For me depression is when my inflated ego meets the real me and becomes as disappointed as a school girl who upon meeting her boy band idol realizes he is a selfish sleazy drunken womanizer.

I got hit with a sudden panic attack starting last night through yesterday about my sudden fear of my loss of bachelorhood. I didn’t get this when Sarah and I got married. It started on Tuesday when I was trying to make some Captivate movies and needed to find an XML RSS feed. I went to feedster and started looking through the Red Sox blogs. I was happy to see that people were going to be able to purchase turf from the World Series for $150 but then I started to hit some web sites. I happed upon some website of a twenty-something woman blogging about the Red Sox from a location down the street in Brookline, Basegirl. I then started surfing from there to her favorite sites including The girl in Camo and This fish needs a bicycle. Then my mind started to go into a cloud of anxiety as I realized that the world outside is still moving around with women bustling about hustling men and vice-versa. Or I panicked that my blog was getting a thousandth of the traffic (not like I’ve tried to build traffic) of a blog about some girl who writes about the Red Sox. Should I just write about the Red Sox? Nobody reads my crap? Who cares? What the hell? Why do I write?

I went onwards down the spiral. At dinner on Tuesday Jeremy was there with Sarah and me at Vinny T’s yammering about his sex life and how he was bored with sex and all of his one night stands with Internet girls. Sara was talking about how nice the grotto would be at the Playboy mansion and that I should send my parents pictures of it as a model for the hot tub area in Marshfield. Jeremy hit me with some dagger about never having left Boston and living a few miles from my parents house. That isn't about the change any time soon.

The cups at Vinny T’s had shrunken from better days so the drinks were smaller. They didn’t even do the shake the wine bottle with little chips in it to win a free meal game. Things have gone down hill at Vinny T’s. The maitre d woman who seated us was on the job for the first night and she was flirting with me and I was flirting with her and it was clear that in another world or time that I would have been obsessing over her for months. But I have a pregnant wife and we went home to watch Raising Helen, a movie I had already seen on a plane and hated the first time about a New York socialite who has to raise her sister’s orphaned children. That’ll cheer anyone up in the middle of a panic attack but the worst was suffering through the scenes with the models, New York parties, exclusive clubs.

So I didn’t get much sleep. I woke-up early in the morning. I went through some meetings and then drove out to Burlington. During the drive I listened to an interview with Brett Easton Ellis who wrote Less than Zero, American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction on NPR. He was talking about his new book that is a horror novel that fictionalized his abusive relationship with his father. Mr. Ellis felt that the reason that the father had become abusive was because he had never really wanted to become a father but had gotten caught-up in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s pressure to become the family man and would have preferred a single life like the one Mr. Ellis was leading. Ellis wrote Less Than Zero when he was in his teens. So I’m thinking about myself as a writer and dragging a mile behind basegirl and the girl in camo because I lack a specific subject to write about and don’t have the same anatomy to intrigue the reader about my thoughts. So I must be about 100 miles behind Mr. Ellis in a 26 mile race to reach some kind of constructive synthesis of creation. And with Less than Zero and having watched 16 Candles I was back in the ‘80s swimming in the regret of not having been confident enough to ask out the twenty girls I had a crush on in high school.

Hunter S. Thompson had a funeral and I wasn't invited. I am mad that he is dead through a suicide and nobody knows why he killed himself. I am mad because the gonzo journalism died and was reborn as drugged out teen Internet bloggers around the world writing the same drivel as me are turning the world into a big annoying cyber-attic to store crap.

We had our best day in terms of sales ever at VP with three $49 orders coming in over the Internet. This was a good thing but I could watch the downloads and they were going down already. Maybe we peaked at $147? I was in a funk and tired from lack of sleep so it was hard to appreciate. By the time I got to improv I was ready to sleep or crawl under some object. I did a scene as a miserable hot dog vendor who hated his job and life. But Joan had brought her baby Henry and that perked me up a bit. I later managed to do some scenes that woke me up. I got some email from Stephanie about a mother who had died of cancer.

I have a lot of nervous self-doubt questions sometimes and I was thinking that as a person I don’t ever get satisfied or stop asking questions. I can see the appeal of God and the church since people are in this nagging dull pain of questioning themselves and their decisions and their lives. So when you are in pain you can always turn to the people who claim to have the solution.

The church says – “Just listen to us and we have the answers. You won’t be lost anymore. You won’t even need to ask the questions anymore. It will all be good from here on out if you stay on this path.” But as an atheist and a masochist I’ll stay on my route. I talked to Sarah’s belly for 30 minutes last night. She is coming into my world very soon so that could be the cause of all the panic.

Change is never a comfortable feeling but hopefully once it has worked it’s way through me then I can be calm and happy again.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The CEO of Forrester sent an email to lots of people about changing from bowties to diamonds and assumed somehow that people know what you are talking about when you say <> or >< with regards to working with customers.

;)

Excerpt:
"Using Jack Welch’s model of servicing the companies you build products for (the diamond: <>) versus merely making the products (the bow tie: ><) revolutionized the buyer/seller relationship in big industry."

Read Bowties to diamonds if you are interested. I didn't bother to try.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I played basketball on Monday night so my feet are covered with blisters. As I was looking for my sneakers, I never found the right pair, I realized that I hadn't looked for sneakers for months. This is connected to my belly that is growing almost as rapidly as Sarah's. One of the unfortunate side effects of having a pregnant wife is becoming pregnant yourself and putting on pounds like a squirrel preparing for a cold Boston winter. It is called couvade syndrome.

Madeline was weighed again In-Utero through an ultrasound and is almost 3 lbs. 9 oz. This puts her at about the 58th percentile for weight. We got a good look at her face from the ultrasounds and Dr. Cohen let us keep a couple of them for momentos. They are apparently potential motivation tools for when Sarah is in labor. I am supposed to flash them in front of her face and say something like. There she is. Just a little more work and you can meet her. My guess is that if I do this my retina will detach and Sarah will clock me and I will fall backwards onto a chair and become paralyzed. (This statement was influenced by a recent viewing of Million Dollar Baby) which had nothing to do with babies.

Tonight we had dinner with Jeremy who is depressed because of his break-up with Jenny. He believes that he no longer even enjoys having sex with women that he meets on the Internet which for him is a big blow since that was the one major thing that he enjoyed in life. He'll get over it sooner or later. He has grand bicycling plans to get from Boston to somewhere far, starting with Marshfield. He bought a new bicycle and a trailer for it.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sunday we went back to the natural childbirth class. It was a little less interesting in the second session as the teacher went through areas like packing bags filled with mood lighting, post-partum, massage, two meditation sessions, and another labor movie. Sarah was amazed at how calm the woman was giving birth in the movie. The more low key session was fine because I wasn't up for taking a drink from a firehose on Sunday morning as I was falling asleep. We had been painting on Saturday all day and then watched Bubble Boy until late at night.

In the evening my family including mom, dad, Lisa, Dave, Sarah and unborn Madeline walked to Fenway to see the Rolling Stones open their 2005 tour. On the walk over my mom told us about her labor with Lisa and me.

