks with “My name is x, and I’ve been Java-free for y months and z days.” Not only did they give great talks during the conference itself, but they also taught the Rails Guidebook the day before RailsConf opened, and are terrific trainers and speakers. They still speak on the Java circuit, not about Java, but rather explaining this new Rails thing to Java developers.

At any rate, there are enough Java luminaries who are leaving Java for Rails that it at least should make any Java developer stop and think about why that might be happening.

Another thing I’ll mention is to repeat something Stuart Halloway said at the end of his talk. RailsConf 2007 will not be like RailsConf 2006, because even though Rails is experiencing strong growth now, it’s going to explode in the second half of this year and first part of next. As steep as the adoption curve is today, it’s going to be more vertical in 6 months.

Which means next year RailsConf will be a lot bigger, and accordingly less tight-knit and informal. This year’s RailsConf sold out the 550 seats in days. Even with a larger venue and 2000 seats, I predict next year sells out in less than two weeks. It’ll feel different. So if you attended this year, spend some time reflecting on the experience. It was special, and may not be repeated.

Last, let me be yet another person who points out how weird it was to be at a non-Mac technical show, and see so many PowerBooks and MacBooks (Accordion Guy covers this nicely).

This could be because Rails strongly imposes the taste of the primary developer of the framework. DHH’s sense of style and design is simple and elegant, and reflects his own personal vision of how things should be done. (I don’t mean to discount the contributions of the Rails Core here, but they are a self-selected group who had to possess similar tastes to join the project started and still guided by DHH’s (strong ;-) opinions.) Who does this remind you of? Is it any wonder that this appeals to Mac people?

Of course, it could simply be a reflection of how much better Ruby and Rails, and the associated software like Apache / lightTPD run on Unix-style operating systems compared to Windows, where they run OK, but not well.

At any rate, let me conclude by admitting that I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, and my goal is to be doing 100% Rails development work by the end of the year. I doubt that I’ll be giving a talk at next year’s RailsConf, but if I did, I want to be able to start with “My name is Michael Alderete, and I’ve been PHP-free for x months and y days”…

The problem is the wiring. Our house is a 100+ year old Victorian, and all of our phone wiring (except for the actual phone jacks) is on the outside of the house. And it’s old, and it’s been abused, and so on. So with all the rain we’ve been having, apparently water is getting into the wiring.

We’ve had PacBell out, more than once, and about the only thing they’re consistent about is that it’s our problem, not theirs. Even thought it’s on the outside of the house, it’s “inside” wiring because it’s past the junction box, and so our responsibility.

Anyway, it’s sunny and working now, and it looks like we might be done with the rain for a while. In the meantime, I’m calling wiring contractors, because I can’t take it when we don’t have internet access. I must be a junkie…or then again, maybe I need to have internet access to, like, work and earn a living…

The quality of the display is terrific. I dunno about doing color-calibrated print work, but as just extra screen space (which I’ve found I absolutely need to do web development productively), it’s spectacular, and makes the built-in screen on my laptop seem dingy by comparison.

I paid a little over half what we paid for Rochelle’s 20” LCD display a couple years ago. Hers is a little taller, at 1600 pixels by 1200 pixels, while mine is a little wider, at 1680 pixels by 1050 pixels. My display is quite a bit brighter, and can do picture-in-picture, sharing two of the four inputs. All in all, I thought it was a great deal for $535 delivered.

Today Dell is offering an even better deal, $422 before tax, with free shipping. That’s about $70 less than I paid. If you’re in the market for an LCD display, I highly recommend thinking about this one. Quickly, the deal ends in a week.

Update 5/24: I thought under $500 was ridiculously low for such a good monitor, but it turns out Dell can go lower: the current deal is under $400!

(And note that this monitor proves I’m not an Apple Uber Alles freak; the Dell is a great monitor at a great price, with multiple inputs, at half the price of a comparable Apple display with only one input. The Cinema displays are lovely, but the Dell was the right features at a better price.)

