Blog posts by David E. Weekly covering technology, startups, education, and life from 1996 to presenthttps://david.weekly.org/en-ushttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-06-25-vendor-spending/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-06-25-vendor-spending/A new Vendor Spending page, under Budget, indexes a decade-plus of district checks: search any vendor, see year-by-year totals, browse by category. And it answers the obvious question — did we really triple our spending? Mostly no: the big swings are bond construction and pass-through, not baseline operating.Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTrcsdopen datacivic techschool boardbudgethttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-06-10-june-tune-up/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-06-10-june-tune-up/The board's 619 policies now have searchable Spanish titles. Every school page shows who teaches there. The site behaves on a phone. And two bugs in our own data — doubled English Learner counts and 22 broken Spanish transcripts — that we found and fixed.Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTrcsdopen datacivic techschool boardaccessibilityhttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-05-31-search/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-05-31-search/There's a search box now. Type a school, a topic, a dollar figure — it searches six years of public record in English or Spanish, and links straight to the document, not just the meeting that mentioned it.Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTrcsdopen datacivic techschool boardsearchhttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-05-22-data-sovereignty-ai-agents-why-docs-are-the-new-apis/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-05-22-data-sovereignty-ai-agents-why-docs-are-the-new-apis/I want to chat with my family finances without handing the data to anyone, and without abandoning a decade of Quicken history. Here is how, plus why Agent Skills are beating MCP servers as the shape of these integrations.Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTpersonal-financemcpsqlitesovereigntyartificial-intelligenceopen-sourcehttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-04-20-charter-schools-and-mcp-fix/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-04-20-charter-schools-and-mcp-fix/Three RCSD-authorized charters were a 404 on the site for months because a branch never merged. Tonight they're live, the /schools/ index has three sections instead of one, and the MCP tool can finally see what each board item actually proposes.Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTrcsdopen datacivic techschool boardcharter schoolshttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-04-16-what-your-router-knows/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-04-16-what-your-router-knows/A while back my home network started acting strange. Not broken, exactly. Just a low-grade wrongness. Video calls would glitch for a few seconds and come back. Large file uploads would stall and resume. Speed tests mostly looked fine. Occasional ones didn't. Every tool I pointed at the problem said "looks ok to me."...Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-04-09-orbi-mesh-beacon-topology/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-04-09-orbi-mesh-beacon-topology/I was pulling apart a Netgear Orbi WiFi 7 mesh system for Network Weatherhttps://networkweather.com and found an undocumented 31-byte Qualcomm vendor IE in the 5 GHz beacons from each mesh node. In these captures, one six-byte field appears to encode the node's current upstream parent, another matches the BSSID of the radio sending the beacon, and the parent field changes when the mesh re-parents...Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-04-06-cessna-172-rental-cost/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-04-06-cessna-172-rental-cost/We analyzed 1,586 rental rates from flight schools across America to map the true cost of renting the world's most popular training aircraft.Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTaviationflight trainingdataaetherhttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-03-26-two-weeks-in-rcsd-info/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-03-26-two-weeks-in-rcsd-info/What changed between launch day and the first public announcement of rcsd.info.Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTrcsdopen datacivic techschool boardhttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-03-13-open-data-for-rcsd/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-03-13-open-data-for-rcsd/Why I built rcsd.info, an open data portal for the Redwood City School District, and how you can adapt it for your own district.Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTrcsdopen datacivic techschool boardhttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-03-04-ai-assisted-networking/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2026-03-04-ai-assisted-networking/I connected with a friend yesterday about his job search. He's a scientist with 20+ years of experience leading drug development teams, recently laid off because his company is winding down. Tough market right now. Biotech capital has gotten scared and shifted toward late-stage assets, which means a lot of very qualified people are looking....Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2025-12-05-charitable-contributions-psa/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2025-12-05-charitable-contributions-psa/PSA: consider pulling in charitable contributions to the next few weeks that you were considering making next year....Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2025-09-29-what-makes-a-great-leader/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2025-09-29-what-makes-a-great-leader/A great leader inspires a team with possibility, vision, agency, and genuine caring for their people at every level. They are willing to fearlessly dive into the details and roll up their sleeves alongside their team when needed to get the job done. They actively solicit feedback and critique to improve and create a culture where it's safe to speak up. When a hard call needs to get made, they own...Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2025-09-10-apples-2025-product-announcement/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2025-09-10-apples-2025-product-announcement/The new iPhone is here! And yes, to cut to the chase, I am going to get it because it is bright orange, thank you very much....Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2025-09-05-rust-vs-swift-6/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2025-09-05-rust-vs-swift-6/I re-coded a Rust library in Swift 6 this week and was surprised to see it was a third the size. It ended up with no third party dependencies beyond the system Frameworks, whereas the Rust crate pulled in several third party crates that in turn pulled in innumerable other libraries - creating a situation with multiple versions of the same library ultimately needing to be included....Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2025-06-11-introducing-network-weather/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2025-06-11-introducing-network-weather/Folks; thanks for all the kind comments on my transition last week. It's time to start sharing what I'm working on now - fixing employees' remote & hybrid connectivity....Wed, 11 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2025-06-02-last-day-at-capital-one/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2025-06-02-last-day-at-capital-one/Today is my last day at Capital One....Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2024-06-13-commercial-pilot-license/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2024-06-13-commercial-pilot-license/After seven+ months of work, studying my ass off for my written, and a retest after I went long on my first power-off 180, I've finally achieved a life long goal of becoming a Commercially-rated airplane pilot....Thu, 13 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2023-10-08-qr-codes-and-trust-chains/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2023-10-08-qr-codes-and-trust-chains/Trust is an interesting thing. Who do you trust when you scan a QR code on the side of a McDonald's Happy Meal? McDonald's of course, but the list is a lot longer and stranger than that......Sun, 08 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2023-06-29-school-board-masters-in-governance/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2023-06-29-school-board-masters-in-governance/About a year ago, I started thinking seriously about running for the school board. As I eased in, it became clear that I had an enormous amount to learn. While I had served on for-profit and non-profit boards for 20 years, being an elected official on a school board was a whole new thing. New regulations, new standards, incredibly complex budgeting processes.. I started my learning even as a candi...Thu, 29 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2023-04-13-hacker-dojo-executive-director/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2023-04-13-hacker-dojo-executive-director/Folks; Hacker Dojo is looking for an Executive Director....Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2023-03-25-human-adaptability/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2023-03-25-human-adaptability/Human adaptability is one of the most remarkable and fascinating attributes of our species. Paradoxically, while we are fantastic at accommodating change, we often resist it. Yet, when we are forced into an adaptation, we end up enjoying aspects of it and keeping those adaptations with us even beyond the circumstances that required them....Sat, 25 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2023-02-18-infinite-depth-questions-in-the-technical-interview/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2023-02-18-infinite-depth-questions-in-the-technical-interview/The main goals of a technical interview are to assess what the candidate knows, how they explain what they know, and how they reason: how they handle being pushed beyond their limit of firm knowledge and have to rationally speculate. Common failure modes are: clamming up being unwilling to reason or share their thought process, bullshitting confidently and erroneously prognosticating, and not sani...Sat, 18 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-11-24-developer-experience-as-leverage/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-11-24-developer-experience-as-leverage/I suspect that one of the most powerful points of leverage for any tech company - in a downturn or no - is excellent developer experience....Thu, 24 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-09-07-apple-sep-2022-announcement-reactions/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-09-07-apple-sep-2022-announcement-reactions/Amazing: Didn’t see the Watch Ultra coming - amazing battery life and durability, astonished that they’ve obsoleted dive computers. Neat improvements to mic and speaker, tho I’m not sure how much the “emergency siren” is gonna help at ~85dB versus, say, yelling?Personal locator beacons now possibly obsolete - but satellite SOS doesn’t compete with the T-Mobile/Starlink deal since it’s extremely lo...Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-07-27-i-sued-a-spammer/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-07-27-i-sued-a-spammer/I sued a spammer!...Wed, 27 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-06-23-the-metaverse-is-a-bad-idea/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-06-23-the-metaverse-is-a-bad-idea/The Metaverse is not a bad idea not because it can’t be built. It’s totally doable, though challenging with dozens of very complex and exciting risks that require solving for: human perception, haptics, foveated rendering, extremely lightweight optics and compute, low-latency network interconnects, and edge processing of a massively sharded but contiguous world. The depth of rich and exciting comp...Thu, 23 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-03-11-why-we-built-howdy/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-03-11-why-we-built-howdy/I’m one of the tiny team that built Howdy, a new voice-first chat application that sends speech & an auto-punctuated transcript to close friends and family. We launched our iOS app in Q1 of 2022 and we’re working on the Android app!...Fri, 11 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-01-15-a-ring-theory-of-social-media-closeness/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-01-15-a-ring-theory-of-social-media-closeness/I had the pleasure of working at Facebook many years ago. It was a very exciting time, where smart engineers from around the world got a chance to work shoulder-to-shoulder on problems that impacted a large and growing fraction of the human population. A lot of the excitement was due to an earnest belief that in helping people share with each other we would help people feel better connected to eac...Sat, 15 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-01-05-shutting-down-blrb/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2022-01-05-shutting-down-blrb/> BLRB is shutting down. All accounts, content, and pages will be deleted in the coming days....Wed, 05 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-12-03-ten-gig-is-here/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-12-03-ten-gig-is-here/Today Sonic.net installed a 10 gigabit synchronous, unmetered XGS-PON fiber optic link to my home in Redwood City California. The connection will cost me $40/month. My only gripe is that I can’t get static IPs, too! I spent the earlier part of the week wiring my home with 10G capable switches and getting a 10G copper Thunderbolt 3 interface for my notebook — which means that for the first time in...Fri, 03 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-10-29-so-meta/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-10-29-so-meta/The Meta announcement is interesting and unexpected....Fri, 29 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-08-04-thoughts-on-life-and-education/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-08-04-thoughts-on-life-and-education/The 20th century model of life can be roughly encapsulated as being in three acts: in the first act, one is educated up to the limit of one’s mental capacity. Then, once full of knowledge, you are sent out into the world to work for as many years as you can. Finally at the end of your career you retire, have some fun, travel a bit, then die. We can call these stages: Learn, Work, Play and they are...Wed, 04 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-04-20-spring-2021-apple-announcement-reactions/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-04-20-spring-2021-apple-announcement-reactions/I know the schtick is to “start with the small stuff and then build” but the purple iPhone and reskinning of the Podcast app were pretty underwhelming. There’s so much more Apple could be doing in the podcast production and consumption space. Boo....Tue, 20 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-03-18-blessing/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-03-18-blessing/Blessing...Thu, 18 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-03-16-learning-and-proficiency/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-03-16-learning-and-proficiency/This morning I was reflecting on the fact that it has been some 20 years since my primary job was computer programming. It’s quite possible that I would struggle — or even fail — at a number of the technical interviews that I passed in the past. This is not a sign of my dotage yet! but rather a reflection that my focus and skills development has been in other areas. I haven’t maintained my profici...Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-03-16-learning-proficiency/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-03-16-learning-proficiency/This morning I was reflecting on the fact that it has been some 20 years since my primary job was computer programming. It’s quite possible that I would struggle — or even fail — at a number of the technical interviews that I passed in the past. This is not a sign of my dotage yet! but rather a reflection that my focus and skills development has been in other areas. I haven’t maintained my profici...Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-02-04-staying-secure-in-2021/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-02-04-staying-secure-in-2021/How can you make it less likely you’ll be hacked? Only a fool would describe any setup as “hacker proof”, but with every meaningful effort to adopt best practices, you’ll close off holes that will make it easy to attack you....Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-01-29-starflation/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2021-01-29-starflation/One of the common online retail experiences is to show a product or service rating with one to five stars. But should we weight each rating equally? What makes a given rating more or less helpful to discerning whether the product is any good or what the critical deficiencies are?...Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-12-08-startup-concept-staygreat/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-12-08-startup-concept-staygreat/This is an idea for a startup that should probably exist and then get acquired by AirBNB or the like. I’m not planning on starting this company myself. If you do end up making it or have already done so, please get in touch....Tue, 08 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-12-01-http-3-safari-google-app-engine/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-12-01-http-3-safari-google-app-engine/Just as an FYI since I wasn’t able to find this information elsewhere…...Tue, 01 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-11-11-apple-silicon-where-we-re-at-what-s-next/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-11-11-apple-silicon-where-we-re-at-what-s-next/So Apple came out with their new M1 based laptops and Mac Mini. The new MacBook Air looks like a nice fit for a college laptop: going completely fanless was a bold choice, though it’s disappointing that they said literally nothing about the camera optics namely something better than the very tired 720p from cam on the last few generations given that this is such a point of excellence and pride for...Wed, 11 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-10-27-teli-bridging-silicon-valley-dc/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-10-27-teli-bridging-silicon-valley-dc/On Wednesday evenings for the past few months I have been part of a new class run by the Aspen Institute where a small cohort of experienced tech leaders have been learning about public policy and how to drive change in the federal government. It was announced today....Tue, 27 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-10-24-why-corporate-incubators-fail/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-10-24-why-corporate-incubators-fail/My name is David Weekly. I’ve been in Silicon Valley for nearly 25 years now, invested in 60+ startups, created mexican.vc returning >11x cash-on-cash, founded three companies and two non-profits. I’ve created corporate R&D teams at both Facebook and Google presenting our team’s work to the CEO, and seen a huge amount of innovation happen everywhere from garages to emerging markets to big, publicl...Sat, 24 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-10-13-david-s-take-on-the-iphones-12/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-10-13-david-s-take-on-the-iphones-12/Mostly, it's a bunch of iterative improvements and polish. It's not a revolutionary new phone but it's definitely a better iPhone and is definitely a step forward. Mostly it's a better processor and a better screen with a better camera. The screen is much less likely to crack but the cases are just as likely to scratch/dent. Wireless charging works a little better. There's a nice blue color. The a...Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-10-01-in-other-contexts-this-is-known-as-kinesthetic-learning-aka-learning-by-doing/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-10-01-in-other-contexts-this-is-known-as-kinesthetic-learning-aka-learning-by-doing/In other contexts this is known as "kinesthetic learning" aka "learning by doing". Any skill that you have to actually perform in order to learn practically falls into this bucket. It's a very efficient way to learn but also scary, because it requires performing an action when it's obvious that not enough is known about all the potential impacts of the action. The truth is, some systems are too co...Thu, 01 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-05-06-givingtuesdaynow-2020/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2020-05-06-givingtuesdaynow-2020/Happy GivingTuesdayNowhttps://www.facebook.com/hashtag/givingtuesdaynow?source=feedtext&epa=HASHTAG, folks!...Wed, 06 May 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2019-05-25-board-basics/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2019-05-25-board-basics/Written for a dear friend who recently joined her first Board.by David WeeklyMay 24, 2019...Sat, 25 May 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2019-05-18-thoughts-on-giving/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2019-05-18-thoughts-on-giving/Over the last few years, my wife Rebecca and I have continued to discuss and iterate on our approach to charitable giving and I think we have something that we are happy with. I’ve shared it privately with a number of my friends and they found it useful, so I’m putting it out there now not as an example of generosity many others give much more nor the only right way to give, but rather a structure...Sat, 18 May 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2019-04-26-medcorder-secures-2-5m-in-funding/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2019-04-26-medcorder-secures-2-5m-in-funding/Hey everyone! Many of you know that I went full time on Medcorder earlier this year. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s an app focused on improving decision making in medical care by helping patients and families get the most out of their time with a doctor. Headquartered from my garage, we already have hundreds of people using the app....Fri, 26 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2019-04-25-what-you-think-about-matters/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2019-04-25-what-you-think-about-matters/If you think that life is meritocratic, or your country, or your company, you’re likely to believe that outcomes are strictly due to skills. This will cause you to falsely conjoin an analysis of your decision-making skills with an analysis of the quality of your outcomes; in particular, you’re unlikely to learn much from your successes other than becoming smug. Much worse than that, you’re likely...Thu, 25 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2019-01-03-tdcommons-a-treasure-trove-of-ip/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2019-01-03-tdcommons-a-treasure-trove-of-ip/If you talk to a corporate patent attorney about why the company files patents, you may hear things about building a defensive portfolio, creating valuable long-term assets, or protecting key developments from exploitation by competitors. But increasingly the top priority of the company regarding IP is “Freedom to Operate”....Thu, 03 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2018-12-13-the-next-chapter/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2018-12-13-the-next-chapter/Friends; after four great years at Google and before that a year and a half of great times at Facebook it is time for me to return to startup-world. January 25th will be my last day at Google and I'll at that point be commuting the much shorter distance to my garage, which is now kitted-up with gigabit FTTH and a pretty wide variety of computing devices all ready to start hacking on things....Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2018-12-08-advice-on-note-taking/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2018-12-08-advice-on-note-taking/A coworker of mine recently wrote to me asking for advice on how I take notes. Here is what I wrote back:...Sat, 08 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2018-06-26-medcorder-helping-people-talk-about-health/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2018-06-26-medcorder-helping-people-talk-about-health/When about two years ago my dad was diagnosed with the prostate cancer that ended up killing him, we had no idea what to do. There was a lot of information coming at us, fast. Most of this information was related to my dad in conversations with doctors. It wasn't written down in any kind of a clear way and contained a lot of medical jargon, possible conditions, measurements, treatment options, and...Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2018-04-03-an-introduction-to-internal-product-management/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2018-04-03-an-introduction-to-internal-product-management/aka "Building Great First Party Tools"...Tue, 03 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2018-02-20-a-skeptic-s-guide-to-discourse/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2018-02-20-a-skeptic-s-guide-to-discourse/It’s easier to give advice than to follow it! The below should be considered the bar I’d like to hold myself to, even if often I fall short of it…!...Tue, 20 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-12-08-reflection-on-systems-hype-doubt/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-12-08-reflection-on-systems-hype-doubt/It’s difficult to predict the future. More specifically, there is error in estimating the derivative of the economic value of a given technology over time. Errors in this estimation are underdamped and have poor impedance matching to true underlying progress. Hype builds on hype, so a high rate of change in the estimation of the value of a technology induces yet a higher rate of change an unstable...Fri, 08 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-11-08-practice-interview-grading/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-11-08-practice-interview-grading/I gave a colleague a practice interview today. They asked me before we began to at the end say what I would have graded them and if I would recommend they be hired or not....Wed, 08 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-10-15-apple-watch-series-3-review/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-10-15-apple-watch-series-3-review/This is my first time with an Apple Watch of any sort; my last smartwatch was a Pebble which was helpful but utilitarian. When I saw LTE connectivity from my wrist with built-in Siri capability, capacity to make phone calls apart from my phone and all in a waterproof device, it felt like a chance to explore whether I could have a “phone lite” experience that would allow me to leave my phone behind...Sun, 15 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-10-04-on-confusing-position-and-velocity-process-and-risk-in-the-corporation/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-10-04-on-confusing-position-and-velocity-process-and-risk-in-the-corporation/I have seen large and well-funded organizations use their social and monetary capital to acquire large and highly experienced teams. The great danger with this is the ensuing confidence of success. To visualize this linearly, that collective experience in person-years might mean you are ahead of everybody. But to visualize it differently, this starting point is the Y axis intercept. If we assign t...Wed, 04 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-09-26-consumer-tech-failing-to-innovate/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-09-26-consumer-tech-failing-to-innovate/I’m feeling baffled. I’m on a three year old laptop with a two year old smartphone and a four year set top box hooked up to a six year old receiver and projector....Tue, 26 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-09-16-medium-and-message-thoughts-on-our-devices/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-09-16-medium-and-message-thoughts-on-our-devices/It was a generation ago that Marshall McLuhan noted that the medium was the message. It was very apt. Norman’s Design of Everyday Things gave further insight that objects are inherently good at helping us perform certain things and not good at performing other kinds of tasks. A device that is inherently and explicitly good at performing a certain task is said to have an affordance for that task....Sat, 16 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-08-17-august-meditations/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-08-17-august-meditations/Your heroes are more flawed than you realize, Your enemies, more noble....Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-08-10-anatomy-of-a-malware-injection/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-08-10-anatomy-of-a-malware-injection/Today I got a number of pretty questionable “friend requests” from young females on Facebook with zero mutual friends and with very racy profile pics. Of course they were fake, but I was curious to safely explore what was at the bottom of the rabbit hole. It was an exciting trip....Thu, 10 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-05-01-tips-on-fatherhood/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2017-05-01-tips-on-fatherhood/Stuff I wish I could have read about before becoming a dad....Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-12-05-acing-your-product-manager-interview/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-12-05-acing-your-product-manager-interview/I’m a Senior Product Manager at Google and was also a PM at Facebook. I’ve done over 100 product management interviews, shadowed PM hiring committees, and created a class called “The Path to PM: Learning if Product Management is Right for You” through which I’ve shared these thoughts with thousands of Googlers. I’ve mentored a number of folks who have then successfully transitioned into the PM rol...Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-10-14-california-2016-elections/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-10-14-california-2016-elections/We voted! I love that I sit down with my wife Rebeccahttp://www.facebook.com/rebecca.lipon to go through our ballots and discuss together. We don’t agree on everything but having a counterparty to talk things through with is fabulous. Maybe we should have a “voting party” where everyone can bring over their ballots, discuss, and then register our votes....Fri, 14 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-10-14-california-2016-fall-elections/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-10-14-california-2016-fall-elections/We voted! I love that I sit down with my wife Rebecca to go through our ballots and discuss together. We don’t agree on everything but having a counterparty to talk things through with is fabulous. Maybe we should have a “voting party” where everyone can bring over their ballots, discuss, and then register our votes....Fri, 14 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-08-18-what-i-think/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-08-18-what-i-think/Many people seem broadly nervous to write about their own personal political platform stances which may be nuanced and not in alignment with any one party or candidate, instead preferring to stump for a party and candidate and re-share uncritical pro/con articles. I’d like to be part of the solution by sharing my thoughts on policies which don’t seem to fit neatly into a box or label — although le...Thu, 18 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-07-26-clouseau-a-postmortem/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-07-26-clouseau-a-postmortem/How I vetted and dumped a startup idea in ~20 hours and for under $1000....Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-07-19-the-mechanics-of-angellist-syndicates/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-07-19-the-mechanics-of-angellist-syndicates/for Investors & Startups, by David E. Weekly, written mid-2016...Tue, 19 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-07-18-avoid-lendingclub/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-07-18-avoid-lendingclub/Summary: Don’t ever put money into LendingClub. You can invest in seconds but will spend years of your life trying to get it out, and the returns are unimpressive....Mon, 18 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-06-11-equity-compensation-at-several-public-companies-like-google-and-facebook-is-in-the-form-of-direct/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-06-11-equity-compensation-at-several-public-companies-like-google-and-facebook-is-in-the-form-of-direct/Equity compensation at several public companies like Google and Facebook is in the form of direct stock grants, yes. Employees can sell these shares once vested on the public market for full retail value during either an open trading window following public typically quarterly investor disclosures or can in the Fall opt in to forcibly auto-selling all of their shares for the next year as soon as t...Sat, 11 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-06-10-while-this-article-correctly-notes-that-a-little-negotiation-at-onboarding-can-result-in/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-06-10-while-this-article-correctly-notes-that-a-little-negotiation-at-onboarding-can-result-in/While this article correctly notes that a little negotiation at onboarding can result in significant gains, there are some serious errors in the suggested approach....Fri, 10 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-05-18-silicon-valley-startups-and-labor-pricing/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-05-18-silicon-valley-startups-and-labor-pricing/Looking back over the past twenty years here in Silicon Valley there have been some remarkable transformations in how knowledge worker labor has been priced....Wed, 18 May 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-02-16-startups-macro-markets/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2016-02-16-startups-macro-markets/I’ve had a number of folks ask me about the macro markets and if that should change their stance on angel investing or their startup. TL;DR: nope....Tue, 16 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2015-06-13-why-the-internet-in-sub-saharan-africa-sucks/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2015-06-13-why-the-internet-in-sub-saharan-africa-sucks/Mildly technical post about Internet performance in emerging markets....Sat, 13 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2015-01-24-hackgeny-keynote/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2015-01-24-hackgeny-keynote/Keynote speech given to kick off Hack Generation Y on January 24, 2015...Sat, 24 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2015-01-17-the-things-i-like/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2015-01-17-the-things-i-like/One of the benefits of aging is that we get to discover the products that we really like; we’ve had the chance to try out lots of different things and so we can be sure of our preferences. Life brings lots of petty satisfactions from sleeping on your perfect bed or even brushing your teeth with your perfect toothpaste. It’s not about consumerism per se buying things to be happy but rather acquirin...Sat, 17 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2014-08-11-android-makes-me-sad/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2014-08-11-android-makes-me-sad/A few months ago I installed iOS8 on my iPhone 5. I was pretty unimpressed. The new OS, admittedly a beta build, was sluggish, crashed often, and didn’t have any really revolutionary new features that made using an iPhone better. I think one is allowed to either have very buggy but innovative software or totally stable and performant minor releases, so I get grumpy when such an apparently minor re...Mon, 11 Aug 2014 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2014-07-22-dear-foursquare-a-breakup-letter/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2014-07-22-dear-foursquare-a-breakup-letter/Oh, Foursquare. We’re breaking up. It’s not me. It’s you. I know this may come as something as a surprise; after all I’ve known you longer than I’ve known my wife and been with you more places. I’ve paid extravagant international data plans simply for the pleasure of checking in somewhere. I’ve used you in obscure locations worldwide to find reliably awesome and delicious experiences when the over...Tue, 22 Jul 2014 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2014-07-22-dear-foursquare/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2014-07-22-dear-foursquare/Oh, Foursquare....Tue, 22 Jul 2014 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2014-06-08-four-typical-post-product-mistakes/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2014-06-08-four-typical-post-product-mistakes/> You’ve built a great product. You’ve got a couple customers okay, most of them are friends and/or free, a small but passionate team, and a product that demos well. Now you just need to turn it into a company!...Sun, 08 Jun 2014 00:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2014-04-17-hdmi-2-0-4k60fps-and-uhd-content/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2014-04-17-hdmi-2-0-4k60fps-and-uhd-content/Current display technology, using HDMI 1.4, can only do 4K at 30fps. This has rather limited the adoption of 4K screens since there has been no way to get high frame rate content all the way to the display &8211; and of course there's no way to do 4K in 3D. This is beside a point that there's precious little source 4K content and the solutions from e.g. Sony have been whimperingly pathet...Thu, 17 Apr 2014 15:58:33 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2013-05-03-facebook-last-day-bootcamp/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2013-05-03-facebook-last-day-bootcamp/9am, Facebook Headquarters: Cafe 18. My laptop is open next to a plate of kiwi and mango. It's Friday and my last day of "bootcamp" at Facebook. Every person in the engineering organization &8211; VP to fresh-outta-college &8211; has to go through four to six weeks of fixing real bugs from all kinds of nooks and crannies of the product. I'd never done any Android programming at...Fri, 03 May 2013 16:26:18 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2013-03-14-science-and-religion/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2013-03-14-science-and-religion/How do people come to believe a thing? They can believe a thing because of reason, or take something on faith....Thu, 14 Mar 2013 18:50:13 