reoriginalize

Received an email today asking me to evaluate the feasibility of an idea, this was my response to it:

Subject: Re: Question

Body:

| In a nutshell, I would like to create something - like [XXX] - that is geared more towards the [XXX] community.

| Is that enough information?

Obviously not.

| I don’t want to go to in depth because it may be a “very” good idea and I would like to know I could trust the person - hearing the whole presentation - to not disqualify it to me and then go on to develop it for their own personal gain.

That is in almost all cases a very flawed path to follow. Ideas aren’t worth much of anything, I assure you somebody else has had your idea and most likely many other people, the fewer people you tell your idea to the more likely it is that you will build yourself into a hole without input, fail to see things from other perspectives, fail to find out that your idea has already been done before you waste the time trying to build it, and in almost all cases simply fail. “Stealth Mode” is a worn out and useless concept perpetuated by people who expect to get something for nothing, what makes things happen is (1) actually fleshing out the idea through constant interaction with other people more knowledgeable than yourself, giving you additional reasons and urgency to actually build it, and (2) actually building it. The difference between the successful and the unsuccessful entrepreneur often has much more to do with how well that person can actually organize the people around her into making their dreams a reality than about an idea.

Good luck.

–andy

Anybody who’s spent much time with me knows I’m neither the kind of guy to take no for an answer nor the kind to say something isn’t possible, rather I am the kind who feels like he can be great at everything and be everything to everyone. It’s a fault but I do well enough most of the time that I can skate by.

Today on the bus ride to work while finishing reading the play “Copenhagen” I came to the sudden realization that I would never make a significant contribution to mathematics. It wasn’t ever something I specifically strove for, nor anything I put any sort of commitment towards, but somewhere in the back of my mind I’m sure I hoped, as I do with an outrageous number of things, to wind up in a position where it would be possible and that by sheer force of character I could make it happen.

Even now, after tossing the thought around all day, I can’t quite bring myself to accept the word never in the paragraph above. It feels like a challenge. Even after deciding that I will not commit myself to the level of study and research it would take, even with the generally held statistic that most great contributions to mathematics happen by the time the contributor is 25, even after accepting the overall lunacy of the idea that I might be in some way qualified, never is still a tough pill to swallow.Loan with credit score Average national credit score Long term care insurance leads Best home insurance Home equity loans refinance credit Credit score help Credit score repair Debt consolidation companies New hampshire health insurance Faxless payday loan Refinance houses michigan Federal long term care insurance program Lifewise health insurance Free payday loan Hancock long term care insurance Home equity loan refinance credit Credit score auto loan Commercial construction loan Credit card debt settlement Health insurance online quote Commercial loan leads Student loans for bad credit Accept card credit online Credit repair help Equifax credit reporting Is credit score Fair credit and reporting Federal student loan forgiveness Consolidation debt loan payday Self help credit repair How to repair bad credit Credit score what Student loan for college Credit card debt history Good credit score New jersey payday loan Universal life insurance American home insurance Ovarian cancer health insurance lead Cheap payday loans 0 apr credit cards Commercial loan interest rates On line credit reports South carolina health insurance Credit card debt consolidation Oregon commercial loan Student loan consolidation rates Order credit reports Mortgage rate refinance loan home Metlife auto insurance Stop credit card offer Term life insurance protection Auto loan after bankruptcy Getting out of debt settlement Fair credit report California home loan refinance rate california mortgage Second mortgage home equity loan rate Refinance bay county Life insurance agent Commercial loan brokers Free credit card offers Arizona long term care insurance Online health insurance quote Long term health care insurance plans Credit repair specialist Auto loans bad credit Self credit repair State farm home insurance Auto loan refinance Colorado free credit report Home loan refinance rate bad credit refinance mortgage Texas health insurance provider Credit rating score scale South dakota health insurance Credit card debt deceased Three major credit reporting Payday advance loan

Andy wouldn’t mind seeing:

• • Friday -
• The Verve
• Tegan and Sara
• The Breeders
• Goldfrapp
• Slightly Stoopid
• Battles
• Aesop Rock
• Vampire Weekend
• • Saturday -
• Kraftwerk (Zombienaaation)
• Rilo Kiley
• MIA
• Animal Collective
• Flogging Molly
• Islands
• Man Man (!!)
• AkronFamily
• Minus The Bear
• Yelle
• • Sunday -
• My Morning Jacket
• Justice
• Metric
• Simian Mobile Disco
• Autolux
• Sia
• Holy Fuck
• Grand Ole Party

And there are a lot of other names that sound familiar/good:

• • Friday -
• Les Savy Fav
• The Bees
• • Saturday -
• DeVotchka
• Blonde Do Role
• Kavinsky
• The Bird and the Bee
• 120 Days
• • Sunday -
• The Field
• Sons & Daughters
• Austin TV
• Shout Out Louds
• Plasticines

Social social social social.

I think I’d like to work a bit now.

So, at big companies like this it appears you get to do these “performance review things,” anyway I ended up spending far longer working on it than I wanted to when I should have been rapidly typing things like api.channel_post or request.user but I figured I could make up for some of that by posting a good chunk of it here.

Overall Performance

Just getting moving, between integrating myself with the company and pushing for support for Jaiku I feel these first months were certainly my slowest, but with a solid plan and commitment to it I feel that this is just the beginning.

Accomplishments

• Oh em gee super sekret.
• Biking to work about once a week.

