obfuscated.org

Dear Capital One,

Thank you for giving my shredder such a wonderful workout. I have now idea how I would quite so regularly verify that it’s still working if I didn’t get your asinine offers for credit cards four or five times a week.

I don’t know if it’s the 0% success rate you’ve had with me over the years or just a deep seated loathing for the environment and local mail carriers everywhere, but whatever it is that keeps you going must be amazing stuff. If you could bottle that, perhaps you could just sell that instead of trying to get our nation deeper than it already is in to silly consumer debt.

In closing, I’d like you to know that I do and always will hold you in the highest regard. Except in this case, by “highest regard” I actually mean “the exact same regard in which I hold AOL and their CD’s.” And I can’t freaking stand those AOL CD’s.

Spitefully yours,

Corey

John Scalzi’s new book The Ghost Brigades is available at stores as of yesterday. I picked up my copy last night and stayed up reading it later than I really had planned on. I haven’t finished it just quiet yet, but I like it so far. It starts of very quickly and is within a few chapters in to relatively deep questions about the nature of humanity. Also, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of dependence on Old Man’s War in terms of back story, which is a good thing.

If you’re looking in and around Pasadena, the Vromans west of Lake is sold out. (I got their last copy.) TGB is selling like hotcakes over on Amazon, so you can definitely get it there.

Today is my first day of glorious unemployment. What am I doing with this momentous occasion, you ask? I took my dry cleaning in. If this doesn’t cement in your mind the notion that I am in fact the most exciting individual ever to walk the earth, I’m not entirely sure what will. I totally am, though. Just ask the folks at the cleaner’s.

So the upshot of this is that last Friday was my final day with Yahoo!. I started there a little more than three years ago in what was at the time called Overture Research. When Yahoo! purchased Overture, we became “Yahoo! Research Labs” and were later re-branded as “Yahoo! Research.” A few months back we moved from Pasadena to Burbank, and the commute has turned out to be too much for me to deal with on a daily basis. That, and the creamed spinach at the corporate cafeteria has started to disappoint on the regular, so it seems that it’s time for me to move on.

What’s next? Well, for the next two weeks, absolutely nothing. I’m taking some time off to relax and hang out with Stephanie and The Kid. This pleases me greatly. There are a few personal projects I’d like to get some traction on, a couple of books I’d like to read, and of course the aforementioned dry cleaning. After my little break I’ve got my next gig all nice and lined up; I’m excited to hit the ground running there.

So for all you ‘Hoos out in ‘Hooville: thanks, it’s been fun, and I’ll almost certainly see you around. For all my peoples in Pasadena: Chippy Friday — Choppy Friday if you’re hep — starts 3/10/2006.

I got the call via email today to represent for Pasadena at this year’s BarCamp Los Angeles. Unfortunately, it in part conflicts with Lebowskifest LA, so I don’t know that I’ll be able to make it — I could in theory go on Sunday, but I don’t know that an evening of bowling and white russians is the best lead in to a technical gathering of this magnitude.

Anyway, if any of you nerds out there in nerd land have that weekend free, it looks like an entirely cool weekend. Anyone who’s everyone in LA’s tech scene is going to be there, so at the very least it’d be a great place to network. Gavin is on the tentative speakers list, and if his stuff is any indicator of what’s in store for BarCamp, it’ll be super informative as well.

Test your hunting knowlege over at Channel One. If you do well on this quiz, you probably already know that it’s not cool to shoot your hunting friends in the face.

John Battelle has some intensely interesting things to say about Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, the US Government and their role viz China and free information. Long story short we’re all doing the wrong thing, and the problem goes all the way to the top.

Until the person leading this country values human rights over appeasement, and decides to lead on this issue, we’re never going to make any progress. Congress can call hearings, and beat up Yahoo, Google and the others for doing what everyone else is doing, but in the end, it’s not GYMA’s fault, nor, as much as I wish they’d take it on, is it even their problem. It’s our government’s problem. Since when is China policy somehow the job of private industry?

The article is a great read and rather eloquently addresses the notion that even censored information will be more of a boon to the Chinese people than it is to their oppressive government. This is an important issue. I do hope we get it right sooner rather than later.

I know I’m lame for posting something that’s already been on BoingBoing, but the last Beastles album was so good that I can’t pass up mentioning this. Long story short is that djBC put mp3’s for Let It Beast up on the magic internet machine. The first two tracks are great. Grab it while you can.

Update: Infinitely flaccid! djBC’s site seems to be down. Anybody care to speculate as to why?

Update 2: Just as quickly, it’s back.

Joel on Software has some interesting things to say about setting your priorities when creating software products, the basic conflict being between doing things quickly and doing them correctly.

Listen, I know that everybody is saying that the cool thing to do these days is Ship Early and Often, but when you ship half-baked ajax calendars that don’t do much and then get Scoble to go nuts about how great they are, well, you’re going to have a lot of people like me checking it out and realizing that, for example, no thought whatsoever has gone into printing, which is fine, it’s a 1.0 release, but you know what? I’m not going to look at 30 Boxes again — I’ve spent enough time evaluating it. G’bye.

A very wise person once told me that nobody will remember how quickly you get things done. They’ll only remember how well you do them. This goes pretty contrary to the dot-com-boom/Web 2.0 thinking that “first to market wins,” or, as Joel points out, at least gets purchased:

Why so many Ajax calendars? My theory is that about a year ago, there was a lot of buzz (possibly true, possibly false) about Google shipping a calendar, and everybody thought, oh gosh, it’s gonna be really good, like Gmail, and then Yahoo! is going to be embarrassed again, and run out and buy the best Ajax calendar company they can find, just like they did with Oddpost, making those very funny kids millionaires overnight.

(It’s funny because it’s true.)

Anyway, I think Joel’s thinking here is long-run correct if what you’re trying to do is build a quality product that people enjoy using. Yes, client feedback is important. It’s absolutely essential, in fact. Just try to get feedback on something that work. If the product is bulletproof and well-thought-out, the feedback will tend towards making a good product great than towards making a crap product acceptable. You want your users to think of new features that you could implement, not bugs that you really should fix.

In terms of interacting with clients and ending up with a product that everybody (myself included) is happy with, I’ve always had better luck spending more time on things — up front time writing quality tests and putting research time in to tools as well as just being more thoughtful when actually writing the damn thing — than I have getting things out the door ASAP. Long run, I’m betting that the companies that follow this line of thinking will be the successful ones.

I don’t know if it’s on or if TLI just got served, but I do know that this east coast/west coast narnia rap battle is damn damn funny.

Thanks to Jill for the link!