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News From Russia: What You Missed Over the Weekend
Ukrainian soldiers walks at the line of separation from pro-Russian rebels near Katerinivka, Donetsk region, Ukraine. Andriy Dubchak / AP / TASS
Security talks
A top Russian official said he had a "difficult" conversation with his U.S. counterpart on Sunday as preliminary talks on Ukraine got underway amid fears of a Russian invasion of its pro-Western neighbor.
The United States and Russia had set firm lines ahead of the high-stakes security talks on Ukraine, with Washington warning of the risk of confrontation and Moscow ruling out concessions. A full day of talks was to follow Monday.
Kazakhstan unrest
Russia has evacuated nearly 1,500 of its nationals from Kazakhstan, said Moscow's Defense Ministry, which leads a regional military alliance that has been deployed to quell anti-government protests in the ex-Soviet Central Asian republic.
Kazakhstan's interior ministry said almost 8,000 people have been detained following a week of unrest. Its information ministry initially reported — before retracting its statement — that 164 people had died across the country during the violence.
Almaty, Kazakhstan. Valery Sharifulin / TASS
Trading barbs
The U.S. and Russia traded barbs over the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization's (CSTO) deployment to Kazakhstan, whose "peacekeeping" mission authorities expect will wrap up in one week.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said "one lesson of recent history is that once Russians are in your house, it's sometimes very difficult to get them to leave."
Russia's Foreign Ministry hit back with references to past U.S. invasions of other countries, saying "when Americans are in your house, it can be difficult to stay alive, not being robbed or raped."
'Gateway to Hell'
Turkmenistan's strongman leader has ordered experts to find a way to finally extinguish a massive five-decade old fire in a giant natural gas crater in the Central Asian country, dubbed the "Gateway to Hell."
Citing environmental and economic concerns, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov appeared on state television Saturday telling officials to put out the flames at the Darvaza gas crater in the middle of the vast Karakum desert.
The Darvaza gas crater. Tormod Sandtorv (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Orthodox Christmas
Orthodox Christians observed Christmas on Friday, Jan. 7, with Patriarch Kirill leading the Russian Orthodox Church's main midnight service at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow.
President Vladimir Putin attended a service at the Church of the Image of the Savior Made Without Hands in Novo-Ogaryovo, his residence outside Moscow where he has spent much of his time since the start of the pandemic.
Путин посетил рождественскую службу в храме в Ново—Огарево. В этом году глава государства в праздник Рождества остался в своей подмосковной резиденции — а вот в прошлом году он встречал его в Новгородской области. pic.twitter.com/DO0qxWsrok
— Кремлевский пул РИА (@Kremlinpool_RIA) January 6, 2022
AFP contributed reporting.
Russia experienced its largest population decline in 2021 since the end of the Soviet Union.
TAMPING DOWN TENSIONS
Volodymyr Zelenskiy pointed to the need to "stabilise" Ukraine's already battered economy.
The latest developments you need to know.
fundamental concerns
The Russian leader hasn't commented publicly on the Ukraine crisis in over a month.


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Government import ban shuts 58 motor dealers' shops
Although the ban has been extended on import of conventional vehicles, electric cars are allowed in
Photo: NADA Auto Show
Many motor dealers across the country are shutting their businesses due to the extended government ban on the imports of vehicles to save foreign exchange reserves. However, imports of electric cars are allowed.
Imports of light vehicles like car, van, and jeep for personal use have been banned. As a result, many motor dealers across the country have been forced to close their businesses, adding financial burdens to businesspersons, according to the Nepal Automobile Dealers Association (NADA).
Similarly, the recent hike in interest rates on loans by banks and financial institutions has added to their problems. In the previous fiscal year, 2021/22, banks and financial institutions invested approximately Rs 95 billion in motor dealers.
According to the latest NADA data, at least 58 motor dealers across the country have shut down due to the ban. Likewise, 100 others are on the verge of closure. Nine of such closures are in Province 1, 11 in Madhes Province, 18 in Bagmati Province, seven in Gandaki Province, three in Lumbini Province, seven in Karnali Province, and three in Sudurpaschim Province.
According to NADA, 1,025 vehicle dealers are in operation across the country. Of them, 145 are in Province 1, 95 in Madhes Province, 378 in Bagmati Province, 182 in Gandaki Province, 105 in Lumbini Province, 62 in Karnali Province and 58 in Sudurpaschim Province.
NADA General Secretary Surendra Kumar Upreti said the government had extended the ban, further mounting pressure on their business.
"We have frequently been urging the government to remove the ban. We only got the assurance from the government," he said.
Upreti warned all the auto dealers in Kathmandu Valley would be closed if the ban continued after mid-November. "We have been running office and providing salaries to staff by taking loan from banks. The business is considerably down. Motor dealers have been closed after they could not afford expenses. Dealers of heavy vehicles will be closed if such situation persists ", he said.
According to NADA, the closure of motor dealers has resulted in the loss of more than 1,000 jobs across the country.
Issuing a notice in the Nepal Gazette on April 26, the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Supplies banned the imports of 10 items, citing depleting foreign reserves in the country.
Although some items have been lifted, the government has extended the ban on the imports of smartphones priced over $300, jeep, car, van, and motorcycle with a capacity of more than 150cc till December. --RSS

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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To create peace of mind for our customers by providing state-of-the-art systems integration solutions and industrial control automation in collaboration with their engineering and maintenance personnel.
In 1991, Kenneth M. Anderson was an engineer for a local distributor. Sara RS Miller operated Valley Controls Inc. doing PLC and operator display terminal programming. One Sunday afternoon in November, Kenn attended an installation ceremony at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.
"I picked the middle of an empty row in the lower grandstand at the Marcus Center to sit by myself and watch the ceremony. A few minutes later, Sara and her husband selected the same row, bypassed all the empty seats from the aisle to the center, and sat down right next to me."
Soon Kenn and Sara discovered they worked in the same market segment offering different but complementary services. One thing they both learned was to take advantage of an opportunity.
In 1995, Nova Systems Inc. was formed to provide systems integration services for local manufacturers. The Milwaukee-based company is a systems integration solution provider, with Sara serving as Chairman and Kenn as President.
Starting as a vision of its founders, Nova Systems Inc. has grown from a small two person operation with a few customers to a thriving business with a customer base exceeding 250 businesses.
Nova Systems was selected as a finalist in the 2007 and 2008 Control Engineering Integrator of the Year competition.
Copyright 2018, Nova Systems Inc., All Rights Reserved.


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188 – When is a carbon tax not a carbon tax?
Climate change, Economics, Policy, Politics
5 June, 2011 20 October, 2011 by David Pannell
The proposed carbon pricing policy in Australia is now routinely referred to as a carbon tax by both government and opposition. This is odd, because the proposed scheme is not actually a tax.
It seems reasonably likely that Australia will, sooner or later, end up with an emissions trading scheme (ETS) for CO2. An ETS works by setting a cap on emissions and requiring emitters to hold a permit for each tonne of CO2 that they emit. The level of the cap determines the number of permits available.
If emitters don't already hold a permit, they must either cut back on their emissions or buy a permit from another emitter, who must then cut back. This means that a cost is imposed on emissions, equal to the price of buying or selling a permit. But, importantly, it's not actually the price that causes the overall cuts in emissions. Rather, it's the required cuts in emissions that cause the price. That is, permits have a value, because they allow you to avoid making cuts in emissions.
A carbon tax is sort of the opposite. A cost is added to all emissions, equal to the level of the tax, and this causes people to cut back their emissions. There is no cap on emissions in a tax-based system. People are free to emit as much or as little as they like, but if they do emit, they must pay the tax.
The system that the Australian Government is currently proposing to move to in the medium term is a standard ETS, not a carbon tax. But in the short term, there is a twist. The proposal is to fix the price of permits for the first few years, presumably to reduce uncertainty during the transition period after the scheme commences. It would still be an ETS, with a cap on emissions, and permits that can be traded, but the price of permits would be fixed by the Government.
Depending on how high the price is fixed during the early years of the scheme, it might be either the price or the cap that determines the level of emissions. If the fixed price of emissions is low, it would not create much incentive to reduce emissions, so the level of emissions would be determined by the cap on emissions. On the other hand, if the price is high enough, people might actually emit less than the maximum level set by the cap. In this case, the price of permits would be the main driver, not the cap, and there would be some unused permits.
You can see that there is a similarity between the fixed-price ETS approach and a carbon tax, in that it can be the price that determines output, although only when the price is set at a relatively high level. There still are important differences, however. In the Government's proposed scheme, permits could still be traded among emitters and potential emitters, even in the period when there is a fixed price. That does not occur under a carbon-tax regime. When people pay a carbon tax, the revenue goes to the government. A fixed price ETS could be set up so that the initial revenue goes to the government (i.e. all the permits are sold by government at full price), but it could also work effectively even if some of the permits are given away (which the government is likely to do) provided that subsequent sales were only allowed at the fixed price or the cap is enforced. Revenue from subsequent transactions between emitters would go to the seller, not to the government.
As far as I can tell, from the perspective of households, the scheme will be no different in its fixed-price phase than in its later floating-price phase, other than in the level of carbon prices (which will rise over time) and the presence of price volatility. Households will not have to pay for emissions permits directly, but will do so indirectly as businesses pass on some or all of the higher costs they face. If the government had opted for a carbon tax, the result at the household level would not have been noticeably different. Higher costs would have been passed onto them through higher prices in a similar way. It would also have been possible to compensate low and middle income earners through reduced income tax or increased government payments, just as is planned under the ETS. In neither case would individuals have to put in any sort of tax return for their carbon emissions.
