Surf Roots, Software Thoughts

Today is a sad day.  Today marks the end of an era for me, an era of rack-mount computers, data centers, nerdom, and fantisticism.  Nearly 18 months ago, some friends and I installed a 1U rack-mount in a Seattle data center.  I had purchased the machine thinking my social network startup, Cellarspot, would create enough traffic to require a monster machine.

After 18 month of spending $97 each month, not to mention an up-front cost of $2,800, my machine has been unracked and is now waiting to be picked up and sold off, never to be in my life ever again.  The pinnacle of my nerdom was installing that baby, and today I feel slightly empty.  However, I’m quite excited to be chipping away at my credit card bill.  And to be totally honest, purchasing a server, power, and a fire hose was insane overkill and an entirely uneconomic hosting decision.

I tried to sell services such as game server hosting, web hosting, etc, but I didn’t get any bites.  I will step foot in more data centers as time goes on, and I will have another rack mount at some point.  Goodbye, Dell PowerEdge 1950.  I will see you, or at least your sisters, brothers, and cousins, again.

With love,

Alex

I’ve been referred to some really, really awesome datasets.  I wish I had known about these while taking data-analysis classes in college.

• theinfo.org
• infochimps.org
• PoliParse

My personal favorite is the Enron emails of 150 employees, mostly executives.  Included are their names, their sent items, inboxes, notes, etc.  WOW would I have a blast hacking away at this for hours.

I have to restart Firefox 3 at least a few times a day to avoid having it eat most of my resources.  Take a look:

We need Google Chrome on Mac!  Why not Safari you ask?  I don’t like Safari’s interface all that much.  Perhaps it’s because I’ve been using Firefox so much?  I don’t know; there’s just something about it that turns me away.  Give me some Chrome!

I’ve been meaning to write a post about the comedic potential of listening to non-technical marketers talk about technology.  I’m only referring to the marketers who speak with such conviction that innocent bystandards might actually believe they know what they’re talking about.  I’ve witnessed this many a time when speaking with MBA-types about various web startups.  I would normally cite specific examples, but Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, has done better than I could ever do.  Read this short article about cloud computing and silly marketers who want so badly to be technical but fail miserably.  It’s like a new Revenge of the Nerds, even though Ellison probably isn’t a nerd given how much cash he’s rolling around in.

What’s curious is that the title of this post is “Larry Ellison’s Brilliant Anti-Cloud Computing Rant.”  That’s completely misguiding.  This isn’t an anti-cloud computing rant; it’s an anti-marketer-who-speaks-with-conviction rant.