Five days into the Etsy tenure and other than a sloppy focus mishap (damn you Mac!) and feeling like my brain is going to get heartburn (telencephalon-burn?) from all the information I’ve digested, I’d say it went pretty well.

Actually, better than well. I can’t stop talking about this place. Dogs in the office? Awesome. My own lab coat? Awesome. Telephone booths? Awesome. Craft night? Awesome. Eatsy? Delicious. Having one of these in our kitchen? Awesome.

Most importantly, the people? Incredibly smart, talented, hard working and–wait for it–awesome.

Oh wait, I haven’t even talked about the work! How many places are there where you can go from zero to production deploy on day one? Or find yourself the subject of CTO tweet and team leader blog post?

Like I said, I can’t stop talking about this place. The good news? You can experience it for yourself because we’re hiring in NY and SF!

Switching teams tomorrow. Postgres and Python, here I come.

Oh, and we’re going to give it another go with the Mac. Anyone know if those things support sloppy focus yet? Also is spaces anything close to decent yet? (i.e. can you wrap and drag windows amongst spaces?)

are the new double-unders

Just finished serving as 6th man for team No FOMO Runners (a.k.a. Team Eat Strong) in this year’s Ragnar Relay. 24 hours. 184 miles. 12 friends.

For posterity:
Leg 6 – 12:00pm – 4.9 miles – 36 min
Leg 18 – 10:40pm – 7.6 miles – 59:50 min
Leg 30 – 7:30am – 6.9 miles – 57:00 min

Total: 19.4 miles.
Average pace: 7:52

New firsts:
First time I’ve run 19.4 miles in 24 hours.
First time coconut water has ever tasted good.
First time calves have been non-functional.
First time Carmen has walked faster than me.

Notes to future self:
Train for it next time.
Advil and ice are your friends.
Soaking in a cold bath after 19.4 miles is priceless . . . as long as you get past the first 20 seconds.

You can re-live the experience at eatstrong.tumblr.com.

Are morale annihilators.

the crab preempted me, but here i is, Windows 7 on Fedora 12 via KVM. Although the fedora kids would have you believe the setup is a walk in the park, it actually isn’t. Some things to note:

1. You must have a processor that supports the virtualization instruction set
2. you must enable said instruction set in your computer’s bios
3. the default virtualization lib install only supplies the qemu emulator. this will not work with windows 7. many BSODs await you on this path.
4. Instead, install the kvm emulator packages.

and that’s it! I should also mention that the performance on this thing is pretty sick. I can’t even tell i’m running two operating systems at the same time.

now to see if i can get ie6 running and to hookup some network routing magic.

Last saturday was our turkey day warm up dinner. Happy to report that a good time was had. While it didn’t go as smoothly as I would have liked, all the food got out and we set a new record in attendance (14!).

On the menu:

• empanadas
• Crackers with Fromage d’Affinois and Sarabeth Marmalade
• butternut squash soup
• mashed yams
• corn bread pudding
• brussel sprouts cooked in bacon fat (mel special)
• macaroni cheese (mel special)
• challah stuffing
• bourbon cranberry sauce
• turkey

Other new additions this year included real plates and cups! Maybe next year we’ll have real chairs.

Many thanks to our wonderful guests who provided all the booze and desserts as well as fantastic company for a night of eating and drinking. Also, major props to mel for the mac & cheese and brussels as well as tessa for a wonderful home made apple pie.

As always, we’re looking forward to next year’s dinner. We’re hoping to see all the smiling face of those who could and couldn’t make it this year. With the new job, we might not be trying as many new recipes this year, but i’m sure we can find something interesting to add to the menu.

Finally, many were curious about the infamous spreadsheet, so here it is. Enjoy.

a season of new has arrived. new job. new fedora. new dev box. new kings season.

one of those things doesn’t quite belong. anyway, first week and a half down and things are still in the feeling out stage. exciting and daunting at the same time as scope is large and time lines are aggressive. It’ll work itself out, i’m sure.

On another note, new fedora! I am quasi sad to report that i’ve finally officially switched to using gnome . . . there, i said it. for those in the know, this next sentence will blow your mind even more. I’m now booting into run level 5, too. wow. i feel so dirty saying that, but alas, it was getting too difficult to figure out all the new daemons i had to get windowmaker to run in order to keep up with modern laptop features. in general, the box is fast enough where i don’t notice the performance difference between windowmaker and gnome. the panels still annoy the hell out of me, but i’m slowly learning how to use them. also, if i enable compiz and workspace as cube mode, i can drag windows between workspaces. kinda crazy that gnome requires you to have 3D acceleration just to drag windows between workspaces . . . so dirty . . . the one last hurdle hurdled was how gnome window geometry was absurdly large. my 80×25 emacs windows would take up a full quarter of my screen at 1400×1050. unacceptable. here’s the magic sauce in my .Xdefaults file that did the trick:

emacs.font: Monospace-12:antialias=True:pixelsize=12

you can mess with the pixelsize to get things to your liking. after each edit you have to hit

$ xrdb ~/.Xdefaults

speaking of emacs, after years of failed attempts with multiple major modes a la mmm-mode, it looks like there’s finally a good solution to be found in nXhtml. Finally a mode where php, javascript, css, and html can live happily together. the only down side are the hideous background region colors that are used to demarcate each mode. you can fix that by putting this in your .emacs:

(custom-set-faces
‘(mumamo-background-chunk-major ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background dark)) (:background “black”))))
‘(mumamo-background-chunk-submode1 ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background dark)) (:background “black”))))
‘(mumamo-background-chunk-submode2 ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background dark)) (:background “black”))))
‘(mumamo-background-chunk-submode3 ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background dark)) (:background “black”))))
‘(mumamo-background-chunk-submode4 ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background dark)) (:background “black”)))))

well, that’s all i got for now, folks. enjoy you turkey day!

I’ve been trying to write this post in my head for a while now, but sometimes there’s no thinking like doing, so here it goes:

I’m in Sunnyvale this week finishing my last days at the Y Bang. Awkward is the only word that comes to mind right now. Saying goodbye to the people who have supported and shaped my life for the past four years is not something I take lightly, and although I’ve been working remotely for the past year, I’ll still miss my daily interactions with the group.

Deboarding the plane in SJC this past Sunday, I was a bit surprised to be awash in memories of the first days of my return to California and all the decisions that led to this point. I remembered landing in Oakland four years ago filled with excitement and enthusiasm. I think I even raised my hands in victory as I trotted down the stairs and took my first breaths of bay area air as a newly re-minted Californian. There was a lot to be happy about in addition to the sunshine and blue skies. I was tired of new york, I was going to be closer to family, and I had this great new job that blended two things that I really loved–engineering and sports. In hindsight, that moment is going to be hard to beat. But on this particular Sunday, all I could think about was how a lot of the things I was excited about just didn’t pan out–not necessarily in a negative way, but more in a non-expected way. I never thought I’d move back to New York and I certainly never thought I’d leave Yahoo!.

So, here I am. Y! Sports Defender no more. While leaving has it’s down sides, I’m looking forward to the challenges ahead at the new job. I’d like to say a final thank you to all my co-workers at the Y!. It’s been a lot of fun. If any of you are ever in NYC, give a holler. Otherwise, I’ll see you all on the Madden field.

pubes on a site, originally uploaded by attack_gecko.

This blogging hiatus has been interrupted to bring you pubes on a site.