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2013-02-27-how-to-handle-recruiter-calls/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2013-02-27-how-to-handle-recruiter-calls/Unsolicited calls from a tech recruiter are one of the banes of existence of a technologist with a LinkedIn and/or GitHub profile that has been anything close to meaningfully filled out. Or a startup founder. Both sides get hammered with calls. And emails. All. The. Time. If you haven't been on the receiving side of these, it may be difficult to explain why these calls are so infuriating. Aft...Thu, 28 Feb 2013 01:19:55 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-11-21-an-overview-of-the-web/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-11-21-an-overview-of-the-web/Written as a Thanksgiving present for Kate Compton...Thu, 22 Nov 2012 00:52:15 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-07-16-oha-na-begins/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-07-16-oha-na-begins/One month ago1, we started working on our newest idea, connecting extended families through sharing. We’re now proud to announce the name for our endeavor: Oha.na2....Tue, 17 Jul 2012 05:09:50 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-06-14-third-times-the-charm/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-06-14-third-times-the-charm/As posted on the Gaston Labs Tumblr1:...Thu, 14 Jun 2012 18:39:42 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-03-08-four-startup-archetypes-hacker-hustler-designer-operator/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-03-08-four-startup-archetypes-hacker-hustler-designer-operator/Much1 has2 been3 said4 about the classic "Hacker + Hustler" dynamic, but I think a lot of the discussion misses the subtly of what both bring to the table and some of the other critical archetypes that need to be filled in a successful startup like the Designer and the Operator. I don't think people need to be pigeonholed into a given role &8211; everyone will find they resonate to...Thu, 08 Mar 2012 20:09:41 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-01-27-21st-century-manufacturing/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-01-27-21st-century-manufacturing/Here's a bold bet for the century: manufacturing will return to the U.S....Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:07:05 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-01-22-hacking-a-business-from-project-to-compan/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-01-22-hacking-a-business-from-project-to-compan/In this talk for StartupMonthly1&8216;s Demo Day I outline the analogies between hacking together software not the malicious sort! and hacking/founding companies....Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:22:04 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-01-21-term-sheet-basics-video/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-01-21-term-sheet-basics-video/In this video, I walk folks at Blackbox1 through my Guide to Stock & Options2 and the ins and outs of founder stock, options, term sheets, and more....Sat, 21 Jan 2012 22:22:48 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-01-04-getting-my-feet-wet-again/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2012-01-04-getting-my-feet-wet-again/A funny thing happens to technical founders: as the company you built takes off and a proper Engineering Team develops, you find yourself doing less and less code. You need to spend your time managing the business, recruiting new talent, setting direction for the product, prioritizing tasks, and the like....Thu, 05 Jan 2012 05:13:12 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-04-26-founder-institute-build-your-product-with-empathy-for-the-user/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-04-26-founder-institute-build-your-product-with-empathy-for-the-user/This recorded talk comes courtesy The Founder Institute1, where I am a mentor....Tue, 26 Apr 2011 21:21:40 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-04-18-tedxvalencia-go-write-some-science-fiction-video/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-04-18-tedxvalencia-go-write-some-science-fiction-video/A talk I gave at TEDxValenciaSt1 in 2011 on the importance of imagining the ideal freed from the constraints of knowing how you're going to build something!...Mon, 18 Apr 2011 21:34:32 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-04-03-6dot-interview-with-karina-pikhart-peter-cantisani/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-04-03-6dot-interview-with-karina-pikhart-peter-cantisani/My interview with Karina Pikhart and Peter Cantisani about Karina's startup 6dot, which is making a new portable Braille labelling system....Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:00:11 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-03-21-interview-with-dr-jade-wang-of-nasa-ames/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-03-21-interview-with-dr-jade-wang-of-nasa-ames/Dr. Jade Wang of NASA Ames talks about The Game, her long, fascinating voyage to America from China as a child and her time here in Silicon Valley....Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:09:32 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-03-20-interview-with-dr-william-marshall-nasa/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-03-20-interview-with-dr-william-marshall-nasa/David interviews Dr. William Marshall of the NASA Ames Research Center about his current projects to build low cost satellites, the neccessary creation of a lunar base, and his path in coming to Silicon Valley....Sun, 20 Mar 2011 22:12:03 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-03-19-interview-with-browserling/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-03-19-interview-with-browserling/David Weekly interviews James Halliday and Peteris Krumins, the CEO and CTO respectively of the newly-established Browserling, a browser testing firm in which David made his first angel investment. The interview was done a mere hour after closing the round! James describes his drive down from Alaska to the Bay Area to pursue funding for his startup and Peteris describes his childhood with computer...Sat, 19 Mar 2011 22:13:42 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-03-08-environment-california-interview-with-tim-telleen-lawton/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-03-08-environment-california-interview-with-tim-telleen-lawton/David interviews environmental policy wonk Tim Telleen-Lawton about his work for Environment California....Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:07:06 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-26-blackbox-vc-interview-with-bjorn-and-aleksandra/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-26-blackbox-vc-interview-with-bjorn-and-aleksandra/Bjoern Lasse Herrmann and Aleksandra Markova describe the Atherton, CA based incubator-house they live in called Blackbox.vc, how it sprung out of a global network of youth entrepreneurs called Sandbox, and how a young, rural German came to meet a young, rural Russian somewhere in Washington thanks to a U.S. Government program&8230;...Sat, 26 Feb 2011 23:15:41 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-17-interview-with-jeff-lindsay-progrium/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-17-interview-with-jeff-lindsay-progrium/My interview with Jeff Lindsay, my co-founder of SuperHappyDevHouse and the Hacker Dojo....Thu, 17 Feb 2011 23:17:35 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-17-interview-with-jeff-lindsay/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-17-interview-with-jeff-lindsay/My interview with Jeff Lindsay1, with whom I co-founded SuperHappyDevHouse2 and the Hacker Dojo3....Thu, 17 Feb 2011 23:03:20 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-06-interview-with-rhett-butler-of-mongabay/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-06-interview-with-rhett-butler-of-mongabay/Rhett Butler of Mongabay1 talks about his upcoming State Department sponsored trip to Indonesia, where he'll address thousands on the subject of biodiversity and property rights. We cover US consumers' relationship to Green Marketing, corporate pioneering of sustainable economies, and more!...Sun, 06 Feb 2011 23:22:03 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-06-interview-paolo-privitera/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-06-interview-paolo-privitera/Interview with Paolo Privitera of DooChoo, talking about innovation and startups in Venice and creating ties and cultural exchange with Silicon Valley....Sun, 06 Feb 2011 23:20:55 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-06-ulrichs-road-trip-interview/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-06-ulrichs-road-trip-interview/My now former roommate Ulrich describes his epic road trip from California down to the southern tip of Chile in his trusty Jeep, with a kayak mounted to his roof. The trip took over four years and included a three month pit-stop in Guatamala "an excellent place to learn Spanish" and six months in Panama, where Ulrich now owns a small retreat center / compound....Sun, 06 Feb 2011 23:18:59 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-05-interview-with-alan-keefer-on-silicon-valley/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-05-interview-with-alan-keefer-on-silicon-valley/Alan explains how he got introduced to computers, why he went to Stanford and majored in philosophy, and how he ended up as a software engineer working for a Silicon Valley company....Sat, 05 Feb 2011 23:24:29 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-05-interview-with-alan-keefer-on-testing/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-05-interview-with-alan-keefer-on-testing/Alan outlines the three rules of software testing:...Sat, 05 Feb 2011 23:23:16 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-04-interview-with-jocelyn-joy-berl/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-02-04-interview-with-jocelyn-joy-berl/Jocelyn describes her childhood in Wyoming and coming to Silicon Valley as well as her personal interests....Fri, 04 Feb 2011 23:25:38 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-01-30-interview-with-nathan-nato-saichek/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2011-01-30-interview-with-nathan-nato-saichek/David Weekly interviews Treehouse housemate Nato Saichek about his hobbyist space vehicle project to build a pico-satellite measuring 4&8243; cubed that will use solar sails to sail to the moon....Sun, 30 Jan 2011 23:26:35 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2010-03-22-my-lasik-experience-intralase-wavefront/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2010-03-22-my-lasik-experience-intralase-wavefront/I grew up nearsighted pretty badly in my left eye 20/200, or -3.0 &8211; my right eye too, but to a much lesser degree 20/35 or -1.0. I hated the idea of sticking stuff in my eye every morning and glasses didn't appeal to me much as a kid, so I just went around with everything kind of in 2D. Sports like shotput and wrestling were obviously not too badly affected, and soccer even was not that...Mon, 22 Mar 2010 18:05:40 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2009-09-28-how-pbworks-was-a-lean-startup-video/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2009-09-28-how-pbworks-was-a-lean-startup-video/A talk I gave for Lean Startup Circle at UCSF in 2009....Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:30:19 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2009-06-15-trademark-registration-primer/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2009-06-15-trademark-registration-primer/Curious about the TM and R symbols by brand names? Interested in whether your company needs a trademark? I hope to here clarify for you what a trademark is, how to register one, and how to get your trademark registered internationally!...Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:30:40 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-12-21-philosophies-on-living-2/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-12-21-philosophies-on-living-2/Because stories are told from a first-person perspective, they concern themselves with the subjective truth of the observer. different observers of the same factual events are recorded as different stories with different truths. many conflicting stories can be created from the same factual observations depending on the perspective of the observers. differences cannot always be resolved through...Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:54:06 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-12-21-you-must-remember-2/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-12-21-you-must-remember-2/you must remember...Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:52:12 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-12-11-premature-thoughts-on-weight-loss-2/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-12-11-premature-thoughts-on-weight-loss-2/I've been losing weight for a month and have managed to shed around 12 pounds; I've still got a ways to go, but I've been happy enough with the results and have received enough good advice about the topic that I thought it would be worthwhile to share. These thoughts are "wildly premature" because hey, I haven't lost a huge amount of weight yet or kept it off, etc, so...Fri, 12 Dec 2008 03:29:36 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-11-16-distillation-2/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-11-16-distillation-2/The experience itself has a small value, providing tidbits to recall later context for other experiences....Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:02:06 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-11-05-two-ssd-bets-for-2010/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-11-05-two-ssd-bets-for-2010/I've been following with keen interest the development of solid state drives1 SSDs, which are basically really fast and reliable flash memory to use instead of the current rotating magnetic drives. Why does this matter? Well, first and foremost, they don't rotate, which means that they don't have any moving parts, which means they could last much longer and consume less electricity....Thu, 06 Nov 2008 04:26:48 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-10-18-10-levels-of-modern-communicatio/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-10-18-10-levels-of-modern-communicatio/My coworker Joël1 and I were today discussing the different ways we can communicate and how "serious" each was. From lightest-weight / most innocuous to most intimate and serious, we came up with the following:...Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:01:37 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-10-16-mre-review-sopakco-chicken-pesto-pasta/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-10-16-mre-review-sopakco-chicken-pesto-pasta/This is my first review of an MRE from the Sopakco Sure-Pak 121. I got the version without heaters....Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:37:41 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-08-28-great-music-for-brett-durett/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-08-28-great-music-for-brett-durett/David's Awesome Tunes You May Not Have Heard for Brett...Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:03:03 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-06-29-beer-wine-mead-sake-reviews/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-06-29-beer-wine-mead-sake-reviews/Also known as: David's Guide to Getting Drunk in Style....Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:26:32 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-06-26-tinkering-before-millions-video/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-06-26-tinkering-before-millions-video/A talk I gave at the Peninsula Linux Users' Group1 about the history of PBworks....Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:38:10 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-05-26-terrible-ui-hotel-gotico-elevator/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-05-26-terrible-ui-hotel-gotico-elevator/TERRIBLE UI @ Hotel Gotico: Elevator Originally uploaded by dweekly...Mon, 26 May 2008 22:32:40 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-05-26-perill-de-caigudes-or-breakdancing/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-05-26-perill-de-caigudes-or-breakdancing/Perill de Caigudes? Or Breakdancing? Originally uploaded by dweekly...Mon, 26 May 2008 21:26:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-05-12-l0k8-simple-twitter-location-service/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-05-12-l0k8-simple-twitter-location-service/This weekend I banged out a very simple location service called L0K8. It consists of a small 1.1MB Windows download. You install & run, it pops up a web page, you give it your twitter username & password, and now as you move from place to place your Twitter location will change to follow you. And of course you can follow L0K8 on twitter1 to stay up to date with developments....Mon, 12 May 2008 22:28:01 GMTdavidweeklydweeklygeol0k8locationpbwikitwitterupdatehttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-04-30-essence-of-life/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-04-30-essence-of-life/Who am I?...Thu, 01 May 2008 01:14:10 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-04-09-boingo-wireless-astoundingly-confident-poor/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-04-09-boingo-wireless-astoundingly-confident-poor/When I was stuck in Boston's Logan International Airport for a few hours waiting for a flight, I decided I ought to get some work done; I popped open my laptop to see if I could spot a free network. Signed onto "loganwifi" and got a page full of ads asking me to pay for access via Boingo Wireless. At $10/mo $22/mo after the first 3 and 100,000 access points, I decided I might give i...Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:22:40 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-04-06-thoughts-on-architecture/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-04-06-thoughts-on-architecture/written during an april 2008 trip to boston...Sun, 06 Apr 2008 17:30:49 GMTarchitecturehttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-03-30-mapping-the-internet/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-03-30-mapping-the-internet/With only about 50% of PBwiki's traffic coming from North America and with preliminary benchmarks showing 3+ second page load times in Paris, I've been thinking a bit about how to make the PBwiki experience snappy for people around the world. We've experimented with using various CDNs, but I've actually yet to be blown away by any of them. Having our own nodes at the edge can p...Mon, 31 Mar 2008 01:01:49 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-03-21-on-free-speech/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-03-21-on-free-speech/A post of mine from a recent email thread on why a co-op should continue to host a server with arguably distasteful but legal content:...Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:27:43 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-03-14-davids-difficult-math-question/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-03-14-davids-difficult-math-question/In honor of pi day1 3/14&8230;...Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:45:45 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-03-13-mildly-controversial-thoughts-for-further-exploration/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-03-13-mildly-controversial-thoughts-for-further-exploration/The singularity is past. We're already living in a collective consciousness with behaviors exceeding the capacity of any human or machine to understand, because that collective has intelligence exceeding our own by definition....Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:12:37 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-03-13-mission-statement/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-03-13-mission-statement/Who am I?...Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:38:07 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-02-19-beer-tasting-notes/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-02-19-beer-tasting-notes/On September 22nd, 2007, I got together with several of my friends Eve Phillips, Jocelyn Joy Berl, Travis Kalanick, Nathan Schmidt, and Alan Keefer and with the inspiration of my brother Chris Weekly1 we tasted a number of beers and rated them, along with commentary. They're ranked here from top scoring to bottom scoring as averaged by all six individual scores. All scores are on a scale of 1...Wed, 20 Feb 2008 05:00:40 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-02-16-gluing-david-together-again/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2008-02-16-gluing-david-together-again/Help. My identity has been spread too thin....Sat, 16 Feb 2008 22:19:35 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2007-07-18-the-simplest-thing-video/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2007-07-18-the-simplest-thing-video/In this talk for STIRR1 FounderHacks, I emphasize that founders should have their product do the simplest thing possible and let their users guide but not design! their product....Wed, 18 Jul 2007 21:26:39 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2006-10-06-why-im-not-going-to-landmark/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2006-10-06-why-im-not-going-to-landmark/> Landmark is a popular and profitable program in the US that claims to teach people how to better master themselves and their perceptions of the world. A number of my friends have attended or have considered attending at one point or another. I explain here in an excerpt from a letter to a friend why I don't think it's right for me....Fri, 06 Oct 2006 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2006-04-15-specism-a-moral-framework/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2006-04-15-specism-a-moral-framework/Every person and every animal has built in a desire to survive and to better themselves. Upon this self-centric axiom systems such as Objectivism1 are built. Such systems lack something central to the human experience &8211; desire for the direct betterment of the group, even at the expense of the self. They range from the Randian capitalist's soulless lack of recognition of the value exchang...Sat, 15 Apr 2006 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2006-03-18-the-echo-chamber/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2006-03-18-the-echo-chamber/> Much of the "blogosphere" seems to be an echo chamber, with its own terminology including the word "blogosphere", cult leaders, conferences, and memes. Why? Is this healthy?\...Sat, 18 Mar 2006 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2006-02-27-please-mock-me/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2006-02-27-please-mock-me/I am rather appalled by the continuing aftermath of the publication of a few single-frame cartoon images of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper nearly half a year ago. A natural question has gone unasked: how many, if any, of those protesting have actually seen any of the cartoons in question? There is a further irony of course in trying to protest imagery of Islam as a violent and oppressive religion...Mon, 27 Feb 2006 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-08-01-my-experience-with-vonage-why-vonage-sucks/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-08-01-my-experience-with-vonage-why-vonage-sucks/About half a year ago, I decided to go sign up for a Vonage account. This was mainly because I found myself needing to send faxes quite a bit, and it didn't seem too expensive. So I signed up....Mon, 05 Dec 2005 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2002-11-16-consumption/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2002-11-16-consumption/a very rambling and awfully incoherent saturday writing, done without the benefit of breakfast, or even lunch....Sat, 08 Oct 2005 19:44:39 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-10-08-work-isnt-wolf-in-a-wood-will-not-escape/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-10-08-work-isnt-wolf-in-a-wood-will-not-escape/I had a weird experience today chatting with a hacker on ICQ who had taken over my friend's account. The conversation's too weird to have made up:...Sat, 08 Oct 2005 19:27:12 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-02-20-server-issues-2005/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-02-20-server-issues-2005/Some of you may have noticed that david.weekly.org was down last week for several days. Email to me bounced and there was general havoc in my online life. What happened? Did I get slashdotted? No....Sat, 08 Oct 2005 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-10-07-bypassing-ad-blocking/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-10-07-bypassing-ad-blocking/This article describes modern ad-blocking technique, their effectiveness, and how advertisers are likely to work around them....Fri, 07 Oct 2005 19:56:06 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-10-07-the-ps3-blu-ray/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-10-07-the-ps3-blu-ray/The PS3 will be significant for Blu-Ray. And vice versa....Fri, 07 Oct 2005 19:03:28 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-10-07-davids-two-rules-of-business/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-10-07-davids-two-rules-of-business/I'm still a business newbie, I'll admit it. I haven't made a million dollars yet and I haven't been on the cover of a magazine in a while. Although I was the subject of a Fortune cover article back in the day. But it's been my sense that beyond the typical business schtick that I'm busily trying to catch up on, there are two solid rules for getting ahead with a compan...Fri, 