When Lisa was born in 1971 it was difficult to find a hospital in Boston that allowed fathers to be in the room during the birth. So they went to a religious hospital that did allow it. My mother had Lisa naturally with no anaesthesia. She went to the hospital at 2:30 AM and was laboring about 24 hours. Including sleeping after the labor she had gone for about 36 hours without food. The next morning someone was ringing a bell as they went from room to room. My mom thought the bell meant that it was time for breakfast and was ready to put her order in for a big mound of food. A man walked in wearing a frock and he bent over to ask her "Do you have any sins to confess?" She just replied "I'm Jewish." and waited for the priest to leave to exclaim to my father how ravenously hungry she was.

I was a faster baby as the second. She went to the hospital at about 2 am with me and I was born the next morning at 8am. They gave her an epidural for the last 15 minutes of pushing, which in retrospect didn't seem worth the trouble.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you have ever tried to sell enterprise software and been presented with responding to a dreaded RFP. This is what an RFP would be like if someone was interested in buying your house. I dug this off my old computer too. I am not sure why I wrote it.

Home Owner RFI

This RFI (Request for Information) has been sent to you because you have been selected as a potential vendor for Daniel Housman and his family in the area of HOME OWNERSHIP. Mr. Housman and his family have contracted our consulting firm Amoco, Price, and Kraft to aid in the selection process. Your response is due on [ print yesterday’s date] in order to be considered for a demonstration of your home. If your home is selected for the next round of our purchasing process you will be contacted via a secret code and be provided with a key to unlock the code. In order to respond you will first need to send back an NDA that you have received this and are not intending to show it to anyone else.

If the house burns down will I be able to replace it the next day? What tools will you use to rebuild it?

How many houses have you sold before and to who? Can you provide 50 references of people who have purchased properties from you and which types of things such as bathrooms, swimming pools, or solar panels were included in each one.

Can your house fly?
If not what are your plans to make your house fly in upcoming remodeling?
Can your house fly if we remodel the basement?

Our family would like to move our current swimming pool to where your swimming pool is because we like our swimming pool better. Can you describe any tools you are offering with your house to allow us to do this? Is there a price break for bringing our own swimming pool (REQUIRED)

What materials was your house built with? Please explain how it was built describing each layer in the houses architecture.

Does your house support all standards for power, television, and reception? We have some appliances that we bought in England and would like to use them in our new house including a telephone – France , a toaster oven – China, a Television and VCR – England. Please describe how your house would accommodate these appliances.

Does you house provide broadband access?
Do your outlets support industrial machinery standards?

How many people can be fit into your house before it crumbles t o the ground. Please provide any load testing you may have done on your house such as total volume of people that can be fit into the building as well as what will happen during particularly active periods with varying numbers of participants such as

A) A dance party
B) Riot
C) Tae-Boe

Have you ever held a party with more than 800 people in your house before? IF so please provide the names of some of the attendees at the party.

Home features – We are evaluating features of our home please enter whether you have any of these features and whether it is a “Minor”, “Moderate”, “Major”, or “Impossible” home improvement to improve your home to meet our requirements

Included – Included in price of home
Minor – Small adjustment to furnishings
Moderate – Cosmetic change such as paint, interior modification
Major – Structural change to walls, floors, etc.
Impossible – Beyond the laws of physics

Kitchen - Requirements

Big Sink big enough to fit 100 unwashed dishes
Self-Cleaning Oven with top grill
Microwave oven
Sub-Zero Fridge
Wooden Cabinets
Wooden floor
Washing machine and dryer
Robot that cooks and cleans for me

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I nest and clean the apartment I find old thoughts that I had locked in laptops like my NEC Versa from the nineties. Here is an example showing that I was still obsessed with start-up survival even back when Survivor's first season came out. I actually watched it back then...

Lessons learned from the TV show "Survivor"

Although the show Survivor is only a representation of a sample of one group of people in a scenario that is obviously contrived, when watching it I can't help but make some observations about the nature of competition among people that can be applied to competing in a high tech new market environment.

The island began with 16 people who were eventually narrowed to 1 person.

At first - The objective was to survive not to be the best.

You need to understand the nature of the game if you want to win. In a competitive environment where only one person can survive, you have to realize that surviving is the objective. Many of the people did not understand this and may have been more fit but didn't win. Greg was an incredible outdoorsman but he wasn't able to last very long nor was a woman who also had significant outdoors experience. Most of the contestants were able to eat bugs or rats but in the end nobody said of the winners that they survived because they had an uncanny ability to eat bugs and rats or walk on fire. It was something else. The skill to handle the competitive environment to survive is different than the skill to survive physical, mental, or environmental challenges. Kelly, who survived until the last round was very quiet and nobody felt threatened by her in early rounds when people were being voted out. Because of this she was able to survive through initial rounds.

The first objective of a start-up or provider in a new market is also to survive. Focusing on survival at early stages is supercedes focusing on being better. Most markets can't support multiple 600 pound gorillas and being too obvious or too capable of intentions at the beginning can endanger survival at an early stage. Allowing others to focus on competing vs. surviving can be an important way to make it through an initial selection. In many ways that is the start-up imperative at first. Just don't be noticed by the more competitive competitors. Stay off the radar screen. So when big companies like Siebel and Oracle keep focusing on being a better CRM provider, staying quiet can be a way to fight them as a PRM provider in the early stages. If they are paying attention to competing and not survival in the new market it can hurt them later.

* Alliances are critical to survival. With 16 potential survivors converging upon one eventual survivor it came down to a group of four people who had formed an alliance early in the process that were able to engineer the survival of the four people Sue, Kelly, Rudy, and Rich by systematically ousting the other players. It is much easier for four to compete against 12 individuals than for one to compete against 15. This alliance was begun by Rich, the eventual winner of the contest at the beginning of the contest.

Strategic alliances determine the outcome of competitive situations. Clearly having a plan for alliances like Rich did at the beginning of the competition was the way to survive.

The need to create alliances when there is a large group is also true in business in an early stage competitive market. With a large number of potential providers in the market it is more competitive to form an alliance with a would be future competitor than to go alone to the market. For ChannelWave this means that forming the right alliances in a market that allow for survival can allow ChannelWave to weather a fragmented market or a new market. This is not something that necessarily happens once in business. New markets emerge from existing ones. The question comes down to who will dominate those emerging markets since that dominance is the prize. Taking on a strategy that uses alliances effectively to lock out the new markets is needed to survive in any round one of an approach to an undefined market.

Also the more fit were less likely to form alliances as was clear later. A company like Siebel is so fit that they are a threat to the survival of any company that wants an alliance with them. This is a disadvantage to them in long term survival since the less fit companies can "plot" to remove them from the market because they are such a threat.

From a product perspective we should note that when winning is about survival, if our product can provide the needed tools to execute strategic partnerships that allow survival than we are providing the "brains" behind the market equivalent of Rich, the eventual winner. The key value in the software for alliances is in the ability of our customer to "win" to win in new markets by first surviving and ultimately out maneuvering even alliance partners when needed. They need to use tools as early as the first day in competition, while they are just planning to compete through the last day in managing their alliances. That was Rich's strategy and it worked very well.