Despite the similarities described above, it is factually incorrect to call the proposed system a carbon tax. I can understand why the Opposition wants to call it a tax. It plays to people's dislike of any sort of tax. But to me it seems odd that the Government has adopted the same language. Given the traction that Opposition Leader Tony Abbott got from his line about a "great big new tax on everything" during the last election campaign, you'd think that the government would avoid the "tax" word if they could. And they can. Their proposed initial approach is, in fact, not a carbon tax, but an ETS with a fixed price.
p.s. 8 June 2011. I received several interesting responses to this PD.
Rob Fraser pointed out that, if the price of permits is fixed at a level below the market-clearing price, this would inhibit trade between emitters. My judgment is that, if all the permits were sold by government at the fixed price, this would not be a major problem. But if a lot of permits are given away (as is likely), they could easily end up in the hands of businesses that don't have the highest marginal benefit from using them. In this case, the low fixed price would introduce significant inefficiencies to the market. This would not occur under a carbon tax. I don't think this is a problem if the fixed price is above the market-clearing price.
Jerry Vanclay pointed out another likely important difference between a tax and an ETS: the transaction costs of the two systems. These are the costs of administering and participating in the market. "… one difference you didn't canvass is the transaction costs for ETS and tax. My view is that there will be considerable costs associated with estimating and monitoring emissions and ETS trading – plus there will be volatility that [imposes] additional costs and uncertainty on industry. In contrast, a fossil carbon tax levied on those who dig up fossils, would be cheap and easy to implement – and may even save bureaucracy if it is made revenue-neutral by reducing income tax …"
David Alonso Love commented: "I agree the Federal Government is doing itself no favours by calling this a carbon tax, but I'm not sure "an ETS with a fixed price" quite cuts through. It would sound like goobledy-goo political speak to the punters." I'm sure he's right. Perhaps this is part of the reason for the government's acquiescence.
p.p.s. 5 August 2011
I wrote the above prior to the government releasing details of the scheme. It turns out that trading amongst permit holders will not be possible during the fixed-price period. Permits can only be obtained from government. Emitters will have to buy permits (or be given them) in order to be permitted to make emissions. This means that the scheme is actually a bit more like a tax than it might have been during the fixed-price phase. However, it may still be like an ETS if it is the level of the cap, rather than the price, that determines the level of emissions. At this stage, it isn't clear to me whether the price will be high enough for it really to behave like a tax.
187 – Public attitudes to climate policy
189 – Donna Brennan commemoration
Please solve this to show you are real * nine − two =


The IPM are delighted to announce the results of the IPM COGS 2016 winners including the coveted Grand Prix and Company of the Year. Congratulations to all our winners and thanks sponsors Edge Loyalty, Snipp! and POD Staffing.
HighCo MRM scooped the COGS 2016 Grand Prix with their incredible work with 2016 Sport Relief Campaign, Mando took the title of COGS 2016 Company of the Year along with Gold in the Risk Management category.
With other notable wins from The Black Tomato Agency who took Bronze, Silver and Gold in the Prize, Incentive & Reward category, read on to find out more about the heroes of promotional marketing.
The IPM COGS Awards 2016 celebration lunch was held on Friday September 23rd 2016 at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel.
The full list of winners, covering 14 industry, channel and specialist categories, plus the 2 Special Awards, can be found below.


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Kept out of traditional jobs, transgender people see hope in tech world
by Oscar Lopez | @oscarlopezgib | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Wednesday, 28 October 2020 12:00 GMT
A person wearing a protective face mask waves a transgender pride flag during a demonstration for the rights of transgender people, amid the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at Puerta del Sol square in Madrid, Spain, July 4, 2020. REUTERS/Juan Medina
About our LGBT+ coverage
We delve deeper into the issues faced by LGBT+ communities around the world.
LGBT+ advocates and tech entrepreneurs are offering training and employment to trans workers in one of the world's fastest growing industries.
By Oscar Lopez
MEXICO CITY, Oct 28 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - As a transgender woman living in Russia, where LGBT+ people often face abuse and state repression, Chloe Golovleva said she felt like an animal trapped in a cage.
"There was no life for me," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Two years ago, Golovleva left Russia and sought asylum in Argentina where trans people have greater legal protections, but she still felt her co-workers did not accept her.
"It's very difficult to start a new life," the 40-year-old said. "There's transphobia and homophobia, just like everywhere else in the world."
Golovleva's experience is common across the Americas, where conservative social norms often leave trans people locked out of formal work and pushed to the margins of society.
But increasingly, LGBT+ advocates and tech entrepreneurs are teaming up to offer training and employment in one of the world's fastest growing industries: information technology.
With relatively well-paid jobs, a disruptive attitude toward traditional work environments and an emphasis on innovation, advocates say the tech industry offers opportunities for trans people often left out in the cold.
"There's a lot of trans folks ... who are working in the tech space and who are also leveraging their access to resources to help other trans folks," said U.S. tech entrepreneur and academic Kortney Ziegler.
Because the industry "is focused on innovation and the next big thing, there's a lot of room for people of all identities," Ziegler said.
'REPRESENTATION IN TECH'
In countries such as the United States, Brazil and Argentina, LGBT+ rights have become increasingly accepted in recent years, despite resistance from conservative groups.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that workers could not be discriminated against for being LGBT+, while Brazil's highest court made homophobia and transphobia a crime last year.
Argentina established a quota system in September under which at least 1% of public sector jobs are reserved for trans workers.
Despite these strides, trans people are often left out of the workforce.
In the United States, 16% of trans people reported losing a job due to their gender identity, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality, a nonprofit, while in Brazil, some 90% of trans women work in prostitution.
But in the tech industry, often centered in liberal, LGBT+-friendly urban centers like San Francisco in the United States or Buenos Aires in Argentina, acceptance of gay and trans people tends to be higher, experts say.
"The representation in tech is genuinely higher than it is in a lot of more old-school industries," said Vivienne Ming, a U.S.-based researcher and tech entrepreneur.
According to Ming's research, nearly 7% of people in the U.S. tech industry identify as LGBT+, compared with about 4% of Americans overall, according to polling firm Gallup.
Despite the greater openness, trans people may face discrimination in the industry, especially in the recruitment process, Ming said.
As a result, many trans people in tech have taken it upon themselves to make the industry more inclusive.
Ziegler had a doctorate degree and was living near San Francisco, but as a Black trans man struggled to find work.
So in 2013, Ziegler founded Trans*H4CK, an organization to provide training and support for trans and nonbinary people, meaning those that don't identify as male or female, in the tech industry.
"I was inspired by this space of innovation, this idea of folks of different backgrounds and skills coming together to build something that's tangible and usable and can save lives."
In its three years of operation, the organization said it helped more than 100 transgender developers to create mobile apps for other trans people to find work, health care and friends.
Ziegler admits the industry has a long way to go toward trans inclusion, and research from Trans*H4CK suggests trans tech workers often are paid less than are their non-transgender peers.
But Ziegler said Trans*H4CK's impact has been long lasting.
"In our existence we birthed so many different organizations focused on trans folks," he said. "So many different ideas and platforms that are still in operation to this day have come out of that."
'PROFOUND IMPACT' Initiatives like Trans*H4CK have become more and more common. In 2014, U.S. transgender actor and entrepreneur Angelica Ross founded TransTech Social Enterprises, providing training and co-working spaces for trans people in tech.
"I wanted to create a program that was really powered by the community," Ross said on a recent Facebook live.
"I wanted to make sure that folks had access to community, to mentorship, to resources, job opportunities."
In Brazil, Noah Scheffel runs EducaTRANSforma, an organization which provides training for trans people as well as inclusion training for potential employers in the tech industry.
The organization began in 2019 with 16 students taking in-person classes, although with the coronavirus pandemic shutting down much of the country, Scheffel moved courses online and hopes to train 200 trans people by August next year.
"(My dream) is to give them an opportunity that they've never had in their lives," Scheffel said via WhatsApp message.
In Argentina, Daniel Coletti founded Trans-TI two years ago, providing coaching and jobs for trans people, helping them prepare for tasks like online software testing.
According to Coletti, jobs in tech do not necessarily require formal education, so trans people with few prospects can quickly learn the skills they need.
"A lot of times, the impact can be quite profound," he said. "It's not that we're giving them charity - we're giving them a job."
Among the trans people employed by Trans-TI is Russian refugee Golovleva, who started working at the organization in March.
It's been a steep learning curve, she said, but after two years in Argentina, she said she finally feels at home.
"I have formal work, and in this job, there's no transphobia," she said. "In that sense, I'm happy."
