More sun!

I guess the sacrifices worked, because there's all kinds of sun and blue skies today. There're still lots of clouds and the potential for rain, but sun is making the plants in the garden very happy. 

More sun!

"Delivering Happiness" - a review

A few months ago, I attended South by Southwest for the first time. When I was there, I heard about Tony Hsieh, who had a book coming out shortly called Delivering Happiness. There was a deal for bloggers and writers: if you promised to post a review of the book on June 7, you could get an advance copy. I received two advance copies in April and this is my promised review.  

(a-hem)

"Wow!"

"I mean, like, WOW!"   

Okay, okay, I've got more to say than that. :)

Delivering Happiness is first about Tony's personal history and his successes in the early part of the dot-com boom. He built up a company called LinkExchange, which he sold to Yahoo in 1999 for $265 million (he didn't get all of that but he got a sizeable piece of it).

You and I would probably call his chunk (um, $40M or so? maybe 'only' $20M?) fuck-you money and maybe even bordering on fuck-everybody money, but Tony didn't feel like sitting back and doing nothing. Money was not The Thing for him. He invested in a lot of dot-com companies that looked worth investing in (and did marginally okay, though he says that his ultimate take was no big deal for doing this), but one company in particular, Zappos.com, looked like a real deal.

Zappos, if you're not already familiar with it, started out as an online shoe store. You could buy many different brands and types of shoes through them. It was a novel idea and it worked. As Delivering Happiness shows, it was hardly an overnight succes; it took 10 years of work to bring it to the point where it was sold to Amazon. During the journey from then to now, Tony (who signed on as CEO) and the rest of the company realized that the company wasn't running the way most software companies do... and that's why it was working so well. They realized they were (chord of organ music here) delivering happiness, and that's what they needed to do. 

The bulk of the book describes how Tony and the rest of the company brought Zappos to success and made it such an amazing place to work. It sounds like a place that I'd love to work because it's so radically different from the many Theory X high tech companies I've been at in the past (read "standard Microsoft-model software companies by people who want nothing more than to get rich/powerful on the backs of a bunch of other people"). At Zappos, people are valued for being people and are actively encouraged to "have fun and be a little weird." The proof is in the pudding: when Amazon bought Zappos recently for $1.25B, they also made a point of setting things up so that the corporate culture that has made the company so successful would not be affected.

Anyone in high tech, anyone in management, and anyone who wants to work in corporate environments should read Delivering Happiness as much as they should read Robert Townsend's Up the Organization and De Marco and Lister's Peopleware, and for the same reason: all describe the right way to run a company for maximum effectiveness and minimal abuse. For more information, take a look at the book's website, http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com.

And while I'm at it, if you need to buy shoes, bags, accessories, or a number of other items, you ought to look at Zappos. There's free shipping both ways and a very generous return policy. I'll be buying my next pair of shoes through them.

"Delivering Happiness" - a review

Adding labels to the blog

I've added labels to about half the blog posts. There are 750 blog posts, though, so this is taking a while. I'm also experimenting with the blog label display format. I can sort alphabetically or by frequency of usage and list things hierarchically or in a cloud. Anyone care to venture an opinion on what's most useful? 

I'd thought there was some change in the focus of the blog but I'm not sure that there has been, at least not as much as I'd thought. I've done the first hundred blog posts and the most recent couple hundred blog posts and they're not as different as I'd been recalling. The more recent ones are occasionally more political, but it's not like there's a huge delta in the types of posts.

I have been able to fix a few broken links and some typos here and there. And I've re-read a lot of things and missed my cat Bernie.

It's a good blog. I like what I've posted.

Adding labels to the blog

"Around the world, across your town, and up your street...."

Vpike.com (short for "Virtual Turnpike") is an interesting site that you give an address to and it shows you the street view for the address. You can move up and down the street, turn and look at things across the street, and so on. Try it out on where you live now, places you used to live, and even old family homes.

"Around the world, across your town, and up your street...."

Quote du jour

Thanks to Isaac O'Bannon for this one.

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead." -- Bukowski

Quote du jour

Sun! There's SUN!!!

Well, there was sun, anyway....  Late yesterday afternoon, we had blue skies, which continued until maybe 2:30 this afternoon. It was actually warm, too, which was a pleasant change. The plants are enjoying it very much: some of the marigold seeds have sprouted and I saw at least eight sunflower seeds breaking the surface this morning. I figure there will be more later today.  

Had a lovely time at the First Friday Art Walk last night with Jim & Beth Weldy and their grandniece Caitlyn (who's in town from Tennessee). 

Back to messing with the scanner, trying to get it to install correctly under WinXP SP3. Bleah.

Sun! There's SUN!!!