Within the 4 - How to survive in the tight competitive market

Once the field had been narrowed to 4 people how the group dynamics worked differently. The alliance had survived but needed to be restructured with a single winner. One alliance member was singled out by the group for removal, Kelly.

Kelly was able to survive only because she was able to handle the challenges that gave her immunity 5 times in a row. It was clear that she had made mistakes in her relationship with Sue that had ensured that she was going to be voted out from the alliance of 3 Sue, Rudy, and Rich had she not won two consecutive challenges. Basically she was more fit than the other competitors and had in her words only been able to get to the final two because of faith, and a will to survive. Rudy was ultimately removed because he couldn't beat Kelly in a competition to hold on to a pole. Had he been able to do this he would have won the survival game.

Kelly's ability to execute was necessary in order to survive. While alliances are important, they can be overcome by execution of objectives outside of those alliances. Kelly very well could have won the competition on execution alone. Companies like Siebel have been flawless often in their ability to execute. In a tight competitive environment the one who executes can survive longer than one who doesn't. It is better to be a Kelly than a Rudy. Making little mistakes can take you out of the running.

Kelly didn't win though as competitive execution was not enough. She made some mistakes along the way that cost her. One mistake was that she admits to was that she voted to remove Sue from the island. Sue had been one of her allies and later proved her worst enemy in the final decision.

In many ways this comes down to keeping your allies as you compete with them. Rich had a tremendous advantage among the four competitors because two of them were going to vote for him after they were removed. Rudy would because he was loyal. Loyalty was very important. Sue would select Rich because Rich was the lesser of two evils. Again loyalty was important. Sue was Anti-Kelly because Kelly had not stayed loyal to her.

Since former competitors ultimately decided who the winner would be it was necessary to not lose the trust of the other competitors. It meant that Rich had 2 of seven votes going into the final decision and Kelly had none. This was the equivalent of having a 2-0 lead in a seven game playoff series. The challenger needs to win 4 before you win 2 more. Again the alliance returned and execution within the alliance was critical to Rich's success. Had Sue tried to go against Rudy she would have faced the same odds or worse which is why Rich didn't even need to try to win the pole competition. He knew Rudy was loyal, and he knew that Kelly would rather compete against him than Rudy. Rich was also able to win over the doctor with his relationship with him that was not an alliance but the leaving him only needing one vote. Two of Kelly's 2 votes were for "not-rich" except for one which was a performance based approval for having been so capable. Clearly there was a cost to forming alliances, which was that in doing so Rich appeared very politically motivated and unlikable. He would have been a land slide winner had he been more likable. Kelly had spent energy on this and it nearly landed her the competition.

So it was important for Kelly to make it to the tie that she was likeable. It is important to be likeable in order to survive against a strategically capable competitor. Being likable is just as important as being a good alliance strategist and is a form of alliance strategy in and of itself. Businesses should look to be likable if they want to survive. They never know when they'll need a vote for them based on this over loyalty.

From a business perspective for CW and for our customers it should be clear that alliance creation and leadership is very important but in the long term it is the appropriate management of the alliance throughout time that is critical. It is a matter of survival to maintain loyal alliances. These alliances can also allow organizations the luxury to not always win or even compete in execution of a competitive objective.

Luck and chance are always factors

- It appears that the 3-3 voting tie was broken by Greg, who used the number 9 to figure out who to vote for and he voted for Rich because Rich gave him the number 7 when asked and Kelly gave him the number 3.

As a company in competition you can't always win on principles of strategy or execution. These just weight the odds one way or another to get us to a win, a loss, or to stay even enough to let luck take its course in a tie. Luck does not create winners though, it breaks ties among highly capable competitors. You can't easily say that Rich won because of luck given all of the obstacles it took to get to the coin toss. From a business perspective it boils down to opportunity favoring the prepared.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had nightmares that I was smoking in front of my mother last night.

I think they were a result of my odd experience people watching yesterday. I was sitting looking out the window of Perks, a coffee shop in Norwood Center, waiting for my dad to meet me so we could carpool our way to the Patriots pre-season game and save $30. I could watch the world outside the window from the high perch of my stool and the article in the Globe about kayaking wasn't holding my interest very well. A man was sitting outside with a cigarette in his mouth and a tattoo on his arm. He had thinning blond hair and his left arm was painted with fading tattoos that had been aging for at least ten years. I wouldn't have paid him any mind but a pair of young looking girls walked-up to him and sat down with him. They were dressed in Delores, Lola, Lolita, fashion with the blond one looking more confident than most. She was smoking a cigarette along with mr. Tattoo. I have trouble telling the precise ages of young girls, especially ones wearing mascara, mini-skirts, and smoking. I was willing for a minute to convince myself that they were actually short women and he was their friend or lover. Then came the transaction. The smoking blond opened her wallet and pulled out some crumpled dollars and handed them to mr. tattoo. He then walked with the money into the next door convenience store. He popped back out to bark out a question about what the girl really wanted. When he returned looking mildly guilty and secretive he handed the blond smoking girl three packs of cigarettes. She flashed them in her hands, did a jumping jack of excitement, and worked to get the more timid brunette sitting in the seat excited as well at their lucky conquest. All three of them sat together, smoking girls and mr. tatoo chatting and enjoying each others company.

I was thinking to myself. Could my daughter become that smoking Lolita? Yikes. I was turning paler by the minute. Then a man stood hunched over a runners sipping bottle who either had CP or DT. He was shaking his hands enough to spill half of the two cans of Pepsi onto the ground as he was coached by a friend to pour the contents into the sipping cup. He came inside Perks and sat down shaking to drink his beverage.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On Sunday Sarah and I went to the first of two classes to learn how to deliver a baby the natural way. We had a choice between taking six two hour classes or two six hour classes and with scheduling problems and football games we decided together that with the Patriots playing early home games on Thursday that we needed to opt for the Sunday classes. The official name for the class on the receipt from Isis Maternity is “Natural Ch1”. It was yet another adventure into adult sex-ed.

We were early so we walked around the area where they sell various motherhood products. The rack of specialized bras caught my interest since they had a number of clever tools to extend the standard bra into a milking machine. The most space-age of the bunch is the Easy Expression Bustier Hands Free Pumping Bra. It looked like it was inspired by the Austin Powers movie where the femme bots were shooting from their nipples.

The class itself began with the dreaded introductions. We didn’t have a tennis ball and have to memorize names. The name tags were helpful for avoiding that. Instead each couple would interact to learn key facts about the couple next to them and then would introduce the other couple to the group. The group was about 10 couples. During this exercise I ran the numbers in my head and determined that 70% of the women doing natural childbirth are also certified yoga or at least part-time hypno-yoga instructors, 20% are from foreign countries who don’t speak much English, and the rest are people like Sarah and me who have medical reasons for being denied anesthetics.

