soonerjm

Born on March 31, 2010•36 Karma

on July 17, 2012

•on: What a startup does to you. Or: A celebration of n...

Funny, I had a very similar experience to the author's with my first child. After hours of inconsolable crying and running on a bare handful of hours of sleep over the last several days, I remember looking at him and thinking "Oh wow, I can totally understand shaking a baby now." Thankfully, I didn't, then or later, but it made me way less judgmental of other parents, and gave me a much better appreciation for the value of sleep. Amazing how much easier things are when you're at least semi well-rested.

The kids have turned out better than my first startup did (thank God for that), but there are some definite similarities between the two, as Jason points out. I can't think of too many other experiences which contain such intense combinations of both positive and negative emotions. And yet, with both, it's almost impossible to imagine choosing not to have the plunge if you had it to do all over again.

soonerjm•

on July 9, 2012

•on: On Configuration

This echoes what I've come to believe over time. I used to spend a LOT of time tweaking my environment, and searching for that magic productivity-enhancing utility that was going to make me super-productive and optimize my time.

I've gradually come to realize that most of that time was just a way of procrastinating, and that I was better off just taking what's there and getting on with it already. I'm amazingly more productive now that I've freed up all that extra time to actually work :)

soonerjm•

on June 18, 2012

•on: edw519: Shana Weissman, 02/26/97 - 06/16/12

My condolences, Ed. She sounded wonderful, and I'm very sorry for your loss.

soonerjm•

on Dec 16, 2011

•on: I'm starting to think LEGO is evil

Strongly stated, but I agree. When I first started buying Legos for my eldest a few years ago, I was initially turned off by all the special pieces they include in kits nowadays. I thought they'd be a deterrent to building his own creations. In practice, it hasn't been a problem at all. He's always excited to build the model on the box, but it's never together more than an hour or two before he's torn it down to create his own things. Which is awesome, since I think that's where most of the fun and a lot of the value of Legos comes from.

soonerjm•

on Sept 22, 2011

•on: Betty Weissman (mother of edw519) 1930-2011

Beautiful eulogy. So sorry for your loss, Ed.

soonerjm•

on Sept 20, 2011

•on: What Netflix Could Have Said This Week

This. Ultimately, the splitting of the queues between two sites will be what drives me away from Netflix. As long as the streaming choices are only sporadically decent and intermittently available, having the DVD option as a backup is important.

Currently, if I come across anything I'd like to see at some point in the future, I add it to my Netflix queue and forget about it. I may watch it via streaming if and when available, or get it on DVD, or buy it...it doesn't really matter. The queue itself has value because it's a one stop shop for anything I may want to see (well, aside from things currently showing on television, which get added to Tivo in similar fashion).

Splitting the queues kills that convenience. Now I'll have to add it to multiple queues on different sites, and think about which list(s) something needs to be on, and maybe keep things in sync...it takes Netflix's single best feature to me and just kills it.

soonerjm•

on May 20, 2010

•on: How We Moved From Microsoft ASP.NET to Rails and N...

I can vouch for the Postgres part of that. We use .NET against PostgreSQL at work (a not especially database-intensive app, fortunately) and wound up using the ODBC drivers. We experimented with Npgsql, but ran into some flakiness that scared us away. There's really not a tremendous amount of documentation around using .NET with Postgres, either, which is unfortunate.