Free tech t-shirt continues!  #FTTF
It was ironic that I happen to have my Windows t-shirt on that day when I unveiled my brand new Macbook Pro.
It is truly an amazing machine.

I really enjoy wearing it.  I even wear it out socially... that's a full moon during a summer evening rooftop party.  It looked surreal IRL.  The photo doesn't even come close, but it's a good reminder.

So nice that Yunderson Labs is ready for the mobile-preferred revolution in search!

Here it is in case you need it:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?utm_source=wmc-blog&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=mobile-friendly

A near perfect weather Sunday in seattle and all it takes is a douchebag like me to walk into a fantastic dive bar like Horseshoe Saloon to ruin it all.
I was already having a horrible day.  Pretty much from waking up today, to the very moment of my existence in this wonderful establishment had been a series of failures and disappointments.  
Already: a fight with the wife, the dog is limping for some mysterious reason, a handyman invoice for a few hundred dollars, and now my mobile phone was going to die soon.

So when the dee-bag that i am walks in with a briefcase bag so that he can charge up his almost-zero-battery phone from his big bad douchie information worker laptop, he can't.  He forgot to pack his charging cable.  Great.  The day just got worse.  1:30pm and the full battery from 10am is in the teen percentages already.

To further ruin the great vibe in the place he walked straight to a table, ignoring the two large signs that say "ORDER HERE" hanging over the bar.  He has the audacity to try to get served at a table.  He can't be like all the other nice guests at the bar, enjoying the Mariner's game and drinking cold ones.

BUT WAIT.  there's MORE.  he sees on the menu that the burgers are a half pound of beef.  Pretty much all of them, except the sliders.  But he doesn't want to take a chance on some mysterious sliders.  Basically, the dilemma was that he didn't want to eat that much dead meat.  He was just looking for a single simple quarter pound burger to get him out of his low blood sugar horrible series of events Sunday; and it's just not working out.

He has the nerve to ask the server if the burger can be made smaller.  He thinks to himself as he utters the question out of his mouth that the burgers are probably pre-made, and the very thought of ruining their half-pound burger of grilling mastery by making it smaller is a sin, but he can't help it.  

A frog is a frog and a scorpion is a scorpion.  They will always be what they are.

Half the burger was consumed.  About half the fries were too.  Which equates to getting a quarter pound burger in the first place.  A take-away box for the leftovers.  Regardless of how the day went, sometimes it all works out in the end.

Blood sugar is normalized.  A couple of cold PBRs from the tap help make the day a little more tolerable.  And the Horse Shoe Tavern continues it's reputation of a quality five star establishment.

“We want to be the worlds largest online bookseller.” - sound familiar? 
I’m in Seattle, so they are one of the backbones of our local economy.
After approximately a couple of decades they are known worldwide.
Sounds like a simple idea to be the worlds largest online bookseller.

But simplicity does not equate to easy.
Start-ups are hard.  Really Hard.

What’s the definition of insanity? - Taking the same action over and over and expecting a different outcome.
(example: i keep restarting my PC to get Outlook to start correctly.)

The above video I made:
57 attempts in a row the first time before success.
3 attempts in a row the second time before success.
It’s a metaphor for starting a company.
If you are lucky, it takes you about ten years to get your first big success.
The next time it might take you two or three years, if you’re lucky.

Failures abound and yet you keep going.

Recently, a miraculous arctic dig uncovered a perfectly frozen, preserved village of cavemen.

Start with a cage containing five newly thawed cavemen.  In the cage, build a set of stairs to some food at the top.  Allow one of the cavemen to go up the stairs towards the food.  As soon as he gets the food, violently spray all the other cavemen with ice cold water.

After a while, allow another hungry caveman to get some food.  Violently spray the rest of the cavemen with cold water.
Repeat the process until all the cavemen have tried to get some food.

With all this repetitive training, when any of these five starving cavemen tries to climb the stairs, the other cavemen will restrain and possibly beat the one trying to get some food because they know the consequences.  The hunger is not enough reward for the punishment of the ice water spray.

Now make two small changes: replace one caveman with a newly thawed caveman from the village and eliminate the cold water spray.

Watch the brand new starving caveman go for food.  Without understanding the history and the training, he will get mercilessly pulled off the stairs.  There is no explanation.  After a few attempts, he knows not to go for the food.

Now replace another original caveman with a brand new caveman.  Without understanding why, that first replacement caveman will now participate in the brutal restraint of this second new caveman.  He doesn’t know why.  He was never even been sprayed with the water.  He just knows that when he tries to get the food, he is beaten and restrained.  So now with this second new caveman, he willingly joins in on the violence.

All the original five cavemen will be replaced one by one.  Eventually, no one in the cage will have ever been violently sprayed with ice cold water.  But each time a brand new caveman is introduced into the cage, he learns not to go up the stairs for the food.  He also learns to participate in any physical cruelty necessary to keep the new caveman off the stairs.

Why?  Because that’s the way it’s always been around here and no one knows why.

And that’s how CORPORATE POLICIES AND PROCESSES are developed.



epilogue: this thought experiment is not mine.  I adapted it from a piece I randomly read at least a decade ago online.  To the guy who originally wrote about the monkeys going for the bananas: you are my HERO.

Part of my day job in the real world is to translate telecom technology to business people, aka non-technical people.  Sometimes it's hard to take very, very technical people out of their world of hardware and software and put them in front of real life people.  So that's where people like me come into the picture.  I never dreamed as a undergraduate studying Electrical Engineering at NCSU that I would be in a job like the one I am, but here I am.  And most days I love it...

I like to play with new gadgets.  The above video is not a test of a new gadget, but a new software feature of my iPhone 5s.  It was virtually free, with a software download from my friends down in Cupertino.  And it's a pretty darn fun little feature.  It takes the extremely mundane task of making coffee and washing dishes and puts a little flare on it.

My virtual friends at Studio Neat do a fantastic job of doing what I do in my day job in a great little post that explains how the time-lapse feature works.

enjoy!

My workload has gotten a little too high, so I am looking to hire someone into the Yunderson Labs team.

These are the job qualifications of what I consider the perfect employee:

01. Never gets sick, so that they never miss work
02. Because of #01, I don’t have to buy them health insurance
03. Does not have living family (parents, uncles, aunts, siblings, children) of any kind to answer to
04. Does not have dogs or cats or pets of any kind; or plants or fish or anything living at home, so nothing can die due to the inevitable neglect to come
05. Never complains
06. Is technically proficient in every task possible for my company
07. Is on call 24x7x365
08. Always online
09. Never goes on vacation
10. Never asks for a raise
11. Never asks for training
12. Gives me personal “loans” of untraceable cash
13. Buys me lunch regularly
14. Happily accepts pay cuts to increase the profit that I can take home to my family
15. Allows me to lay him off anytime I want when there is less work, and waits for me to hire him back
16. Readily accepts demotions
17. Readily accepts degrading comments like "you're a total loser who will never amount to anything in your life other than making me more rich."