One, when I was in high school, we had one of those kneeling chairs (though a cheap one, without the back, not the nice one Alex is considering), which I spent many a late night in, writing papers for classes (in WordStar on an Apple IIe with a CP/M card, uphill, in the snow…). After a couple of hours, it always felt terrible; often I would go get a kitchen chair. And I was young and limber then, I can only imagine what they would do to me today.

Two, I worked for 14 months for one of those dot.bombs that immediately went out and spent their fresh VC dollars on Aeron chairs. I loved mine, and wanted to buy it when the end came. But the CEO made a deal with the landlord to resolve the lease/rent, and my chair was included. I was very sad. I still think about buying one. I suppose if the remodel ever ends, I may do that this year, if I continue to work at home.

Three, about two years ago, Rochelle got a great little size A chair from an excess sale at her job. It was a $500 chair when new, from a premium office furniture maker, so it was a great deal at $40 used. And getting the small size was perfect for Rochelle’s short body. (Finding someone who carries the small size can be difficult; they are almost always special orders.) Every once in a while, I’d sit in it for an hour or so, while admin’ing on her computer, and thought it was pretty comfortable, if too small for me. So, when her company had another salvage sale, we bought another chair, in my size, and I replaced my $150 Costco chair immediately.

After two months, the “better” chair had hurt my back pretty badly. I had a spinal x-ray, an MRI, and various other exams. I ended up doing two months of physical therapy, because we thought there was something else wrong. But it turned out to just be the chair. After an hour of sitting in it, I would be in pain. When I finally realized it, I gave it to my mother, and went back to the old Costco chair, and my back has been in decent shape since. And my mother loves the chair that hurt me.

You would think I would have noticed that the chair was hurting me sooner than I did. I mean, I was in a lot of pain. But, when I get in front of the computer, I get focused on other things. I just never noticed, until it got really bad.

Anyway, the point of this long third story is that expensive chairs are not necessarily better for your back, and every person needs a different chair. If you can, take your laptop or a stack of paperwork to the chair store, enough for a couple hours of work, and get them to set you up with a chair or two that you think you might want to buy. And then, work in each one for at least an hour. But an hour may not be long enough, so ask about return policies, and don’t buy where you can’t return it within 30 days. You’ll pay a higher price, but you’ll be sure you’re getting a chair that works for you. If you’re spending even 40 hours a week in it, it’s worth it.

Casual users can view the basic traffic maps for free, but if you subscribe to the extended service, you get custom route monitoring (for your specific commute route, even primary and alternates), real-time alerts via email and text messaging to your mobile phone, and other features designed to keep you from getting stuck in traffic.

It’s these custom routes, and notifications of issues along them, that really make the service shine. When I was commuting regularly to Berkeley, I actually took a different route _to the site than from it. So being able to define multiple routes, and customize the alerts for the to and from segments for each, was the only way it was useful.

At any rate, I need to get back to work, instead of continuing to fuss. Bye!

But, we started looking into options, researching in Consumer Reports and in cooking and food resources. Rochelle eventually found this article, A Range of Options, by David Rosengarten, which blew away both the Consumer Reports mantra of low cost, high value appliances, and our gift budget.

But, once you commit to getting a centerpiece-style range, is it even possible to just do that? Not if you’re Rochelle or me.

The next obvious requirement is to get a new stove hood, because we currently have no ventilation in the kitchen, except opening the back door and window. And, well, looking at the wall it would be mounted on, it’s actually a fake wall, built (by the previous owner) to hide the brick chimney behind it. Let’s take that out!

And, when we measure the chimney in the basement, it’s clear we’ll be getting a lot of space back. And when you combine that with the need to conceal the ventilation pipe, you come to the inevitable conclusion that we need new floor-to-ceiling cabinets in that corner.

After doing all of this, is there any doubt that we’ll need to paint the entire room afterwards? Especially since we’ve been planning to take the over-sink cabinets off the wall for over a year? And that horrible fake tile siding that lines the lower half of most of the room?

And these are the plans we haven’t quashed. Because taking the cabinets off the wall is really the first of many things that should happen to that side of the room.