Two of the couples were scheduled to go to a natural birthing center and had received a mysterious and short letter in the mail the previous morning telling them that the birthing center was closing suddenly due to staffing reasons and that they would have to go to Newton Wellesley hospital to deliver their babies. We discussed this situation and it was suggested that staffing reasons may have been a code word for some impropriety that forced the shut-down. Maybe a newspaper reporter should do some investigation. It sounds like a juicy and lurid story akin to when those fertility docs where fertilizing eggs with their own sperm.

Our classmates contained of a narrow range of people with the most common being the funny goofy guy cracking the jokes they wished they could have in high school and the earthy-crunchy woman kicking him in the shins repeatedly but giggling along with him. Everyone had gotten their partner pregnant so they were all comfortable with each other’s foibles. One couple was a long distance relationship and most questions for them revolved around whether he would have time to get to the hospital fast enough from Long Island to be involved in the birth.

After the intros we did a word association around the room against the word childbirth. Most people’s first reaction was “pain” or “miracle”. I used my expert improv skills to raise the first word that came to mind and said “goop”. The fear of childbirth was followed by a fun game of find the internal pregnancy parts on the diagrams of a regular or pregnant woman. I was responsible for finding the bladder and was looking for it near the stomach figuring it had to connect somehow but then was redirected closer to the end of the intestines. Other key parts that were hard for people to find included the stomach, amniotic sac, and the mucous plug.

The instructor had a special baby doll and hipbone that she could use to demonstrate the baby going through the pelvis and the various orientations it could be in. In general it was clear that unless the bones themselves were flexible there was no way the baby could fit through the hole so she bent the bones and snapped the snaps to tighten the baby into a tuck and managed to force it through the bones with various twists of the head during the motion. It was like watching a contortionist put their whole body through a squash racket.

Pregnant women late in their pregnancy generate a hormone called relaxin that makes their bones and muscles more loose for stretching to fit that baby through the pelvis. The relaxin can lead to a pregnant woman waddling walking style. Given all of the complexity for this important event evolution has equipped the baby and mother with tons of feedback mechanisms and tools to make the process go right. It makes you think that these strange receptors are interesting targets for pharmaceuticals to connect to.

The baby can be in about four major configurations with the most useful being the head down with the back facing the right way. If the feet are down, breach, then the doctors call it a win for modern science and use a C-section to cut it out. In this case they use could general anesthesia so you can’t eat food in the hospital as you might choke on it if you throw-up from the anesthesia. Instead the hospital provides ice chips for sustenance. Some people have gotten clever and made ice chip flavoring syrups to make this more fun but the whole snoopy slurpy ice chip plan sounded like it was unnecessary.

If the babies head is in backwards then the baby is pushing-up against the mother’s spine instead of the soft stomach as the uterus contracts. This is called back labor and basically pinches all of the nerves in the spine and hurts like hell. So among the goals of natural childbirth is to get the baby flipped around before or during labor so that the head is pointing both down and the right way. Doing this is a lot of making room for rotation by crouching on all fours and rocking hips. This led ultimately to a lot of pregnant women on all fours getting deep tissue massages on their buttocks from their husbands and moaning.

Among the important roles that I have to play as a father is to provide massage support and encouraging statements. The role of the father has evolved twice in the past forty years. The fifties father was just in the waiting room or a bar with cigars and whiskey. The post sixties father was supposed to be a super-coach knowing every possible scenario and barking out key rational commands for the delivering mother to follow while she was controlled irrationally by her pain. The second and short lived plan was apparently created by men and women didn’t like being barked at and doctors didn’t like men who were mainly ignorant of the delivery process trying to explain how to have a baby to mothers screaming in pain. So the new role is to make encouraging statements and to provide helpful and timely massages.

The encouraging statement is not that simple of a task. Apparently if you took a hypno-birthing class they provide a full encouraging statement cheat sheet. But the general idea is to provide firm but gentle statements. For example when your wife says “I can’t do it” instead of saying “You have to do it” or “You can do it” I am supposed to say “You ARE doing it”. My guess is that in the moment I will forget this and make some unwelcome sarcastic but really funny if you think about them closely remarks. The class is supposed to cure me of this but I am a lost cause on this front.

The instructor had been a doula where her client was giving birth in a hospital and the mother was asking for a bar to hold on to so that she could squat to push the baby out and the nurse had told her that she didn’t think it would help. “I don’t believe in gravity”, the nurse said.

The course also included watching two videos of babies being born. The first was right before the lunch break (Yum!) and also after a brief discussion about looking at the color of the water when it breaks in case it is green or brown which can be dangerous. The other was near the end of the class. The first movie showed a woman who seemed to get very far along in terms of dilating without even knowing it and then the baby came fast in the hospital after taking a very hot shower with her husband massaging her back. The second movie woman was a midwife from Mexico and her Japanese sculptor husband who all got together naked in the swank blue tiled family hot tub ultimately with their two sons to experience the birth of their first daughter together. The Mexican woman looked like she was in a trance and was focusing on her husband walking backwards behind her while she walked forwards.

What I learned from the movies is that hot water and semi-nakedness are the two key components of the labor process.

The class spent significant time discussing walking through in detail the various phases of labor beginning with when labor is beginning, how long each phase lasts, and what to expect from each phase. With the doll babies head going through the hip-bone multiple times in various different scenarios the class seemed very similar to the feeling of scouting a wicked rapid with an experienced guide. Among the helpful scouting tools was a big diagrams with three columns including a clock (how long the phase was), pictures of the baby going through the hole (the position the baby is in), and a mother’s general expression ranging from smiling, to neutral, to something angry (transition), and then to angry neutral.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While nesting and moving lots of stuff Sarah dug-up this email. It was the first communication that I ever sent to her and now she is my wife. So if you are looking for a wife and meeting somone through your Asian yenta downstairs neighbor then this message may be a good template to use. It worked for me.

====
From: Daniel Housman (dhousman@channelwave.com)
Sent: Friday, August 8, 2003 3:46 PM
To: Sarah Carvey
Subject: Do you know someone named Waichi

Sara,

Hello. I am Dan Housman. Waichi introduced me to you and you to me although we haven't met yet.

I was spending much of this evening eating ice cream with Waichi in order to console myself after the Celtics lost to the Nets again. Waichi game me your email address and said that we would likely enjoy meeting each other. She thought that the best way to get started would be for me to send you an email to introduce myself so this is what I am doing.

Introducing me:

I am 29.
I live upstairs from Waichi.
I work in Cambridge at a software company that I started after I graduated from MIT.
I recently returned from Africa.
I have always lived in the Boston area but grew-up in Newton and Watertown.
I love to read. I love sports. I love to travel when I can.
I like to laugh. I am going to my improv comedy class tomorrow. It's fun.
I want to wrte although I haven't in 10 years. I am going to a class on how to write a novel next Wednesday. Maybe it will inspire me.
I have a friend named Jeremy who is coming to live with me for the summer.
He was a fraternity brother of mine from MIT from AEPi. He normally lives in St. Maarten.
My sister is a folk musician who plays all around Boston but mostly on the subway. She is teaching me to play the guitar.

