Bam! Third Wheel!
For anyone that ever reads (or read) Maddox (aka: thebestpageintheuniverse.net), you might appreciate what I found yesterday while in Seattle:
Yup, apparently someone actually took Maddox’s idea for rendering the Segway Human Transport obsolete seriously and sold it to the Seattle police department.
Yesterday I was re-waitlisted for the Fall 2008 incoming Berkeley Haas full time MBA program. Considering the other two outcomes are rejected and accepted, it could have been worse but it could have been better. Being the 5th time I’ve received communication from Haas that I’m still on the waitlist, I guess I should take this as a good sign, considering that they have let most other people off the list by now.
However, school starts in August and I find it increasingly unlikely that I’ll be getting in. Fortunately, I have other plans. One of the many options I’ll be considering is re-applying to Stanford and Haas.
I’m also considering applying to my undergrad alma mater: UCSD’s Rady School of Business, which is a new MBA program launched only a couple years ago. And as I look towards programs like the Peace Corps, the MBA programs offered while on a Peace Corps mission seem interesting, though they are primarily from lower-ranked schools.
Now that I’m leaving my job and looking at my next steps, I’ve been spending some time researching various volunteer organizations that would take me out to third-world/impoverished nations to do volunteer work. So far the two most promising are Doctors Without Borders and Peace Corps.
The problem is that neither offers exactly what I’m looking for:I’m leaving Gomez, my current employer, as of next Friday, July 25th. It’s been a great ride. Over the last ~2 years, with Gomez, and an additional year as the founder of Autoriginate/HostedQA, I’ve had a tremendous opportunity to work on really amazing products in the QA/testing/SaaS space.
But it’s also been tough, especially the frequent flights between Portland, OR and Boston, MA, and I’m looking to either pursue an MBA graduate program and/or move back to the San Francisco bay area, where I’m originally from. I’m on the waitlist at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business full-time MBA program, and if that doesn’t pane out I’ll be re-applying to several bay area schools next year while also looking for new opportunities in the bay.
I don’t have anything specific lined up. My plan right now is to spend the rest of the year carefully weighing my next steps. I’m looking at a lot of different options: grad school, another startup, joining a bay area company (ideally a startup focussing on consumer/social media), or possibly even doing something “out there” like joining the PeaceCorps or some other field work in an impoverished country. In the more immediate term, I’d likely be working on mioNews in between planning my next steps.
With that in mind, I’m open to hearing from my friends and readers about what I should do next. Find a job in Portland, OR or the bay area? Perhaps someone has participated in the PeaceCorps and has advise? Or perhaps someone is out there looking for help in software development and/or product management leadership at their startup? Let me know - the idea of so many options excites me!
mioNews, on the other hand, is a much more complex UI - similar to an RSS reader. It introduces concepts similar to other RSS readers. But instead of rating people and topics that you like/hate, mioNews asks you to like/hate individual articles. Then, using some autotagging secret sauce, the topics and people are tuned behind the scenes.
While NoiseRiver and mioNews are both young projects and have a lot of room to improve, they are also both strong proofs that social software today does need to better help us cope with the “noise” on the web. I’m sure both products will need their algorithms to be tweaks and improved over time, but the most important thing is that people are open to the idea of allowing computers determine what we should read when we’re overwhelmed with noise.
Today (actually yesterday, but adcom was lagging) was another “deadline”. I was notified, again, that the waitlist for the Berkeley Haas School of Business MBA has decided to keep me on the waitlist. They did say they booted “many” people off the waitlist and rejected them last week, which I guess means my chances have improved. Of course, they only improve if there are actual spots available! Anyway - staying on the waitlist is better than a stick in the eye, so here’s to continuing to hope…
Ability to divide a single build procedure into several parts/builds that can be run on different agents both in sequence or in parallel. Ability to use the same set of sources in all of themThis is a really big deal. When build systems (either CI or the build tool itself) can properly know how to fork off independent tests, run them in parallel on remote machines, and then report back the results as if it was a single test run, then software development will truly be able to utilize the power of cloud computing technologies like EC2. I know OpenQA could use this right now - our current builds take hours to run!