'Unable to learn' - Transgender schools in Latin America offer a fresh chance
From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, LGBT+ investment on the rise
Dropout 'mad scientist' uses AI to tackle bias
(Reporting by Oscar Lopez @oscarlopezgib; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org)
LGBT - Business
EXPLORE MORE LGBT+ NEWS
Ralph Lauren drops sponsorship of Thomas after he uses homophobic slur
Parler asks U.S. court to order Amazon to restore service to social media app
Amazon warned Parler about content threatening Black, gay, transgender people before cutoff - court filing
Two local firms win gold in India's first LGBT+ work equality index


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Bubblegum Monsters
Burning Shadowrun
Death and Taxes
Dystopianizing Cyberpunk
Fate Approaches Vs Skills
Guns And Moments Of Play
Hit Locations In Fate
Immanent Setting
Insane Spelljammer Theory
Kung Fu Drama
Milestone Aspects
Obscuritus Mag
Princes of the Universe
Shadowrun Reputation
Social Consequences
Star Wars Fate
Tiered First Characters
Yuan-Ti
I really think Shadowrun is a neat game. Big fan. Of course, that also comes with a lot of baggage. Shadowrun is an old game, and it has a lot of the feeling of an old game. The most important part of that is that it publishes a bunch of big heavy hardcover books. And the real question is, is it worth buying this giant pile of heavy hardcovers. The question, for me, comes down to moments of play.
In theory, my goal in playing RPGs is to tell a cool story. I am totally down for that as a theory of how to make play happen, but I also think that the play of building a character, growing that character, and leveling up, and so on, that's all fun. Making a character grow and change is really fun. So having lots of options and stuff for that character to do is important to me, both to use when being played, and for me to think about as I level up.
There's a theory in cardgame design that putting in bad options makes the player feel good about themselves for noticing it. And therefore, the bad options are there in order to teach people about mastery. I think that makes sense for RPGs as well. Why ever use a Browning Ultra-Power when the Ares Predator V exists. The only differences are 5 ammo, and a little bit of cost (offset by the Ares' free smartgun). Similarly, why use the Remington Roomsweeper when the Colt Government is better, unless you need a few hundred nuyen. And obviously, making these attached decisions is fun. It's fun to see the better guns and try to do what you can. But there's also something important about that. People are using the Colt Government because they are issued by the police. People use the Roomsweeper because they cost a few hundred nuyen less, and that matters for people who aren't Shadowrunners. People with more poverty.
And I think that's where RPGs diverge from cardgames. Having lots of guns with different attributes, and narrative is pretty fun. Similarly, I've had moments in Shadowrun where I've looked through the armour, not looking for the best armour to money, but instead looking for what I could wear to a black tie event, without spending too much. Which is where things start to get more fun. No Shadowrunner will ever use the Tiffany Needler, but it's definitely going to be used by someone looking to have a nice fashionable weapon that wont raise eyebrows.
So, in order to sell me a book, Shadowrun doesn't want to give me bigger guns, more deadly guns, or whatever, they need to give me moments. Times when I want to use these in play. This works because Shadowrunners don't tend to be going into caves and killing goblins. They tend to be going into office buildings and planting data. Or to fancy parties and kidnapping socialites. So by having so many weird quirky items, Shadowrun gives me a lot of choices to give to enemies (which don't end up making the enemies feel samey, or make the enemies give the players a bunch of cool guns for free), as well as a lot of moments where the PCs need to select items for their roleplay potential, or for strange effects they have.
One of the things I'm seeing a lot in games with that every weapon is give 0-2 stats, and then a series of tags. For example, Spirit of the Century doesn't distinguish between weapons and fists mechanically, but you might be able to use a weapon to get an aspect or something, or use it as a narrative hook to add a gadget to. Most Apocalypse World games have damage and tags. So a gun might do 2 Harm, and be Heavy, or do 1 Harm and be Concealable. And this is a good way to minimize the problem


I am a professional Licensed Massage Therapist and owner of Rothrock Massage in Boalsburg Pennsylvania. I started my massage therapy business in 2017 and currently share a work space with my wife, Michelle, who is a licensed Mental Health Counselor. Choosing massage as an occupation has been very rewarding for me. Therapeutic massage allows me to accomplish my goal of helping others achieve a better quality of life. Reducing stress and tension from life's activities or achieving optimal sports performance through massage is the goal I have for all of my clients.
I am a graduate of the Integrative Bodyworks School of Massage Therapy (IBSMT) in State College Pennsylvania. My current training includes Swedish Massage, Sports Massage, Myofascial Bodywork, and Neuromuscular Technique. My areas of focus within massage therapy are restorative sports massage, therapeutic massage, relaxation, and deep tissue bodywork.
I have had the opportunity to provide sports massage therapy for several of the Penn State athletic teams such as football, women's gymnastics, men's and women's track and wrestling. Regularly working with a massage therapist has allowed these athletes to recover from competition, normal workouts, and even return from sports related injuries more quickly than without receiving massage. Whether your life revolves around athletics or if you are simply a weekend warrior I can help you perform at your maximum potential through massage therapy.
In addition to my wife Michelle, I also live with my son David and our two dogs Tully and Panzer. I also have a daughter who is living in the Harrisburg area. When I am not working as a massage therapist I enjoy hiking and being outside in the woods, traveling to and spending time in our country's National Parks. I am also the current Scout Master for Boalsburg Troop 380.
Why are we called Rothrock Massage?
I love the outdoors and have hiked and camped in Rothrock State Forest for over 40 years. It's a place I can go to get away and to collect my thoughts, a place where I lose any stress and tension I have. That's where the connection comes in. Rothrock Massage, like Rothrock State Forest, is a place where you can go to remove stress and tension.


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The Talk Show ✪: Ep. 200, With Special Guest Craig Federighi
The Talk Show
'200: Episode CC', With Special Guest Craig Federighi
Very special guest Craig Federighi returns to the show to talk about Face ID, the perils of live demos, Apple's approach to designing the iPhone X, privacy, security, and more.
Download MP3.
Sponsored exclusively by:
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This week's keynote address.
More on the Face ID demo glitch.
This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.
https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2017/09/15/ep-200
Tagged with 15 september 2017 face id iphone x download mp 3. search engine
—Huffduffed by paulstone one year ago
Special B&B Throwback Episode: The iPhone 7 Event — Shawn Blanc
Design, tech, writing, and other creative matters.
http://shawnblanc.net/2016/09/special-bb-throwback-episode-the-iphone-7-event/
Tagged with shawn blanc apple macintosh macbook pro design iphone ipad software reviews interviews mac reviews macintosh software reviews sweet mac setups writing os x ios
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The Talk Show ✪: Ep. 146, With Very Special Guests Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi
'"They Might Be Giants" With a Spanish Accent', With Special Guests Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi
Very special guests Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi join the show. Topics include: the new features in Apple's upcoming OS releases (iOS 9.3 and tvOS 9.2); why Apple is expanding its public beta program for OS releases; iTunes's monolithic design; how personally involved Eddy and Craig are in using, testing, and installing beta software; the sad decline of Duke's men's basketball team; and more.
Some scoops too, including: the weekly number of iTunes and App Store transactions, an updated Apple Music subscriber count, peak iMessage traffic per second, and the number of iCloud account holders.
Sponsored exclusively by Meh.com — the daily deal site from the people who created Woot, sold Woot to Amazon, abandoned Woot, and started again.
Apple's iOS beta preview page.
Apple Insider on the new features in tvOS 9.2.
Walt Mossberg: "Apple's Apps Need Work".
Your truly, following up on Mossberg's column.
Duke falls out of AP Top 25 for the first time in more than eight years.
http://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2016/02/12/ep-146
Tagged with woot os releases talk show '" giants " craig federighi friday
The Talk Show ✪: Ep. 142, With Special Guest Dan Frommer
'They Sherlocked F.lux', With Special Guest Dan Frommer
Special guest Dan Frommer returns to the show to deliver his first-hand report from last week's CES in Las Vegas. Other topics include Periscope, Peach, why Apple never participated at CES, El Chapo's re-capture, iOS 9.3, Apple Watch, Apple's finances (and stock price), and self-driving cars.
Wealthfront: A low-cost, automated investment service that makes it easy to invest your money the right way.
Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code "GRUBER" for 10% off your first order.
Igloo: The intranet you'll actually like.
Dan Frommer's report on Rupert Murdoch's private super-conference held at the Wynn Las Vegas during CES.
Frommer: "Fitbit's Long-Term Future Sales Curve Revealed".
Frommer on Apple Watch, six months in.
The re-launched City Notes.
U.S. marshalls raid hovercraft booth at CES.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt: "Why So Much Apple Commentary Is So Clueless".
The Boeing Dreamlifter (inspiration for Apple's iPhone Smart Battery Case).
Sean Penn's remarkable story for Rolling Stone on meeting with El Chapo.
Dave Winer on the El Chapo story, and the objection from some journalists regarding the disclosed concessions they made to create it.
Tagged with talk show ' 13 january 2016 las vegas other topics stock price )
The Talk Show ✪: Ep. 139, With Special Guests Craig Federighi and John Siracusa
'How Many Fingers Should This Baby Have?', With Special Guests Craig Federighi and John Siracusa
Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi joins the show for a wide-ranging half-hour discussion about Swift — Apple's new programming language that just went open source.
Next, John Siracusa returns to the show to follow up on Federighi's segment on Swift. Other topics include Apple's new Smart Battery Case for the iPhone 6/6S, and our mutual (and perhaps futile) desire to head into this week's premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens knowing as few spoilers as possible.
Transcript of Craig Federighi's interview.
Harry's: High-quality shaving products; great gift ideas. Use promo code "TALKSHOW" to save $5 off your first purchase.
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Wealthfront: An intelligent, automated investing service. They'll build you a free personalized investment plan in 2 minutes.
Craig Federighi talking about Swift going open source with Ars Technica, TheNextWeb, and Mashable.