I'll bet Waichi already told you most of this.

Tell me about you?
Is your name spelled Sara or Sarah?

I'm looking forward to hearing back from you.

- Dan

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Another item that I had been oblivious to was that babies need pediatricians as soon as they are born. This translates to – pick out a pediatrician before your baby is born. Having last been at the pediatrician when I was 11 I hadn’t thought about these people for a long while but Sarah, who is on top of things, let me know on Monday afternoon that we should go to the pediatrician open house at the same place where she goes to see her obstetrician. This was a private practice office that isn’t a part of a specific hospital. They seemed like very nice people and are only a two-minute walk from our condo so they appeared to have the deal sealed in my mind. But since they were recruiting new patients the office had a nice little spread of cheese, crackers, cookies, grapes, and juice for the pregnant women and me to chow down on while they explained the history of the practice and how it works to sign-up for them. They explained that their practice is very large which made me envision a five hundred person team who all were working on my future child’s health and well being but under further inquisition I learned that big means that they have 8 people, four doctors and four nurse practitioners. These eight people see thousands of kids. The solution to always seeing the same doctor problem is that they assign a doctor/NP pair to your kid who you generally meet with when you have your appointments.

Among the decisions to make, which I am not opposed to, is that they won’t accept a new kid if the kids aren’t going to have their vaccines. Vaccines have become a battlefront issue since some parents think that vaccines cause autism. Luckily the head of the practice mentioned to us - “frankly we have no idea what causes autism”. That was reassuring. But she did explain that there isn’t any mercury in the vaccines they give and mercury, the cause of mad hatter’s disease, is only involved in vaccine shots for the flu and we generally give those to old people and not babies so that wouldn’t cause autism, just early senility. They went over their neutral position towards circumcision. I paid some attention to what they were saying but had trouble worrying about circumcision when we are having a girl. It is good to know this since if we had a boy we would probably circumcise him and wouldn’t want one kid to go to one pediatrician while the other kid went to another. We also need to worry about latching, which is that the baby can grab on and start feeding from Sarah’s breast. But we shouldn’t worry much in the first few days since babies do a lot of things randomly at first. And we need to make sure that the baby doesn’t get jaundiced because if she does she’ll need to go under lamps.

Some parents were worried about the kids mixing between sick and healthy in the waiting room but I think it’s best to just get sick while you are young. You can’t shelter people from germs their whole life. It isn’t healthy.

In all it was fun to go and check out the pediatricians office and especially a good time because they had good cheese. If they have good cheese all the time maybe I’ll camp out there.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have been working on doing some elephant hunting lately in order to grow the business. I don’t have a financial partner like a VC to outfit us with the latest sales hunting gear from their portfolio companies and cash to pay the smooth service companies that feed on fresh start-ups. So I’m on the hunt for that elephant of a deal that can feed us for six to twelve months provides the energy and capital to expand the business. It’s going to have to be a six or seven figure deal so there is no point in calling on folks that can’t stomach that. Luckily millions of years of evolution have contributed to making me a natural born killer and I’m ready to feed.

Picking the prey

The companies I am looking to sell to are ones that have cash to spend. So I focused on the ones that were public and the venture backed start-ups since they appeared to have the best promise for revenue. From them I looked at a number of criteria to match them against things that analysts, customers, friends, and advisors had said that our technology would be or is good at solving. Since it takes a lot of energy to hunt each company I like to pick the right ones. The ones that are having a problem or are in distress can be more attractive than the others because they can be taken down the easiest. So I went to Monster.com and looked at the job boards to see if they were doing hiring in areas that indicated that they needed support with building desktop applications for organizing content. I found one elephant this way that looked like a good fit. They were hiring a sr. product manager to lead a product team locally to build a product that could use our technology and knowledge to succeed. So I marked them for a hunt. I also read the news about companies worth checking out. To do this I subscribe to Google news but more recently I have been using our own product to search RocketInfo to get the latest news feeds and blogs about companies to see who might be a good fit. In general change is good at a prospect site. A good change of management makes everyone unstable including existing vendors. The new management may not be ready to buy immediately but the first in is the most likely to win.

Tracking and studying the game

I have grown to love the Internet as a source of information to find the broken branches and holes to help quietly approach the game. Plenty of clever start-ups have provided tools to use that in an aggregate form leave most individuals exposed to a phone call or email. For the contacts that I wanted to approach I first wanted to look deeper at their organization. LinkedIn provides a host of information about individuals that is frankly, incredible. I generally don’t care much about whether I am linked to each person so much that there is a person named John Smith who is the VP of Engineering at Elephantco who used to work at Elephantcoacquiredsub and Frank Black who used to be the VP of Engineering at Elephantco and is now working at Gazelleco. So their business model means they are giving me tons of value and I don’t pay for it but that isn’t my problem. Years ago I used to dream of having a resource like this to find people’s names and interests and roles. Sometimes I’ll even use the tracking tool in LinkedIn to see how I’m linked to a person. In one case recently I knew someone who was a former employee at the company I was interested in reaching that was a new colleague from one of my former colleagues. I didn’t actually use LinkedIn to contact the person. Instead I called my old buddy and asked for an introduction.

Testing approaches

But the social network garbage only goes so far. Most people aren’t directly connected to me and I don’t mind hunting alone. At some point it is just me and the game out there in cyberspace. When it comes down to that I need to get some contact information and make an approach. The site zoominfo.com is a good companion to LinkedIn because it provides utilities to send an email to the contact. They have a form where you can forward an email to the person and propose something like a meeting or call. The email comes from you so they will reply to you. I don’t use this tool often but you have to try something to get through. An alternative is to guess the email address. Companies have corporate standards for email addresses and they look like this flastname@company.com, fname.lname@company.com. So you don’t need to guess a seven digit number to put an inquiry into a person. I’ll try five or six people at the same company over the course of a few weeks to see if I can get anyone to bite. It only takes one to get started.

But email is a little indirect and the telephone is a very useful tool. So while in hunting mode I like to make a lot of phone calls to very important people. Some people find this intimidating but it is actually a fun, contact sport, part of the hunt. To make it a little less intimidating think about it this way. If you are selling something worth $100,000 then it must have an ROI to the buyer of over $500,000. So you aren’t making a call to take $100,000 but instead to announce that the person you are looking to reach is the lucky winner of $400,000. You are the publisher’s Clearing House, the lottery, the good guys. People should love to talk to you.

The telephone attack

But they don’t like being cold called. So the avoidance strategies by the prey to block me from calling and reaching my targets are significant. They include hidden extensions, people who don’t answer the telephone, and rerouting of calls to irrelevant peons. To handle locating the extension of the person you are looking for I just call the main number and ask for John Smith, the guy who I found on LinkedIn. People’s blogs also can work well although it is sloppier to use them. Since I have the name and their title I normally get through to the right extension. That worked for me the other day and I’m in the process of negotiating an elephant opportunity that came from it. But it is often more complex than that. If I don’t have a name because the management team isn’t networking on LinkedIn to find their next gig then I need to interrogate someone on the phone directly. The administrative people in companies are actually quite nice and want to be helpful since they are in an outward facing customer service role. They can be reached using the O key on the telephone. Chatting with them can help build a map of people that I can go back to later with names and titles that aren’t available anywhere else. Then I can pull the same trick of calling and asking for a person whose name, title, and favorite sports teams I already know.