07 Oct 2005 17:52:57 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-10-07-why-blade-servers-arent-smart/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-10-07-why-blade-servers-arent-smart/This article explains why thin form-factor servers like blades may not be a good idea....Fri, 07 Oct 2005 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-10-07-voip-colorizing-logger/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-10-07-voip-colorizing-logger/This article describes a system for making useful transcripts of Voice over IP VoIP chats....Wed, 05 Oct 2005 17:49:59 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-05-16-the-intellectual-property-wage-slave/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-05-16-the-intellectual-property-wage-slave/The Intellectual Property Wage Slave or Why You Should Quit Your Job A study of the productivity of software programmers shows the most talented coders to be over 100 times more efficient than the meanest. It is clear, however, that there is nowhere near a commensurate increase in pay....Tue, 05 Apr 2005 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-03-21-pull-devices/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-03-21-pull-devices/A few days ago, it occured to me that it would be useful if my alarm clock knew to awake me an hour before my first appointment of the day, as automatically pulled down from my Yahoo! Calendar. All the alarm clock would really need to do is to have a net drop wifi / ethernet and every half hour or so attempt to establish a connection to a central server and ask if there were any updates to my sche...Mon, 21 Mar 2005 20:02:33 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-03-21-on-podcasting/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2005-03-21-on-podcasting/A number of friends have asked me of late what my take is on podcasting. It's certainly a hot new buzzword; but is it really the "next step for blogging"? It doesn't seem obvious to me....Mon, 21 Mar 2005 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-11-26-nobody-makes-good-cell-phones/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-11-26-nobody-makes-good-cell-phones/The cell phone market bugs me. It seems to have been taken over by marketers utterly out of touch with the reality of what people are looking for in a phone, their singular focus instead on a cheap game of one-upmanship with the competition. In recent talks with others and their pleasure or displeasure with their phones, I've found that I'm not the only one who's annoyed here. So wh...Fri, 26 Nov 2004 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-11-04-bush-won-lets-wake-up/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-11-04-bush-won-lets-wake-up/So here we are, post-election, and George Bush has won. A lot of people, Bush supporters and otherwise, are dumbfounded by the numbers. The Republican party absolutely and surprisingly spanked the Democratic party to a degree that nobody really expected....Thu, 04 Nov 2004 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-10-16-your-blog-is-evidence/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-10-16-your-blog-is-evidence/Your blog can and will be used against you in a court of law....Sat, 16 Oct 2004 20:07:09 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-09-14-ghana-wrapup/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-09-14-ghana-wrapup/So I'm back from Ghana, safe and sound minus a nasty cold I picked up on some continent. I never get sick! The camp was a resounding success; sorry for not posting more here earlier, but it's been a total zoo. I got back last night at 2pm and, shortly after explaining to someone how incredibly important it is to keep awake until it's nighttime lest jet lag kick your butt. Oops; woke...Wed, 15 Sep 2004 05:27:17 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-09-07-ghana-update-v/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-09-07-ghana-update-v/Oh, every day has such ups and downs! It's hard to compress it all here. Immediately after the last update, I think I gave the talk of my life &8211; the kids in the afternoon were a lot more jazzed up than the morning kids, which shouldn't be surprising &8211; I mean, if you had to...Wed, 08 Sep 2004 05:25:07 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-09-06-ghana-update-iv/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-09-06-ghana-update-iv/I just got done teaching the morning session; with two classes a session and two sessions a day, I have to lecture the same material four times, all while trying to keep the kids excited and engaged. My first tack was to try and give them a brisk walk-through of the entirety of computing, but this proved a little much &8211; simply giving them some time in front of the word processor was one of th...Tue, 07 Sep 2004 05:02:35 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-09-05-ghana-update-iii/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-09-05-ghana-update-iii/Busy Internet strikes again. Internet here is 12,000 cedis per hour. The exchange rate is very roughly 10,000 cedis per dollar. It's actually more like 9k and change So that's around $1.25/hour, which isn't so bad and certinaly doesn't seem so punishing that it's keeping locals away &8211; this place is busy and provides Internet, so no false advertising there. The bills s...Mon, 06 Sep 2004 05:01:37 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-09-04-ghana-update-ii/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-09-04-ghana-update-ii/I'm at "Busy Internet" in Accra right now. We've been calling the people who did and didn't manage to make the program. It seems that instead of taking 50 kids, we're going to try and take 100 kids, doing two sessions a day. Clara had indicated that we'd be "totally fried" trying to do just 50 kids, so God only knows how intense this upcoming week will...Sun, 05 Sep 2004 04:59:41 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-09-03-im-in-ghana/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-09-03-im-in-ghana/So I'm writing this from a computer lab in Accra; it's nicely modern, with about 50 pentium 4-2000 machines, but it's about 1500ms to anything really interesting on the Internet backbone and the speed's not that fabulous. But it works! And while we were hoping to have 50 students for the camp, it looks like we actually got more like 150 applicants; so we're actually having...Sat, 04 Sep 2004 04:58:19 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-08-30-and-off-to-ghana/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-08-30-and-off-to-ghana/Oh boy. I'm two days away from hopping on a plane to Accra, Ghana to go teach kids about science, technology, and the Internet. Much of our planning is very last minute as we're trying to slap together a curriculum, local sponsorship, etc. We're planning on doing much of it on the loooong flight over. It feels like the Greeks putting their stadia together at the last second! It work...Tue, 31 Aug 2004 04:56:43 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-04-02-thank-you-president-bush/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-04-02-thank-you-president-bush/I would like to thank President Bush for his efforts to expand democracy around the world. He's done a really incredible job, but not in the way that he may have anticipated. In his efforts to found democracies on the other side of the globe, he revitalized America....Fri, 02 Apr 2004 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-03-18-cavafy-ithaca-greek-dalven/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-03-18-cavafy-ithaca-greek-dalven/The following is the poem "Ithaca" by the famous Greek poet Cavafy, in its translation by Rae Dalven, the original Greek, and also with my own horribly-bastardized pronunciation guide for the Greek. Note that the translation is not line-based, which is to say that each line in English does not \exactly\ say what is in the same Greek line....Thu, 18 Mar 2004 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-02-24-a-letter-to-brian-on-gay-marriage/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2004-02-24-a-letter-to-brian-on-gay-marriage/I wrote the following letter to my pastor Brian Emmet at Covenant Ministries1, in response to his latest newsletter2, which decried permitting homosexual marriages....Tue, 24 Feb 2004 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-12-03-peace-in-the-middle-east/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-12-03-peace-in-the-middle-east/The middle east is pretty damn annoying. Specifically, the whole Israel / Palestine deal. I mean, it feels like there's good evidence that there are a very large number of totally reasonable people on both sides who are being totally ignored by a small number of...Wed, 03 Dec 2003 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-11-20-a-simple-strategy-for-spam-control/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-11-20-a-simple-strategy-for-spam-control/I've recently employed a very simple mechanism for spam control. So far, it's been quite effective and required the installation of NO new software, tunable Baysian filters, or anything. So I thought I'd share it with you....Thu, 20 Nov 2003 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-10-27-why-ipv6-wont-be-here-by-2005/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-10-27-why-ipv6-wont-be-here-by-2005/This message was posted on October 27, 2003 to a mailing list in response to a post that claimed that IPv6 would be widespread by 2005 due to an IPv4 address shortage. Given that 2005 has come without IPv6 having taken off, this post feels vindicated in its conclusion....Mon, 27 Oct 2003 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-10-14-formats/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-10-14-formats/For protocols there's Ethernet, TCP, IP, UDP, AIM in ICQ, OSCAR, and TOC flavors!, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, IRC, SOCKS5, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, POP3, FTP, Shoutcast, SSH, and Kazaa&8230;and that's just what's running on my desktop right now! Then there are umpteen formats for data storage. MBX, PBX, DOC, MP3, AVI, WAV, MPG, and so forth....Tue, 14 Oct 2003 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-10-09-linux-unicode-support-sucks/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-10-09-linux-unicode-support-sucks/Unicode1 is just about the coolest thing since sliced bread. It's the kind of thing after which you wonder how things possibly worked previously. The idea is simple: one character set can represent any character in any language. There are a few different ways of encoding Unicode characters there are more than 100,000 of them! but the most popular is "UTF-8" for the 8-bit Unicode tra...Thu, 09 Oct 2003 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-08-31-professionalism/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-08-31-professionalism/I've learned a lot in the last two years about what it means to be professional. Here are some of the things I've learned; I hope you can learn them without having to be the fool I am! Please note that I'm not smart enough to actually apply these rules a lot of the time....Sun, 31 Aug 2003 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-07-01-over-coffee/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-07-01-over-coffee/DISCLAIMER...Tue, 01 Jul 2003 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-04-google-a-brain-extension/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-04-google-a-brain-extension/Over the last few days a subtle error on the part of our home's gateway to the Internet rendered Google1 inaccessible. I was in agony. I was unable to write reports and actually felt rather stupid without it. I then realized I had effectively undergone a temporary lobotomy: Google is a part of my brain....Wed, 30 Apr 2003 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-04-24-the-peril-of-using-etags-in-a-cluster/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-04-24-the-peril-of-using-etags-in-a-cluster/Apache administrators: beware ETags if you have more than one webserver! If you only have one webserver this article will not be useful to you....Thu, 24 Apr 2003 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-03-11-philip-2014/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2003-03-11-philip-2014/Written mid-2002, this is a letter from the future....Tue, 11 Mar 2003 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2002-11-11-the-perils-of-accidental-rudeness/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2002-11-11-the-perils-of-accidental-rudeness/Just now, I did something horribly mean. I ignored a nice person on AIM that was having a delightful chat with me. And \BAM\, I ignored them, never to see a message from them again. I rebooted my computer and any and all traces of them were removed....Tue, 12 Nov 2002 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2002-11-09-on-leisure/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2002-11-09-on-leisure/Looking at the great inventions and awesome creations of art that humankind has collectively produced, I can't help but notice a common theme: the need for leisure. Leisure here not meaning, sitting around and doing nothing at all, but the need to have time that is otherwise unstructured and undemanding. When you are toiling day in and day out without respite, it is difficult to innovate or t...Sat, 09 Nov 2002 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2002-02-13-mirroring-web-content/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2002-02-13-mirroring-web-content/originally posted to the Apache Development mailing list...Wed, 13 Feb 2002 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-07-18-tribooting-apples-titanium-laptop/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-07-18-tribooting-apples-titanium-laptop/sidestory how i got my laptop...Sat, 09 Feb 2002 06:16:05 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2002-02-06-presumed-backing/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2002-02-06-presumed-backing/I find myself dealing sometimes and indeed am guilty of a phenomenon that I would like to call "Presumed Backing."