Siracusa's explanation of Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) in his Mac OS X 10.7 review in 2011.
Siracusa's excellent introduction to Swift from his Mac OS X 10.10 review last year.
Glyn Williams post on Quora regarding how iOS devices need less RAM than equivalent Android devices, because Android's virtual machine uses garbage collection and iOS doesn't.
"The Curious Case of the Curious Case" — my review of Apple's new Smart Battery Case.
Michael Tsai's link roundup on Sketch leaving the Mac App Store.
"Don't Drink the Bacta Tea" — spoiler-free episode of The Incomparable last week, with Siracusa, Jason Snell, Serenity Caldwell, and Dan Moren talking about The Force Awakens.
Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki
Sci-Fi Corridor Archive. Start here, of course.
Tagged with swift smart battery case force awakens talk show ' many fingers
5by5 | The Pipeline #10: Jason Fried
Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, joins Dan to talk about building a business (vs. maintaining one), long-lasting businesses, setting a business up to succeed, reinventing your business, thinking big too early, and competition.
http://5by5.tv/pipeline/10
Tagged with 5by5 5x5 5 by 5 five by five pipeline danbenjamin dan benjamin interview tech geek design development
WordPress responsive images
http://wptavern.com/joe-mcgill-explains-how-responsive-images-work-in-wordpress-4-4&goal=0_df65b6d7c8-56248ee5e7-59001505
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Success and Failure at Fog Creek – Podcast - Fog Creek Blog
In this podcast, coinciding with Fog Creek's 15th Anniversary, we take a look back over the years at the various successes and failures we've had at Fog Creek.
We discuss the early days of Fog Creek and how we recovered from a doomed first product. As well as dealing with technical debt, the missed opportunities we've had along the way, and what we've learned from them. We also get into how we develop new products and the impact of bootstrapping, before finishing with tips for those starting companies themselves.
Joel Spolsky – Co-Founder of Fog Creek, CEO of Stack Overflow and Founder of Trello
Michael Pryor – Co-Founder and President of Fog Creek, Board Member at Stack Overflow and Trello Founder and CEO
David Fullerton – Former Fog Creek Developer, now VP Engineering at Stack Overflow
Justin Gallagher – Former Fog Creek Program Manager, now VP Product at Trello
Jack Bowman – Veteran FogBugz Developer at Fog Creek
Allie Schwartz – Host of the Podcast and VP People at Fog CreekContent and Timings
Early Successes and Failures at Fog Creek (2:00)
Developing Products for the Long-term (15:00)
Missed Opportunities (25:02)
The Impact of Venture Funding (36:12)
Hiring Smart People Who Get Stuff Done (41:27)
Allie:
Welcome. My name is Allie and I am the VP of People at Fog Creek Software. This is a conversation about Fog Creek's first 15 years, some of our big successes, how they happened, and some of our failures and what we learned about them. With us today are a bunch of people who worked at Fog Creek or still work at Fog Creek, and who were involved in the spinning off of the two products that came from Fog Creek and are now currently huge, successful companies of their own. I am going to introduce them and then they're going to say a little hello, so that you can hear their voices. First, on my left, is Joel Spolsky. He is one of the founders of Fog Creek, Trello and Stack Overflow. Say hi, Joel.
Joel:
Hi, Allie.
Hi. Next, we have David Fullerton, who is the VP of Engineering at Stack Overflow and he started his career at Fog Creek.
That's true, as an intern.
As an intern.
Hello. Then we have Justin Gallagher, who came to Fog Creek in 2010 as a designer.
Justin:
PM at the time.
A PM.
Yeah. On Stack Exchange Enterprise.
Which I didn't even know.
That's right. He worked on Stack Overflow too.
Wow. Stack Overflow and FogBugz, and is currently the VP of Product at Trello. Hi, Justin.
Hello. Now we have Jack Bowman, who also came to Fog Creek in 2010. First job straight out of college and he is one of our developers on FogBugz.
Hi, Jack. He's five years at Fog Creek, and he's one of our old-timers, hilariously.
Last, but certainly not least, we have Michael Pryor, also one of the founders of Fog Creek, Trello and Stack Overflow.
I'm just more like a bookkeeper. I was the bookkeeper at Stack Overflow.
He was the bookkeeper at Stack Overflow and currently, the CEO of Trello. Hi, Michael.
Hi, it's great to be at this Quinceañera party. It's awesome.
Yeah. It's great. Every day is a Quinceañera.
We need music.
Early Successes and Failures at Fog Creek
We're going to start just talking really broadly. Joel, can you talk to me a little bit about … Fog Creek has had a lot of successes. Probably more than a lot of companies, although there have also been some …
Sure. Companies have gone out of business with fewer successes than we've had.
That's true. We've had some failure too, but more successes than most companies. Do you have anything, just off the top of your head, that you think is one of the largest contributors to that?
You mean why we have so many successes?
I guess it could be my brilliance.
That's what I was going to say, Joel.
Yeah, go on. Sorry, okay. No, it's really all about the people, Allie.
Yeah, true.
It's about get the best people first and then good to great things will come from that.
I think that's the defining … Joel doesn't want to toot his own horn, but I think the defining feature of a Joel and Michael company is putting people first, choosing people very carefully and then setting them up for success and letting them pursue the ideas. Everybody talks about people first and all that stuff, but I think the way that … The specific way that that's actually done in Joel and Michael companies is a big piece of the success of all three companies.
It's also we're looking at this from hindsight. We're going to get to the failures, I bet, coming up, but it's easy to point out the successes when we gloss over all the times that we failed. In fact, if you think about one of the first products that we even created for our company was a giant miss.
Why don't you talk about the first product you ever created?
When we started Fog Creek, we were consulting and that was actually successful.
Well, for 10 minutes.
Right, it was successful for 10 minutes and then what happened was we were doing consulting and we thought we're bringing in big bucks. We're basically bringing in twice as much as we're paying, and with the extra money, we're going to invest it in building other products. That was 1999? 2000.
Great time to start a company.
Then, essentially, the market blew up and the first thing that people cut was their spending on outside consultants. There were actually a lot of companies, Scient, Viant…
Razorfish.
Razorfish. There were a lot of consulting companies out there.
MarchFirst.
It was easy for us to get jobs or get a business very early on, and so we hired two people, and then basically when the consulting dried up, we were like [gasp], okay, reset.
Then we thought, we were working on a product at the time. It was a content management system called CityDesk that we were building because it was much too hard to build websites at the time, because you had to install all these Perl scripts and you needed root access on the server. We were like, oh, you can just run it on your desktop. That'll make it easier. It was, but also the people that were building those tools also realized that it was hard, and so they basically started hosting those things. So you got Blogger and Movable Type and TypePad and all that stuff. It was just a total miss to try to build a desktop app for content management.
We made a reasonable bet, but it was the wrong bet.
Right. We've done that a couple times, where we couldn't get … We'll probably cover some other things that we did that with.
We certainly will.
It was lucky at the time, because we had this other product that we were building, which was a bug tracking app, that Joel had built previously at a different company and then he used it at Viacom. What was it called then? JoelBugz?
VisBugz?
VisBugz. Then we used it a Juno, where Joel and I met.
Where it was JunoBugz.
It was JunoBugz, and then we used it at Fog Creek, so we called it FogBugz, and we're like, we can make a couple bucks off this.
You guys are really good at names, by the way. I'm just saying.
They all had Zs.
Joel's a really good namer.
I'm also good at setting prices for things, by the way, we discovered after 15 years.
FogBugz is this slow and steady thing that was slowing gaining ground at the time and we had to cut back the company to just Joel and myself. We're working out of his grandmother's basement.
It wasn't a basement.
I thought it was the brownstone.
Bottom two floors. You're right. Ground level. Garden apartment.
It had a nice garden. Yeah, exactly. It was a garden.
It was quaint, but it was just the two of us. Not that much money coming in, but every month we would make a little bit more than the previous month, and so that just started to build.
With FogBugz, you talked about CityDesk a little bit and why it didn't make a lot of sense, but FogBugz is the next thing that came out, it sounds like, from the Fog Creek mini-factory that was there. It still is our flagship product. It's really been the thing that sustained us for a really long time. I'm wondering if, Joel or Michael, you have any thoughts, if you've ever thought about really what is it about FogBugz that's allowed it to be this one big product that's kept this company running.
Wow, that's a good question, I think I'm…
I'm smart, Joel. You hire smart people.
Part of it was that we had the right audience. The important part is not just having the right product, but also being able to market it in some way or get it to the right audience. There were probably 20 bug trackers that you could get in some shape or form when FogBugz first came out. Although, to be fair, probably in those days, those were like Windows apps that you installed and you had to probably get a special server.
Yeah, web-based, there were only a few …
There wasn't a lot of web-based. There was Bugzilla. Yeah, but it was a matter of the blogging that I was doing at joelonsoftware.com, which gave us a big audience of people that might be willing to use it. Then I think the product sort of hit the right mark, because whenever it took an opinion on something, it took the opinion that, I think, made people more successful with their teams. Some of the things that were kind of hard-coded into the way that FogBugz works and is still hard-coded into it today, like the fact that when you resolve a bug, it doesn't just disappear, it goes back to the person who opened it so that they can check if you really fixed it. That came from our knowledge since the beginning, that 90% of the time, the person who's fixing the bug thinks they've fixed the bug. They've actually either fixed something else or for whatever reason, they haven't actually 100% eradicated that bug and so it has to go back to the original person who checks it to make sure that what they think was broken is not broken anymore. That's just built in to FogBugz, and in fact, some of our big competitors have that as a configurable option, as opposed to something that's built in. FogBugz just kind of tricks you into doing the right thing.