If you have ever tried this then often when I get to the target person and their response is to fob me off to that guy from the Capital One commercials who says no in twenty languages. This is a typical response. “Wow that’s a great idea. You should talk to people in product management about that.” I have come to learn that the best way to play this with a real elephant is to play along but use it as a hook to get back to the real buyer. So I’ll talk to whoever you want and then I’ll call you back to tell you how it went and what they thought, etc. Sometimes the referrals really are sending me through the whole political route to get the approvals, etc. to make a big sale so it isn’t the end of the world if this means actually doing some work.

The waiting game

The big game don’t die quickly. In fact it is good to have a lot of time on your hands when hunting these big companies. Really good ideas take about six months to percolate through the big companies before they can regurgitate the $100K or more. I like to use this to my advantage to spend less time working on them when they are making me wait. In fact I prefer to gamble with them by telling them I am ready for meetings that I’m not ready for. So I’ll say something like. We’ve been working on the proposal and we are hoping to present it tomorrow. This roughly translates to in my mind. “I think you are going to schedule a time in two weeks to go over the proposal. If you do schedule something then I’ll put together a proposal.” This strategy does carry some risk to it but my time as a bootstrapper is very valuable and experience with these elephants tells me that they can’t move as fast as me so in order to avoid spending lots of time making a proposal, etc. I’m going to get on the schedule with them and make sure the right folks will be there.

The kill…. To be continued.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Worst install of the year: TurboTax2004
So I remembered why I didn't manage to get my taxes done this year on time. It was because TurboTax 2004 refused to print them for me. The problem it had was that it wanted to update one of the files for the tax returns since it didn't have the right information on time for it's Dec. 2004 shipment date. This should have been fine since they invented a system called "One click update". This one-click update mechanism pops-up when you reach the last step of your return and you go to print it or when you first load the software. So I hit that one-click update button and the system went into what Turbo Tax support refers to as the "TurboTax 2004 update loop". In their own words....

This issue presents itself as a seemingly endless "loop" and occurs after you've downloaded a TurboTax update. It begins with the following message, which appears after starting TurboTax:

Updates not installed. There is an update for your TurboTax. Would you like to install the updates now?

Basically this leads to constantly being asked to reboot your computer with the only solution to forcibly remove this program and anything that ever touched it from your computer. I have now done so and will attempt to reinstall it (plus the Free state add-on) having to enter the memorable code 9481C5EA93F62103 and the last eight digits of the credit card I paid for this software in order to activate the installer.

It is ironic that the company that makes this very frustrating user experience is called Intuit, as in Intuitive, since this process is far from intuitive.
Wish me luck...

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I learned last night that the baby doesn't like to give those big kicks to Sarah when I am watching her belly or putting my hand on it.

Today I found another bug when trying to finally accept that the new build was ready for prime time and kept finding a problem with each successive new release. This experience once again proves Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entymology: There's always one more bug. I haven't found the law for fetal non-kicking but my guess is that this Lubarsky guy is somehow involved.

This afternoon I have dedicated some time towards the August 15th holiday of National Procrastinators Tax Filing Day. I heard from Jeremy that the government is organizing a march on Washington to support the war. So they are organizing people to march to them to show their support. It sounds a bit egotistical and Jeremy thinks it is the beginning of a totalitarian Animal Farm state. I just thought it was a little awkward that they could take money the people paid them to protest that the people were protesting the war that people were paying them to vote to carry out that the people are paying for and dying for. At the moment though I am trying to figure out how to make my ink jet work well enough to print the paperwork that I need to prove that I paid the right amount to them to carry out all this effort in Washington. Unfortunately with all of the billions of dollars spent in Iraq, I am still getting ripped off by the Epson corporation for spare ink cartridges.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We met the person who will be our doula on Sunday afternoon. While I had read about halfway through the book "The Expectant Father" earlier in the pregnancy I had never skipped forwards to the section on the actual birthing day. Sarah had read me some things about the phases of delivery using key descriptions like cervix dilating to 8 centimeters.

Sarah has been much more involved with trying to understand what it will be like to deliver a baby since she is now less than three months away from doing so. Meeting with the doula for me was a crash course in the realities of some of the details that I remembered being taught distantly in sex-ed that I used to snooze through in high school since I wanted to get to the mildly pornographic parts that were more interesting like putting a condom on a banana. As we met with the doula I probably looked like a squirrel caught in the headlights of a redneck on a back country road.

First of all I learned that a doula is a birth coach advocate. They provide a basic service of being around throughout the birth experience. Apparently nurses and doctors don't really do this. The nurses scurry from one room to the next taking vital signs readings and checking progress and the doctors only arrive when the nurses alert them that there is something to pay attention to like a newborn head crowning or a baby dropping out in the next five minutes. The doula stays with the mother and offers helpful advice about how to get through the birthing experience like how to crouch, when to walk around, and how to distract themselves from the pain.

Among the things I have learned is that there is such a thing as a birthing experience. Women spend a lot of time, since they have 10 months to kill anyways, trying to optimize their birthing experience. There are choices including where you want to birth, how you want to be distracted or made to feel less pain, and what you do or don't want to happen within those choices.

For example there are pros and cons to whether you want to wear the hospital gown. Among the cons are that your baby won't be something you can feel in the front of your naked body when it is born because a hospital gown is closed in the front and open in the back. You also have to worry about vaccuum extractions and internal fetal monitors where they screw probes into the babies head or attach suction cups to them. Do you want 'em or not? The timing itself is something to think about - when in the process do you go to the hospital. Should you watch the Lord of the Rings six hour directors cut of Return of the King for the first few phases of labor or just head over to the hospital with the latest People magazine?

The process of selecting the optimized birthing experience is similar to wedding planning although the party includes fewer people and more pain and blood loss.

Apparently Sarah can look forward to a large amount of labor pain involved in delivering our baby. In thinking about this I realized why men are more interested in dangerous and painful daredevil activities like sailing on the open ocean in storms for a month or climbing at high altitudes on Kilimanjaro. Us men have to create life threatening saga experiences to keep ourselves occupied while women can always look forward to the challenge of their lives getting a little baby out of their body. Since they know they have plenty of excitement in this form it isn't too appealing to jump out of an airplane or try to swim in a volcano in an asbestos suit.

The meeting with the doula also made me aware that people have a perenium, formerly called the nacho (not you butt, etc.), an area of the body I hadn't put much thought into until we discussed how much it can take a beating while pushing a baby out. I think men have a perenium as well so I could relate personally to this conversation better than other labor topics. I am performing the role of coach more than having to know how to actually do the task of laboring to deliver a baby for 24 to 50 hours. So it's hard to learn to do something you aren't going to actually do. That's why I wasn't paying much attention in the pregnancy and delivery portion of sex-ed class in the first place.