...Tue, 05 Feb 2002 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-09-05-adventures-in-housing-2/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-09-05-adventures-in-housing-2/So, I just found a new place to move into. Just like last year's adventure1, this spin around was every bit of a madcap little hunt for a house. It started out in late July. Poking around made it clear that real estate prices had dropped significantly in the past year. Instead of paying a very sizeable chunk of change for a two-bedroom house that was rented to us as a three-bedroom they calle...Wed, 05 Sep 2001 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-08-17-ftaa-eff-skylarov-dmca/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-08-17-ftaa-eff-skylarov-dmca/\The following letter was sent regarding recent lanugage in the FTAA draft agreement that would require, effectively, all nations in the Americas South and North to make it illegal to reverse engineer copyright-protection software. This would permit producers to force restrictions on how their works are not just copied, but used. They can, and will, take your consumer rights away. For more informa...Sat, 18 Aug 2001 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-06-13-active-optimism/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-06-13-active-optimism/There are, in my view now, two kinds of optimism. There is the pleasantly naive optimism that comes from living a relatively sheltered, loved life. This is how I would characterize my life heading into college. As I ran across the ups and the downs of true living, I ended up losing this naive positivism that runs along the lines of: "Anything is possible because I...Wed, 13 Jun 2001 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-06-12-lack-of-updates/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-06-12-lack-of-updates/There have been a definite lack of updates to my website over the last half year early 2001-mid 2001. Some of you have been asking about this. Why have I slacked on posting? It's because I'm going through some very painful and wildly confusing personal bits, and some of the parties involved happen to read my website. One even asked to have access to my website blocked....Tue, 12 Jun 2001 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-04-06-die-record-industry-die/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-04-06-die-record-industry-die/written for the pho list I think that those of you who have known me and my progression of thoughts throughout this whole insane MP3 thing so far have know that I've \tried\ to keep a semblance of perspective on things. But&8230;...Fri, 06 Apr 2001 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-03-23-aphorisms/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-03-23-aphorisms/Just for the sheer, unadulterated hell of it, I'll put some aphorisms of mine here. They may alternately amuse, disgust, or bore you....Fri, 23 Mar 2001 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-03-01-the-efficiency-of-instant-messaging/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-03-01-the-efficiency-of-instant-messaging/Realtime textual dialog, such as in IRC, ICQ, AIM, or ytalk, is a unique communication form. Allowing for two or more participants to simultaneously be contributing their throughts, reading responses, and calculating replies, it is the ultimate information medium for the attention deficient modern intellectual. It is unique from a voice conversation that might be had in person, over the phone, or...Thu, 01 Mar 2001 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-02-18-hired/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-02-18-hired/I'm hired. I got a job at Legato Systems1 today. It's a big company &8211; a couple of thousand people. It looks like I'll be one of their architects, helping them get a good vision for the future of backup and then helping them actually implement it. No, I won't be able to tell you all everything that goes on there. 😉...Sun, 18 Feb 2001 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-02-04-secure-audio-path-a-bad-way-to-go/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-02-04-secure-audio-path-a-bad-way-to-go/written for the pho list...Sun, 04 Feb 2001 19:55:48 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-08-13-sdmi-aris-wins-world-loses/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-08-13-sdmi-aris-wins-world-loses/written august 13, 1999...Sun, 04 Feb 2001 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-02-03-gnutella-and-the-state-of-p2p/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-02-03-gnutella-and-the-state-of-p2p/written for the pho list...Sat, 03 Feb 2001 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-25-the-rental-home-efficiency-problem/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-25-the-rental-home-efficiency-problem/There is a fundamental problem with energy conservation as it relates to homes that are rented from a central organization, such as a realtor. It's a very simple problem: the realtor pays for infrastructure, but the renter pays for the utility bills. This setup makes sense at a first glance. Renters shouldn't have to pay to renovate a home that they may only be living in for three months...Wed, 31 Jan 2001 20:00:07 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-31-rethinking-computer-interfaces/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-31-rethinking-computer-interfaces/The first dot-com boom has come and gone and we now find ourselves in the gritty interim period, where only innovation, cunning, and realized profits will save us and bring us back to prosperity. Gone, thankfully, are the lucrative days when anyone with a webpage could call themselves an "ebusiness" and acheive an obscene level of rapport with investors. A lot of new business models have...Wed, 31 Jan 2001 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-13-ces-quikie-xbox-preview/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-13-ces-quikie-xbox-preview/this quikie written for KoreanZ.com1...Sat, 13 Jan 2001 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-09-ces-quickie-intel-keynote/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-09-ces-quickie-intel-keynote/this quikie written for KoreanZ.com1...Tue, 09 Jan 2001 20:52:16 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-09-ces-quickie-mp3-proliferation/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-09-ces-quickie-mp3-proliferation/this quikie written for KoreanZ.com1...Tue, 09 Jan 2001 20:51:21 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-09-ces-vegas-2001-quickie-roundup/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-09-ces-vegas-2001-quickie-roundup/this quikie written for KoreanZ.com1...Tue, 09 Jan 2001 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-03-hire-me/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2001-01-03-hire-me/posted january 3, 2001...Wed, 03 Jan 2001 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-17-crash-the-end-of-p2p/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-17-crash-the-end-of-p2p/exclusive for Digital Mogul1...Sun, 17 Dec 2000 20:42:48 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-17-powering-the-future-internet/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-17-powering-the-future-internet/exclusive for Digital Mogul1 with Rafael Queseda...Sun, 17 Dec 2000 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-10-why-you-should-have-a-website-and-how-to-do-it/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-10-why-you-should-have-a-website-and-how-to-do-it/You should have a website. You have something to share that only you can share, something that other people can enjoy, learn from, and be entertained by: your life....Sun, 10 Dec 2000 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-04-why-the-net-is-not-dead/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-04-why-the-net-is-not-dead/Things are grim financially for dot-coms....Mon, 04 Dec 2000 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-03-comdex-overview/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-03-comdex-overview/for KoreanZ.com1...Sun, 03 Dec 2000 20:47:41 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-05-12-philosophy-the-necessity-of-subversion/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-05-12-philosophy-the-necessity-of-subversion/I occasionally undertake mildly subversive activities, like posting documents describing how proprietary protocols are organized1, setting up MP3 sites2, explaining to people how to get around bans3, describing anonymous file exchange possibilities4, or writing sneaky perl code5. But this comes as part of a larger philosophy of subversion; I've never made a penny off of my website, but have p...Sun, 03 Dec 2000 18:58:28 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-11-02-alack-for-the-trees/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-11-02-alack-for-the-trees/Trees, how I love you, but I love you not today....Sun, 03 Dec 2000 18:54:25 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-03-unfreezing-the-site/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-12-03-unfreezing-the-site/In the coming days, the now-familiar "frozen" sign should be disappearing from the site. That's right, I'm back1 and I've got an itching to do some cool things with this site....Sun, 03 Dec 2000 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-11-03-fun-with-companies/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-11-03-fun-with-companies/So, I'm actually not in San Jose right now despite recently getting housed there...Fri, 03 Nov 2000 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-10-23-adventures-in-housing/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-10-23-adventures-in-housing/Whoo, boy. I just got housed! I hope to share with you some of the joy of finding a house in Silicon Valley here. =...Mon, 23 Oct 2000 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-10-02-why-i-came-back/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-10-02-why-i-came-back/Well, I'm back. I spent two weeks in New York, two weeks in Italy and France, two months in Sweden, two weeks in Boston, and have now arrived back in the...Mon, 02 Oct 2000 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-04-17-censored/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-04-17-censored/I found out from an anonymous email account that my website is being censored / blocked by the University of Central Florida, i.e., students at UCF can no longer read my site. I just sent the following letter to the UCF student government in response....Mon, 17 Apr 2000 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-04-10-client-as-server-a-new-model/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-04-10-client-as-server-a-new-model/A new model is emerging from the Internet. It represents the culmination of years of incremental evolution in the structure of the network and the clients that feed upon it. It is based upon the same principles upon which the Internet was founded. It is this: the client is the server....Mon, 10 Apr 2000 19:49:35 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-04-20-why-xml-will-fail/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-04-20-why-xml-will-fail/There has been a fair amount of hype surrounding XML, or the eXtensible Markup Language, over the past year and the hype is slowly but surely growing. I decided it would be a prudent thing to think about, and chewed it over. I came to the following conclusion: XML will fail before it has even started on its most basic premise: openly structured data....Fri, 07 Apr 2000 06:25:03 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-03-10-why-sdmi-will-fail/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-03-10-why-sdmi-will-fail/Hounded