Yeah, so it sounds like FogBugz benefited from the fact that the people who built it were the people that would use it.
Yeah, and also that we had … What I was doing on Joel On Software was writing blog posts for developers, saying, if you're wondering, a good way to run a development team or how to manage your little software company or how to beat Microsoft at their own game …
A lot of those were the kind of blog posts that I was writing in those days, so I got a big readership of people that were interested in improving their software development skills.
Right. David, Stack Overflow, I think is really similar to Fog Creek in that you have this connection to your community, it sounds like, in the way that Joel on Software was a big connector for Fog Creek and the community of people that used FogBugz.
I guess an interesting question for me, sorry … What was different about Stack Overflow from what we were doing on FogBugz? I think the biggest … Well, there were a few shifts. One was the shift to continually releasing software, actually, that FogBugz wasn't doing at that time that I think led to a natural process of listening to people, taking their bug reports, tweaking things, showing it to them, seeing what they think, taking more feedback, tweaking it and seeing what they think. The other big thing was that really, really close connection with the community. I think it helped that it was developers building something for developers. That always helps, but listening, having that really close relationship to the people using the thing, to the community, was something that just didn't really exist when we were building FogBugz.
We knew how we used it and we tended to assume, because it was opinionated software that that's how everybody else used it, but I think, looking back, I never really, as a developer on the FogBugz team, had a really good idea of how different customers were using the software in different ways. Versus with Stack Overflow, with just having this open community involved in building the product, having a site where they can go and talk about it and suggest ideas and report bugs, and talk about what they'd like to see fixed. That gave and gives more insight into what's wrong with it, what's not working, what's working well, what do they like about it, what do they not like.
Right. Justin, I'm wondering, as Trello was growing, you know, Trello now has, what, like 10 million users? Is that right?
Eight, we're supposed to say publicly right now, until…
Eight million users as of August.
Until tomorrow.
I'm wondering, same question to you. As you were building Trello, was that part of the thing in your mind, the community of users? Because it's a very different thing, right? Trello is really, of the three, the one that appeals to the biggest community of not developers.
Yeah. We definitely took the stance from the beginning that it wasn't going to be a tool for just developers. We always had that as part of the plan. Doesn't mean developers can't use it, it's just not only for developers, but it's for anybody who's collaborating on something with anybody else and it gives you this nice visual interface for it. That includes us. We are part of that audience. It's not like we're building a tool for grocery store managers and none of us manage a grocery store. We do have some example of how people want to use it and how they do use it. We do try to talk to people. We've always tried to … We get lots of support emails and things like that, but we try to interview people and talk to them about how they're using it and build it up in a way that uses that, but still try to stay true to the original vision of the product, as well, those two things.
I just want to bring up something. When you were talking about Stack Overflow and Trello, I was thinking about how Stack actually was almost a big miss, because when we first started out, in typical fashion, we were a software company. We built the software and then we sold it to people. The initial vision of … We built … Stack Overflow existed and we had this huge developer site, and we had built this community engine and our thought was, oh, great. We'll license this Q&A engine to anyone that wants to build a site for whatever group of people they want. We were headed down that path…
You mean making Stack Overflow into software that you could buy.
Yeah. Basically selling the software behind Stack Overflow and it took us a little bit of time to realize but we did finally realize that the most valuable part of Stack Overflow was this community of developers. It was not the Q&A engine we built. That was cool but the reason the Q&A engine was important was not the code itself, but the thought behind it, the rules and the way that it worked and the things that made it Stack Overflow and not any other Q&A engine. It was opinionated in a way. It's the same story with Trello. Trello, we actually do sell the software, so we're back to selling the software, but it's a very … When we built it, Joel's vision was very contrary to all the other solutions that were out there, the project management solutions. His vision was, let's strip it way down and make it this really simple visual metaphor. Everything out there was always just you have a big database of issues or cases or bugs, call them whatever you want. Leads. Even Salesforce is like this. It's like, you have this giant database and you basically just have to build an interface on top of the database.
Yeah, you look at the app and you see the tables.
Trello was this … It was a totally different, it was like no one's thinking about it like this. Let's try this. That's the valuable part to Trello. It's not that we wrote a bunch of code. Certainly, we have a headstart because we had this big team. They understand the core mission. We have these mobile apps. If somebody tried to build exactly what Trello is, they could do that. There's already a clone of Trello and there's a thousand clones of Stack Overflow. Why are those things successful? I think it's because a lot of times … This is actually attributable mostly to Joel, is that he has a vision for something that people aren't understanding right now. It's about seeing what's going on in the future and coalescing there or trying something. Actually, sometimes it's making an Indian job board, for example, was not that successful. It's our classic mistake, but sometimes you miss and people don't…
Cowboy job board was pretty good.
The what?
The cowboy job board.
Cowboy job board, yeah.
Developing Products for the Long-term
Lots of cowboys out of work these days. Great. As you were talking, I was thinking, contrary to that, when you're starting a product and you're thinking, what do people need right now, and now we're in this interesting place at Fog Creek where we're 15 years in on this product FogBugz, that has become this really big thing and there's a lot of technical debt and it's a very … It's like we're not quite a startup anymore because our product is pretty mature. I was wondering, Jack, if you could talk a little bit about … Also because you were saying, Michael, that the thing about Trello, was that it was very pared down, right? It's really in contrast to Fog Creek, where the product is very involved and it's gone through a lot of different changes and there's a lot of things that you can do in there. I was wondering, Jack, if you could talk a little bit about coming into a company where the product is mature and starting to work on it and what it's like on the other side of that, where you're working with a product that has been around a while.
Yeah, it's really difficult. That's a fundamental question for a legacy product that you're continuing to support. I guess technical debt is really interesting for me because it's a great metaphor to use the word debt and to think of debt as you're borrowing. That's why you have debt. How can you capitalize on that? If you have a lot of old debt and it's just continuing to increase, then you need to pay it down because you don't want to continue to pay interest on that debt. If you want to do new, exciting things, then maybe you take out some debt, and that's okay because you need …
Debt is also leverage.
Yeah, exactly. Debt is leverage. The technical side of things is balancing how much leverage you need vs. how much it's going to crush you ultimately.
Right. One cool thing about Fog Creek, I think, and the reason why we have Stack Overflow and Trello is Fog Creek has always been a place where we've continued to innovate and new products are always coming up all the time. Jack, you're working on a new product right now so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about as opposed to working … You're leveraging your technical debt right now, right, working on this new product. What's that experience like for you?
Yeah, it's interesting. I guess we've been going through a phase of prototyping as well at Fog Creek. Just trying out new ideas, giving ourselves the opportunity to make those same failures that Joel and Michael are alluding to in our past. We tried out a bunch of different new product ideas at the beginning of this year. Some of them seemed really interesting and some of them seemed like this is never going to actually become a product at all. A totally different ballgame. You're not even thinking about those things like technical debt or your previous customers. You're just thinking, how can I make a prototype of this product the quickest way possible, just to prove a concept? You want to make that concept as fast as you can and see that it will fail, if it's going to fail. A lot of them are failures and that's okay.
For us, thinking back to when we were starting Trello 4 years ago, whatever it was, anytime we tried to think ahead, and tried to plan for the future and develop something in a way that was going to scale better or work out better in 2 years when we had … This was when we had literally hundreds of users. Thinking ahead to thousands or whatever users, we ended up doing it wrong. Checklists was a famous story. I've talked about this a hundred times with various people. We had these crazy ideas of how we thought Checklists would work in the future and we built it that way to start.
What were they?
We thought Checklists were going to live on the board and you would
They live in the cards now.
Actually, I forgot about that.
They were templates basically, and you could have a checklist template that you could apply to cards, so if you had the same card that had the same checklist all the time, it'd be real easy to just put that checklist on the card.
I guess we were concerned about … We were building a more complicated model than we needed to.
Yeah, and it ended up backfiring. We had to redo it several times to simplify it. To make it more scalable.
The original reason why you were doing that was because it was something that you would want in 2 years?
Right. We were trying to think ahead and plan ahead for greater scale and more complex use cases and it just backfired.
I think it speaks to, when you have a product that's been around for 15 years, you realize that all the things everyone bitches about when they have to work on a product that's 15 years old, are all there for a reason. There were really good reasons it was done that way. In fact, the first version of whatever you're building, it just doesn't make sense to build it to last for 20 years because who knows if it's going to work at all or if anybody's even going to want it. You make a very simple version of it and it probably has to get rewritten 2 or 3 times, even in the early days, just to get good enough to support a few users, if you have any success whatsoever. Then you'll discover 5-10 years down the line, the technology is kind of old. We had that approach when we started building Trello, right, when we decided what technologies to use.
Yeah, exactly. We only used the latest stuff. We only supported the latest browsers.
That was, was it 5 years ago now? No, when did Trello start?
We started working on it …
Yeah, January 2011. Then launch was September 2011.
Those decisions were being made 4-5 years ago. We were actually saying, let's not support IE. What was it? It would have been IE6.
It was 7.
IE 7. We don't even have to support IE7. Today, IE8 is not even a thing. IE9 is barely a thing. It's interesting that any work that we would have done then to support IE6 or IE7 would be a complete waste of time today. It wouldn't have had enough value for us.
