Monthly Archives: May 2006

Pulling up stakes and headin’ west

2528 miles (4068 km) have been keeping me away from <a

href=”http://www.ajaxscaffold.com”>AjaxScaffold updates, SlimTimer and

much of anything else around here.

You might have noticed the upcoming event on my Kiko

calendar that reads ‘May 20 Move to Missoula, MT!!’ and wondered what that was all about. Well, <a

href=”http://www.lindsaydocherty.com”>Lindsay is going to the Rocky Mountain

School of Photography’s Summer and Digital Intensive programs. One of the nice things about being independent

is that I can pick up an move with her. I mean, it’s not like I ever leave the house anyways.

Needless to say doing something like this still takes a lot of time trying to find a <a

href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/sprump/sets/72057594127337053/”>place to live, <a

href=”http://raleigh.craigslist.org/hsh/160477090.html”>sell off our excess possessions and all the other

innumerable things that come up.

I just wanted to let everyone know what’s going on so you won’t despair when you don’t hear from me for a

couple weeks. For the same reasons we don’t push out Kiko releases after 5 PM, I’ve been holding back on both

projects until I land softly in the beautiful Bitterroot

Valley (probably around the end of this month). You can expect a point release of AjaxScaffoldGenerator and

possibly an invitation to a very private beta of SlimTimer.

Speaking of a SlimTimer beta, I’m still looking for people for it. I’m trying to target independent

contractors/consultants or small companies who bill by the hour and spend almost all of their time in front of a

computer. If this sounds like you and you would be willing to try SlimTimer and engage in an ongoing dialogue

about how it can be improved, please drop me an email with your name and

a brief description of what you do and how you keep track of your time. Also, I’d be helpful if you included in

your email which, if any, of these applications you use on a regular basis: <a

href=”http://www.backpackit.com/”>Backpack, Basecamp, <a

href=”http://www.blinksale.com/”>Blinksale, Freshbooks (formerly

2ndsite).

I’m going to try and keep this first beta very small so that I can really listen to everyone’s feedback, so not

everyone that emails me will get an invitation, but I’ll do my best.

Thanks for your patience. I’ll see you all very soon.

Startup School 2006

Just got back from an awesome, and exhausting, trip to the Bay Area for <a

href=”http://startupschool.org/”>Startup School 2006.

The speakers were very good, especially the afternoon lineup of <a

href=”http://www.oreilly.com/oreilly/tim_bio.html”>Tim O’Reilly, <a

href=”http://www.paulgraham.com/”>Paul Graham, Chris

Sacca (Google), Om Malik and <a

href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Schachter”>Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us). If you
couldn’t make it you should definently check out the <a

href=”http://notelab.infogami.com/startupschool2006”>online notes.

Of course, the real utility of an event like this is to network and conversate with

very smart and passionate people in this industry. I hung out a lot with the

other Y-combinator peoples: the notabug team (Aaron, Alexis

and Steve), Beau (Pixoh and <a

href=”http://www.instantdomainsearch.com”>InstantDomainSearch), the <a

href=”http://particletree.com”>ParticleTree/Wufoo guys

(Kevin, Ryan and Chris), Phil (TextPayMe) and Matt (<a

href=”http://www.flagr.com”>Flagr).

I also met a ton of other really cool people that worked for various heavyweights in the

valley: Google, Yahoo, eBay, Apple. Including the original developer of GMail whom I had to

restrain my fanboy’ness with. There we a lot of guys from Google in attendance and even one that

worked on Google Calendar whom we had a little good natured ribbing with. I realize that Google

is a competitor now, but its just so damn hard not like like and admire those guys and their

work.

The highlight of the trip? It was riding on Trevor’s (<a

href=”http://www.anybots.com/”>Anybots) homemade “segway”. I’ve never been on a “real”

segway, but his is apparently faster and you don’t have to use little switches on the handle to

turn, you just lean. Very cool.

So to recap: The Bay Area is beautiful and full of really smart people. I can’t wait to move

out there