mult.ifario.us

I grilled some oysters this weekend, and while I've eaten them grilled before, this is the first time I've done the grilling. (Taylor Shellfish Farms sells 4-6" oysters — bigger is better for grilling — at our local farmer's market for $8/dozen, so it seemed like a low-risk experiment from a financial perspective.) The recipe is of the two-ingredient variety that I like (ingredient one: food; ingredient two: fire), and six minutes on a very hot gas grill was sufficient to cook but not overcook the oysters. The caveat is that when some of the oysters "pop" at around the five minute mark, they spew boiling hot oyster juice, but other than that, it was a simple and tasty meal. I chose a pinot blanc to accompany, which was an easy choice because it was the only white I had in the house, and it was a good pair. There are lots of other good choices.

While I'm fully prepared for whatever "the terrible twos" means for the kid, we had an entirely civilized father-daughter outing this past weekend, which is a far cry from some of our experiences past. She did largely as she was asked, where I mean things like not running around in the parking lot, not jumping into puddles, not climbing into the faux tide pool with the starfish. (The first stop on our father-daughter day out was the Seattle Aquarium, which was both overly crowded and just OK. I was spoiled by visiting the Shedd regularly in Chicago.) The kid's tour de force for the day, however, was sitting through an entire meal. Without being belted to her chair.

It was a great experience to just sit and have a conversation, albeit about whether or not bumblebees bite and what color lights are on top of police cars and fire engines.

Interesting question of the day over on Found+READ:

How do I deal with board member whose priorities seem to be diverging from mine and my co-founder’s at a critical time in the startup’s life?

[...]

The director is a well-connected investor, so we can’t afford to alientate him, or anyone else. And I figure if we go head-to-head with him we’ll lose. (Money talks.) So short of fostering more confrontation/conflict before the board, what can we do? The more time we spend assuaging his concerns, the less time we have for the real work.

Seems like an ill-posed question to me, since the director sounds like he's within his bounds. "Tough love" is not appropriate in this context. Some thoughts:

• It's your job to convince the Board that the company is being run properly. It shouldn't be that difficult or time-consuming to get information in front of the Board about the sales pipeline, state of deals, product status, and burn rate. In fact, all of that data should be in front of the Board already, so it should be easy for the Directors to assess where the company is headed and when it's likely to arrive.
• The Board is important. A dissenting director is not something to be ignored, since the proper functioning of the Board is one of the fundaments of the corporation. Look at it another way, your shareholders can always sue you, but running your Board by the book makes it less likely that they'll feel a need to and unlikely that they would win.
• Buy 'em out. If he's really that worried, get him out at a loss — have him offer his shares to another investor, have the company buy the shares back, let employees redeem their options, have the management team buy in, etc.

As for too many things to do and too little time to do them, welcome to entrepreneurship.

From Blaine Cook's RubyConf presentation on scaling Twitter:

(The SlideAware guys obviously have a different perspective.) As I've been bouncing around between languages for various projects (Java, Ruby, Erlang, Haskell, etc.), the only thing I've found that really makes me want to wield a fork or other sharp implement is what people do with the language as opposed to the language itself.

Just before JavaOne, I replaced my venerable G4 PowerBook with a black MacBook, and I've been pleased with the transition. (At over three and a half years, the PowerBook had an exceptionally long useful life for a laptop.) A few observations:

• A 2.0GHz Core Duo is more than fast enough. In fact, while I wouldn't have expected it, the MacBook handily beats my 4-way G5 for many development-oriented tasks like builds and starting up IDEA.
• Battery life is essentially the same as with the PowerBook, a little over four hours at minimum screen brightness.
• MacPorts, rsync, and the usual downloads (Aquamacs, Quicksilver, Adium) made it quick to get a usable configuration up and running.
• Just like the PowerBook, it's too damn hot to be truly used as a laptop without some additional insulation.
• The keyboard is odd, doesn't light up, but is otherwise tolerable.

So far, so good.

The prospect of spending time with Pat was one of the main reasons that I took a position at Amazon long ago, although we both migrated to roles in different parts of the company a relatively short time after I joined, so it's nice to see Pat out of the jungle and blogging. (My office was close enough to Pat's that I could drop by conveniently but far enough away that I couldn't smell the puns...)

Pat's entry on his talk from CIDR (paper) contains one of the lessons of running a business: The customer is the observer who matters. (I mentioned something about this topic in the context of "doneness" and business tradeoffs once upon a time.) It's important to regularly and religiously pop the problem solving context until the customer's problem is what you're thinking about, since that's ultimately why you'll get paid.

I took advantage of being in the Bay Area for JavaOne and went to visit my Ph.D. advisor over in Berkeley. After breakfast, he gave me a tour of the renovated and expanded Mathematical Sciences Research Institute ("MSRI", pronounced "misery" in the old days) up the hill. Since the last time that I'd been there (probably 2000 or 2001), Jim Simons, among others, stepped up and led a funding drive for MSRI that expanded and renovated the institute. The differences from my time in graduate school a decade ago were striking, but I can sum it up in two pictures:

The shot on the left is what I remember the auditorium seating looking like, and the shot on the right is what it is now. The old seating had the distinct advantage of being uncomfortable, ergo difficult to doze off in, even if a talk was particularly boring.