And it would have prevented us from doing something that exists now.
That's because today, we got 10 million users and back then we had … Sorry, 8. Today, we have 8 million users and back then, we had 17, so all that work to get from 17 to 19 users is nothing compared to … Those extra 2 users today, are meaningless.
When Jack was talking about stuff, when we're talking about failures and stuff get thrown away and that culture of just building something and trying it out and testing it, it's like, even at Trello, we built this whole feature around video chat that we threw out because it was just too janky. It was kind of not work because the WebRTC model that it's based on is just not … It's okay but it's totally not up to speed. Our 8 million users wouldn't have appreciated it. We do that all the time. I don't know if they're still throwing stuff away at Stack Overflow or not. David?
When Joel was talking earlier about, you have to build one to throw away and then rebuild it and so on. I actually think it's … What makes it harder is, you're not going to have to rebuild everything. You're not going to have to throw away everything. You're going to have to throw away about 25%-50% of it and rebuild it and you don't know which 25%-50% until it's too late. Any time you try to guess and overbuild it … I think we see that with Stack Overflow. The things we've had to … I've actually been thinking about, it's been surprising how stable the core of Stack Overflow has been. A lot of the core has really held up, but some systems, we've had to rebuild. We completely rebuilt the reputation system.
And the tag engine.
And the tag system. We wouldn't have known that then, that those were the things we were going to have to rebuild. We haven't really had to rebuild…
Jack did.
Well, we knew we were taking some shortcuts with the tags and stuff but that worked, right? Building the actual tag engine, which is the thing that lets you filter by … Basically generate an arbitrary list of questions based on the tags and some other things. Actually, building that thing was really complicated and you don't want to do that until you're sure you need it. That's one of my favorite hacks that they built early on to handle tag filtering.
Just a LIKE query?
Yeah. Basically. It was, they actually abused SQL server full-text indexing and so they put all the tags … You could have 5 tags in a question. They put 5 tags in one field in the database but full-text treats it like it's a sentence, right? You're doing search on a sentence and you say, contains this word but not contains this word, which works great, except the full-text search doesn't recognize certain characters or it treats them as word breaks because it's detecting sentences. Hyphens or the # in C#, things like that would just be stripped out by the full-text search. They decided, okay, well, we've got these extra characters lying around …
That nobody uses.
That nobody uses. The E with a funny accent over it, or the O with the umlaut.
C# became CE.
Nobody needs those. Yeah, I think that was the O with the umlaut or maybe that was the hyphen that was replaced with that. They just had this switch statement that just replaced characters on the way in and out, and it worked.
Until our first French website.
It worked until we needed to go to the national sites. That part really broke down when we went international, but before then actually, performance broke with the full-text search so we had to half-rebuild it for performance, and then we had to completely get rid of it for internationalization. That was a lot of debt paid down.
How many years did it last?
It was a good shortcut. It lasted a few years. It shortcutted one of the more difficult problems in building. It was just like, yep. Let's just take this quick path and we'll pay it off later.
Missed Opportunities
We've touched a little bit on failures and talking about features that have failed and different kinds of stuff. I want to just run through a couple other products at Fog Creek that you don't know about, or that you may never
Wait, what? Do I know about them?
No, you know about them. We've been building this in secret. You know that box fort in the back of the office? That's what we're actually doing. Okay, so there was a product called Co-pilot that Fog Creek no longer owns. It still exists.
That definitely was not a failure. That was … One, we made a cool documentary out of it, which is super nerdy and difficult to watch now, but it was really fun and also was a cool marketing thing for us. We sold a bunch of DVDs. That site's still up and one of the original creators now owns it and is putting a lot of work into it.
Alright. I'll take that one back.
It's a failure in the sense of if you think about at the time, we had 3 interns build it and it was …
We were probably right at the moment … That's right. Four interns. Right at the moment where LogMeIn did not exist as a company at that point.
Co-pilot is screen-sharing software.
Right. We essentially could have built LogMeIn.
Timing-wise, we were ahead of the curve.
The big mistake there, I think, is that we didn't merchandise it like we did Trello. If the core version had been free and we had charged for a business version, we could have.
It was like $5, right?
Yeah, well, it started at $10 a day.
The whole positioning was also very much around tech support. It wasn't quite…
Right. We used it for tech support.
It wasn't like GoToMyPC.
It didn't take the Trello stance of well, you can do anything with it.
…be for everybody.
That would have been a little bit…
The marketing was a little bit of a miss and the pricing was a little bit of a miss and also, there was a point where it would have taken a decent amount of technical work to make it as fast as it needed to be.
Basically, we went as far as we could just leveraging this VNC protocol, and the next thing to do would be to write a Windows display driver or something, and get into the operating system. That would have been ten times as much work as everything we had done up until then and we just couldn't afford to do it, really.
Is that when you know when to pull the plug? When the work outweighs the …
We still haven't pulled the plug, in the sense that the product is still available and you can get it.
Yeah, it was successful but it could have been ridiculously successful.
What about, Michael, you mentioned CityDesk and then there's WebPutty …
Yeah, CityDesk could never have been …
Yeah, CityDesk could not. It imagined a different future.
You had the right idea but there was a fork in the road and you went the wrong direction. If you had gone the other direction, like the CMS thing
You mean web-based.
Right. A web-based CMS could have been huge.
Right, yeah.
…for a desktop-based CMS.
Or even a hosting service that just hosted TypePad or something until they came along and did it themselves.
Right, so how do you know? Is it different for each product, it sounds like? When do you pull the plug on something that's just not working?
When do you pull the plug? I don't know. That's tough.
Don't ask us. We're not experts on…
It's hard but I think we're getting better. We're also getting better at understanding how to build … We were building the right thing but then there were a couple of tweaks we were missing the biggest impact that it could have had. I think we're getting better at that, right? Understanding how to make the biggest impact.
The hard ones, I think, are like … They're like, I don't know who talks about it. They're like zombie companies or zombie projects, where they're just successful enough that you keep pouring resources into it but they're not growing. That's kind of where Co-pilot was. It was a good product. People used it. It made money, but it flatlined and it would grow a little bit but not very much.
We've also got …
That's when it's hard, right? Because if it's an outright failure, then it's just like, okay, great. Shut it down.
Yeah, when it's in the middle … We can also talk a little bit about Kiln, which is …
That was kind of in the middle.
Sort of in the middle too.
The bet there, the miss was, we bet on Mercurial and Git won even though … It was like VHS over Betamax.
I think that was part of it. I think actually, the second mistake we made, and I was there for that, was we … I think actually, it was a mistake to bet so much on FogBugz integration. Tying it so closely to Fogbugz, if it had been built more as a standalone thing, it may have done better.
David, you want to tell us what Kiln is for anybody who might not know?
Kiln is GitHub without the social parts.
It's code reviews and version control.
It's code reviews and version control, that's right. It was built originally on Mercurial, which is like Git but…
Only better.
Slightly simpler/less powerful. Anyway, at the time that it was made, distributed version control, which is what Git and Mercurial and a few others are, was clearly on the rise. Everyone was starting to recognize that this was probably a slightly better model than the centralized version control for certain things for most companies. It's probably the direction people are moving, but you can only really pick one source control system. You never want to have two in your software company. That was the bet that Michael was talking about, that Fog Creek, we looked at it and we said, nope. Mercurial is going to win. It's simpler. It's easier to pick up. It's way harder to shoot yourself in the foot with it. This is where things are going to go, so we're going to build it on Mercurial, and GitHub had bet on Git and …
Git won. We made a second mistake. Yeah, Git won because GitHub won. Where we made a second mistake was, we were like, okay, now we're going to support Git because Kiln does support Git and has for a very long period of time.
Was that Harmony?
Well, our first idea was, we'll support Git. We'll do that work. With a little bit more work, we'll allow companies to be agnostic. Anyone and their team can use either one. We'll do all the hard work on the backend. Like David alluded to, people just pick. A team just picks. There was no market for this. If we had gone out and asked people …
They might have told us.
Yeah, we might have been able to find this out. We did…
I think it's the sort of thing that they would be like, yeah, that sounds great. In theory, but in practice …
Right. Pay for it then and they wouldn't … We accumulated a lot of technical debt because we over-engineered that product. We built something very complicated that we've now ripped out and now we either support Git or we support Mercurial.
There was a lot of opportunity cost of time spent doing both.
Solving a problem that turned out to not really exist, basically.
It sounds like with Kiln, what you're saying is if we had just gone out and asked people, and it sounds like that's a huge thing of what David was talking about…
We just got unlucky a little bit there.
We made mistakes in retrospect. It's easy to see the mistakes in retrospect. Just asking people, I don't know if they would have told you the right answer. Like I said before, I think actually, tying it to FogBugz seemed like a good idea at the time, because it's like, oh, we can leverage all our FogBugz customers and just get them to add Kiln and it'll be this awesome upgrade for FogBugz, but then it didn't … It prevented it from standing on its own as a product and it forced it into some … I think it ended up in weird UI that was trying to look like FogBugz but not, and then eventually, that was abandoned.
It had its own bird.
It still has a bird.
It actually took a lot more work in the initial work to make it plug into FogBugz and act like a plugin.
Right, which is not something we did with Trello.
A one-time initial release, which didn't add that much value for customers, really. I think the clean break of Stack Overflow, the clean break of Trello was just like, no. Build a new thing. Build it separate.