I am quite proud of Sarah having taken on this big challenge and will be working hard with the doula when the time comes to make Sarah's birthing experience as positive and memorable, or in certain areas quickly forgettable, as possible.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was scanning an RSS feed while testing the new find RSS feeds functionality in an alpha release. It was something just sitting around on feedster for the Red Sox feed. The news item listed was a short piece about how Matt Clement has gained Psychic powers since he was hit on the head. The site it came from, Call of the Green Monster, is just awesome and funny (if you are a Red Sox fan).

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This weekend was dedicated to nesting activities in preparation for the impending birth, in November, of baby Madeline. The big plan for months has been to finally paint the condo, after seven years of living here the only time the place has been painted was when I moved in. Painting is a sport also known as opening Pandora’s box because you need to clear each room before painting it. That was part of our plan. We wanted to try moving items around in order to determine whether we needed them or not. That way we could chuck the things we don’t need out the window, give them to family members, or move them to offshore locations. The first room we decided to paint was Jeremy’s old room. It sounded like a small size Pandora’s box since it was supposedly an empty room after Jeremy moved out. But it actually still had a closet full of items, three bookshelves with drawers and cabinets, and an entertainment center that I have been trying to get rid of for over 12 months now. Want one?

It is unbelievable how much stuff is hidden in bookshelves and closets. The living room is now full of all the junk that was formerly in the empty room. I called my parents to ask if we could drop off the many photo albums that we had borrowed for making the wedding photo montage. My dad let me know that he had rented a truck from Zip car, the place that gives you wheels when you need ‘em. Apparently he and my mother had also been infected with nesting instincts due to the coming second generation. They were clearing out all of their bookcases and having all of the floors sanded down and stained in their Newton house. Sarah and I saw this as an opportunity to unload our three not too attractive bookcases so when we dropped off the sixty-two photo albums in boxes in Newton we also looked at the fourteen or so empty book cases that they had emptied out into their significantly larger piles of boxes into their living room, study, and bathrooms.

I offered my mom a swap and she said she wanted to see our bookcases. When she arrived in Brookline she decided she didn’t want ours but did offer a couple sets of theirs for us to take. So my dad and I schlepped an old recliner that I bought at the giant church yard sale across the street in the back of the truck they had rented back to Newton thinking we might take it out to Marshfield. On reaching Newton we decided to throw it out so we just left it under a lilac bush near a fence.

According to my parents there is an underclass of scavengers in Newton who professionally take furniture left on the street by wealthy Newtonians and sell the furniture on eBay, craigslist, or in showrooms. I can imagine that these strange third wave, think Alvin Toffler renewable usage of energy, people will ultimately get highly organized and become a major corporation themselves similar to the Kentucky Fried Movie company that makes energy from pimple oil, used combs, and farts from Mexican restaurants. So my dad was confident that one of these people would take the dingy old recliner despite the fact that it was really second hand garbage.

Once in Newton we carried out two heavy, long, and attractive bookcases into the back of the pick-up truck and realized that they were longer than the flat bed of the truck. The only way to fit them was to take the gate down and tie them in. Tying them used to require lots of skill with knots but the truck came with some odd screw things where you can thread rope through them and tighten them. A secondary rope looked like a good insurance policy to avoid having someone behind the truck have their last memory be of a large bookcase flying through their windshield.

Figuring that I was a sailor I tried to make a useful knot but realized that I was hopeless. I called Jeremy because he is a real sailor and he let me know that it would be impossible for me to get walked through a trucker’s hitch knot while on the phone. He said it was two half hitches and a bowlin’ or something like that. I turned to the Internet hoping that a trucker’s hitch was doable by a mere mortal. I found scary animations that looked like this.

I tried to do this for about twenty minutes after printing out a copy of it. My dad then helped me try as well claiming that he had been a boy scout as a child. But we finally both gave up after making the realization that it was a good thing neither of us went into a profession where we needed to make knots regularly. So I tied a granny knot and called it good enough and we trucked the newer book cases over making sure that I wasn’t driving behind the truck in order to avoid having my last memory being of a large bookcase flying through my windshield.

Posted by Dan Housman at 06:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was in Sarah's parents basement the other day when I saw their pile of wires connecting from the place where the cable line came into the house. I noticed that with the advent of cable modems and wireless networks that the inbound cable wire was connecting into a modem-802.11 router. The wire then made a line up into the house to connect to every location where a television might be located. Each television needed to have it's own box.

So I got to thinking about it that the wire doesn't need to go any further than the basement if a wireless network was powerful enough and the TVs were hooked up to devices that could show the content streaming from the basement. I was thinking of a wireless television system where the smarts of the television stay in the basement as a server able to serve-up television to any wireless device in the house able to consume a fast wireless protocol. The advantages of doing this would be to get rid of one more set of annoying wires, to reduce the cost of high-end hardware attached to each television, to centralize functions like TIVO recording, and make television available to standard PC computers with cable local television decoders. The main product would be this basement router plus the decoding / subscriber units to connect to televisions. The system would also work for satellite dishes that sit on rooftops and are tricky to link via wires to where the televisions reside. Anyone interested in building this into a multi-million dollar company... you know where to find me.

Meanwhile I realize the big problem is that my wireless network itself is still very unreliable and I can't post pictures to the web from my camera at the moment because the machine I usually do it from is no longer connected to my wireless network for some stupid reason.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sarah and I constructed our own wedding ceremony from a rough template offered by Jeff our justice of the peace. I wanted to put ours up for people because when I went looking for wedding ceremony templates I didn't find anything other than a few sparse sites. The one that I did find that I liked and bookmarked isn't even available as a link anymore. But if you are a scavenger looking for some pre-made components to improve for your own wedding or if you have some other nefarious purpose please feel free to look at the planned transcript for Dan and Sarah's wedding ceremony. The bits that aren't available in that file are the readings since they were a surprise and the song written special for us on our wedding day, an adaptation of Wherever you go, sung by Lisa and Dave (Lisa is my sister). The song in MP3 format is apparently currently unavailable from their site but that will hopefully be fixed shortly. At least the lyrics are available. If you can get your sister to adapt one of her folk songs for your wedding I highly recommend it as a personal touch. The readings were some content from the Song of Songs by Bruce N. and my mom read these quotations.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A big software company that we had cozied up to was giving us the opportunity to have our software be downloadable on their add-ins page.

Survival tip: The beaurocracy of the big boys is an invitation to partner

There is more of a story to it than that but the short of that story is that small companies should partner with big companies where possible. Us little guys can do things without the inertia and trouble that the big companies have. So when a big company may be making a similar product to yours that won't be ready for 18 months they may want to partner to have a similar product on the market much sooner. Big companies have all sorts of problems getting new products to market including 18 month delays because the products needs to be translated, security checked, architectural review boarded, IRB approved, HIPPAA compliant, uncrackable by chinese hackers, alpha, beta, gamma, integration, smoke tested and terrorist screened. That doesn't even begin to mention the MRD and adjustments to the field sales compensation plan that needs to be filled out in triplicate and delivered in person to Anchorage Alaska to get the engineering resources available fix the bugs in the product. So before I return to the story I started the main point is that us little bootstrappers look great as an execution engine for getting real things done fast. We are always the little mammals scheming against the dinosaurs but they know it and if you drill deep enough and high enough into the big guys there is someone who will champion partnering with you. Ask Bill Gates if you can get through to him.