by open formats like MP3 that encourage free copying of music, record companies have been praying for an escape: a high-quality, secure digital audio format that could be sold to consumers everywhere online and without a risk of piracy. Unsatisfied with proprietary solutions offered by Liquid Audio1 or AT&T2, they have forged to create a new standard that would be ultimately secure and pow...Thu, 06 Apr 2000 18:09:53 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-06-20-on-collaborative-filtering/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-06-20-on-collaborative-filtering/A recent set of technologies have been devised to help websites learn about their users and take intelligent actions accordingly. These technologies, called "recommendation engines" or "collaborative filtering," examine a user's past viewing habits and compare them with other users who have similar interests. If your interests were found to parallel another group of users,...Thu, 06 Apr 2000 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-03-17-the-need-for-next-generation-email/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-03-17-the-need-for-next-generation-email/Email is, arguably the killer app of the Internet. It was what launched it and still is one of its primary uses. When surveying current email systems in place, it occurs to me that an upgrade is in order....Fri, 17 Mar 2000 20:17:53 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-02-20-three-days-of-mirc/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-02-20-three-days-of-mirc/While spending a weekend at Hopkins Marine Station1, where my girlfriend2 is studying this quarter it's a bit of a drive3!, I was introduced to Rurouni Kenshin4, an incredible anime series. The weird part was that we didn't watch the episodes on a TV. We watched them on her housemate's computer....Sun, 20 Feb 2000 20:14:43 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-02-25-sexiest-geek-alive/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-02-25-sexiest-geek-alive/Okay, I'm dying over here. Just for fun a month ago, I saw a posting on a contest for the "Sexiest Geek Alive." Giggling, I went to their page1 and filled out an application2. I laughed and didn't think about it again....Sun, 20 Feb 2000 19:04:09 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-02-20-turning-on-a-compaq/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-02-20-turning-on-a-compaq/WARNING: This is a bit of a rant. You may think I am an idiot after reading this....Sun, 20 Feb 2000 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-01-22-response-to-the-dvd-injunction/https://david.weekly.org/blog/2000-01-22-response-to-the-dvd-injunction/Regarding the DVD injunction:...Sat, 22 Jan 2000 20:36:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-11-09-my-letter-to-clifford-nass/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-11-09-my-letter-to-clifford-nass/Hello Professor Nass. My name is David Weekly. I am the student who approached you after class just now to ask you what would happen if I disagreed with you. I am a junior in Computer Science here....Wed, 10 Nov 1999 06:13:48 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-11-01-the-multicast-user/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-11-01-the-multicast-user/A very sleek, hip, and powerful word. Multicast technology, about a decade old, enables a computer to "broadcast" a single stream over a network and have the network copy the stream as required. So for instance, if I was broadcasting a concert from San Francisco and had 50 people listening in from the Netherlands, I'd just send out one stream. The routers would pass along this singl...Mon, 01 Nov 1999 20:09:48 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-07-29-the-psychology-of-online-music/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-07-29-the-psychology-of-online-music/A lot of people out there are quite juiced up about online music. MP3.com just IPOed at a market valuation of well over a billion dollars, Liquid Audio shot out of the gate for just short of $100m, Spinner and Nullsoft were acquired by America Online, SDMI is being rolled out, Madison is still getting whispers, Sony's in bed with Microsoft, and Universal and BMI are suddenly making forays int...Thu, 29 Jul 1999 19:08:27 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-07-05-alex-blok-the-original-music-man/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-07-05-alex-blok-the-original-music-man/Two years ago, before the days of the Rio or even Saehan's MP-Man, a tall, somewhat balding British man came by my dorm room to talk with me about digital audio. He explained to me his plans for a flash-memory based portable music player and showed me drawings and designs for his solid-state device, dating back to 1988. He wanted me to help him find a team of people to build such a device. Wh...Mon, 05 Jul 1999 20:03:56 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-06-16-mp3-summit-two-1999/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-06-16-mp3-summit-two-1999/So much has changed and so much is the same since last year's MP3 Summit1. The first and most noticeable difference is the sheer quantity of people attending this year's MP3 Summit. There were probably something on the order of 500 folks at this year's versus around 100 last year. A lot of the same folks are around, which is fun; it's great to see those familiar old faces, the...Thu, 17 Jun 1999 06:32:12 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-06-10-on-effective-leadership/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-06-10-on-effective-leadership/Successful leaders will have to undergo the change from perceiving themselves as managers to perceiving themselves as facilitators. It was best put to me by an executive who said that he hopes that this summer he can serve his interns coffee. This change is required due to labor conditions in the IT market which are making it increasingly difficult to attract and keep high talent. As a result, man...Fri, 11 Jun 1999 06:35:44 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-03-16-an-overview-of-digital-audio/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-03-16-an-overview-of-digital-audio/sponsored by Audio Explosion1...Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:01:38 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-03-05-a-box-to-fit-in-marriage-and-gendered-roles-in-society/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-03-05-a-box-to-fit-in-marriage-and-gendered-roles-in-society/The human mind thrives on classification. We like to put things in boxes. We love to learn about something that we don't know by lumping it with things we do; or at the very least, to lump a bunch of things we don't know about together and declare that we know something about them. This tactic often makes us feel more comfortable and wise and sometimes does genuinely provide information...Fri, 05 Mar 1999 20:58:21 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-03-15-the-mp3-artist/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-03-15-the-mp3-artist/sponsored by plug.com1...Fri, 05 Mar 1999 08:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-01-27-the-invisible-orchestra/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-01-27-the-invisible-orchestra/sponsored by Audio Explosion1...Thu, 28 Jan 1999 07:09:37 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-01-24-the-stanford-linux-revolt/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1999-01-24-the-stanford-linux-revolt/At Stanford, there's a Technology Career Fair that pops up at least once a year. The idea is that students will hustle down there with their resumes and companies and students will smell each other out for good matches. We knew that Microsoft would be coming to the career fair, and we thought it would be great to show a little resistance. So on Friday, the day before the fair, two of us Natha...Sun, 24 Jan 1999 07:07:28 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1998-12-10-very-solid-audio/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1998-12-10-very-solid-audio/sponsored by Audio Explosion1...Fri, 11 Dec 1998 06:57:18 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1998-11-09-thoughts-on-efficiency/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1998-11-09-thoughts-on-efficiency/a story for you...Tue, 10 Nov 1998 06:38:36 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1998-11-09-teleacoustics-the-regulation-of-transmitted-speech/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1998-11-09-teleacoustics-the-regulation-of-transmitted-speech/For the last century, the Western world has been in possession of two technologies created for the primary purpose of transmitting speech over a distance: the telephone and the radio. While both deal with the transmission of audio, they differ significantly in how their content is regulated and who is allowed to transmit information over the medium, partly due to each media's respective natur...Tue, 10 Nov 1998 06:31:06 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1998-10-09-sharing-and-the-internet/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1998-10-09-sharing-and-the-internet/The Internet is about sharing. Designed to prevent even nuclear bombs from inhibiting its never ending ebb of data, it is the most unstoppable, pervasive, and subversive medium for sharing information that the world has ever seen. From this central point we may examine three corollaries: one, that everyone should be allowed access to the Internet with a reasonable connection; two, that people shou...Fri, 09 Oct 1998 18:01:11 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1998-08-09-diamond-rio-review/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1998-08-09-diamond-rio-review/Wednesday afternoon, I came home to a wonderful sight: a slender, foot-long cardboard rectangle sitting in front of my door, addressed from Diamond Multimedia. I walked to my friend's room and smiled....Mon, 10 Aug 1998 05:55:01 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1998-06-09-mp3-summit-report/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1998-06-09-mp3-summit-report/This writeup of the conference is highly opinionated. I represent myself only and am in no way affiliated with MP3.COM1, even if I think they're cool. = I also missed a few demos and one of the panels in process of talking to some folks &8212; my apologies to those of you that I left out. Also, because I'm a moron who forgets everything and didn't take notes, I probably left out big...Wed, 10 Jun 1998 05:19:44 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1996-11-19-the-knee-jerk/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1996-11-19-the-knee-jerk/This month, the very fundamentals of the First Amendment are held in question....Tue, 19 Nov 1996 20:23:41 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1996-11-12-seat-11-c/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1996-11-12-seat-11-c/The girl sitting across from me on the flight back to school somehow reminded me of a million things from back home. Her tight, determined lips instantly brought back memories of Noelle and the party. She had khakis on. This is important to me, but I'm not quite sure why. The thick, brown eyebrows brought back brief memories of the Meehan clan and Berea. Eyes may say a lot about a person&8217...Wed, 13 Nov 1996 07:28:02 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1996-08-13-i-carry/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1996-08-13-i-carry/Who am I? I, to the outside world, am comprised of the sum of my actions. What is precious to me? The things that I carry inside of me define who I am to myself. Who I think I am will direct my actions and hence what the outside world thinks of me. As a result of this, not only will exploring what I carry inside of me help me to define for myself who I am, but will also allow the outside world to...Tue, 13 Aug 1996 19:55:06 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1996-06-04-my-salutatorian-speech/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1996-06-04-my-salutatorian-speech/WE'RE DONE! WE'RE ALL DONE WITH HIGH SCHOOL! Let's give THANKS! cheer, and wait for it to quiet down quite a bit But now what? Where to now? In the words of Microsoft, "Where do we want to go today?"...Tue, 04 Jun 1996 07:00:00 GMThttps://david.weekly.org/blog/1996-04-17-trial-by-fire/https://david.weekly.org/blog/1996-04-17-trial-by-fire/The pungent odor of industrial detergent filled my nostrils as hot plates scorched my palms through thin plastic gloves. I quickly stacked dishes in neat piles, threw pots and pans on a shelf, and grouped steaming glasses in grids. A fellow student quickly jammed plates into the other side of the monstrous, fire-breathing machine &8212; he was the source of all of my labor; the faster he pushed ca...Thu, 18 Apr 1996 06:27:16 GMT