Then you can build an integration.
Then, yeah. Then you'll know if you want integration.
I guess I agree with what David was saying about Kiln and its …
Did you work on Kiln ever?
No, I worked on Kiln briefly, but not to a great extent. One of the things that we missed out on, which Michael was alluding to GitHub, Git winning because GitHub won. It was this social aspect of it. That's exactly what the FogBugz integration with Kiln prevented, right, is that we couldn't grow by becoming this social thing. That's clearly the opposite of what we're doing in Trello, because Trello is saying, hey, let's give this away for free and everyone can use it. You can use it with your friends. That's a great way to grow interest in something.
I think if you look closely at Trello, one of the reasons it wins and it's hard to notice that because we forced it, but we decided early on, the idea is you have your Trello account and with your Trello account, you can access boards that are your own boards, but you can also access boards from other organizations. It's interesting because you can compare it and contrast it to Slack, where with Slack, you have to be part of an organization and you end up with 7 Slack accounts for all 7 organizations that you're in, and if you're not in an organization, you can't use Slack even if you want to communicate with people. In the Slack-y way, there is no way. It's this weird thing that I think we got right in Trello and part of that was looking at Kiln and saying, we got to give you something that creates a social network-type aspect to it here.
It's funny because we've been building out an enterprise product recently at Trello and having a lot of these discussions on how that works and how the security model works and all that. We've been reviewing and thinking a lot about the way we do accounts and the fact that we start user first instead of team first, even though it is a collaboration tool, which is different than most project management collaboration-y tools. You have to create a team and then you join a team, and then you invite people to your team.
We would get into these debates with investors who would say, we only invest in network things with network effect. We would say, we have network effect. They're like, what network effects do you have? We're like, well, you will want to use Trello because you're on these different teams and they're all using Trello for different reasons, and you need to collaborate with all of them. They just didn't see it. They saw it as … Well, some of them saw it and some of them didn't.
It enables both though.
Some of them just didn't buy it.
We hear these stories all the time where you're using Trello at your company, whatever, doing whatever. You get it and you see the value and use. Then you create a board to use with your spouse or whatever and you invite the contractor who's helping you remodel your kitchen. Was actually a real story that we heard.
We did that when we remodelled the kitchen at the Fog Creek office.
Our guy was on that Trello board.
The fact that you can take it and use it with a different group of people without having to create another entity for those people, because you don't need a team for your wife and your contractor or whatever it is. You're just going to have one project once and then that thing can go away when you're done. It feels very heavyweight to have to create that higher level thing and then invite people to it. I think it constrains it to grow in that way, from growing that way.
The Impact of Venture Funding
Great. I'm wondering, one of the differences between Fog Creek and Trello and Stack Overflow, is Fog Creek is totally bootstrapped and has never taken any venture capital. I'm wondering, when talking about failures or different products or just things that haven't hit, or when you're trying to figure out what direction a product is going to go, how, Michael and Joel, do you feel like you're able to take the same kind of risks when you have investors or are you more inhibited, or what are the differences, I guess?
Think about Co-pilot for example. We're bringing in, at some point, say we're bringing in 30 grand a month in revenue for Co-pilot. We're like, wow.
Free money.
This is awesome. Yay. Paid for a couple devs. You're like, yay. But the problem was, that was real money to us because we're a small, profitable software company, right? Then in some ways, I think that prevented … There was a little bit of that prevented you from taking this big leap and saying, hey, let's just make Co-pilot free. Right? Because we got to pay the bills. The cash balance, the bank account can't go below zero. Later on, when we knew we had something that was going be successful and it was going to be big, and we had proven the product a little bit, it was much easier to say, okay, let's go for the gold. Let's build the big thing and do the things that are necessary in order to make this hugely successful.
I think that's maybe the difference also between Trello and Kiln, right? I think Kiln, the decision to tie it to FogBugz was a safe, short-term bet for quickly getting to some revenue, instead of dreaming big. To build GitHub, you have to have a much bigger vision for what this thing is going to do, and like you said, to justify giving it away for free. I don't think you have to be that way if you're bootstrapped, but the tendency is going to be to dream small and be happy with a smaller revenue stream. Of course, then the tendency in venture capital is to go big and bust, right?
There's a downside to it too.
For Trello, it was actually, it keeps a lot of … Somebody could recreate Trello with a decent amount of work, but it's not impossible. It prevents this tiny group of people from doing that, right, because they'd have to charge for it and because it's free.
Actually, there are a lot of people in that category. I remember in the early days of Trello, a lot of clones were showing up and a lot of other Kanban boards for software developers were showing up for some reason. It was a popular thing that year. I would go check them out every single time. There would be a Hacker News headline saying, look at the Trello that I made or something. I would click on it and be like, oh no. I would click through and I would see one of two things. One, I would see terminology from the software development world, and then I'd be like, oh whew. They missed that boat. They would just be like, and we have burndown charts or something that's specific to software developers. I knew they could never meet Trello. More commonly, I would look for the little pricing button and I'd click on that and they'd say, it's only $19.95 a month per person. I'd be like, oh, excellent.
That works with a winner-takes-all product, right? I don't know. Is that the same thing with … Well, I don't know.
They'll make a little lifestyle business if they can support 3 people, like FogBugz.
Yeah, that's true. You make a niche product.
Which was bigger and it supported more people and they could get to that, but they won't make it GitHub type, like this could change the world and everybody knows it and everybody uses it type product, if they're going to charge every single person.
Have you ever given thought to if you had to do it over again, would you have taken money at Fog Creek?
Oh, I wouldn't have taken money at Fog Creek.
You were pretty anti taking money for a while.
For sure, because I think that you can lose control and a bunch of things changed. One is, cases at both Stack Overflow and Trello. We had much better opportunities for the investors, meaning that we got to dictate our terms. We did not lose control. The other thing that changed is there is a very small and limited group of VCs out there who now understand what it means to be entrepreneur-friendly, which didn't exist or we were afraid didn't exist at the time that we started Fog Creek. I still wouldn't have taken VC. If I knew what I know now, I probably would have immediately gone straight to some much better products. In the year 2000, what would you build? First, you build Git.
Yeah, Facebook. There you go.
Twitter? AirBnB?
I literally had a friend who kept explaining something and it didn't make sense to anybody and years later, I realized that what he was describing was Facebook, only instead of saying you have a wall and people come and write on your wall, he said you have a couch and people come and leave things on your couch. I was like, what? This is ridiculous. It was only after Facebook came out that I realized that much.
Who likes people to leave stuff on their couch? Nobody.
What he was describing, other than the fact that he used the word couch instead of wall, was just Facebook.
Hiring Smart People Who Get Stuff Done
Okay, so we are nearing the end of our time here so I just wanted to see maybe if we could go around the table and maybe say like, if you had one piece of advice for somebody starting out …
Have a brilliant idea at the right time and execute on it really well. It's easy. Two things.
Make a website. Make it really popular.
No, it's two things.
Start with a super popular blog.
You have to think about the world and imagine it in a different way in the future, and then prepare for that, right, in order to be a big winner because people aren't … Basically, the idea is not that many people are going to see it that way. It's like AirBnB. You're trying to pitch it a couple years ago. You're like, yeah, it's cool. People rent out rooms in their houses and people are like, ugh. You're crazy.
That's gross.
I'm not going to have some weirdo stay in my house. Then it actually does work in New York and then it starts to take on some of the vacation rental stuff and it actually grows into this big thing and the world changes and the way people trust each other changes. So there's that. The second thing, which is more along the lines of what you guys were saying was find an amazing co-founder who's really smart and amazing person.
Just generally hire good people that are smart and get things done.
That's one thing that you can actually do, right? Go have a brilliant idea is like, good luck. Where do I start? Gather a really good team is something you can actually work at and figure out and solve.
Yeah, hire smart people. Give them room to operate. I think you have to have a lot of optimism, think about what could exist and try it.
We also have tried 15 or 16 things over the years between these 3 companies.
Yeah, when it doesn't work out, think about why.
Three or 4 of them are huge and …
What do you do with the people who fail? Where are they now? Are they in a cave?
We killed them.
There is always an opportunity in the dog-walking of Taco, and washing of my car departments.
Anybody else have any final words?
Happy anniversary, Fog Creek.
Alright. Thank you, guys.
Bye, everyone.
http://blog.fogcreek.com/success-and-failure-at-fog-creek-podcast/
Tagged with joel allie michael david people
BBC World Service - World Have Your Say, A Migrant's Choice?
Should migrants and refugees be allowed to choose where they settle?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03115m2
Tagged with a migrant's choice?
5by5 | Mac Power Users #222: Workflows with Myke Hurley
David and Katie sit down with Myke Hurley of Relay.fm to talk about creating his new podcast network, the tools he uses for creating his podcast, juggling multiple jobs and why he finally decided to go full time with Relay.fm
http://5by5.tv/mpu/222
Tagged with 5by5 5x5 5 by 5 five by five mac apple power user productivity workflows
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text:
State of Idaho Parks
Kootenai National Wildlife Refuge
Mountain Bluebird © stateparks.com
Small Boy Fishing © stateparks.com
Gone fishin.