Survival tip: Borrow graphics styles and get cheap illustrations

So this large software company was willing to add a link to their plugins page featuring our software and was ensured to be a lock-in for at least 45 days before anyone else would make it onto the page due to obvious beaurocracy around obtaining the rights to change the page and the resources to do so. Beaurocracy is your friend. The first folks through may be the last. But this great opportunity included a logo at 170 X 170 pixels. As a bootstrapper my first instinct was to call the graphic arts department at my company. When I picked-up the phone I realized that the graphics department was me futzing with some old versions of Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Fireworks because it was the only thing I had handy. If you have neither try GIMP - It's a free knock-off of Photoshop.

So I created the graphic below that showed my utter lack of skill at designing logos at any size. Upon showing this to my partners they suggested that we call in favors from a graphic designer friend. Unfortunately we had already used those favors. If you have a graphic designer friend I strongly encourage pretending you are a pledge in their fraternity doing their laundy, giving them rides, cooking them breakfast, whatever you can do so that when you ask for that favor they will be there for you. Bijoy told me that he cut a deal as a revenue split on his book with a graphic designer.

But favors were not available for us. We just had me, the marketing guy who is graphically challenged. But Shelley, a key partner, suggested we look at licensing images from istockphoto.com. At first I was skeptical about doing so since licensing images normally costs billions of dollars and stealing images puts me at risk for legal action from angry mobs of photographers with deep war chests. But on istockphoto.com I was able to acquire about five icons in vector format for under $10 total that looked like professional WindowsXP graphics. They pasted into the graphics programs like champs and by copying a logo that I liked, below from Microsoft. While the logo isn't great it was done the bootstrap way.

First awful embarrassing graphic

Microsoft image imitated Imitation is the sincerest form of bootstrapping.

Cheap knock-off image done by bootstrapper Dan using istockphoto.com for $10

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was watching Animal House with Sarah tonight. We noticed that Donald Sutherland as an English professor looked a lot like Matt Swift. Here are a pair of photos to compare. Just imagine Matt with a haircut, some hair above his lip, and dressed with a scarf and peacoat and you have a dead ringer for Donald Sutherland. If you know Matt I highly recommend Animal House just for the potential comparisons for the stoner English professor.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Liz sent me a note this morning that our old drivers ed teacher is in some hot water. The folks at Boston.com wrote about it in an article about Drivers ed rape allegations. I remember Mr. Swerling as the guy who ran the movies like Blood on the Highway. He was famous for his extra brake in the passenger seat and saying... "Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up-up-up-up-up, STOOOOOPP!!!".

He never tried to sexually assault me but I wasn't a very attractive child. In general I would have to place drivers ed teachers, sorry to malign the entire profession, in a similar category as priests. People who show movies of bloody boodies to teenagers and have the teenagers drive them to the donut shop to get coffee are definitely suspicious.

In Mr. Swerling's case the courts already decided his fate. According to the Daily News Tribune he was acquitted. I think I believe him.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The world is conical
While reading the World is Flat I quickly became annoyed in the first chapter about the fundamental premise that the world is flat. I understood the basic idea that the world had evolved in terms of geographic barriers coming down but for me the picture of a flat world looks just like it should before Columbus. At the time geographically things were lined-up on maps so that distances can't be traversed in circles.

A number of geometric rules have been put forth to figure out what geometry that you are in that you can learn about in Feyman's Six Not So Easy Pieces in a chapter on Curved Spaceused to figure out whether Space-Time is curved or not. They generally focus on how a bug experiences their space not knowing it's contour. For example, if a bug tries to walk in a square by turning at right angles on a globe with equidistant measures they won't return to the point where they started.

Now we not only can traverse distances through low cost light speed communications/software, but to me that isn't a flat surface at all. The surface is just redefined where distance is related to the level of sophistication of the communications network and infrastructure. So flat is actually a bad way to describe how things are now. For instance I am closer to Bangalore than to Otis, MA on a telecommunications sophistication map because Bangalore is super wired while Otis hasn't gotten too far in wiring itself.

So if the world isn't flat - then what shape would it look like if we could visualize it. Some smart people at Princeton managed to visualize what the United States looks like through the lens of Presidential politics in the Princeton 2004 Election maps. So why not build some other maps about the world.

While trying to figure out the shape of the cyber-world is a wierd question it may not be possible to do and to create a new map structure from it. My first guess was that I could see the world first in a flat structure but upon adding that Bangalor is close to Boston the map would need to somehow put these points closer to each other. A reasonable way to do this would be to first flatten the map into a circle (since it is the base of a cone) with oceans towards the edges as best as possible. Then above the map build a cone ending at a point above it at the top. Rather than having mountains above the map the height of the area would rise upwards through the cone to the top based on how connected it was to the Internet, etc. If the resolution was infinite then two people talking on a telephone in cyberspace to each other would both be stretched to the top of the cone and facing each other. But since this would be an approximate map, just like the flat maps of the world not showing relief, the average in a region of connectedness to the world through a number would set the height of the peak for a region and the pull into the central point of the cone. The distance between any two places would actually no longer be readable on the lower circular map of the world but from their relative heights or a path that factored both geographic distance and the relative heights.

This new cyberworld map unfortunately would be very hard to read because things get pretty dense towards the top of a cone. If 750 cities all ended-up in a point it would have a lot of labels sticking out of it. This isn't a new problem. You can't read road signs on a map of the whole globe. You need to be able to zoom in and out. So one solution is to be able to change the view from the bottom to the top. At the bottom you have standard road sign problems but since the top condenses a lot your views probably should take cross sections - from height a-b and display what's in them labelled correctly.

In another way to approach this the world could be looked at with two dimensions. Each point would be defined A) by a two dimensional E-W land area (like a district, suburb, etc.) and B) by a number from zero to one representing a measurment number. The reason for measuring from zero to one would be to normalize the measurement such that every area was on the same scale, whatever that scale was. An actual number could be used but then a scale would need to be figured out to translate it into a picture. The measurement itself would be important for determining the outcome of the map but it could measure -- % saturation of cell phones, % users with Interet computers, etc. Next the little squares with E-W land areas could be sorted by range from 0-1 into a line. Now this doesn't look like a map yet but it does provide a start for displaying how close things are. The other dimension could be another arbitrary item including longitude and latitude mixed into a variable that would project a full globe onto a line such that Boston would still be somewhat near Bedford.

I unfortunately don't have the time to make such maps. If you are from Wired Magazine or Time or Princeton and you would like to collaborate with me and give me a team of programmers in Bangalore to create the maps... you'll know where to find me. I am somewhere midway up the cybercone near the US cluster.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)