Close family friend, fellow rocket monkey James Yoneda recently launched SeeMonkey – his DIY Photobooth (or DIY Photo booth for Google’s benefit). So cool! I had the privilege of setting up the very first SeeMonkey photo booth at James & Lauren’s wedding – it was a fantastic idea, well executed, and completely loved by the guests. The resulting candids from their wedding are far better than any I’ve seen elsewhere.
And yes, I’m shilling hard for a good buddy and fellow member of Team Rocket Monkeys, but you can ask any guest at his wedding and they’ll validate that this is an awesome addition for any wedding or party .
Whenever I can, I read from my iPhone. Email, blogs / RSS, books – everything. (I am a Google Book Search PM, it’s kind of my job – but my interest in this pre-dated the job – check out my iPhone skin).
So it is annoying that I can’t read The Economist on my phone. No mobile version of their site, no iPhone app, it’s painful. I trust they will get there, but it’s annoying they haven’t yet.
In the past (college) I would have implemented this myself. Not anymore. This is an interesting observation. In college, I had mobile phone email by auto-forwarding emails from my personal server to SMS, and vice versa. Well before Gmail for mobile. Now, I trust that progress will solve many of these little annoyances, and there is enough competition for my attention / interest that if something isn’t perfectly meshing with my desires, I find something else that is. (Or, for The Economist, which deserves my attention, I put up with its annoyances).
Our family has settled in Scituate. We think we’ll be here for a good long while too. With Gabriel on the way, we were looking for houses in the Boston area, and ran into this cute little cottage over Thanksgiving (Abe’s Uncle lives 4 houses down the road). Franny and I drove back the next day to check it out, and we were sold. We pushed the sellers down an additional $85k from their ask, and we had a deal.
We bought the house without a realtor or lawyer – saving $$$ – go us. We can read our own contracts, and who is better aligned with our own interests than, um, us? (If you’re interested, there are great HBS cases on why realtors are completely unaligned with either the seller or buyer’s interests).
We were then the proud owners of a house on a cliff, overlooking the ocean, with a beach at the foot of the cliff for surfing and playing. This was literally the way Franny and I would dream about our perfect house – “wouldn’t it be nice to have a house on a cliff, with surfing waves, by the ocean?”
The house was being sold as a knockdown. We knew better – but it was a scary proposition. The house was built in 1920, fairly solid, but hadn’t been occupied in 8 years, wasn’t completely winterized, and had been destroyed by a bad 1970’s makeover.
Long story short – we are in heaven, we bought at the low point in the market, at a truly hardball price (paid for land only) and then “flipped” our own house with the help of tons of family and friends – thanks everyone! We now live in a beautiful, inspiring, livable, warm Cape Cod summer cottage, we play daily at the beach with our children, and we wake up to sunrises over the Atlantic. Incredible.
(Update: fixed themes and comments, all back to normal)
Annoying, I don’t have time in my life to play at sysadmin anymore, I’ve already learned this stuff. Why can’t wordpress, from the admin screen, just perform an update in the background? Totally stupid that I have to download a file, unzip it, upload it, and then it borks everything. Serious wtf moment.
I’ll fix it sometime soon, perhaps when I get around to delivering on those promised posts from earlier .
My wife and my buddy have been working on Monkey Analytics – a fantastic web startup, which they just launched. Go Team Rocket Monkey! Next step for them is sales and marketing, so I thought I’d share some link love.
It’s so exciting to see this – I remember ~1.5 years ago walking on the beach in Long Island when Franny first had this idea – to bring science / math computation such as Matlab to the cloud / web application space. She built out the concept into a business plan, and then started executing. My good friend James was pretty excited about this too, and had the flexibility (he is a freelancer) to pitch in as well.
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