Kootenai National Wildlife Refuge is located in Idaho's Panhandle approximately 20 miles south of the Canadian border and 5 miles west of Bonners Ferry, Idaho (map). This 2,774 acre refuge was established in 1965, primarily to provide important habitat and a resting area for migrating waterfowl. The Refuge is comprised of a wide variety of habitat types. Wetlands, meadows, riparian forests and cultivated agricultural fields (for producing valuable wildlife food crops) are interspersed in the valley bottom adjacent to the west banks of the Kootenai River. Wetlands include open-water ponds, seasonal cattail-bulrush marshes, tree-lined ponds and rushing creeks. The western portion of the refuge ascends the foothills of the scenic Selkirk Mountains which consists of dense stands of coniferous trees and tranquil riparian forests.
Over 300 different species of wildlife can be found on Kootenai National Wildlife Refuge, indicating the richness and diversity this area holds. The refuge not only serves as valuable habitat for resident andmigratory wildlife, but provides a nice stopping point for visitors to get out and enjoy some of the vast natural beauty Boundary County has to offer. The refuge receives approximately 20,000 visitors annually; bringing together people from all nationalities and different backgrounds for the enjoyment of our Nation's natural wildlife resources.
For further information on a specific topic you would like to learn more about, please click on the topic bar located on the left of your screen.
A hard copy of the refuge brochure and hunting & fishing regulations can be obtained by contacting our Office or stopping by one of our information kiosks, located at the East Parking Lot and at Refuge Headquarters.
Nature of the Area
The northward waterfowl migration coincides with the thawing of refuge ponds in late February. Tundra swans, Canada geese, and ducks stop on the refuge to rest and feed while other birds begin their courtship displays. Among the most spectacular displays are snipe "winnowing" and ruffed grouse "drumming." By late spring, waterfowl, bald eagles, osprey, and songbirds are nesting. Occasionally a visitor may be fortunate enough to see a black bear, a moose or an elk.
By early summer, geese and ducks have hatched. Their broods can be seen on ponds along with American coots and red-necked and pied-billed grebes. An active bald eagle nest can be observed from the Auto Tour Road. Northern harriers, red-tailed hawks, and American kestrels are commonly seen hunting over refuge fields. Osprey hunt for fish from the air while great blue herons wade in shallow water searching for fish and frogs on refuge ponds. Dippers flit among the rocks in Myrtle Creek.
In the mornings and evenings, beavers, coyotes, mule, and white-tailed deer might be seen. Osprey and shorebirds depart early in the season, while duck migration peaks in early November. Bald eagles arrive at the same time in search of sick or injured ducks that make an easy meal.
Ponds freeze over by late November and remaining waterfowl move to the ice-free Kootenai River. They continue to feed in refuge grain fields. Bald eagles concentrate around the flocks of ducks. Rough-legged hawks hunt for mice on the uplands.
Kootenai National Wildlife Refuge is
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text:
Backstage in January
kirstenfehring.substack.com
devoted to our environment, our planet, to us ... Art is always also political
Kirsten Fehring
This month I am listening to …
Caroline Shaw's four-movement string quartet The Evergreen - moss, stem, water, root - is a tribute to a tree's ecosystem, and beautifully descriptive.
I am reading …
through the Alternative Classical bookshop list of books with a classical music theme. A great idea which not only supports the writers and Alternative Classical but also independent bookshops around the country. I definitely have some books to add.
I am looking at …
the new Casals Forum in Kronberg (my home town)
In the words of the Kronberg Academy:
"... Music in the service of humanity" – that philosophy of Pablo Casals, the great cellist and champion of peace who believed that art, humanity and respect for nature are inextricably linked – will become the guiding principle for all training and musical activities that take place at the new Casals Forum, which is the first concert hall and study centre in Europe capable of carbon neutral operation."
The Casals Forum is cooled using an innovative ice storage tank funded by the EU and the State of Hesse, making it (to the best of their knowledge) the first carbon-neutral concert hall.
©Staab Architekten
The intimate concert hall can host up to 550 guests on two levels. The acoustic can be adjusted depending on the size of ensemble (up to 65 musicians can fit on stage). There is also a smaller venue for up to 150 guests. Part of the hall offers views towards the park and the Taunus hills, still quite unusual for a concert hall, but adds to the transparency and the inviting atmosphere the Academy no doubt wants to achieve. The courtyard and restaurant will probably help, too.
The hall and the adjoining hotel are also right next to the train station with direct links to Frankfurt Main station as well as in walking distant to the centre of town and the local park. So basically not even an environmentally friendly bike is required.
I was there over Christmas and did not manage to have a look inside (the team was on well deserved vacation) but very much looking forward to experiencing a concert there someday soon. Maybe even together with some UK musician!!
I am thinking about …
the environmental consequences of the classical music industry's activities. There is much to do and my thoughts and observations will obviously only scratch the surface today. The work is ongoing, whether it is the sustainability of an opera production or looking closely at the environmental impact of a young string quartet's way of touring.
"The indicative total shows that the UK music market is responsible for approximately 540,000 tonnes CO2e per annum. While this is not as carbon intensive as many other industries, it remains a significant challenge to reduce CO2e emissions by 80% by 2050 in line with national and international targets."
Touring, especially by plane, is the most significant contributor to greenhouse gas emission in the sector. A short haul flight for an ensemble orchestra of twenty-odd players has a shocking impact – over 10 metric tonnes of CO2e – when estimated using recommended government conversions.
However travelling by train will mean a far less convenient and often a much more expensive trip.
For artists and ensembles in the middle to low income bracket especially (and let's face it, there are many here in the Uk, as fees are so very low), more days on the road also mean loss of earnings elsewhere (gigs, teaching etc). Extra childcare costs must also be considered. And although train travel is a lottery in the UK, you might also get stuck on your international rail travel (I am looking at you Deutsche Bahn!).
How about renting electric cars or buses? Rental prices are varying extremely and of course energy prices at the moment are not helping. The range of a 50 seater bus is ca 200 miles with a 2 hour charging time to full capacity again. Time and cost are clearly still quite prohibitive.
Maybe the promoter or organiser might like to chip in to add to their green credentials? For musicians it is worth considering to collaborate with event organisers to make more conscious decisions about the gigs and the festivals they perform at. Choosing to play primarily at events that prioritise sustainability, artists can send a clear message while putting pressure on event organisers to meet expected environmental standards. However this is probably possible for a band like Coldplay, but I have yet to meet more than one to two classical musician with that kind of power. We might all have to shout even louder.
One step in the right direction is to find and utilise synergies between artist agencies, festivals, concert venues, concert series, on a national and international scale. The bigger the art agencies and venues, the better they are connected and can plan an environmentally viable tour, often years in advance. However, younger ensembles are less able to do that and mostly accept and travel to where they are invited to perform, criss-crossing the continent.
So, should we skip touring abroad? But where would we be without cultural exchange? Maybe we could meet in the metaverse? While this might represent a novel solution to minimise emissions, it will not really replace live concerts and the joy of exchange in the real world. A hybrid model whereby artists perform both virtual and live concerts to minimise the impact of live touring emissions sound attractive. The one good thing about the pandemic is that we all got so much more tech savvy. We have nearly all broadcasted from our bedroom or later from still empty venues and most of us embraced the possibilities to reach out that way to new and far away audiences. Many organisations now permanently add online concerts to their programming. It does also give the audience a choice to attend in person or minimise travel.
For small music organisations or ensembles on a budget it's all about baby steps, depending on financial circumstances. Having shifted through many initiatives, declarations and tool kits, so far I am impressed with culture declares and music declares; very clear and informative with ideas and steps that are manageable to implement for smaller set ups.
By making some informed choices, artists are able to reduce their carbon footprint, and a lot of project managers and artistic directors have added 'Transformation Manager' to their many hats with the job description reading something like:
dynamic and proactive individual with some experience of change and transformation, and a very general knowledge (but constantly researching the - often confusing - data available) of Climate Change issues and the work needed to achieve carbon reduction and a sustainable working environment.
And I like …
this text score by composer Annea Lockwood from 2018
Listening with the neighborhood at midnight, or at dawn.
Listening with an awareness that all around you are other life-forms simultaneously listening and sensing with you – plant roots, owls, centipedes, cicadas – mutually intertwined within the web of vibrations which animate and surround our planet.
Listening to feel that 'I am one with all these phenomena. Can I know?' I listen to know it.
What we are at one with, we cannot harm.
Such a relevant and truly poetic score, easily to be 'performed' by all.
On a side note: I love the idea that with a text score a composer can open up their ideas/art/work to performers who might never had a conventional musical training or knowledge. No conventional instrumental or vocal content might be needed. It can be as poetic, or abstract as you like, with lines diluted.
PS There is a lot of reading, listening, research and travel involved in my line of work; I stumble across many interesting things and ideas I can't just leave behind so I decided to write about them and share with you.
https://juliesbicycle.com/resource/uk-music-greenhouse-gas-emissions/
I love it though, that new over-night train links have been (re-)introduced on the continent. Tempting. Check them out.
© 2023 Kirsten Fehring


I'm so proud of my new interactive contact form that I have to let you guys see it even though the layout has not been addressed at all--that will be for this afternoon, with style sheets and fancy pictures, but if you want to see bare-bones functionality (and be the second client in my database--I'm the first), go fill in some info and see what happens.
I guess it really isn't all that exciting to fill out, but as long as you don't reach an error page, everything is working! if you do reach an error page, I'd appreciate it if you could tell me what you had done and what the message said. thanks, beta testers!
I got it! it probably makes me happier than is normal for such a thing, but I'm very very happy. you are now in my database!