I am finishing up a week in Orlando. My first, and quite possibly last time here. I had never been to Disney World, nor did I desire to go, not even back in elementary school when seemingly every other child had been. Turns out I didn’t really miss anything (aside from lots of country music and large Americans).
The good - kids do love it. Isaiah loved all the rides, all the water fountains, all the fun things to do. So did his cousins. And the trip itself was wonderful - Franny and I loved the time with her mother, her sister & family. Plus, Florida has beautiful weather.
The bad - commercialism. Overwhelming commercialism - everything is for sale, useless plastic crap, obnoxious strip malls. The parks were the worst. Sea World has stopped educating and is now an entertainment machine for ADD kids, passing out plastic crap that will pollute the ocean instead of teaching about plastic crap polluting the ocean. Not to mention Disney’s overall role in copyright extension (evil!) and their boughtpolitician.
The creepy - tinfoil hat time. Every park requires visitors to give a fingerprint impression to enter. I bet large sums of money that these fingerprints are sold on to the government, tied to our credit cards & lots of other personally identifiable information. Remember kids, the FBI can’t legally compile this information on you, but they can purchase it from the free market where it is available! *Shiver*
An American Mecca - I am cognizant that the demographics encountered here are more American than my normal North-East surroundings, that I am outside of the mainstream in not wanting to be here. It is good to be humbled by this, to remember we are all different, and all equal. Especially if I want to build businesses selling to this large American market.
Problem - Phanfare is shutting down. This means my images are not loading all the time, as I used them for photo sharing and hosting. (Phanfare isn’t shutting down, they’re just changing business models, and their new model precludes image hosting & sharing).
Solution - moving to Flickr, slowly. So far have only updated my recent art posts, will have to work backwards through the other posts bit by bit. Upside: Flickr is cheaper ($25/year vs. $50/year for unlimited storage). Downside: Flickr sucks more (navigation / UI, slideshows, video support are all worse, less customizable). Integration sucks, but so did Phanfare’s.
Rant - why is there still no good solution? Why can’t I use an image management tool of my choice (Picasa, iPhoto, etc.) with the hosting / sharing service of my choice? Why don’t updates in the cloud automatically sync with my local instance? Why don’t iPhoto tags, filenames, and other metadata automatically percolate to Picasa Web? to Flickr? Why does Flickr not provide an iPhoto plugin? There are a lot of startups in this space, but they all miss the goal by a mile. I smell opportunity, I’m just sad that I’ve smelledthisopportunityfor years and it still hasn’t been filled.
James and Lauren are engaged! Woohoo! Yippee! So exciting. Here is the official rocketmonkeys post with pics.. In the meantime, I’m not surprised but so happy for them both. Go James! There’s lots of pressure on “the guy” to make the engagement super special romantic etc. Sounds like James did a good job - chatting with him yesterday brought back a flood of memories from that time in Franny & my life - funny how it wasn’t that long ago. The happier you get the faster the time goes by…
1. Franny and I got a pair of iPhones. Oh so wonderful, and quietly fits in a pocket. Now I can annoy people with all of my Isaiah pics and having internet wherever we are has changed a lot of behaviors. I feel like this is the future ;-).
2. New car too - Toyota FJ Cruiser. The Jeep wasn’t cutting it with a baby in the back. Crazy thing - gas prices could triple and we’d still save money vs. buying a hybrid 4WD car. Nuts. Come on car companies, give us something better.
3. And as always, lots more Isaiah pics and vids are up. He is huge (23.5 lbs, 31″, 95th percentile all around). Almost walking, says Mama, Dada, Up, and lots more sounds. Crawling around like crazy, cruising from one piece of furniture to another, pushing chairs around the kitchen. Check them out.
More Isaiah photos are up! Of course, the sheer amount of photos/videos we take of him implies 1 of 2 things: (1) he will be over-represented in the family archives, or (2) we will have to set ourselves quotas for photo/video of follow-on children . These are problems we can manage!
Update: switching over to Flickr, until then photos unavailable
Say hello to Isaiah Joseph Murray, our new baby boy! Vital stats: 9lbs 10.4oz, 22″, born 4/20 at 11:45pm. Franny did this au natural, which was impressive (and fast - only 45 minutes of pushing - she was a rockstar!) He is huge, and rock solid. The nurses said he was the strongest baby they had ever seen - they had to use all their weight to pin him down for shots, etc. Too funny!