This is somewhat old news, but I never shared it so I figured now is as good a time as any, considering that I may know the decision in the next 24-48 hours. In January I applied to the Stanford and Berkeley MBA programs. While I got interviews at both, I ultimately was denied admission from Stanford and waitlisted at Berkeley.
After living in Portland, OR for almost four years, I’m excited to come back to the bay area for either school or possibly a new opportunity (I’ve got a couple in mind)… or both! I’m moving forward with life assuming that Berkeley will not work out this year, but there is a chance that either way I’ll be back home this fall. As much as I love Portland, I need to come back to the tech world for a few years - no place else is like it for a tech guy like me.
Anyway - tomorrow Berkeley notifies the people on the waitlist of what their status is. They’ve cut it down quiet a bit over the last few weeks, so the good news is that I’m still on it. The bad news is, of course, that I haven’t been accepted yet 
Keep your fingers crossed!
An interview I did last Friday about my company’s new product launch, Reality Load XF, was published this morning. Pretty cool! If you’re in the market for load testing, check it out.
I’m fully switched over from MovableType to WordPress. First, for those curious: I am not switching because I have a problem with MovableType. I merely switched because I’d heard good things about WordPress and wanted to try it out. So if you’re looking for validation of one being better than the other, you won’t find it here!
Also, there were a couple tricks to migrating everything over. They were:
The first problem was switching my FeedBurner account over. WordPress has a plugin called FeedSmith that is supposed to make it trivial, but it wasn’t actually redirecting my RSS feed like I expected. It turns out I had to change my permalink settings and then the change took place. So that tripped me up a bit.
It was also not clear from the FeedSmith/WordPress integration documentation how the plugin works. I finally figured out, through some trial and error, that it basically redirects the RSS URLs in WordPress (ie: /feed/) to the specified FeedBurner URL for all requests EXCEPT for those from FeedBurner, which of course is required to avoid circular logic.
Once I figured out what the plugin was supposed to do, I then tried to configure FeedBurner to point to my new WordPress installation. I had already imported my MovableType content, which worked perfectly. However, FeedBurner would not accept the new URL and instead was complaining that there was an invalid UTF-8 character.
It turns out that one of my posts from MovableType had a special character that was giving FeedBurner some grief once it had been moved to WordPress. I figured out which one it was with trial and error: I simply changed my WordPress settings to have 1, 2, 3, etc posts in the RSS feed until FeedBurner started complaining about the feed. Then I just deleted that feed as a quick fix.
Once I had everything else done, i wanted to preserve my old MovableType links so that search results and blog entries wouldn’t be broken. Fortunately there were two articles I found that greatly assisted with this process. The second link was especially useful, though I had to do a few things differently.
The first step was to get get the original MovableType directories to have a wildcard redirect (I believe using mod_rewrite, but my ISP did this part) such that /my_mt_blog/* redirected to /my_wp_blog/* where the wildcard pattern was preserved. For example, this URL:
http://blogs.opensymphony.com/plightbo/2008/02/selenium_users_meetup_next_wee.html
Redirects to this:
http://lightbody.net/blog/2008/02/selenium_users_meetup_next_wee.html
Once that was done, then I needed to configure WordPress to use the “Month + Name” permalink settings, with a small modification: I needed to use “.html” as the postfix instead of “/” like WordPress defaults to.
At this point, just about everything was working except for two final problems:
In the blog post I referenced, there was a tip to use the Underscore Plugin for WordPress along with a special mySQL statement to truncate the post names. I found I could skip the plugin and just run the following:
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_name = SUBSTRING(post_name,1,30);
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_name = SUBSTRING(post_name,1,29) WHERE post_name LIKE '%-';
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_name = REPLACE(post_name, '-', '_');
This truncates the imported posts to 30 characters and, for those that ended in a space or special character, to 29. It also replaces dashes with underscores. The end result is that my imported posts have the same URL as they had in MovableType. That’s it!