But, since we’re not really remodeling, those will have to wait. Hopefully…

For me, the thing that dominated the year was my new “job” as a consultant. I’d done some consulting before, but in 2004 I managed to string together almost an entire year of work. Mostly half-time, so it wasn’t quite the income I would have liked, but I was able to pay the bills, and that’s pretty amazing. Really, all the credit goes to my primary client, Nicely Done Solutions, where the majority of my work comes from. They’ve kept me busy, and I hope to keep doing work through them for some time.

That dominated my day-to-day, but my biggest accomplishment in 2004 was my five year wedding anniversary with Rochelle. We have many more of those in our future, if we can both resist the temptation of butter.

After a frenzy of traveling in 2003, we mostly stayed at home in 2004. A short trip to Boston, where Rochelle was attending a conference and I was eating cannoli, was the furthest we went. We also made our traditional Thanksgiving visit to Rochelle’s family in Texas. And our longest trip was a road trip down to Palm Springs, where we stayed for two weeks in a condo, while Rochelle wrote the culminating papers for her Masters degree. (Which was Rochelle’s biggest accomplishment of 2004, successfully completing her Master’s program. All over but the paperwork. Yippee!) I mostly loafed around and read a couple of books; in fact I think that was the only fiction I read all year long.

I did get a chance to enjoy more fiction than those couple books, though, by finally giving Audible.com a try. Rochelle started her subscription to the service last year, and has really enjoyed listening to the audio books on her player. When I gave her an iPod mini for her birthday, I inherited the Audible.com Otis player she had been using, and started using it while I was driving. While the Otis sucked, the audio books are fantastic, and there is no better way to enjoy them than on a digital player; CDs and tapes are more expensive, and you have to constantly change them to keep going. Not with the iPod, or even the Otis, which can store almost nine hours — or hundreds of hours for the iPod.

We continued to improve our home with a number of projects, including replacing the solid wood back door with a wonderful wood door with glass panels that lets in far more light. In spite of the glass, with the redone (and now straight) door frame and new weather stripping, the kitchen is much warmer now than it was with the solid door we replaced.

Also in the kitchen we added a display shelf along one wall, to better show off the ridiculously large collection of champagne bottles we’ve amassed. I’m sure we’ll have to purge the collection at some point, but for now it’s fun to have them all in a row, and know that we’ve found and enjoyed some really fine wine in the last couple of years. The bottles on the shelf are only from the last two years, but it represents far more champagne than I drank in my entire life before Rochelle.

We painted our bedroom from top to bottom. Rochelle picked out three new colors that matched our antique bed frame, and over the course of a week, we stripped and repaired walls, and painted painted painted. The results are not perfect by a long shot, but it’s still a tremendous improvement for us.

Also in the bedroom we ended up replacing all but the headboard of that bed frame, which lowered the mattress and gave us a much more stable bed. The antique bed frame itself was quite solid, but the queen conversion kit that came with our McRoskey mattress replaced the solid side beams, and made the bed horribly shaky.

The biggest improvement we made was replacing the old, grim gray carpet that Rochelle picked out 10 years ago with new carpet that is warmer-toned, and coincidentally hides cat stains far better. That went into our parlor, office, and bedroom, as well as the hall closet, which we somehow omitted from the hardwood floors project a couple years ago.

In the office, we replaced almost all of our furniture, getting rid of our desks and a chrome shelving unit, and replacing with much bigger desks and some standard shelving from IKEA. They’re not perfect, but they look a lot nicer than what we had before, and work a whole hell of a lot better with the computers, etc., than the old stuff did.

We didn’t eat out as much this year, and so we discovered fewer new restaurants than we usually do. We still found a few, including Saha, where Rochelle’s favorite chef from last year went after he sold and left our favorite find of 2003 (which is no longer particularly special). The cuisine can best be described as Arabic fusion, and combines Middle Eastern spicing (the chef is from Yemen) with French technique. It’s extraordinary, and everyone we’ve taken there has agreed that the prix fixé dinner would be a bargain at twice the $27 it currently costs.

On the topic of food, I took HomeChef’s “essentials” cooking course (4 hours one night a week for 12 weeks), and had a blast. I made a lot of the food at home during the course, but haven’t cooked as much as I’d hoped to after the class ended. Still, I probably cooked more in 2004 than in 2003, which is a trend I’d like to continue in 2005.