More gardening

Yesterday, we went out to Jerry's and picked up 4 more faux terra cotta pots, and a couple large bags of potting soil, and some more tomato plants, and a blueberry bush. Turns out the pots were slightly smaller than the ones we already had, so I just put one tomato plant in each one. We had a pair of dill plants that hadn't fit in anything (which is why we'd gone to buy more pots in the first place) and they went into two of the 1-gallon pots left over from the tomato plants. And then I planted nasturtium seeds in a bunch of the barrels and pots (there's always room for more nasturtiums) and created starts with a package of Velvet Queen sunflower seeds and "Sparky" French marigolds.

Jewel nasturtiums

Velvet Queen sunflowers

"Sparky" French marigolds

I looked closely at the plants yesterday and today and everyone seems happy. Most of the plants are showing new leaves, there are additional flower buds on a couple of the big tomatoes, the fuschias have larger flower buds, and the nemesia and dill are spreading out vigorously.

More gardening

A day of gardening

I announced to The Babe this morning that I had a PLAN. (She made a disparaging comment; she's a hard woman.) This plan involved going to Jerry's and picking up bedding plants for the barrels and pots in the backyard, grout cleaner and sealers to deal with a grouting problem in the shower, and concrete to erect three trellis we've been waiting for warm weather to put up.  

This was an acceptable plan, so off we truddled. (Yeah, it's a word; deal with it!) We ended up buying about $200 of bedding plants, flowers and vegies both. Lots more flowers because there is always room for more flowers and vegies for the barrels. Last year's attempt to put the barrels in the back had not been successful because we didn't put drainage holes in them and they turned into aquaculture tubs. We bought a spade bit a few weeks ago and drilled holes in the barrels (which drained prodigiously) and they've been okay since then. So this time for sure (in my best Bullwinkle voice.) I got a lot of tomatoes, including Sweet 100s, the first cherry tomato I grew in 1979, the very first year Patricia and I started gardening, Seattle's best, an heirloom tomato popular in the Puget Sound, and Better Boy VFN. There's also a Sweet Pea clustering cherry tomato that I'm not familiar with, but wotthehell?  I also got two sweet red peppers--Red Knight--and two serrano peppers, a lot of sweet basil, and yellow and patty pan squashes. All of this is My Kinda Garden Produce.  

The Babe and I hadn't communicated about how many barrels were going to be used for what, so she ended up buying a lot of very nice flowers--brachysome, some yummy begonias with coleus-like leaves, nemesia, trailing lobelia, white geraniums, and half a dozen other flowers--that she'd thought were going into the same barrels and pots.  

We managed to get most of the flowers and all the vegies into the barrels and pots that we've got, but I need to buy several more 2-gallon plastic pots tomorrow for some of the oddments.  Things are well-fertilized with a Miracle-Gro slow-release fertilizer, so I think we should be okay.  36" apart?  Pfui! They'll live with 6" or so. The Babe also planted large numbers of flowers out front to fill in spaces that didn't have quite enough flowers. 

I'm feeling a bit creaky, but all the plants are looking good this evening and showing no signs of transplant shock. I'll go downstairs and soak several packets of nasturtium, sunflower, and marigold seeds for planting in starter packs tomorrow.  And I may make a drink.  A drink would be good. 

(BTW, I'm finally making use of post labels. In my copious free time, I hope to slowly work through past posts here and there and add labels to them for easier searching and cross-referencing. If naught else, just remembering to add them to new posts will be a step forward.)

A day of gardening

I'm on IMDB!

I just realized I'd posted this information on Twitter but not here on my blog, and it's important stuff.  

Thanks to Jason Scott and his inclusion of me as one of his selected experts in his excellent film BBS: The Documentary, I have a screen credit.  

So, I now have a listing on IMDB! 

Ta-effing-DAH!!! 

Seriously, Jason Scott has done an excellent job of documenting the history of computer bulletin boards, an important part of telecommunications history that laid the foundation for almost everything we now take for granted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Without his careful and exhaustive work, many parts of this history would have been lost forever within 10-15 years. He deserves great credit for an exceptional piece of work.

I'm on IMDB!

Quote du jour

Thanks to @faircher on Twitter, Cherie Atkinson Clark, for this one.

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." --T.S. Eliot

Quote du jour

Hedtke's Law in Latin

Hedtke's Law (about which you can read more here) is now in Latin, thanks to Dr. Sarah: 

Quod neminem laedit neminis interesse potest.

("That which offends no one is able to be of interest to no one.")

For more on Hedtke's Laws, click here.

Hedtke's Law in Latin

Quote du jour

"One should try anything he can in his career, except folkdance and incest." - Christopher Lee

Quote du jour