Update: switching over to Flickr, until then photos unavailable
Isaiah is primarily named after Isaiah in the bible, though there
are other great Isaiahs we are thinking of as well. Isaiah means “God
is salvation” or “God is my helper”. Our favorite Isaiah verse:
I heard the voice of the Lord, saying: ‘Whom shall I send, and who
will go for Us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I! Send me’ —Isaiah 6:8
One of our favorite “other Isaiahs” is Isaiah Berlin, who wrote about
individual freedoms in society, distinguishing between positive and
negative liberty (arguing for freedom to be securely in the hands of
individuals and only grudgingly relinquished to the state). As
independants and libertarians, this strikes home with Franny and I.
Francesca and I splurged - new MacBooks! This is our last capital expenditure prior to the baby’s arrival - Franny’s laptop (Sony P.O.S.) was dying its final death, and my Dell 700m, which was a trooper, was killing my hands (tiny keyboard) and eyes (tiny screen). The MacBooks fit the bill - beautiful machines. Franny’s has 2GB RAM, mine only has 1GB . Small hard drives - we’ll need to upgrade in the near term (only 60GB… almost full already). We’re running OS X, no problems switching our lives (though we have the windows desktop left for special cases).
James the Rocketmonkey got us Techshell covers - they are very cool. Helps us figure out which laptop is which. Actually, he ordered us 1 Techshell, and they sent the wrong one, so we got to keep a free pink one. It worked out perfectly, and they were very good about it. When we were looking into these, we couldn’t find any good photographs of what they actually looked like - for some reason the website itself doesn’t have close-ups. So after setting up our new MacBooks and getting the covers on, we took some photos to share with the world :
Update: switching over to Flickr, until then photos unavailable
So it has been a while since I posted … have been very busy with doodleboard since the “Mid-Summer Update” post. Check the site out - it is very cool. Tijan and I have been pushing very hard, proved the concept, verified the market, built an alpha product, filed provisional patents. Currently doing our best to turn this into our jobs post-HBS graduation! Very exciting, we’re looking forward to getting a shot at it. Check the doodleboard blog out as well for more of a blow-by-blow of the business.
James and I updated our web host, and with him in Hawaii and I in Massachusetts, my backups got lost somewhere in between for a while… thus this blog was down (and thus the time between posts). Good news - he’s headed back to RI for this summer! It will be great to get the original rocketmonkey back on the east coast.
Finally, I’m going to be a daddy! Any day now - due date is April 11th… kind of crazy to be an expectant father, an entrepreneur, graduating with lots of school debt and no certainty about the future. But I am certain I will love being a father, that I love being a husband to Francesca, and that I can’t wait to meet our child! (Pictures will follow, as the little one arrives).
It has been a busy and somewhat stressful summer. Having fun, but working very hard trying to get a few ideas moving. The information market research was intereting, but took a lot of attention. GroupCredit has been fun but hard - met with some Venture Capitals who liked the idea, but are worried about the competitive landscape. We are confident a $1 trillion market has enough room… at any rate, we would need to do a lot more work before we could take funding. We see GroupCredit as a 5+ year business, and it might not be the right time to pursue that, being in the middle of business school, and at the end of an economic cycle. We will see.
We have another idea. It is a big, exciting, fun, idea. BIG! And of course, we can’t share it. But we are working furiously to get talented developers to work with us and make it a reality. We would want to get this thing built and launched soon. Like by the end of the year. We stumbled upon this idea a few weeks into the summer, and have somewhat shifted focus to it for the time being.
It is hard being creative, having all these ideas, knowing that nothing will happen correctly without the proper amount of care and feeding, and thus meaning that you really need to pick one idea and make it work. When all your ideas are good, you start wishing you had multiple instances of yourself, so you could pursue them all…
and having internet wherever we are has changed a lot of behaviors. I feel like this is the future ;-).
. These are problems we can manage!
. Small hard drives - we’ll need to upgrade in the near term (only 60GB… almost full already). We’re running OS X, no problems switching our lives (though we have the windows desktop left for special cases).