Strengths

• Contributing energy, excitement and enthusiasm / pleasant to work withness / constructive feedback and helpful suggestions is always one of my main strengths.
• Code-wise, I feel I do a good job of contributing well-thought-out, simple, useful designs, generating great new ideas and staying abreast of new developments in the industry, a close connection to open source developers.
• I move quite fast and make a lot of progress when the path is clear, tends to be very helpful for people wanting to experiment with an idea.
• I’d like to think I cultivate relationships between engineering groups, I definitely feel that will be a strong point of mine once I’ve had a chance to interact with more groups.

Areas for Development

• I feel I could always test much better and do better at keeping design docs up to date, I end up running ahead of those far too often, I feel this will improve greatly as I am exposed to more great testers via code reviews, nothing drives me forward as well as working with bright people.
• I would love to teach and mentor others more, I feel I frequently skimp on this due to the feeling of lacking time or for getting frustrated with people who are still learning, I think I can improve this by beginning to write more documentation for projects, documentation for APIs and things like that.
• Complete projects that I started is a big one for me, I’ve noticed myself dropping out of projects here at Google once the meetings become about what I feel is just large company red tape, I’d like to improve this by learning enough of what the issues people are facing are that I can solve them before my interest dies completely. Additionally, simply having the stamina to get through the boring parts long enough to be a useful contributor again.
• Providing leadership, I’m quite used to running my own projects but at a company of this size and nature it requires much more to be a leader that can contribute, I plan to improve this by working with great leaders and taking on larger and larger responsibilities.

Career Development Objectives

My past objectives in career development have always been related to starting projects that bring together small groups of bright individuals in a way that allows them to thrive and produce free products that move towards making the world a better place and in the process learn greatly by being surrounded by these people and working with them.

So moving here felt like quite a departure at first, but I feel I’ve found the right niches to dive into where I can again contribute and progress towards those goals.

My plans are to bring about environments within the company that breed the kind of passion and excitement that I’ve always taken for granted at smaller companies and smaller projects, and through working in those environments implement and launch innovative products that assist other developers both internally and externally in bringing that same passion and excitement to their environments.

Having a platform like Jaiku on which to rapidly develop new tools is one way in which I intend to begin accomplishing, and working with some of the more interesting developer-facing projects internally and externally is another. Along the way I intend to re-acclimatize myself with C++ and Java so that I will be more quick to contribute to those projects that are based on those languages.

My new bike - Photo copyright Mission Bicycles - CC BY-NC

The glamour shots are out and Joi just blogged his. The picture above isn’t actually the final configuration for mine (but it is such a pretty picture), I ended up swapping the grip tape and seat for black because the pinks weren’t totally matching. It’s name is trotz. They’re taking orders, so go grab your own

Yay! Last night after a bunch of hard work by Lindsay and Travis to clean up the house in preparation for the thanksgiving party we decided we would crack the seal on the projector and watch a not-mind-intensive movie (Spiderman 3) on our couches. I had picked up Anni to join the festivities and shortly after we started Mika, Teemu and Emma all arrived. Ample couch space for all seven of us and some cozy blankets / reindeer skins later it was a damn fine way to wind down an evening.

It’s starting to feel like a real house ‘n stuff. -cozy- Still looking for a roommate or two for downstairs.

Woke up, wandered downstairs without a shirt on, turned on the pac, made some cereal and sat my ass on the couch to read the internet. Word.

My house feels pretty lonely without my housemates here.

More like 3.5 but the kid (ha, I can say that, I’m old now) who proved the universality of the 2,3 Turing machine is giving a tech talk right now. I’ll have to watch the video afterwards.

But yeah, 3 and a half weeks in, how do I feel? (This is one of those list posts)

• Only a little like a cog, far less than I expected to even if I’ve already found myself complaining about changes to my cube walls (they put a hole in so that team members on either side of the wall could communicate, but it now means I stare at the back of somebody’s head).
• They moved an Argentine dude near me, which is cool I get to practice some Spanish and I have a good track record of befriending Spanish and Portuguese speakers. He brought me a chocolate cookie treat yesterday.
• Mediamatic has a much better coffee machine and coffee system all together. The espresso machine here lamely gives you miniscule amounts of coffee and you have two… handles? One which stores probably 4 people worth of coffee and one that stores half a person if that. So either you get mega-tiny coffee or you have to pack a big cup full and waste a bunch of beans. Additionally the milk is stored across the room from the machine so you have to do this little juggling act running back and forth to get a cup, steam your milk and pull your coffee. I suppose I can file a ticket. How do I buy one of the Mediamatic machines for my home? And where do I get a better handle? I’ll totally be the guy who has his own, I want copies of both the size handles that Mediamatic has, they appear to have the same form factor. Oh and the steam wand is this wussy looking white thing, I suppose it does the job but come on give me some industry.
• My monitor is BIG, that’s nice. It sort of feels like sitting in front of a microwave though, I’m very superstitious about radiation.
• Why isn’t my linux faster? Firefox specifically eats everything it can get. There are some internal howtos for boosting the performance but I was really looking forward to a computer that can move faster than I can, j00 know? Monitor is fucking huge though. Theoretically we can upgrade to a newer version pretty soon. Also, just switched to FluxBox which speeds things up as all I use is a terminal and a web browser anyway.
• Breakfast burrito every morning. Yumtastic.
• Have my bike near my desk, sweeet.
• I think the Ops guys have a much more dorm-like office than we do, kind of nice atmosphere over there. We need to get a rug, it’ll really tie the room together.