We only threw one party in all of 2004, and it was on the last day of 2004 (more on that in another post). Shame on us. Look for that to change in 2005.

On the technology side, I got a new computer, my first laptop, and have really enjoyed the new mobility. Before the current generation of PowerBooks, I always felt that getting a laptop was too big a compromise. There’s still a big performance gap between the PowerBook I got and Apple’s professional desktop systems; and my hard drive size is limited compared to what’s available in full-size systems; and the PowerBook’s screen is quite a bit smaller than what I had before; etc. But with the current laptops, the hardware has advanced so far that what you get is more than good enough, and the trade-off of headroom I don’t need for mobility I want is now possible.

We also switched to a new DSL provider, Speakeasy, which is both saving us money and providing better service. We stuck with our reduced cable plan, which is $14 a month, and we (mostly) don’t miss the channels. At the end of the year, we signed up for Netflix, so we could get the movies back. Minimum cable plus Netflix is less than half what we were spending for our premium cable services, and gets us pretty much everything we want. Except for ESPN…

I made roughly 60 posts to this weblog. And I sold zero BeBoxes. Both of these numbers need to go up in 2005.

I gained back much of the weight I lost at the beginning of last year. That number needs to go down in 2005.

The cats all stayed healthy and happy, and we didn’t add any new ones. The number of cats in our house needs to stay the same in 2005.

And that was my 2004.

My very first anti-spam tool was something called Mailfilter. I used it for my personal e-mail on Mac OS X, wrote about it here, and almost immediately afterwards lost a non-spam message to an aggressive keyword match. That was the end of Mailfilter. I can’t even remotely recommend it, as it’s just not intelligent enough (strict, single expression matching), and had zero safety net.

My next attempt at a solution was a utility called SpamFire. Like Mailfilter, it is a “pre-filter,” which means it would run before my e-mail client, download my mail, and skim out the spam. Unlike Mailfilter, it actually saved the trapped messages, so if it made a mistake, I could recover the message. It had plenty of other differences from Mailfilter, which I wrote about previously, and which made it so useful that it became the first anti-spam tool I paid for. But in the end I switched to a different tool because SpamFire was separate from my e-mail client, and that made it cumbersome to use.

In the meantime, I had spam coming into my e-mail at work, and at the recommendation of a co-worker, I installed Cloudmark’s SpamNet (now called SafetyBar), an add-in for Microsoft Outlook. It worked reasonably well, but then they went and started charging money for it. It didn’t work well enough, and I didn’t get enough spam at my work address, for it to be worth paying for, so I stopped using it.

I replaced it with another plug-in for Outlook called SpamBayes. Even more effective than SpamNet, it confirmed for me the value of having a tool that plugs into and works directly with your e-mail client. It made dealing with spam seamless, almost effortless (given the lower volume of spam than my home e-mail addresses). Unlike SpamNet, it’s Open Source, and also unlike SpamNet, it doesn’t depend on a third-party server to run. If I still used Outlook (or had a “work” e-mail address), I would still be using SpamBayes. Effective, easy to use, and free. By far the best anti-spam solution I’ve found for Outlook on Windows. Highly recommended.

My happiness with SpamBayes for Outlook lead me to search for an anti-spam tool for my personal use which integrated fully with my e-mail client, Eudora for Mac OS X. I found Spamnix, which wrapped the Open Source tool SpamAssassin in a Eudora plug-in. I fell instantly in love and dropped SpamFire. This was the second anti-spam tool I paid for.

Spamnix was great for a number of reasons. Its interface within Eudora took the form of a new mailbox, and a couple of simple menu commands. Incoming mail judged likely to be spam was shunted off to the new mailbox; the menu commands let you rescue items that were not spam, etc. It was simplicity itself to use, and fairly effective at trapping spam.

The failing of Spamnix was that it was based on an earlier version of SpamAssassin, which while it had some great regular expressions and other traps for catching spam, it didn’t include any Bayesian filtering at all. This meant that spam filtering was good, but never improved. However, it took a new version of Eudora for me to realize that this mattered. (Spamnix has since been upgraded substantially, and uses the latest SpamAssassin with Bayesian filtering; but I’ve not tried it, I moved on to other things, as you can continue to read.)

