The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 18,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
One of the many reasons I’m proud to now be working at Twilio is the way the team honors those who came before us. Check out what the team added to the website last night.
How many boxes does it take to pack up six and a half years of employment? It turns out that the answer is two.
I finished packing up all my things from work today, with tomorrow being my last day at SugarCRM. I also spent a good portion of the afternoon cleaning up the files on my laptop, removing personal files and accounts. When it’s all said and done, the only things left are one more message in my inbox, one more meeting with my boss, an exit interview, and a going-away lunch with the crew. I’m ready to put it all to bed.
This isn’t the first time I’ve left a company, but it’s the first time where I feel like I haven’t wrapped everything up cleanly, with a clear transition in place. When I finally left Netscape/AOL, it was because my business unit was closing down, and there wasn’t anyone left to hand things to. When I left Sun Microsystems, there were other people doing the exact same job as me — albeit in different product lines — but they certainly knew what to do in my absence.
However, with SugarCRM, there isn’t an immediate replacement coming in to do my job. In fact, my job has been a mixed bag of responsibilities, sort of a jack-of-all-trades position. I pretty much molded it to me after taking on the current role, and my varied experience with the company was my calling card. I’d seen it all, so I could cover anything that came my way. While there are other people in the company who could certainly fill my shoes, they’re in other critical roles that would leave just as big of a hole if they were to leave. Institutional knowledge goes a long way when you’ve been there for nearly the entire life of the company.
On the other hand, that won’t be my problem once tomorrow afternoon rolls around. I’ve tried to tie things up, leave things in an okay state. Inevitably, there will be things that fall through the cracks. Hopefully, it’ll all be a memory in a couple of months.
2011 has been a pretty big year for me, and there’s still more than three months left. First it was my girlfriend moving in with me. Then it was my girlfriend becoming my fiancee.
And now I’m happy to announce that I’ll be starting a new job soon. This coming Tuesday will be my last day with SugarCRM. A week from Monday, I’ll join Team Twilio as their new Director of Support.
I’ll get my first real taste of Twilio later this week at the first ever Twilio Conference; no better way for me to learn than to attend two days of Twilio goodness prior to my official start date. If you’re going to be at the conference, say hi to me when you see me there!
Trying out a new theme on the ol’ blog, as I get ready to do some writing this weekend.
The theme is called Chunk, which now makes me think of The Goonies.
A couple of weeks ago, Apple released a software update to the Apple TV, and the news was mostly under the radar. The fact that Vimeo support was added got a bit more play than the feature I care most about — streaming previously-purchased TV shows through the Apple TV via iCloud!
I’ve written a few times about my use of external hard drives to store my iTunes media, and the purchased TV shows are the big space hogs. Then, when I had a major data loss, I resigned myself to never being able to get back to the media files that were lost.
We have two Apple TVs in the house, one in the living room, one in the bedroom. Any time that I wanted to watch something I’d purchased from Apple, I needed to have my external hard drive connected to a computer in the house, and leave iTunes up and running on that computer, in order to stream the media using the Apple TV. Not a big deal, but a White Whine / First World Problem on those nights when I go upstairs to bed, want to watch TV, but forgot to set up the computer downstairs for this scenario.
Now, with the Apple TV software update, the problem goes away. No more do I have to leave the hard drive plugged into the laptop and leave iTunes running. No more do I have to lament losing the previously purchased TV shows. I can now offload the files from my external hard drive, freeing up space for other things. This could easily be my favorite new Apple feature of 2011… which is kind of sad, now that I think about it.
Update: As I go back through the news about this software update, looks like John Gruber agrees that the pre-purchased aspect was more interesting than the Vimeo inclusion. Nice to know I’m not the only one.
If you’re a South By Southwester, you really should vote for this panel.
I may be biased, though… I’m engaged to the session organizer, the speaker is a friend, and the subject is my company.
It doesn’t really matter how regularly I write for this blog, other than my own stupid pride. It’s a competition with myself. So whenever I lapse in my blogging routine, I feel guilty that I’m not holding up my end of the bargain.
The bargain with myself.
I know, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
One day skipping the routine, and it becomes harder to go back to it the next day. Then another day passes. Next thing I know, it’s been nearly two weeks since I’ve written anything.
It’s not like I’ve been super-busy, out late every night. Sure, there have been days in the last couple of weeks where I’d work late, or April and I had somewhere to be in the evening, or family was visiting. Let’s face it, though, there’s time in the day. There are moments to steal to jot down a few thoughts, something reasonably coherent. It’s not like I’m on a deadline with an editor, and I have to fill a certain word count or column length. This ain’t the New York Times.
July has 31 days, and I posted 30 times. That’s pretty good. I can certainly live with that. But here we are, August 13th, and this is only the 2nd post of the month for me. That needs to change. There’s still time left in August to approach 31 posts for the month, which keeps me on track (for the month) with the Post A Day challenge.
I’m back on it now.
The brain is a muscle. Like any other muscle, the brain must be exercised regularly in order to be able to function properly.
Specifically, the parts of the brain that store your technical skills must be exercised regularly. I remember this every time I go months between doing anything related to setting up web pages, writing simple PHP code, configuring databases, etc. My technical skills are suffering from atrophy at the moment. Really a sad state of affairs.
I see my next gadget purchase, and it’s name is BookBook for iPhone. The short description from the Twelve South site:
BookBook for iPhone is a wallet and iPhone case rolled into one pocket-sized, vintage book. Open this beautifully designed leather book and you will see a wallet on the left and a slot for your iPhone 4 on the right. Trade your wallet for this handsome little book and you’ll have one less thing in your pocket or purse when you walk out the door. And, as long as you remember your phone, you’ll never forget your wallet again.
April uses a similar iPhone/wallet case from Michael Kors, but that’s, uhm, a little flashy for my tastes. I can’t really see myself carrying around a gold designer clutch.
However, I can see myself using the BookBook for iPhone. It would require cleaning out my wallet and carrying around less cards and cash, which is not a bad thing.
If only it were my birthday coming up… I don’t think I can wait 6 months to have someone buy it for me as a gift!
See the BookBook for iPhone in action:
Originally seen on Mashable.
