Yearly Archives: 2013

Amazon Goes To The Droids

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Jeff Bezos presented this video on Charlie Rose, I believe, highlighting a future where Amazon could deliver merchandise in less than 30 minutes via drone.

It’s fanciful and not very realistic for most items my family has ordered from them. (We bought a really nice air mattress bed recently that would take a small army of drones to move.) It still feels like  a very long way off since the FAA keeps dragging its feet on drones for commercial use.

Om Malik fills in with some questions that Charlie Rose forgot to ask, including a very good one: why is Bezos, a very secretive and private man about his future business ideas, showing this now, clearly years before it is even feasible?

I have another: who will be buying stuff from Amazon? [1]

In the 1950s the general contract was that employers will pay employees enough to buy their stuff. That contract is broken now. We seem to so rarely think about the human costs of automation. Yes, it’s inevitable that this will happen. Computers will rule the world. What I never hear discussed, though, is how people will live when Amazon needs a tiny fraction of employees, compared to Walmart, which utilized a tiny fraction compared to mom-and-pop shops.

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[1] Yes, I know I keep bringing this up. I’m still looking for answers.

Dinovember

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As November winds down and we head into a long holiday weekend here in the US, I thought I would share something whimsical. It starts:

Every year, my wife and I devote the month of November to convincing our children that, while they sleep, their plastic dinosaur figures come to life.

Absolutely brilliant. The pictures are incredible and what an amazing way to tie into the amazing imaginations that kids already have. These types of mysteries, whether it be dinosaurs or Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, are all part of what being a kid should be about. I only wish I had thought of it first.

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via Marco Arment

My Insatiable Appetite

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I’ve noticed a trend developing about myself the past year or two: if I’m not learning new things I am completely frustrated.

The past few months have been excruciating. I’ve been working on contract projects or repeating things I’ve learned before. My frustration level boils over. I’m irritable. If I have to write one more UITableView I think I could kill someone. And the last project I worked on was almost all UITableViews.

When I think about it, though, I had fun early on as I was starting to learn how storyboards work, learning what to do (UITableViews are a heck of a lot nicer, leaving me wanting to maim instead of kill) and what not to do. (Segues. Ever.)

This year the most fun I had was working on Javascript and jQuery and attempting to make Equals run in a web browser. Oh, sure, it was painful at times but the exploration was incredible. It felt like every sense was alive.

This isn’t restricted to code, though. Learning new business concepts, about marketing or advertising or minutiae of business is interesting, too. It’s just that the new learning opportunities seem to manifest themselves more often in code. There is always something new to learn there.

While we aren’t making much money from powerOne anymore, the learning opportunities associated with completely redeveloping the app have been overpowering. I know in my head this doesn’t make sense and that we can improve the product by improving the existing code base, which is a heck of a lot less expensive than starting over, but the allure of writing it again is so strong.

Head or heart, which will win? I guess we will all find out soon enough.

Winning My Way to Weight Loss

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You won’t change what you don’t track.

I’ve heard this phrase before but never put a lot of stock in it. After all most people won’t change what they do track, also. I think this is going to join my lexicon of great phrases. [1]

When I was a teenager I weighed 155 pounds sopping wet. I never had to work at it. I just had a very high metabolism and was athletic. In college I put on a few pounds but was generally pretty lean for my height, staying around 165-170. After I graduated, though, and when I started sitting on my butt for a living, I ballooned. At my heaviest I was 220.

For the past decade I have fluctuated between 205 and 220, occasionally getting down as low of 200 but rarely dropping below it. I’d like to be about 190. What has made this worse is my on-again, off-again fascination with physical exercise. I’ve always been athletic and played sports when I was younger but never could stand the idea of running on a tread mill.

A couple of years ago I started riding a bike more seriously in the summer and finally forced myself to join a gym for the off-days and winter wet. 4-5 days per week I’m there with some combination of weight training, elliptical and swimming. [2] My weight has stayed pretty steady at 205 but I never seem to drop below that.

See, I like to snack in the evenings. I have this sense that I eat fine all day and then in the evening, after the kids are in bed and watching a little tv, I snack. Mostly it is healthy stuff but I do like a cookie and a glass of milk. Anyway, if I could just stop snacking, I figured, I’d lose the weight. No amount of will power  seemed to work. I always gave in.

This weekend my wife introduced me to My Fitness Pal, an app and service that tracks exercise and diet. What works is that they have a massive trove of foods already in there so the pains of entering aren’t so bad. Saturday I started tracking and I can tell you that the reaction was instantaneous.

Suddenly I had no desire to snack in the evenings and even my meal choices were changing. [3] My desire to exercise improved, too, so I can eat what I want. It turns out my competitive streak took over. There’s a little number at the top of each day that tells you how many calories ahead (green!) or behind (red!) you are for the day. I’ll be damned if my numbers gonna be red!

I couldn’t believe how fast the change happened for me. Literally within hours I was thinking about my intake and looking for exercise opportunities. It will be interesting to see if I can keep this up but if so I bet I shed those extra 15 pounds in no time.

Once I master this game, I’ll have to raise the stakes. I’ll need that cholesterol counter to show me green and red.

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[1] Two of my favorites are “Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance”, the 7-Ps, and “Cash is King.”

[2] In the winter. In the summer it is a couple of days per week to supplement by three-time per week bike rides.

[3] I was right. The evening snacking was killing me.

Accounting Time Capsules

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I always feel slightly nostalgic this time of year. Why? Because my accountant has free shredding week and I pull the old accounting records from the attic. During the process I glance through the files to make sure nothing was filed that I need to keep. In those files I see all kinds of goodies. Old employees I have such positive memories of. A sense that it really wasn’t that long ago that we all worked together. Channels we used to sell through and, because of the vendors and suppliers, a sense for people I haven’t talk to in a long time.

In some ways, those years felt more certain, our success more guaranteed. Now it feels more nebulous and harder to grasp. Reality, however, didn’t turn out that way and what we are working on now has way more potential than what we were working on then.

This year I get to review two years: 2005 and 2006. For some reason I have been keeping eight years back instead of the required seven. 2005 was a very rough year for my wife and me personally. In January of that year my wife’s father died suddenly and in February we lost our baby at 22 weeks pregnant. 2005 also was the year Infinity Softworks lost 75% of our revenue in six months, forcing me to lay off most of the staff and refocus with a tighter team. We went from 10 to 3 people during that time.

2006 was rosier. We were close to shipping our new education product, which at the time we thought was going to have great success. And my first daughter was born a year after we lost a son, one of my three happiest days on this planet. [1] Unfortunately business success was not there yet and navigating first-time fatherhood was difficult. Let’s just say I didn’t handle the mixed family and work responsibilities well. By the time the calendar hit 2007, though, it felt like we were at least on solid footing, at home and at the office [2].

These two years were especially important. They were transition years. Infinity Softworks was changing. I was changing. For the first time I was asking questions about why some businesses were successful and some weren’t. I was questioning the “this is the way it is done” party lines that had nearly driven Infinity Softworks out of business. My priorities were changing. In some ways, for the first time, my wife and I weren’t just two people living in the same house. With the birth of my daughter we were a family.

The years pass, of course. Seven since this time, to be exact. In a few weeks another year will go by the books. In a few weeks I will put 2013 in a box, where it will wait to be opened and its stories revealed, like some accounting time capsule, in 2020.

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[1] The other being when my youngest daughter was born two years later and when my wife married me 13+ years ago.

[2] At home that proved true. At the office… another mirage.