SpamWatch was a plug-in shipped with Eudora 6, which I paid for, making it the third anti-spam tool for which I shelled out money. It provided me with Bayesian filtering in my Mac OS X mail environment for the first time. It was a revelation. The first time I downloaded mail after upgrading, SpamWatch caught a half-dozen spam messages, and Spamnix caught several dozen. A quick menu choice fed the missed spam to SpamWatch, and forever afterwards the ratio was reversed. I’ll never again think the same way about learning systems; Bayesian filtering really becomes dramatically more effective the more you use it. I had learned this with SpamBayes at my work e-mail, but I simply didn’t get enough spam at that address for it to really shine.

SpamWatch was so effective that it soon spelled the end for Spamnix. I just didn’t need a second spam filter (and the attendant delay in getting my mail while it processes incoming messages) when the first filter was so good. So I uninstalled Spamnix, and life was good.

SpamWatch actually improved my effectiveness in fighting spam, not just by being a better filter. The new version of Eudora added a new field for mail messages, the Junk Probability, a 1-100 score on how likely a message was judged to be spam. I quickly learned to process my Junk mailbox by first sorting by the Junk Probability, and then scanning for false positives. By sorting first, the messages at the beginning of the list were a lot more in need of review than messages at the end, making it possible to skim more rapidly over items that were certainly spam.

I don’t really remember why I decided to give SpamSieve a try. I do remember noticing that SpamWatch seemed to have hit a plateau, and wasn’t improving any more. I had friends who used and liked SpamSieve, and were getting better stats than I was with SpamWatch, but the interface between SpamSieve and Eudora was, for a long time, through AppleScript, and the integration wasn’t smooth enough. Probably when the version that used a Eudora plug-in came out, I decided what the heck, it won’t cost anything to try it a couple days, and see how it does.

It was not the revelation that SpamWatch was, but it only took a training pass at my archived spam and Inbox (a few thousand messages between them), and a couple of days use proved that it was noticeably better than SpamWatch. After a week I was sold, and opened my wallet, a fourth time, taking my anti-spam expenditures over $100. (Compared to the problem I have with spam, that’s not a lot of dough, money well spent. But it chafes when you realize that the spam problem is entirely due to greedy amoral scumbags who have polluted the e-mail highways and byways to make a few cents per pound of pollutant spread.) I also disabled SpamWatch, since SpamSieve entirely replaced it.

Well, not entirely, not at first. Although SpamSieve had a more sophisticated and accurate Bayesian engine at its core, there was one thing that it didn’t do well, which was assign a Junk Probability to each message. This meant that I lost a very effective tool in my Junk folder processing, of being able to sort the caught messages from least to most likely spam.

I e-mailed Michael Tsai, the developer of SpamSieve, explaining how I used that feature of SpamWatch. He was highly responsive, and agreed that my approach sounded genuinely useful. Unfortunately, at that time SpamSieve’s engine’s algorithms and formulas didn’t really generate a score that could be usefully assigned to Eudora’s Junk Probability column. The math just didn’t work that way. He said he’d look into it, and perhaps in the future, perhaps it might do this.

Fortunately for me, the future did eventually come to pass, and SpamSieve now does assign useful probability scores to processed mail. Its final fault gone, and with the best scoring engine and perfect integration with Eudora, it is by far the best tool I’ve used for managing the amount of spam I get, and I’m happily using it today. Compatible with virtually every e-mail client running on Mac OS X, it totally deserves its reputation as being the best anti-spam tool available on my platform of choice. Highly, highly recommended.

After all that, you’d think I’d be wrapping this posting up. You and I both wish that was true. But no. I’ve got five more tools to write about.

First is Thunderbird, the stand-alone e-mail client that evolved out of the Mozilla suite. It’s available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, and other platforms, too, I think. It’s a nice enough e-mail client, and one of the best for sending and receiving HTML e-mail, if you’re the sort of person who likes that kind of thing.

It has gotten quite a bit better since I evaluated it, to the point where I installed it on Rochelle’s PC, as a replacement for Netscape Communicator, which she had been using since the mid-‘90s. It has a built-in Bayesian spam filter, which works well enough. It’s definitely not as accurate as other Bayesian classifiers I’ve used; SpamBayes and SpamSieve are both quite a bit better, and I think Eudora’s SpamWatch might be a little better. But it’s more than good enough for Rochelle, who gets an order of magnitude fewer spam messages than I do.

Another advantage of Thunderbird is that you’re not using Outlook, which is the number one attack vector for viruses and worms. It’s a good tool, and if you’re stuck on Windows and can’t do better, it’s definitely worth switching to. Recommended.

Another e-mail client I haven’t used much is the bundled OS X e-mail client, Mail.app. It doesn’t work the way I do, and doesn’t seem to be well-suited to managing the volume of mail I get on a daily basis. Supposedly it has good junk mail controls (which use latent semantic analysis), but in the testing I did with it on a secondary e-mail account, it didn’t seem that good, somewhere around the Spamnix level of accuracy. That is, very good, but not excellent. If you like Mail.app, since you can use SpamSieve with it, that’s what I’d recommend doing, and blow off the built-in junk mail controls.

Finally I come to the server-based tools. I’ve saved these for last, not because I tried them last, but because most people won’t be able to use them themselves. Unless you run your own mail server, most of these are impossible to use.

The first server-side solution I tried, and used for quite some time, was what are known as RBL lists. RBL stands for “Real-time Blackhole List”, and the way it works is as mail is received, the mail server sending the message to your server is looked up on a list, which contains known-bad e-mail servers (ones that are known to send spam). If the foreign server is on the list, the e-mail is rejected, in real-time.

In theory this should be extremely effective, and indeed it does cut down on spam considerably. But not completely, and not without collateral damage. There are just too many servers out there that are sending spam, most of them home PCs that have been infected with a worm or virus that converted it to a “zombie” that sends out millions of spam e-mails. It’s impossible to keep the lists current.

It’s also impossible to keep them accurate. There’s no way to maintain the lists with perfect accuracy, mistakes are inevitable, due to both ignorance and malice on the part of people submitting candidates. In the end I had too many messages rejected that were OK, and I had to turn the RBLs off. (I may turn them on again, I go back and forth on the “damn the consequences” philosophy…)

I also tried MIMEDefang, which was a wrapper for SpamAssassin and Vipol’s Razor, with a plug-in for my mail server, Sendmail. I ended up losing mail to this solution, when it would generate errors under load. The failure was intermitent, and impossible to reproduce on demand. Since the mail would just get dropped on the floor, completely lost, I decided I couldn’t afford to try to track down the issue, and simply uninstalled all of it. I’ll surely try another wrapper for SpamAssassin at some point, when I’ve converted my mail server to Postfix, for which it is easier to write plug-ins, and should therefore be easier to write reliable plug-ins.

The last server-side tool I’ve been using doesn’t live on my server. Maybe that’s why it’s worked so well. I wrote about the amount of spam that was coming to my oldest e-mail address at pobox.com, and how the new filters they rolled out saved the address from deletion. I’m still really happy with the results of that service, and plan to keep my pobox.com address for the foreseeable future. Recommended.

LTFP is what I did very early this morning.

I’ve been dicking around with WordPress on my Mac OS X system, setting it up, configuring it to use the same URL scheme as my old weblog system, tweaking the template a bit, and — most importantly — importing all my old weblog posts from the old system. After four weeks of dithering and obsessing, it’s not done, but it’s going live anyway.

I’ve tried to not break any permalinks to pre-existing posts or the syndication feeds, and otherwise keep it compatible with the bookmarks that people may have for this site. But I’m sure there will be a few things to fix. Leave me a comment if you find something.

There’s also plenty to do on plain cleanup. I will probably have to edit every single post to clean up the HTML and re-link the URLs I included in old posts. And I’m not terribly happy with the design of this template, which is pretty basic, and virtually unchanged from the generic version of Kubrick, which I used to get started. It’s a great template, but there are well-understood steps I still need to take to make it my own…

Anyway, by switching to WordPress, a much more popular weblogging system, I should be back to posting regularly, as the system will get in my way a lot less.

There’s been some coverage of the issue on weblogs and in more mainstream media

• Fired for Blogging
• Clueless Newbie: Friendster
• Why we owe Troutgirl our thanks
• Friendster fires developer for blog [CNET]

Frankly, I wasn’t using my Friendster account anyway; my LinkedIn account is more useful, and my Orkut account is more interesting. Friendter was trapped in-between being useful and being fun, which meant it was pretty useless. So cancelling my account to send a (tiny) message seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

After all, I have this blog, and someday I might be working 9-5 again…

We didn’t do that. Instead, we decided that we couldn’t take the various stains on the light blue-gray carpet that covered half the house. (Two years ago we got rid of the other half, by putting in hardwood floors, which we are still in love with.) Time for new carpet.

Rochelle and David had already spent months finding just the right pattern and color, so when Rochelle’s twice-yearly ESPP kicked out a chunk of change, we decided to go for it. This involved moving everything out of three rooms (including, once again, the bedroom) for a day. And because of the noise and the strangers in the house during the installation, the cats liked this less than the painting. Let’s just say that Billie didn’t stop at puking this time.

But the carpet was fast, in no small measure because we weren’t the ones installing it. We were moving furniture back into all three rooms by the end of the day. We got a lot of the big stuff, but three months later, we still haven’t moved everything back to where it should go.

This is because we’ve decided not to move anything until we’ve decided where it really belongs. Which means we’re throwing out crap, giving away crap, selling off crap, taking crap down to the basement, etc.

To go with the lovely new carpet, we also bought all new furniture for the office. It’s all from IKEA, so it was reasonably cheap. Two bookcases, a three-level horizontal filing cabinet, and two huuuuge new desks for probably less than a grand, and the office is far more usable. And if we ever actually paint the office, it’s going to look really fabulous, too. Which will be good for me, since it looks like I will continue to be self-employed (gainfully, really) for a while. It’s almost to the point to where I could have clients visit!

In the last few weekends, we’ve moved a bunch of stuff to the basement, taken a bunch of stuff from the basement and either thrown it out or taken it to Goodwill, and generally spent a good 30+ hours working on house organization. It’s starting to feel good!

We also had a friend, who is a professional contractor, come and paint, stain, and varnish our brand new back door, which is really beautiful, with small glass panels framed in wood, and lets far more light into the house. The new door framing and brand new weather stripping mean it seals far better than the old door; in spite of being glass, the kitchen is actually 10 degrees warmer than it was before. This is going to be great this coming Winter.

Anyway, all of this is to catch up, and explain a little bit about why no posting. We’ve been really, really busy!

It’s not full-time or permanent, so I make less and will have to pay self-employment taxes, etc. But for now, it gives me a lot of flexibility. And while I pays less than I was making in my last job, it pays way more than unemployment benefits.

Anyway, it’s going to have something that gets me up and out of the house most days, and pays some bills.

Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda. That’s what a Next Big Thing is like. Footprints from your ass to the top of your head. Keep it in mind the next time the Valley Grail Quest gets trotted out by the punditocracy. There will eventually be a Valley 4.0, but the odds of any of the [experts] calling it in advance aren’t very wonderful. Most likely, it will hit rudely from behind, when least expected. So find something that solves problems for real people, gets you up in the morning, and lets you work with good folks, and dig in. That’s the way the Valley actually rejuvenates itself.

Food for thought, given that I don’t really know what I want to do next. These are three important things to look for, not necessarily to find the Next Big Thing, but to find a comfortable seat from which to watch for it.

BTW, I strongly recommend Due Diligence, an insightful, technology-focused blog written by a venture capitalist.

I suppose this could have something to do with idolizing Sarah Hepola’s life in a previous post. Or that I can never remember everything, or much of anything, I did with the day while she was at work. Or that she’s usually waking me up from a nap when she calls home. Or that the stack of BeBox husks is as huge as ever.

At any rate, I now have to be much more productive and accountable. Expect me to blog more, so I can at least point to the posts as something I accomplished.